This Cake Isn’t Done Yet

I finally got to make a nearly-credible effort to try out the Tikka T1x .22 rifle today.

My hope has been that I could find something that would shoot around half an inch at 50 yards. I have not found it yet, but it could happen soon.

I decided to try two rifles today. My Marlin 60 and the Tikka. I used two kinds of ammunition: CCI 36-grain Mini-mags (1235 fps) and CCI 40-grain Standard Velocity Target (1070 fps). The Target ammo is more accurate because CCI stamped “Target” on the little boxes. It really tightens those groups up.

I have criticized the Marlin a great deal, because there is a great deal to criticize. The inner workings are cheap. From the factory, it couldn’t shoot hyper loads safely. It has a tube magazine fastened to the barrel, so free-floating is not an option. To reload, you have to put your hand in front of the muzzle. The factory trigger was a horror. It came with no sling studs.

Whatever. It has a great barrel. There is no denying it. And because I have done a lot of work on it, it now has an acceptable trigger, sturdy guts, and studs. It’s 80% of the rifle Marlin should have made.

I have been planning a major .22 campaign against squirrels, and I wanted something substantially more accurate than the Model 60 and my Savage A22, so I bought the Tikka, my first .22 bolt gun. It cost three times as much as the Model 60. Unless you count all the parts I had to put in the Model 60 to turn it into a proper firearm. Then I guess it only costs around twice as much.

The Marlin has a UTG Bug Buster scope, so named because it will focus on things 10 feet away. I paid something like $70 for the Bug Buster. It started out on an expensive RWS/Diana air rifle, which turned out to be worthless and a waste of money.

The Tikka has a Vortex Diamondback 4-12×42 scope, which I would say is pretty good for deer. It will focus on things as little as 30 feet away, supposedly. I can’t get it to do it. I believe the current price for this scope is around $250.

Which scope is better? The Bug Buster. I don’t care who laughs at me for saying it. The glass is clearer, it has target turrets, it has an illuminated reticle, it has parallax adjustment (the Vortex is fixed at 100 yards)…it’s wonderful.

I couldn’t get a truly sharp focus with either gun at 35 yards, but the Bug Buster was nearly there. The Vortex was just plain bad. Rotating the eyepiece did not overcome my vision issues. Maybe it would have worked well with my glasses.

I set up two four-bullseye targets. The bullseyes are 4″ across, and the rings are 1/2″ apart. I shot 40 rounds per gun. I shot 20 Mini-mags and then 20 of those anointed target rounds.

If my little Leica rangefinder is right, I was shooting at 35 yards. I used my nice solid bench, and I rested the guns. The plan is to zero at 35 and shoot targets later at 50 to see what the gun will do. If I’m zeroed at 35, I’m right on the button for long squirrel shots, and I just have to hold over 1/2″ for normal shots. I can hold under at 50 yards when shooting for accuracy. I think it’s over, not under. I’ll find out.

So what happened? I’ll post the targets. Marlin first. The top two bullseyes on each target were shot with Mini-mags, and you can guess what I used on the lower bullseyes.

I would say the Tikka did a little better, but not two-times-the-price better. I pulled at least one shot while shooting the Marlin, but even if I hadn’t, I think the groups would have been slightly worse.

I would also say the target rounds were less prone to flyers, so Mini-mags are probably the wrong ammo for squirrels over 25 yards off.

At normal squirrel distances of up to 75 feet, these guns are interchangeable in their current state. Might as well shoot the Marlin and avoid getting the Tikka dirty.

Was it a fair comparison? No.

I mounted the Diamondback for seated shooting off my back porch using a hunting tripod. When I rested the gun on the bench, the scope was too far forward. I had to fight with it to get in the eye relief sweet spot. Also, I would guess that the parallax error cost me some accuracy. The Diamondback is not a precision scope. I think it was made to hit a deer in the side, accurately enough to kill it. That’s asking very little.

Right now, you can walk into any store and buy a sub-MOA hunting rifle. Not a tactical rifle or target rifle. A hunting rifle. The hunting rifles our parents and grandparents used, including very expensive ones, were doing great if they managed 4 MOA. Deer are big. You just have to hit an immense kill zone in order to take one home.

I suppose many scopes are still made with MOA+ accuracy in mind.

The furry glass in the Diamondback made it hard to see where my point of aim was. I had no trouble at all with the Bug Buster.

The darker it got, the more the Bug Buster outshone the Diamondback.

I suppose I should put the Tikka away until the new scope comes. Then we’ll find out what it can do.

I also want a new front rest. Today I used a Caldwell Rock Jr., which is a front rest that only goes up to 7.5″. You have to crawl under the gun to get the crosshairs on target. I don’t understand how people use it without fighting it. I should make a simple rest from plywood, with a wingnut to let me adjust the height.

I also used a front bag, but it was hard to get height out of it. They’re great for prone shooting, but they’re small for seated shooting.

I ordered two types of ammunition to see if they’re any better than what I have. I ordered Eley Benchrest Outlaw, which has done great in at least one T1x. I also ordered subsonic CCI hollow points. Not the really slow ones. Barely subsonic. Maybe they’ll help. Real .22 nuts buy lots of different brands to see what works in their guns.

With the silencer in place, the Tikka sounded like an air rifle, as it did the first time I tried it. Really nice.

In any case, I think it’s fair to say I am ready to commence .22LR squirrel genocide. The Marlin will do the job reliably and humanely as long as I don’t get ambitious about distance.

I need to practice and get my trigger pull in top shape. Otherwise, I’ll hold my guns back and maim squirrels.

So that’s it for now. The Marlin will work, and it’s too early to say much about the Tikka.

Taking the Gas Out of Gaslighters

My buddy Mike sent me some interesting photos on December 31. His son works in Manhattan, and while his son was at work, a man showed up on a balcony below his office and set up a sniper rifle. Here it is.

At first, I thought the photo was more interesting than it later turned out to be. I thought Mike’s son’s building was locked down due to a terrorist situation. Then I realized the rifle belonged to a cop. Mike sent me a video, and it featured a burly guy in black clothing with big white letters on the back.

If you were dancing, getting drunk, and doing drugs in Times Square when the ball came down, you were surrounded by guys with precision rifles.

I thought this was interesting, so I went to a community of shooters and asked if they could identify the gun. I have a precision rifle, so it was natural for me to be interested. You could call my gun a sniper rifle if you wanted. Professional snipers use precision rifles, just like shooting hobbyists. Military snipers didn’t always use them. They used to use deer rifles that were nicely set up to maximize accuracy.

I don’t know if it’s correct to say our military still uses deer rifles. The Marines use a modified .308 rifle based on the Remington 700–a deer rifle–and you can buy a heavy-barreled 700 in .308 for $690. The Marine designation for its rifle is M40A5.

A company called Georgia Precision sells the M40A5 for about $6500 without a scope. Do Marine rifles come from Georgia Precision, or are there a bunch of companies selling different M40A5’s? Not sure. I saw an Internet forum post which suggests the Marines build their own rifles.

The McMillan stock they use runs about $1400, and the aftermarket barrel probably costs something similar, including customization.

Do you need to spend that kind of money to get a super-accurate .308? No. But not every custom part is intended to improve accuracy, and the military can afford frills.

How much of the money is, basically, wasted? No idea. I’ll bet a lot of it is.

The Marines use a barrel made by a company named Schneider. So Schneider must make unbelievably accurate rifles on one else can match? No.

I don’t know why the Marines use .308. It’s an obsolescent (not obsolete) cartridge that loses velocity quickly. It drops below supersonic speed at around 800 yards, and when that happens, the bullet jiggles in flight, and it degrades accuracy. A 6.5 Creedmoor round is supersonic to about 1400 yards. It’s a more modern cartridge, designed with better technology.

When I took my precision rifle course, an instructor said my .308 had a trajectory like a mortar. The bullet goes up, slows down, and comes down, creating a path that looks like the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.

All rifle bullets do this, but a .308’s arch is a lot shorter and steeper than a 6.5 Creedmoor’s arch.

A bullet that slows down and drops fast is a pain to shoot accurately a long way out. When you do precision shooting, you have to know how much your bullet will drop over distance so you will know exactly how high it will be when it gets to your target. A short arch means the bullet’s path will be more nearly vertical far away. That means it will drop a lot more over a given distance out there. You have to have a good accurate range figure, because the round is less forgiving than a flat-shooting round.

The .308 delivers somewhat more energy to a person or deer at 200 yards than 6.5 Creedmoor, but farther out, the 6.5 delivers more energy because it’s moving faster. Because it wasn’t designed during the Truman administration.

I don’t know why any sniper would use a .308. Tradition, maybe? I don’t know any Marine armorers, so maybe I’ll never know. Maybe they have a great reason. It can’t be the increased energy at short ranges. A 6.5 Creedmoor will kill a moose just fine, so there is no reason to think a .308 is needed to kill a person. And there are a bunch of other cartridges that are better than 6.5 Creedmoor.

It’s not because a .308 rifle can use spare ammo from machine guns when things get bad. You can’t hit anything with machine gun ammo. I have tried.

If the .308 didn’t exist today, no one would invent it, because the technology is so backward. It would be like inventing a black and white TV with 13 channels.

The .308 was invented 73 years ago. Penicillin was about 11 years old. The transistor was just being made available to the public. The only intelligent life that had been to space was a few perverted beings that liked to abduct guys out of bass boats in Mississippi and probe their unmentionable parts. There were no satellites.

I guarantee you, you can get a Remington 700 that is just as accurate as the Marine version for way, way less than $6500. Maybe it will weigh more or not have wifi or something, but it will shoot fine, and given the short useful range of the .308, it will never need to shoot better than maybe 0.75 MOA. One MOA is 10.5″ at 1000 yards. How wide is a person?

Remington rifle: $650. Timney trigger: $250. New barrel: $500. Precision chassis (stock): $400. Bipod: $100-$250. Ballpark figures. Under $2000. Good scope (Vortex Viper): $1000. Rings: $150.

You don’t actually need the precision chassis, but it looks neat.

What are we at? $3050? Have my 3,000 university math credits paid off?

I think I have something like $2700 in my precision rifle, and I can promise you it will shoot 0.5 MOA with the right ammo and shooter, because I shoot close to that with crap off the shelf, and I am not a great shot.

You know what? Boys like their toys. It’s a blast, customizing, well, nearly anything and getting it just the way you want it. The Marines are boys, just like the rest of us.

As King Lear said when his daughter tried to tell him she couldn’t keep his drunken entourage in her palace, “O, reason not the need!”

To get back to the sniper photo, I asked some forum people if they knew what it was. It turns out the NYPD bought (or was given for publicity) Sako Trg M10 sniper rifles, which sell for about $12,000 without accessories. This is a 14.6-pound gun, and apparently, the NYPD went for .308.

Sako is Finnish, so yay for supporting US jobs.

I asked if anyone knew why the NYPD used this gun when Chris Kyle managed to get by with a TAC-338 which you can buy for $6500.

The TAC-338 uses a real sniper round which stays supersonic out to maybe 1500 yards and can be useful farther out.

The best answers I got involved politics. Basically, the NYPD does not care what it spends, and if it fails to spend whatever it gets in a given year, it gets less the next year, so it tries to spend up to its allotment.

I believe this is the correct explanation, because it comports with my understanding of human nature and blue states.

Anyway, I got a few unbelievably stupid answers. One guy called me a Fudd, which is a nasty name for a person who thinks the Second Amendment only applies to things like hunting shotguns. His answer contained zero useful information. He wanted to know how I had been on the forum for 4 years without knowing exactly why the NYPD needed a $12,000 rifle.

The answer was dumb for multiple reasons. First of all, they do not need the rifle. They could do the same job with an RPR from Bass Pro. Second, since they do not need the rifle, it is not possible for the justification for the rifle to appear anywhere on the forum. Third, who sits and memorizes every post on an Internet forum for 4 years? Fourth, his answer was rude, and he was a bully. I put him in his place and left him there.

Another guy said I had posted a dumbass thread. Another bully. I trimmed him down to size as well. A whole bunch of other users–knowledgeable people including former snipers–had responded with useful posts full of great information. A bunch of them agreed with me. I asked him if they were dumbasses.

I was called a whiner, by someone who has no idea what whining is. Whining means exaggerated, useless complaining. I didn’t complain. I pointed out problems with the arguments supporting the Sako purchase. That makes me a hater, not a whiner, right?

The Internet is a big playpen for jerks and bullies, and forums can be really trying. And certain interests draw unusually snotty people. Firearms. Bodybuilding. Christianity. Fishing. Electronics. Professional machinists are so rude they’re barely human. Hobby machinists are in the middle along with homebrewers. Welders are really nice. Foodies are Nazis. Not regular guys who like barbecue and pizza; they’re okay. I mean people who call themselves foodies and worship Food Network windbags who can’t really cook. Photography people are okay.

It’s funny, but bodybuilding draws bullies, but bodybuilders can’t actually fight. Fighting is a skill. It also requires cardio fitness, which many bodybuilders don’t have because they’re on drugs and don’t do cardio. There are bodybuilders who get tired climbing stairs. A lot of guys pump up show muscles in order to push other guys around, but actual martial artists who could pummel them easily are less obnoxious.

Bodybuilders aren’t even that strong. The kind of lifting they do produces big muscles that don’t do as much as smaller powerlifter muscles.

There is a skinny guy on Youtube who goes to gyms and humiliates drugged-up bodybuilders, tossing their weights around and saying how light they are.

Nineteenth-century-pistol guru Massad Ayoob is a forum guy, and he’s pretty obnoxious. Goes into panic/attack mode when anyone shows him up, which is not hard to do, or, more accurately, hard not to do. He has set himself up so many times. He got me banned from The High Road for disagreeing with him in a thread he was not even part of. Must have sent a note to his pals the mods: “I HAVE BEEN BLASPHEMED!”

Christian forums are awful. The Catholic forums are full of Catholics telling each other all Protestants go to hell. Protestant forums are full of people telling each other they’ll pray God helps them with their errors, when they really mean they hope they go to hell.

You literally have to treat electronics people like mental patients who could have full-blown slobbering-and-head-banging crises if you say the wrong thing. You can’t think of them as human beings. You have to act like you’re trying to extract data from bombs without setting them off. Like you’re playing Operation, with no funny bone.

Reddit is swarming with moderators who have no interest in moderating. They live to delete useful posts and lecture people. “Stand in awe of my deletion powers, mortal! Nanna, get me more Hot Pockets! And shove more Funyuns in them!”

In any case, I think I know why New York City spent a king’s ransom on rifles that work no better than Bass Pro merchandise.

People should be nice to each other. We should be patient. It makes life so much better. If you’re going to be hostile to someone, you should have a very good reason.

When people are nice to you, it gives you a lift. Sometimes I remember nice things people said to me decades ago, and the memories still give me strength. I remember nasty things people said and did, and I realize they still drag me down. It’s funny that I attached so much weight to remarks made by inferior people who were little better than chimps and who failed at life.

When you’re nice, you form attachments to people, and you go on to be helpful to each other in life. Snotty people push others away and end up fending for themselves unless they can control others.

God put us here to help each other. It would be wonderful if more people realized that instead of seeing humanity as a muy thai bag to use to vent their baseless cruelty.

Guess it’s time to take my new rifle out and see what it will do.

The Reckoning Approaches

This was written yesterday.

I was going to go out in the pasture and shoot my new .22 at 35 yards in order to zero the scope, but I have neglected my bench, so I had to lift it with the tractor, bring it in, sand and plane it a little, clean it up, seal the wood, pop the tires off, fill them with Slime, reinstall them, and move it back to the pasture.

I ended up shooting from a seated position on my back porch, using a wobbly plastic hunting tripod. It wasn’t a great rest, but it wasn’t the worst.

I used CCI standard velocity target rounds, rated at 1050 fps. This makes them subsonic, and subsonics are very quiet out of silencers. I used my freshly-cleaned silencer today.

The nice scope I ordered will not be here for a while, so I slapped a Vortex Diamondback 4-12×42 on the gun. I knew this was not an expensive scope, but until today, I didn’t realize how lacking it was. I felt like I was looking through glass someone had touched with their oily hair. On top of that, I could not get everything to look sharp at 35 yards, so I had to guess a little.

The scope has no illumination. Once you’ve had an illuminated reticle, you’ll be really spoiled. I could have used one today. It was starting to get dark when I sat down to shoot, and I only got about 35 rounds out before I quit.

I think the scope would be fine for deer or some other large game in good light, but shooting into an inch at 35 yards is not what it was made for.

The gun’s trigger is wonderful. I adjusted it for a very low pull. For some reason, I get used to triggers very fast, so even if a trigger is light, I start to feel like I’m trying to lift a bowling ball. It’s very strange how quickly I adapt, and I don’t know whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing. In any case, the trigger feels sort of like the trigger on my Colt Woodsman. Like breaking a little glass rod, as they say.

Hearing protection was not even a consideration. I did some research, and I’m confident I can shoot high velocity rounds with my silencer without protection. Using subsonics, the sound was sort of like a loud click. Like a strong air rifle.

I’ll post the targets I used. I started out on the target to the right. I was WAY off when I fired the first shots, so I had to crank the turrets over and over. When I finished, I shot the group by the left bullseye. I still need to bring the shots up slightly.

I definitely pulled the two worst shots (lower right), so I am confident this gun would have shot into around half an inch if I had done things correctly. Half an inch with a poor rest and bad light at 35 yards, with unimpressive ammo, suggests I could stay somewhere close to half an inch at 50 under better circumstances.

I am going to have to improve my steadiness if I want to kill squirrels. You can’t always shoot from a prone position using a nice bipod and bag. You have to do what you can, where you are. I think shooting unsupported would be hopeless at over 20 yards.

I hope to shoot again tomorrow, using a proper bench. I should be able to dial this scope in perfectly, and I could also try a couple of other types of ammunition. I don’t have a big variety here.

With squirrels, I suppose accuracy is the big thing. If a round with great terminal performance isn’t highly accurate, you will miss squirrels entirely, and if you can hit squirrels squarely, you don’t need fantastic terminal performance. Maybe I should hunt with the most accurate ammo I can find and forget about expansion and fragmentation.

I’m not sure about all this, but I’m gathering info.

The thing that scares me is that I might set up my bench and shoot the Tikka next to my Marlin Model 60 and Savage A22 and find out they’re just as accurate.

There are worse problems to have.

If They Could be Trained, They’d be Bringing me my Mail

Conservatives always worry about the feds making secret lists of our firearms from purchase records. Then we go on the Internet and post photos of us shooting everything we buy.

Given the competence of the feds, however, maybe we have nothing to worry about. “‘Facebook?’ There’s a book with faces in it? Why would anyone put his face in a book? Is my pension vested yet?”

Anyway, here I go, doing my part for the database. Today I picked up a Tikka T1x MTR. The last three letters stand for “Multi-Task Rimfire.” I’m not sure what those tasks are. Maybe I can find out.

It looks like the tasks are “small game hunting and training.” That’s from Sako’s website. Sako is the Finnish concern that owns Tikka.

Why would I want to train small game? I guess it would be helpful to train squirrels to quit chewing on my belongings. I don’t think it’s actually possible, however. That’s why I kill them.

Oh, wait. “Training” doesn’t refer to small game. That makes more sense. So what does it refer to? Target shooting? Why not call it “target shooting”?

Okay, on another webpage, Sako says it’s for target shooting. I guess different employees write different webpages.

They drink a lot in Finland.

This rifle is extremely cool. It’s a 16″ bolt-action .22 which is supposed to have a magnificent barrel along with a very good trigger that can be adjusted down to a 1.5-pound pull. It’s very short and handy. It could be lighter, but nothing is perfect except pizza. It’s threaded for a silencer.

The bolt has a wacky 45° throw, which is wonderful. Why can’t other guns be like that instead of making you swing the bolt up and practically hit your scope?

I have not fired the gun yet. I have to put a scope on it, because it comes without sights. It comes with a dovetail scope mount, which must give a lot of people a good laugh. I had to order a rail that attaches to the dovetail mount. It should arrive tomorrow.

Deciding which scope to use has been hard.

I went the buy-once-cry-once route with my first .22 bolt gun. I wanted something accurate and well-made in order to avoid future upgrades. So should I give it a scope of similar quality, or should I go with something cheap, given that I may never shoot at more than 50 yards?

Right now I plan to throw my idle Vortex Diamondback 4-12×42 on it. The scope already has rings on it, and I probably even lapped them. It’s not a top-quality optic, it has no reticle illumination, and it’s a second focal plane scope, so it’s not the finest product around. On the other hand, a lot of people shoot squirrels really well with scopes costing less than $100. All my existing .22 scopes came in at that price level, and they certainly work.

Once the Diamondback is on it, I can put some rounds through the gun and get used to it.

I might get fancy and put a $400+ Athlon scope on the rifle. That would be pretty ritzy for a squirrel rifle, but a lot of guys spend considerably more, and squirrel hunting is actually a serious and demanding pursuit. It may seem like a joke because grown men are shooting well-dressed rats, but I think you have to gauge hunting by the difficulty, not the weight of the prey. Squirrels are very uncooperative in addition to being hard to hit due to their size.

I feel like the worst hunter on Earth. When I tried to get into it a few years ago, I got a deer rifle, a lot of ammo for my shotgun, and some guns for varmints. Then covid ruined everything. I couldn’t buy a paid hunt if I wanted one. And it turns out my property, though rural, is blessed with a relatively low population of game animals. I’ve only seen one turkey here. The coyotes that used to be here seem to have left. I haven’t seen a coon in a you-know-what’s age. There are no hogs. I haven’t seen a bear here.

I shot quite a few squirrels, but I never got around to shooting anything large, unless you count a coon I shot in the head while it was in a trap.

I bought a crazy machine that makes noises to attract coyotes, but I got nowhere with it. I’m not completely sure it’s not a gag.

Rabbits have suddenly become abundant here, which is why I think the coyotes are gone. I hate to shoot the rabbits. They haven’t bothered me yet, and they exhibit a disturbing degree of trust. They get really close. I could shoot them with my EDC pistol.

I have foxes, but for some reason, we’re not allowed to kill them. I’ve seen red ones and black ones here. The web says we have two species: red and gray. They’re all foxes to me.

I’ve never seen a bobcat here. The state seems to want us to shoot them, because the rules are generous.

I can’t leave the property now because we’re having a son, so it looks like it’s squirrels or nothing for the near future.

Maybe once the baby is stabilized, I’ll be able to shoot something other than a squirrel.

Thank goodness Florida decided to extend the squirrel season to the entire year. In the past, I could shoot squirrels anywhere on my property during a short season, and I could shoot nuisance squirrels any time. In order to be a nuisance, a squirrel had to be near the house where it could cause problems. Now I can shoot them all over the farm at any time for no good reason at all.

Hey. How do I know a squirrel a quarter of a mile from the house isn’t planning to chew on my porch furniture? I can’t take that chance. That’s a reason.

I hope to pop some rounds off tomorrow. Maybe Saturday. I haven’t received the rail for the scope. The web thinks it will arrive tonight, but tomorrow is more likely. Once I have the scope on the rifle, I plan to blow a bunch of rounds through it to foul the barrel for precision, and then we’ll see what the gun will do with the types of ammo I have on hand.

It would be great to hand this gun off to my son when the time comes. I should learn to hunt properly for his sake, so I’ll be ready when he is.

Why Does it Taste Like a Dodge Wiring Harness?

I decided to try a Tikka T1x bolt-action .22. It can be my son’s first rifle when he is ready. I’m concerned I may have trouble getting him to pay attention to shooting instruction during the first few weeks of his life. He’ll just have to man up.

As for shooting opportunities here at the compound, targets and things like water bottles and golf balls will always abound, and he will be permitted to kill any animal he sees that isn’t wearing a collar or a saddle.

He won’t be allowed to shoot inside the house, of course, but shooting FROM inside the house will be encouraged, since I do it myself.

Exceptions will be made for home invaders, or as I call them, undocumented guests, and also for those rare times when game finds its way into the living room. It has already happened once.

I chose the T1x because it has a top-notch reputation for accuracy. The other alternative was a Bergara, but the Bergara’s barrel was a little longer than I would have liked. The CZ 457 was also tempting, but in order to get the options I wanted, I would have to accept a 12″ length of pull designed for a 12-year-old. It would have been good for my son, but since I will be the exclusive user of the rifle for, I am estimating, at least two months, he will once again have to man up and deal.

I need a scope now, so I am thinking. It’s not a simple subject.

I was thinking I might go for high magnification because I like seeing what I’m doing at 100 yards, but let’s be honest: there is no reason to shoot targets with a .22 at 100 yards. That far off, it will probably shoot 3 MOA at best, and you learn nothing at all from that kind of spread. I think I will shoot targets at 50 yards and leave it at that.

I do want to be able to see which part of a squirrel I’m aiming at, and I think 12x is about right for that, up to a realistic 50-yard-limit. I am hoping to be able to stay within a one-inch circle at that range without a serious rest. Shooting squirrels is inhumane when you can’t shoot at least that well. I want to be able to tell where my crosshairs are so I can be sure the squirrel will drop even if I’m half an inch off either way.

I’m going to take some of my optics outside and fiddle around at known distances so I can firm up a decision.

To hit things like coons and possums, I should be fine with something in the area of 5x.

Like I always say, nearly all of my grandfather’s good guns mysteriously vanished when my grandmother died, so I didn’t inherit a single one from her, even though I shot with him a lot and the other grandsons did not. My compensation is to get better guns and shoot them better. His .22 rifle was a crusty Remington 550-1, and I have considered getting one, but I was not able to resist buying rifles that were superior in every possible way. The T1x will be the best so far. Comparing it to a 550-1 is like comparing a new Lexus to a Crown Vic at a police auction.

I asked for scope recommendations at a forum for sharpshooters, and naturally they came in with things starting at around $500. I don’t think that’s necessary for this gun. I have some very good glass, and I understand the need for it in some applications, but I’m never going to shoot a thousand yards at twilight with a .22. Or anything else, now that I think about it.

Their recommendations were great, apart from the cost. They know what they’re doing. This country is full of men who can hit a man-sized target over half a mile away, and they are really common in rural areas. There are people shooting .338 Lapua, which is useful at ranges longer than a mile. There are people with night vision headgear, night vision scopes, and thermal scopes.

It makes me want to stay indoors, just writing about it.

The leftists who are most prone to putting on black pajamas and attacking innocent people in cowardly mobs are generally women or men who are a lot like women. Spindly, effeminate, spoiled, and not inclined to masculine pursuits. The country is no place for their fatherless unemployed behavior. A diet of soft urban targets doesn’t prepare them to take on men and women who decorate their homes with other creatures’ heads.

When I bought my first AR-15 here in my rural county, I picked it up at the company’s headquarters. They had a Ma Deuce set up among the displays. That’s legal. And they’re military guys, so it’s not just an ornament. Talk about feeling safe.

It wasn’t like visiting a Target in California and having to step aside while people punch clerks, break glass, and run off with boxes of Prilosec to sell on the sidewalk out front.

If I worked in a building near that place, I know where I’d run if I saw vans full of narcissistic sadists headed my way. I’d only slow down at the register to buy earplugs.

I don’t want to kill anything, but the squirrels have to go. One truck wiring harness is enough. It would be neat if we could be friends, but we tried that, and it didn’t work. At least the crows will feast.

If I hit anything.

I hope I get improved accuracy out of this gun. I’ll feel pretty stupid if it shoots no better than my semiautos.

On the subject of fathers’ gifts to sons, I had a wonderful revelation. A usual, it was something obvious which I already knew, yet which somehow had not made itself part of me. We can’t see the obvious without God’s help.

I realized I should not talk about God and his blessings, as though blessings and God were different things.

We always say we want to do this or that to get God’s blessings. Pray to get God’s blessings. Stay close to him to get his blessings. The truth is that he, personally, is the blessing. The other things are just the natural consequences of being near him.

If you are in God’s presence, you are already blessed. You are wrapped up in love. Because of his love and power, things are going in the right direction for you. Things may not be perfect, but they are headed toward perfection, and they will continue as long as you’re with God.

Knowing him and being with him are what matter.

These things don’t apply if you’re proud. First of all, a proud person can’t be in God’s presence except briefly. He stays far from proud people. Second, when you’re in God’s presence, he gives you revelation, and proud people can’t accept revelation. They can’t learn.

If Satan were in God’s presence, it would be a bad experience for Satan. A human being with air in his lungs and blood in his veins is different. We can surrender and receive help. Forgiveness is available.

God showed me that I have already won. If I stay with him, I’m not just winning. I’ve already won. I’m just watching the victory unfold, one step at a time.

God’s presence should be your top priority, and in order to get it, you have to humble yourself continually. When you get into pride, you push him away and bring demons near, making them your gods and demonized people your masters.

Prayer in unknown tongues is a manifestation of humility. When you do it, you’re admitting you’re too stupid and evil to pray well on your own. You are abandoning your own inner monologue and letting him replace it with his.

I hate being busy. I used to like it. I liked going to work and getting things done. I liked being busy with recreation. Now I feel resentful when I’m busy. It distracts me from God. I miss prayer sessions and receive worthless and harmful things in exchange.

It disturbs me when Christians brag about hard work and long hours. It is bragging. If you’re working 12 hours a day, you can’t possibly be close to God, unless you’re doing simple manual labor and occupying your mind with prayer. If you absolutely have to brag, you shouldn’t brag about being self-destructive and failing your family.

I like getting things done around the compound, but frequently, when I’m done, I realize I’ve overdone it. I should have quit earlier. God isn’t going to reward me for doing a perfect job, clearing limbs out of the yard or spraying weeds. He doesn’t care about things like that. He rewards me for being with him. I was with him a few weeks back, and while speaking by the Holy Spirit, I heard myself say, “Being with you is my purpose.”

My yard needs work, and the nursery isn’t done, but it’s better to fail at earthly jobs than my relationship with the one who loves me and solves every problem. God never rewarded anyone in the Bible for hard work. Not one person.

I have to continue trying to stay with God. The path is already prepared. The enemies are beaten. The corrections I need are in progress. I have to be careful not to try too hard to save myself.

A Varmint Will Never Quit. Ever.

I’m going through a wave of firearm enthusiasm. It hasn’t passed yet.

A few years back, I consulted the most hard core gun nerds I knew, asking if it was possible to shoot well with a .22 rifle. To me, that means 20 consecutive sub-MOA shots at 100 yards.

A lot of people will shoot a hundred bad groups in a day and then go to the web and post a photo of the only three-shot group that came in sub-MOA and say, “Wow, this gun is a tack-driver!” I think most of them don’t realize they’re lying, because before they decided to lie to the Internet, they lied to themselves, successfully.

A monkey can produce a one-hole three-shot group with a horrible gun. You just have to give him enough time and ammunition. When you go up to 20 consecutive shots, the monkeys slink off and find other things to talk about.

Very knowledgeable people convinced me it was not possible, because rimfire ammunition is so poorly made. It’s inconsistent. I decided to quit and accept what I had.

Now I’m thinking about it again.

There is a niche-famous Internet thread about .22 accuracy. People post their achievements, and they have to prove them. To make it, you have to produce 30 consecutive shots at 50 or 100 yards. A surprising number of people have broken the MOA barrier at both ranges.

For reasons unknown to me, a gun that shoots sub-MOA at 50 yards may not do as well at 100. It’s not because they’re trying to hit the same circle at a longer distance; they’re not. At 50 yards, 1 MOA is about 0.525″, and at 100, it’s about 1.05″. The definining measurement is an angle, not a diameter.

Anyway, the list people shoot at two distances. And they do great.

This puts me back in the hole I dug out of. Maybe rimfire ammo is inconsistent, but if other people can shoot into half an inch at 50 yards, consistently, I should be able to come up with a rifle that will do humane squirrel head shots at 100 feet and humane body shots at 50 yards. I can no longer throw up my hands and say the quest is unrealistic or a waste of time.

Right now, with semiautos, I can shoot two MOA all day at 25 yards, which is a distance some squirrels will allow you to close. I have seen guys on Youtube showing groups worse than mine, with bolt-action rifles, and talking as though they were doing great. I find that hard to understand. I think anyone who holds himself out to be a great shot should be able to shoot into a quarter-inch. I’m merely pretty good, so they should be doing better than me, not worse.

My Savage A22 shoots about the same with Mini-mags as it does with CCI Standard Velocity, which is supposedly more accurate. Go figure. I have no reason to give up velocity and hollow bullets if the accuracy is the same. Standard Velocity only comes in round nose.

I have a silencer now, so things are getting complex. The silencer is 6″ long, so it’s desirable to have a short barrel. Obviously, the barrel has to be threaded. When you look for short, accurate guns that have threaded barrels and don’t cost a fortune, the field narrows fast.

I looked at the list to see what other people used. There are a lot of Anschutz rifles. Forget that. I’m not blowing over a grand on a rimfire. I don’t care if it wakes up before me every day and makes French toast. There are other expensive rifles on the list, and they don’t interest me either.

There are a few Ruger 10/22’s on the list. Surprising, since they are generally considered less accurate than the Marlin Model 60. I’ve only seen one Model 60 on the list.

CZ guns appear frequently, although some have very expensive Lilja barrels. If you’re going to spend that much, why not start out with an Anschutz?

I’ve studied up, and there are a few rifles worth considering.

1. Tikka T1x MTR. Not too pricey. Appears frequently on the list. Comes with a threaded 16″ barrel. If you decide to upgrade later, the barrel comes out when you loosen a few screws.

2. Savage Mark II FV-SR. Downright cheap. An MTR runs $650. I don’t think Tikka allows discounts. I can get a Mark II for $269. Being a Savage, it may be a little rough. Savage puts all the money into accuracy.

3. CZ 457 Scout. This is a fine gun with a short threaded barrel, but it comes with a tiny stock for children, so you have to spend over $200 on a real stock or slap some kind of clumsy attachment on the butt. It also comes with a 1-round magazine, so you have to upgrade that. The other CZ 457’s don’t fit my specs.

4. Bergara BMR. This is a Spanish gun with a great reputation. Not too expensive, and the barrel is threaded, but the shortest one you can get is 18″ long. Not a deal-killer. Not that far from 16″, which is the length I want.

If you own a Bergara, and you eventually decide you want to spend more, you can add a target trigger made for a Remington 700.

At the moment, my plan is to cut up my Savage A22 and see what happens. It has a 22″ barrel, which is too long, and the barrel is not threaded.

When I looked into shortening and threading a barrel, it turned out to be a complex job, of course.

Any idiot can shorten a barrel. You clamp it in a vise, cut it with a hacksaw, and use an inexpensive set of hand tools to repair the muzzle.

To thread a barrel, you have to find the center of the bore. If your threads are not concentric with the bore, your silencer will also be out of alignment, and when you shoot, you will shoot the silencer.

You would think gun makers would make their bores and barrels concentric, but most don’t. It’s hard to make a long, completely straight hole down the middle of a round rod, concentric with the rod’s surface. Manufacturers try to get close, and that’s about it.

When you thread a barrel, you have to stick something inside the bore in order to find out where the center is. There is a complicated procedure involving a thing called a range rod. I won’t go into that, because it appears to be outdated.

These days, people put barrels in their lathes and use test indicators with long probes to indicate the bores. If you don’t understand that sentence, it just means you’re not a machinist or gunsmith. A test indicator will tell you when something moves a ten-thousandth or two ten-thousandths of an inch, depending on its level of precision. You stick your probe in your bore and rotate the barrel, and you move things around until the indicator dial’s hand stops moving.

Some people use indicators that can go 2.75″ into barrels. That seems silly to me, although I may be wrong. A bullet’s path is entirely determined by the last bit of the barrel. Bores usually are not straight, but bullets aren’t influenced by whatever crooked paths they may traverse on the way to muzzles. Stretches of barrel farther down the line move them wherever they want. A bullet has no memory of what it was doing a few inches earlier.

If this is true, then indicating the last inch should be more than adequate. Whatever direction the last inch is pointing in will be the direction in which the bullet will fly.

This is my theory.

I plan to take the barrel out of the gun and cut it down to 16.5″. Then I’ll hold it in a 4-jaw chuck with about 2″ hanging out. I may have to find a way to stabilize the rear of the barrel, which will be unsupported in the lathe’s hollow spindle, but if I keep the speed low, I don’t think I’ll need to. It shouldn’t whip around.

I’ll put a nice face on the new muzzle. I’ll make an 11° crown. I’ll turn down the last half-inch for threading. I’ll put a small chamfer at the end to make it easier to get the barrel into the silencer. I’ll put a radiused recess in where the shoulder meets the turned-down part, so the threads will end before reaching the shoulder. Then I’ll thread the barrel and polish everything. Finally, I’ll blue the exposed metal.

I can also drill new holes near the muzzle so I can put the front sight back on the barrel.

This should work, and if it doesn’t, a new A22 barrel can be had cheaply.

When it’s over, I should have a handy, short gun that shoots a little better than it did originally. The velocity should be nearly the same. I won’t have to use hearing protection.

Unless I chicken out and get a new gun. Since starting to write this, I have learned new things, and I am wavering.

As bolt guns go, the Tikka is just about perfect. Fantastic trigger and barrel. Light. Super accurate. If I went this route, I wouldn’t have to do any work, and I’d have my first bolt-action .22.

A Savage Mark II would work, but gun nerds say they have ejection issues.

If I want to stick with semiauto, I can buy a shorter Savage barrel with a threaded muzzle and stick it in my A22.

Finally, I could buy a Savage A22 with a short barrel. They are not expensive at all. They’re so cheap, I could buy one and sell my old one and not lose more than maybe $150.

Of course, I wouldn’t sell the old one, because guns increase in value. I’d hang onto it as long as I had room for it. No reason to hurry.

I don’t know why I’m even thinking about this, with the squirrels avoiding every area where I can get a safe shot and forming conga lines and cheerleader-style pyramids between me and my neighbor’s house.

Whatever I end up doing, it looks like real squirrel-grade accuracy is possible, even with a semiauto.

I Need a Rifle That Fires Hungry Cats

I do not understand how the universe works.

I took a couple of my .22’s and sighted them in for squirrel work. I even put a better trigger in one of them. I fixed them up so they’re accurate enough for squirrels that have the audacity to show up in my yard.

Since then, I have not had one good shooting solution on a squirrel.

I like that term. “Shooting solution.” Like I’m stalking Jap carriers in the Bungo Straits.

The squirrels have vanished. Except for the ones that prance around and taunt me from locations where I would rather not shoot. I don’t want to shoot toward my neighbor’s house. Naturally, they get between my house and his and form Soul Train lines.

Why is the world like this? Why am I not rewarded for my efforts?

I got myself a silencer, and I am enjoying using it with my Ruger 10/22. It’s still very loud, but I am assured it’s not loud enough to do any damage to my ears.

I wish I had a liberal silencer. The kind people like Joy Behar and Rosie O’Donnell think exist. The ones that make a sound like “FFTT. FFTT,” when you shoot. So quiet they don’t even wake up the cat.

For that matter, I wish I had liberal guns. The ones liberal gun-haters use in movies. You plug a 300-pound man in the gut, and the impact lifts him off his feet and carries him through a convenient window.

These guns also keep shooting when the known capacities of their magazines have been exceeded, and they let you do things like shooting a twig off a tree from a thousand yards, offhand.

Where are these guns? They could save me a lot on ammunition. I could shoot 31 real rounds and then keep firing from an empty magazine.

I like my silencer, but it only screws onto one gun. The others aren’t threaded. Now I have to decide whether to thread them (some of them) myself or take them to a gunsmith.

I am supposedly a machinist. I have a 16×40 lathe. It’s long enough to hold just about any rifle barrel between centers. You would think I could thread a barrel, but it looks like it’s a little complicated.

You chuck your barrel up, you turn on the power, you put a shoulder on it, you thread it, and you’re done, right? Well, not necessarily, although I think some bubbas do it that way.

Your silencer’s bullet path has to be concentric with the barrel’s bore, because if it’s not, the bullets can hit the silencer on the way out. You have to be within a few thousandths of concentricity.

This means you can’t just center the barrel on the lathe. You have to center the bore, and when that’s done, the barrel itself may be running eccentrically. Bores aren’t always in the centers of barrels, believe it or not. They wander around in there.

No problem, right? You just jam a live center in the barrel’s muzzle and hold the breech end with a 4-jaw chuck. Well, it looks like it doesn’t work that way. I’m not sure why not, but evidently this may not give you concentricity. You need a thing called a range rod that goes into the muzzle. I haven’t been able to figure out what a range rod is yet, but they cost a hundred bucks or more. That part, I figured out.

I am considering chopping up my Savage A22. This is a really neat .22 semiauto. It has a Savage Accu-trigger, which is about as good as you can do without going to an expensive aftermarket part. It’s easy to disassemble and clean. It has a Savage barrel, and that’s one thing Savage does really well. It’s a great gun. But the barrel is not threaded.

I would like to thread it for the squirrels. I owe it to them.

I also want to cut it shorter. My silencer is something like 6″ long, and it will make the gun unwieldy. It’s already pretty unwieldy. The factory barrel is 22″ long, which seems nutty to me.

I read up, and I learned that there is no point in making a .22 barrel longer than about 16.5″. This is where you get peak velocity. As you add inches, the speed drops. So why are so many guns so long? I have read that it’s all about sight radius.

When you use iron or open sights, a longer distance between the rear sight and the front sight makes the gun easier to aim accurately. Supposedly.

Is this actually true? I have my doubts. Why would it be?

A longer radius means a heavier barrel, and that means the barrel will shake more when you shoulder the gun.

It can’t be because the same angular error at the point of discharge results in a smaller linear error downrange. That’s obviously wrong.

Gun precision is measured in degrees or milrads. Units of angular displacement. If your gun keeps every shot within 1.05″ at 100 yards, that’s one minute of angle, or 1/60 of a degree. If you move your gun up 10° from a given point of aim, the change in the point of aim, measured in linear units downrange, will be the same regardless of how short your barrel is.

My understanding is that the idea is that the same LINEAR error at the shooter’s end will produce a smaller error downrange with a long sight radius, and that is true, but that means you’re making a bigger angular error as you aim. Why would a short barrel cause that?

When I use a scope at 100 or 1000 yards, I have a sight radius of a few inches. It’s inside the scope. I can still shot 1/2-MOA at 100 yards. The nature of the sight makes it easy to see how far off-target I am, so I can withhold fire until I get it right. Why can’t I do that with open sights? Seems to be it’s just a matter of tightening them up. Instead of a front sight as wide as a paper match, use one half as wide.

Am I wrong? I can’t see the mistake.

It’s not easy to shoot a snubnose revolver accurately, but is that because they’re not built to be precise? No. It’s because they have huge, blocky sights which take extra skill to work with. When your sights cover up half of what you’re shooting at, you need to get used to them and figure out where your bullets are going to land.

I just saw a video of a guy shooting a snubnose at 50 yards, and he shot into an area the size of a canteloupe. That would be fantastic shooting with any pistol. I’m a great pistol shot, but this guy is on another planet.

A long barrel doesn’t do more to stabilize a bullet than a short one. It may seem like it would, but it doesn’t. The only thing a bullet remembers when it leaves a gun is the last millimeter of the barrel. Because a bullet is in contact with the barrel’s lands all the way down, it’s not like the lands a foot back from the muzzle have any influence on the bullet’s flight. If the front of the muzzle is in good shape, and the barrel isn’t worn out, the bullet will fly true. If it has a tiny imperfection, the rounds will go all over, even if the other 99.95% of the barrel is perfect.

Barrel rigidity is important to accuracy. Gun barrels hum as bullets move out. They experience waves along their lengths. The shorter or thicker a barrel is, the smaller the amplitude of the waves will be. A shorter barrel should actually be more accurate than a long one as long as the velocity is the same and the bullet twist rate is just as good.

I think putting a 22″ barrel on a .22 rifle is a mistake. I’ll bet they do it mostly for marketing reasons. A long barrel looks better, and people think they’re more accurate. And people expect higher velocities from them.

A .22 charge is pretty weak, so by the time a bullet moves 16″ down the barrel, it has exhausted whatever energy the powder provided. It’s not like a bunch of unused gas will follow it out of the muzzle instead of providing extra speed.

I’m thinking I’ll cut my barrel down to 16.25″, have it threaded, and have the front sight reattached. The gun will be lighter and easier to aim with a scope, and it won’t be 4 feet long with a silencer.

I don’t plan to use the front sight, but I might decide to try it some day, or maybe I’ll find an aftermarket peep sight set I like. Might as well keep my options open.

The gap in the rear sight might have to be widened by a third or so. I don’t know. Or I could grind the front sight down by a third.

I don’t know if an open front sight would be tall enough to be seen over a silencer.

In any case, it would be a pretty neat rifle with these changes. If it didn’t work out, I could probably get a new barrel for a hundred bucks.

Doesn’t do me much good if the squirrels keep reading my mind, however.

It Never Takes 5 Minutes

I have some information for anyone who is having a hard time installing a new trigger group in a Ruger 10/22 rifle or pistol. This is supposed to be a 5-minute job, and of course, with all my tools, I spent about two hours on it. It’s just like the 30-minute toilet-bolt-cap job I did recently, which took 4 hours.

1. The pins holding the old group in don’t just “fall out,” as people claim they do, and you can’t just push them out with a punch. I had to bang the snot out of mine with a big hammer and a punch. They were really tight. I put a couple of blocks of wood on my bench and covered them with paper towels to prevent marring, and the pins came out. They are the same on both ends, so you can’t push them out the wrong way. Either way works.

2. The two smaller pins DO just fall out, and they do it while you’re working on the gun. If you let this happen, you’ll have to fiddle with it to get them back in, so don’t let it happen.

3. If your bolt lock doesn’t seem to want to let go, it’s because it’s stupidly designed. The manual contains some frustrating tripe about pulling the lock lever’s upper part to make it let go, which is counterintuitive. Forget all that. Pull the bolt back, pull the lever, let the lever go, and release the handle. This works.

4. You can buy a new bolt lock lever just about anywhere for $14 or less. Tandemkross makes a really neat one that hangs out where you can get at it. It will also release the bolt when you pull it back and let it go, so your 10/22 will be like a normal gun.

5. Tandemkross also makes a really neat magazine release lever. Other companies make them too, but I trust Tandemkross more than a random sweatshop in Shenzhen that sells via Amazon.

I decided to get a Ruger BX trigger, which is a nicer version of the standard trigger. The pull is a lot lighter. You can’t adjust it; at least not if you’re a typical user. I suppose a gun nerd could do it.

The BX trigger is a direct replacement. Sadly, it has no markings on it indicating that it’s a BX, so if you take your old trigger out and put both triggers down together, you are likely to install the wrong one when you get back to work.

You can also buy triggers costing a couple of hundred dollars. I don’t think a 10/22 rifle is capable of shooting accurately enough to make them worth it. The BX feels very good, and there is no way I’ll need anything better on a pistol with a red dot.

A hex nut fell on my workbench while I was working on the gun, and it matches the pitch of the screw that holds the handgrip on. There are no nuts in the manufacturer’s parts list or exploded views, and if you put the hex nut on the screw, there is no place in the gun where it will fit.

I kind of wonder if there was a nut on the bench, which stuck to my hand while I was fighting with the pistol and then fell off. If so, the matching pitch is an impressive coincidence. I put the gun together without it, and everything seems fine.

I have the above-mentioned Tandemkross parts on the way, so I will not have to keep suffering with the factory bolt lock and magazine release. I also bought a Shock Block, which is a thing that cushions the bolt when it flies back in the receiver. There is a steel pin in the rear of the receiver, and people say the bolt hits it.

There is a lot of argument about whether the bolt needs cushioning. Some say the bolt never hits the pin. Some say it only happens with fast ammunition. Some say it definitely happens when using a silencer. I figured it couldn’t hurt.

This is where my 10/22 efforts and knowledge stand right now. I want to punch the whole Ruger company in the face. I will try out the trigger tomorrow or the next day, and I’ll try the other stuff when it arrives.

Excuse me While I Kiss the Sand of Florida

In our daily prayers, my wife and I pray for divisiveness.

We pray for God to separate us from worthless people. The worthless are the people who are so determined to stay in pride and reject Yeshua, there is no hope for their salvation. They are vexatious and discouraging to be around, they do great harm, and whatever good they do in our lives is not worth the cost.

Division gets a bad rap. It’s actually a huge blessing. Associating with degenerate people is harmful.

The other day, God told me something. Good people avoid bad people, but bad people pursue good people and want to live among them. Parasites can’t get by without hosts.

This is why America has so many destructive immigrants and illegal aliens. People from what are kindly described as “low-trust cultures” come here to get away from their own kind and abuse people who have established a relatively orderly society. On the other hand, good people flee low-trust cultures to get here and experience reduced predation.

Many conservatives are upset because their deranged far-left acquaintances are cutting them off. They complain because toxic people refuse to spend the holidays with them. What are they thinking? There are few greater blessings than having people who do harm removed from your life.

Ordinarily, the type of people who love leftism make an effort to be around successful, productive, orderly people, because they know they can take advantage of them. It’s wonderful when their derangement and hatred overcome their common sense and they decide to separate themselves from us.

I haven’t heard my sister’s voice since 2015, if memory serves. Often, I pray God will keep her away from me forever. I don’t have to be told to separate myself from parasitic people. God got the message through to me years ago.

She sent me an email a few years back. Why? She wanted money. She had moved in with my sick aunt, ruined the aunt’s life, and refused to leave. By the grace of God, my sister fell in a ditch and broke her leg in several places, and while she was being treated, my aunt’s daughter took her junk to a hotel. Then I got the email. I deleted it and blocked the sender. Every day that passes with no communication from her is a big victory, and I literally thank God every day for the separation.

I didn’t shut her out because of a political disagreement. I did it to protect myself. But a leftist relative who ruins family gatherings with vicious diatribes is also a fine candidate for ostracism.

Think about this: far-left nuts generally go to hell, because most never repent and get to know Yeshua. If you invest in them while they’re alive, you’re wasting. What are you wasting? Time, money, affection, company…you name it.

You will die, and after that, you’ll never see them again. You will never share fond memories in heaven. The things you did with them prove to be worthless and not fit to be remembered. Eventually, you will be cut off from them for eternity, so you may as well let them go now.

The more you invest in such people, the more you lose.

Why am I thinking about this? Naturally, it’s because I read about a gun control case.

Hawaii is a far-left state. A horrible place. Hawaii’s government has decided to violate the Constitution over and over. In Hawaii, only a tiny percentage of carry applications are approved. This obviously conflicts with federal law.

A guy who lives in Hawaii was prosecuted for carrying a gun while hiking. He got the case dismissed based on federal precedent, but Hawaii’s Supreme Court reversed and wrote a deranged leftist opinion. The case was appealed to the US Supreme Court, which denied certiorari on procedural grounds. Basically, they decided the case was not ready for Supreme Court consideration. Eventually, it will be.

Hawaii’s Supreme Court said something really stupid. Here is what OUR Supreme Court said, quoting the lower court:

[I]t denigrated the need for public carry in particular, rejecting as un-Hawaiian “a federally-mandated lifestyle that lets citizens walk around with deadly weapons.”

People carry deadly weapons everywhere. Even Honolulu and Martha’s Vineyard.

Legally, many things can be considered deadly weapons. The case law is clear. A wrench. A screwdriver. A bronze figurine. A rock. A car. A canoe paddle. In the George Zimmerman case, a sidewalk was used as a deadly weapon.

People have access to deadly weapons all the time. On top of that, many people ARE deadly weapons. If you’re a 250-pound athlete with 15% body fat and a 300-pound bench press, your hands and feet are deadly weapons.

Carrying firearms doesn’t introduce deadly weapons into an environment. It just makes the playing field more fair to the weak. If you can’t carry a weapon, and you’re small and frail, you pretty much have to accept being beaten up and otherwise abused by stronger people.

There are lots of Hawaiians who are very physically dangerous but unarmed, and unarmed Hawaiians commit a lot of violent crime. Native Hawaiians are extremely prone to criminal behavior. They are known particularly for beating women.

Wife-beating is a big problem among Pacific Islanders in general. It’s not just Hawaii. But you can’t talk about it, because if you do, you’re a racist.

To get back to the opinion, permitting people to arm themselves is not a “mandated lifestyle.” No one will be forced to carry a weapon.

“Un-Hawaiian” is divisive virtue-signaling, and it evinces contempt for the union. Residents of Hawaii are supposed to be American, not Hawaiian. There is no country called Hawaii.

Please don’t tell me how great Hawaiian culture is and how idyllic Hawaiian life was before Christians showed up. They loved human sacrifice. They thought incest was normal. Hawaiians killed Captain James Cook, and 4 of them shared his heart at a ceremonial meal. They murdered many of their babies, supposedly to avoid overpopulation.

If carrying a weapon is un-Hawaiian, then presumably, Hawaiians won’t want to do it, so no harm done, except for the continuation of the harm of allowing the weak to be preyed upon. Tough luck for women abused by native Hawaiian husbands.

I’m very tired of the dishonest anti-2A arguments. They’re all lies told to keep citizens weak and compliant, and, frankly, to turn crime victims into sacrifices on the altar of misguided gun control.

I think the worst lie is the one about militias. The Second Amendment says we have the right to own and carry firearms. It mentions militia work as a motive, but it does not say we can only possess and carry guns while serving in militias.

How stupid would it be to write a Constitutional amendment giving people the right to possess and carry arms in the military?

The Second Amendment is part of the Bill of Rights, which is a list of changes representatives of states forced on the union before agreeing to join up. Its sole purpose is to limit the federal government’s power over states and citizens. It does not give the federal government any power.

It should be obvious that it makes no sense to grant the people the right to carry arms in military service. That’s not a right. That’s something that has historically been forced on people.

Hitler allowed German and Austrian citizens to carry arms in the military. Genghis Khan allowed it. George III allowed it. The pharaohs allowed it. Stalin, Mao, Castro, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh…every tyrant who ever lived allowed it. Their regimes depended on it. They didn’t allow their military slaves to NOT carry arms.

Governments force arms into people’s hands. What kind of idiot would write a law pretending carrying a weapon for military service is a right? It’s like saying you have the right to pay taxes.

Incidentally, 2A says militias are needed to protect the security of free states. Not the union. The states. Against the union. The framers weren’t thinking a state might need to defend itself from Canada. They were concerned that states might be overrun by union troops or forcibly absorbed into the union. Which is exactly what happened in 1865, but let’s not go there.

Leftists stupidly say 2A is only about militias, even though they hate militias, and they also claim we should only be able to carry the types of guns soldiers carried when 2A was written. They like to say this means muskets, but we fought the British with rifles, swords, pistols, and cannons, too.

If the purpose of 2A is to assist with military service, then we should be allowed to carry the military weapons of our time. Full-auto. No nation on Earth goes into battle with AR-15’s that fire one round at a time. Imagine showing up for militia duty to fight the Russians, carrying a flintlock.

I’m glad I don’t live in Hawaii or any other blue abscess. Thank God I live among good conservative people. Thank God I don’t have to go to work every day and be pushed around by sexual deviants, socialists, and environmental tyrants. I’ve never had to take a seminar and be told how evil my race is. I’ve never been pressured to honor a coworker who chose a same-sex marriage. A friend of mine works at a university, and she could not discuss the pandemic at work for fear of being fired. I don’t have to deal with such things.

My best friend has another friend who is a senior engineer at Raytheon, a company we rely on for our defense. The engineer complains of being forced to take wokeness classes, not because he has done anything wrong, but because all employees have to take them. He says the company is filled with affirmative action hires who are incompetent. Everyone else does their jobs for them. I don’t have problems like this. I am so blessed.

I never have to say, “I don’t know how I can stand this, but I have a mortgage.”

It’s good to live among conservative Christians. It’s very good to limit your exposure to demonized leftists who have no future. I don’t chase the people who have shunned me because I turned to Yeshua. We were going to be separated eventually anyway.

Once Again, New Yorkers Get What They Deserve

There was a certain householder, which planted a vineyard, and hedged it round about, and digged a winepress in it, and built a tower, and let it out to husbandmen, and went into a far country:

And when the time of the fruit drew near, he sent his servants to the husbandmen, that they might receive the fruits of it.

And the husbandmen took his servants, and beat one, and killed another, and stoned another.

Again, he sent other servants more than the first: and they did unto them likewise.

But last of all he sent unto them his son, saying, They will reverence my son.

But when the husbandmen saw the son, they said among themselves, This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and let us seize on his inheritance.

And they caught him, and cast him out of the vineyard, and slew him.

When the lord therefore of the vineyard cometh, what will he do unto those husbandmen?

They say unto him, He will miserably destroy those wicked men, and will let out his vineyard unto other husbandmen, which shall render him the fruits in their seasons.

Yeshua spoke this parable against the Jewish leaders of his time who rejected him, and it also applied to those who killed the prophets. Here’s something Christians don’t like to hear: it also applies to Christians who reject the Holy Spirit and try to create their own version of Christianity. People like that think they’re better than the Jews who rejected Yeshua, but they’re the same.

Interesting thing Christians and Jews don’t like to talk about: Christianity is fundamentally Jewish. It’s not Judaism, but it came from the Jewish God. The early “Christians,” as we like to call them, were all–every one of them–Jews. Before the gentile churches existed, the worship of Yeshua was a strictly Jewish phenomenon.

There was no gentile disciple. Think about that. The Romans thought of the struggle to suppress the worship of Yeshua–the arrests and murders–as a squabble among Jews, and that’s exactly what it was.

Anyway, I’m thinking about the vineyard parable today because of Daniel Penny, who risked injury to save a bunch of strangers, some of whom were not white. What did New York City do? It tried to imprison him for many years, among largely-minority criminals who would certainly have tried to kill him.

I don’t say corrupt, racist prosecutor Alvin Bragg did this, although he did. I don’t say his subordinate Dafna Yoran, who is equally disgusting, did this, although she did. New York City did this. Bragg and Yoran were just the instruments. New Yorkers are responsible because they overwhelmingly support leftism. They put Bragg and Yoran in office. They will do it again. They have installed many other far-left lunatics in positions of power. Everything these powerful people do can be blamed on the populace.

New Yorkers are determined to destroy themselves with absurd leftist beliefs based in fantasy. They punish everyone who tries to help them with common sense and decency.

For these reasons, New Yorkers are no longer worth trying to save.

Yeshua spoke of the prophets and himself, but the same principle is true of any helpful person who is abused by the ones he tries to help. A city that punishes selfless heroes deserves to be left in the hands of malefactors.

Daniel Penny got on a train. A violent, fatherless brat or mental case (depending on whom you believe) showed up and attacked other passengers. He said he was willing to die. He made at least one death threat.

What did Penny do? He got off at the next stop and waited for the next train.

No, that’s what I would have done. I’ve spent a lot of time on New York subway trains. I’ve seen entitled punks harass and pressure innocent people. I’ve had black New Yorkers say racist things to me. One man walked out of his way to spit by my feet. A drunk lady told my friends and me white people were nasty and she couldn’t stand us. I know New York racists are dangerous, and I have never seen myself as a person who had the physical tools to confront them. I would have gotten off the train and maybe contacted a transit cop.

Daniel Penny is braver and more altruistic than I am, so he grabbed a dangerous assailant and neutralized him. He didn’t try to kill him. He held him for the police. Penny is not a scientist who analyzes the consequences of chokeholds. No one like that was available when he restrained the criminal. He had to guess. It looks like he guessed wrong, because his chokehold is considered to be a likely cause of the criminal’s death.

Well, tough.

If two criminals stick up a 7-11, and a clerk kills one, the other criminal is guilty of murder. The clerk goes free. Criminals, not their victims, are responsible for such deaths. Similarly, Jordan Neely, the criminal who died after being restrained, is responsible for his own death. Any other conclusion is inconsistent with centuries of precedent, not to mention public policy.

When you put other people in reasonable fear of serious bodily harm, you open yourself up to very bad treatment. I can use a flamethrower to ward off an assailant with a gun, if a flamethrower is all I have. I can push him into a tank full of hungry sharks and watch while they rip him to pieces. If all I had were a machine designed to grab people and peel their skin off, I would be allowed to shove him into it. Scared people on a subway are certainly allowed to avoid a beating by choking a healthy male attacker.

What if the attacker is technically innocent because he’s nuts? Doesn’t matter. It’s irrelevant to your right to use force.

New Yorkers have decided, over and over, to empower officials who favor people who abuse the innocent, and to cut New Yorkers–themselves–off from remedies available in other states. Stores all over the city have closed because criminals are supplying Ebay and Craigslist businesses by shoplifting regularly without opposition. Dafna Yoran– supposedly a prosecutor–worked to get leniency for a young man who murdered an elderly Asian at an ATM. New Yorkers vote over and over to nullify the Second Amendment, so people can’t defend themselves.

They are not worth saving.

If Daniel Penny had gotten off the train, Jordan Neely would probably have beaten at least one victim, including the black woman who talked to news people after Penny saved her. Penny himself would have been fine. He would have had a story to tell at dinner that night. “This nut got on the train and started threatening people. I managed to get off before he did anything, but check out this video I shot.”

No one would know his name today. No one would be protesting, demanding to know why a big, strapping Marine didn’t prevent a spoiled animal from knocking a woman’s teeth out. He would be in the clear. Instead, he is now a famous target who will be threatened by black racists for the rest of his days.

Black Lives Matter is now threatening Penny, who defended a black woman. A BLM idiot said New York needed black vigilantes to go after people like Penny. New York already has black vigilantes. They’re called criminal gangs.

Penny is being sued civilly by the male human being whose sperm produced Neely by chance. The alleged “father.” His attorney is so dumb he speaks in ungrammatical sentences in front of crowds. The attorney told the news Neely was choked to death for boarding a train and asking for food. It’s a shame an attorney can’t be disbarred for lying to the press.

I believe Penny can sue him for defamation. What he says in court is privileged, but I don’t believe that applies to statements made in self-serving press conferences. It shouldn’t.

A quick web search indicates that an attorney may be sued for defamation during the course of a lawsuit for statements made to the press.

New Yorkers should be celebrating Penny, but it’s only happening outside New York City. New York restaurants should give him free meals. The mayor should honor him. Instead, they tried to put him in a cage with dangerous black racists who would love to be known as the person who killed Daniel Penny.

Neely’s “dad” is a real piece of work. Of course, his last name isn’t Neely. He abandoned Neely and let a single woman raise him. Now he’s back, pretending to be devastated because one of the illegitimate kids he had, most likely because he didn’t like condoms, and whom he failed to support, died. Why is he back? Well, we can’t read his mind, but he just sued Penny, whose defense fund is currently at $3,331,843. That’s the kind of bait that attracts roaches.

Penny’s lawyers should force pops to take a DNA test. Maybe he’s not the real father. He may be guessing.

Penny’s putative dad will probably sue the city as well. If he sues the city, the city will pay him. They’ll settle.

I sincerely hope Penny is able to hire excellent attorneys and that they mop the floor with his “dad’s” revolting representation. I hope “dad’s” attorney spends a great deal on this case and loses every…penny.

New York doesn’t deserve Penny. It deserves to be abandoned and allowed to self-destruct. One Daniel Penny is worth a thousand leftist New Yorkers who reward evil and punish the good.

New Yorkers will suffer because of Alvin Bragg’s racist indictment. They’ll be beaten, robbed, raped, and killed because future Daniel Pennys will keep on walking. That’s part of the tax New Yorkers will pay as punishment for wokeness. They don’t mind. The appearance of virtue is priceless to leftists, even if virtue itself is repugnant to them.

My Normal Life

My wife and I have to sleep in separate rooms due to her pregnancy and a painting project.

This morning she woke up and came and found me in the master bedroom, wearing earmuffs and fluffy shearling slippers, staring out through the sliding glass doors, holding a loaded semiautomatic rifle with a scope.

Her first question: “How did you sleep?”

This is the difference between red state marriage and blue state marriage.

Here, only the rodents are squirrely.

I am very seriously considering buying a propane deep fryer for the back porch.

Truce Over

As I have said before, genocide can be a good thing. I was referring to God’s efforts, like the flood, the tribulation, and the destruction of the Canaanites and Amalekites, but it’s particularly true of squirrels.

I used to kill squirrels whenever I got a chance, but one day I decided to stop. I was working in my shop, and a mother squirrel kept walking by, carrying material for her nest. Ordinarily, squirrels are afraid to be near people. She walked right by me, over and over as she built the nest in a tree by the corner of my house.

I felt bad when I thought about killing her and her family. She trusted me. Maybe God was telling me something. I let her live.

Then I paid $6000 for truck repairs. Squirrels ate my Dodge’s wiring harness.

Let it suffice to say the ceasefire is over. And they are the ones who violated it.

I got myself a gadget that lures squirrels and shoves a bolt through their heads, but so far, it has only registered one kill. I’m going back to firearms.

I have a few .22 rifles. I believe the best for squirrel control are a Savage A22 and a modified Marlin 60 (made during the dark Remington years). Both are scoped. I also have a Ruger 10/22 with a Sig red dot and a silencer.

My 10/22 breaks down. I don’t mean that in the FIAT sense. I mean it comes apart into two short pieces you can stick in a backpack. Like an assassin’s ridiculous briefcase gun from a 1970’s movie.

In retrospect, I believe I should have gotten the one-piece version. My understanding is that it takes some skill to make the one I bought accurate, and I think it is also known to lose its zero when broken down.

I have gotten bad results in the past using scoped rifles for squirrels. I can’t let that continue. I don’t want to wound animals and have them run off and suffer. I would also like to avoid giving up and using a shotgun.

I believe the solution is to sight the rifles in correctly and memorize the deviations at squirrel distances so I can be really sure where the bullets will go. I also think I need to use the same ammo all the time, so I’m going with CCI Mini-mags. I have a good supply on hand, and they seem to be 1″-accurate at 50 yards in a good gun.

The Marlin Model 60 is a mix of good and bad. The good? It’s cheap. It’s light and handy. It feels good in the hand. The barrels have a great reputation for accuracy. It even looks nice. The bad? The quality control during the last years was like the quality control at Popeyes. The insides are like BB-gun insides. It’s not made for hyper ammunition. The trigger is plastic, and the trigger pull is bad.

I bought my Marlin a few years ago. I sat down and shot at a target maybe 60 feet away. The impacts covered an area the size of a big orange. Unbelievable.

I sent it back, and Marlin didn’t even try to fix it. They sent me a new gun, and I had to do a new background check.

The tube magazine fell off the new gun, and rather than go through the warranty process, I bought parts and fixed it myself.

I bought a trigger, springs, and some other stuff from a company called MCARBO, and now I have a metal trigger that works fairly well, and the gun will handle hyper ammunition if I decide to use it.

A photo I have on hand suggests this gun will do 1 MOA at 50 yards. I’m not positive about it. I wonder if I typed “50” in the file name when I should have typed something like 25. Anyway, it’s not bad.

Ruger is a fantastic gun company, unlike Remington, which owned Marlin when it made my gun. Ruger bought Marlin from Remington when Remington collapsed. The Rugerians must not think much of the Model 60, because they discontinued it. It’s probably one of the two most popular .22 rifles in history, but I guess Ruger’s people know a problem child when they see one.

I think they should bring it back and fix the issues everyone knows about.

The Marlin has a Bug Buster on it. This is a very cheap airgun scope. I like good optics, but I will defend the Bug Buster against all attacks. At short distances, a scope doesn’t need perfect glass or even good tracking. You just have to be able to see your game. You will never need to move your turrets. Just remember how the gun shoots and hold over or under accordingly.

The Bug Buster has a neat illuminated reticle that lights up in red or green, and it also has target turrets, so you don’t lose stuff when you sight it in. You don’t have to remove caps that fall in the grass, and you don’t need a screwdriver.

When I decided to sight my guns in yesterday, I chose the Model 60 and left the A22 in its case. The A22 is better in every imaginable way, but that miserable Model 60 has an allure no one seems to be able to resist.

The A22 is tapped and threaded for a real scope mount. It has a Savage Accu-trigger. It comes with iron sights, too. It has real-rifle guts. You can replace the barrel with a wrench instead of a press. Savage barrels are known for accuracy.

I didn’t want to go out in the manure and set up my bench at 50 yards, so I settled for 35 yards in my backyard. Let’s face it; no compassionate person is going to shoot a squirrel with a .22 if it’s over a hundred feet away. Rimfires are not accurate enough to trust on tiny game that far off.

I used a dubious hunting tripod for a rest, but I still got the gun shooting into half an inch at 35 yards, so it was good enough. I moved the target to 20 yards, which is a more likely distance, and it shot half an inch or so low. Now I have three numbers to remember: 35, 20, and 1/2. Done.

The Ruger surprised me. I didn’t think a red dot would be any good for squirrels, but it put rounds into half an inch at 20 yards just fine.

I ought to be able to assassinate squirrels very reliably now without resorting to the 16-gauge.

I don’t like the Ruger’s trigger. It’s plastic, and it seems like I can feel it bend before the gun goes off. I don’t think it matters at rimfire distances, but I could see myself changing it some day.

The scope is a Sig Romeo5. Very simple. Cheap. The battery lasts for years. You don’t turn the scope on or off. It’s “shake awake,” which means it comes on by itself when the gun is moved.

Now I’m looking for shooting opportunities. I have a great hide. It’s not black or camo. It’s white. It has a refrigerator and running water. It’s my house. I’m going to look out the windows every so often, and when I see a good shot opportunity, I’ll open a door and shoot from inside. It works great.

I might start shooting from upstairs windows. That will give me more chances. Because of the elevation, more squirrels will be significantly below my position, so I will be able to blast them without any concerns about rounds leaving my property.

Maybe I should put a stand up in the yard. That would be really funny.

When my dad and I were looking at houses here, we saw a 5-acre property with a deer stand and feeder. There is freedom here. I can sit in a stand beside my house, holding a semiautomatic rifle with a 25-round magazine, shooting at squirrels, any day of the year.

I have to stop at 12 squirrels per day. I guess that’s the tyranny I face.

Time to get up and look out the window.

The Tree of Domesticity Must be Watered with the Blood of Rodents

I had a bad experience today. I stepped on a baby mouse. Deliberately.

I have a guy coming out today to look at our chimney cap. A squirrel got into my chimney a few years back, and I had to shoot it in the fireplace. I learned that animals had torn up the old chimney cap. Mice were coming in. I had the cap replaced.

Somehow, they still get in. It may be because I hired Certified Roofing to redo my roofs. Certified is a really awful company. They left dozens of nails in my yard. Shingles are still falling off the roof. I’m going to have to get them to fix everything. If they won’t, I’ll have to hire another company and sue Certified.

It may also be that the new chimney cap, installed by a different company, is not getting the job done. Maybe it’s loose.

Whatever is happening, we get an occasional mouse, so I leave poison out along with traps.

I use the white Tomcat traps. They’re really good if you bait them correctly. If you put peanut butter in them, the mice lick it off and walk away satisfied. I use peanut butter to glue big balls of Victor rat poison to the traps. The mice try to pry the balls out, and that’s the end of them.

The other day, I found a dead mouse in my master bedroom, and it looked like its nipples were distended. A mom mouse. I flushed it down the toilet and went on my way.

Today when I got up, I saw a little object wiggling on the floor by the guest bath. It turned out to be a tiny mouse. It was not very coordinated. It couldn’t get up and run effectively. It could scurry on its belly. Its eyes weren’t open.

It was dying of thirst, so it had left its hiding place to look for its mother.

It was depressing. A person’s natural instinct is to take care of small, weak things that need help. And baby mice are cute. But there was nothing to be done for it. You don’t buy a home for a disease-bearing pest and feed it milk with an eye dropper.

I scooped it up in a box in order to avoid getting microbes on me, I took it outside, and I put it on the porch. It found its way to a porch pillar and started slithering around it. Mice are drawn to corners. They like to scamper along the bases of walls. It was natural for it to go around the pillar. It wanted to get away and survive.

I shoved it out where I could get at it, and I stamped on it. Instant death. I scraped the goo off my sandal and pushed the mouse’s remains out where scavengers could see them.

That was it. I was finished. I went in and made breakfast, which I didn’t enjoy a whole lot.

When my wife made it to the table, I told her what had happened. She said, “It had to go. It was a pest.” No husband-shaming. No tears. I was more affected than she was.

This shows what a blessing it is to have a foreign wife. In some other countries, people are still so concerned about taking care of themselves and their families, they don’t really care how mice and rats feel. They still have common sense.

I have a friend who has three sons. They were at my house one day, and we went to my shop. While we were talking, I saw a big roach, and without interrupting our conversation, I turned on the shop vacuum, sucked the roach up, and turned the vacuum off. The eldest son’s jaw dropped. He looked at his mother. He asked if I was just going to leave the roach in the vacuum. I thought it was a strange question. Of course I was.

It took me a second to realize there was a culture clash.

Back when I was having mole problems, I started telling his mother about a trap I had bought, and she cut me off. She understood that the moles had to go, but did not want to hear about it. It upset her.

It didn’t upset me. I wasn’t happy about crushing innocent creatures in a steel trap, but I wasn’t going to lie awake thinking about it.

I guess they live in one of those homes where people scoop up spiders, take them outside, and rehome them.

My wife is from Africa. They don’t rehome bugs. They don’t even like having dogs in the house.

My friend is a wonderful woman, but every home needs a male authority figure to keep things in balance.

“Harmless” spiders bite people while they sleep, and the bites fill up with pus. I had two spider bites. I would say each one produced over a teaspoon of pus. I had to go to a doctor for each one. One left a scar. Now tell me how spiders are our friends.

I have something awful to say. The more decadent and spoiled a society is–the more worthless it has become–the better it treats animals. Being too nice to animals is a luxury for spoiled people have never had to worry about pests eating their food or giving their children diseases. People who have never had to kill an animal to feed or protect a family.

Everyone should be kind to animals when it’s practical, but we go too far. There are people now who complain about cruelty to shrimp, which are just bugs that live under water. Fish barely know they’re alive, and they aren’t capable of real suffering, but every fishing story on the Internet is followed by moronic, enraged comments from twisted people who think every tuna has dreams and a mom.

In its slide into decadence, America has become feminized and matriarchal, and that’s a problem. Matriarchies don’t work. They breed crime and poverty. They produce generations of worthless boys who end up in prison.

Every family needs a father who is willing to be the bad guy. Somebody has to say, “No, we can’t keep the sick dog we found at the dump.” “No, Fluffy the cancerous cat can’t come home from the vet this time.” “No, we can’t save the rat we found in the trap and buy it a nice cage with a wheel in it.”

That guy is me. I have to accept the burden of doing unpopular things now. I’m glad my wife is supportive.

When I was a kid, I found a mouse that was dying, and I put it in a jar and tried to help it. My grandparents and my mother should have ordered me to dump it in the yard, but they didn’t. That was a mistake. I thought its convulsions might be labor. I thought I might be helping it have “babies.” Mice don’t have babies. Babies are human beings. Mice have young.

It died the day I found it. I should have put it on the ground and stepped on it to end its suffering. Because my family failed to step up, I let it suffer for no reason. Their laziness was cruel.

I have also saved a litter of skunks, a white lab mouse, a tiny raccoon, and a baby mockingbird. I think the mouse did all right. A girl took it home with her. I turned the skunks over to my dad’s friend, a big, brash North Carolina sheriff’s deputy, and I was told they would be cared for by a buddy of his who raised skunks. I’m sure he dispatched them the same day. The coon went to a crazy lady with a wildlife rescue operation. I remember her holding the coon in one hand and a cocktail in the other. The mockingbird was torn apart by the same cat that made its rescue necessary in the first place. I found its headless body.

You don’t rescue coons. They are horrible pests, and they carry rabies without symptoms. I can kill raccoons here legally all year. There is no season. Every considerate, informed, compassionate person hates them.

My last encounter with a coon involved me shooting it in the head while it was stuck in a trap. It kept stealing the bait from the trap I was using to get a squirrel that chewed on my very expensive gate. I put a .22 round through its brain and tossed it over the fence for the buzzards, crows, and possums. I didn’t enjoy it, but someone had to do it.

My friend with the three boys has a mother who keeps abandoned animals on a farm. She’s an animal hoarder. The animals don’t get the greatest care. Most would be better off at the end of a veterinarian’s needle. She buys vegetables and provides salad for wild coons every day. This is like injecting yourself with something that makes covid viruses stronger and more prolific. It’s worse than feeding rats. Coons kill pets and livestock, they invade people’s attics, and they are generally a source of misery.

Who is kind? The person who hangs onto animals that have unpleasant lives and prolongs them with substandard care, or the one who steps on orphaned mice to save them hours or days of agony?

A person has a divine right to live. An animal does not. Jesus ate meat. God allows us to turn animals into meals and shoes. We don’t have to ask for permission or forgiveness.

Euthanizing a person is murder. Euthanizing an animal is compassion coupled with strength of character. It takes character to kill an animal you wish you could help.

I showed mercy to a family of squirrels here. Then I paid $6000 to undo the damage they did to my truck. That’s my son’s inheritance and my wife’s food and clothing. Now I’m killing squirrels again.

Florida has changed the squirrel season. It used to last about 5 months. Now you can kill them whenever you want, although you might be hindered briefly if you live next door to a Karen who just moved here from New Jersey. Florida realizes squirrels are a problem. The part of the state north of Tampa was designed for two types of creatures: retirees and squirrels. Every third tree is an oak that rains acorns. Up north, most trees don’t make food for squirrels. Florida is a squirrel paradise.

God requires us to kill. It’s part of the curse he put on the world. Because of sin, he has to kill and punish, so he wants us to know how it feels. Under the Mosaic law, a person who refused to eat meat had to be cut off from Israel. Animals were killed and cooked every day at the temple. God ordered the Hebrews to kill a lot of people as well as their livestock, perhaps because the livestock were raped and used in pagan rituals. God got angry with Saul for showing the wrong people mercy instead of killing them.

The Messianic Age will be different. The world will be like a big petting zoo. Animals won’t eat meat. They’ll get along. Presumably, we’ll be able to touch them and love them. Until then, we have to share in the burden of ending lives.

I’m so glad I didn’t marry a pampered American girl who tries to keep meat off our table or who would stop talking to me if I shot a coyote. I’m so sick of female self-righteousness.

Women are not the answer. God, a male, is. Women never built or protected a society. Women never established police forces or prisons to keep people safe. Women can’t raise children alone without disastrous consequences, but men can. Women vote stupidly. If men didn’t vote, we would be communists right now. No exaggeration.

Men are extremely important. It does no good to bear children if they just rot. Prisons are full of the children of single mothers, not single men.

The other day, I saw George Clooney doing an interview. He looked spindly and frail. I turned to my wife and asked if Clooney’s wife was a vegan. I could tell.

I looked it up. Yes, of course she’s a vegan. He has a matriarchal household. God help his children. And him, for that matter. He must live in a psychological straitjacket. “IS THAT A SINGLE-USE PLASTIC BOTTLE?” “ARE YOU EATING A TACO AND APPROPRIATING CHEE-CA-NO CULTURE?” “OH, NO, YOU DID NOT MISGENDER THE CAT AGAIN!”

I genuinely pity him. And I thank God I’m not around people like that now.

Two days ago, my wife showed me a horrible photo from the web. A woman with a beard, holding a tiny baby that appeared to be malnourished. The website said the mother was a man.

We have been praying for that child. What chance does she have? Her parents are disgusting.

We saw a self-righteous vegan female influencer showing off a baby. It was much too small for its age. Veganism is not for babies or children. It’s much worse for them than it is for adults. It’s hard to make a vegan work for an adult, but making it work for a baby takes much more effort and knowledge.

The freak with the beard disturbed me and made me wish the world would end. I wish Yeshua would come for us today. We are completely finished as a nation and a world. When you can publish a photo of an unconscionable abomination and get a flood of likes, you live in a world that is not worth preserving for another day.

The squirrels will continue to die, as will the mice, coons, and whatever else gets on our nerves. If you have a wife who will let you be a man, you should step up and accept the honor. If you marry an American girl who voted for Kamala, you won’t get much sympathy from me when the misery kicks in.

DC Struck by Sudden Shortage of Crack, Cheap Wine

The unthinkable has happened. Well, that’s wrong. It was definitely thinkable. A lot of us expected it. Joe Biden has pardoned his son, one-man crime wave Hunter Biden.

It’s very interesting from a political standpoint as well as a legal standpoint.

Let’s see. What crimes has Little Biden committed?

1. He appears to have been second-in-command in a Biden family bribery operation, selling his dad’s favors. It appears other relations, such as his aunt and at least one uncle, are involved. Little Biden was under investigation for lots of related stuff, including his alleged lobbying for Ukrainian firm Burisma, a company he began working for in April of 2014.

2. He lied on an FBI background check when buying a gun. That’s a felony. A jury convicted him.

3. He evaded federal income taxes.

4. He ignored a subpoena and refused to testify before Congress. Ordinarily, I would not take that seriously, but two Trump associates went to prison for the same thing. Of course, they were prosecuted under a different tier of the injustice system.

Am I missing anything? I hope I haven’t. It’s a very complicated story.

There is no point in going through the long list of Big Biden denials. They’re all over the web right now. Even leftists are posting them. They are shocked. Just as shocked as they were when they suddenly realized Big Biden was senile, after 4 years of falling down, shaking hands with imaginary people, and forgetting where he was.

Big Biden repeatedly, indisputably asserted that he would not pardon Little Biden, and his press flak did the same thing from the White House podium. I can’t wait to see her tell the White House Press Corps Biden never said he wouldn’t pardon Hunter.

Where is this woman going to get a job next year? At least Jen Psaki was reasonably bright. It’s hard to believe any media organization would hire this other one, but on the other hand…Don Lemon. The right complexion, sexual fetish, and political stance can outweigh cognitive and moral deficits.

Big Biden lied. Incredible! No one saw a thing like that coming! Because he has always been so honest in the past.

I saw a hilarious 20th-century video of Biden saying he was knocked out of the race for the presidency because he lied. He called himself a liar. He didn’t say he misspoke or whatever. If you haven’t seen it, it’s because the 21st-century press kept it quiet. Even Big Biden has admitted Big Biden lies.

He said it very casually. He seemed to think it was funny. It was like he was admitting he cut in line at Chipotle.

The scope of the pardon is enormous. It spans a decade, up to the day when Big Biden issued it. If we find out Little Biden robbed a bank or sold 10-year-old prostitutes to depraved oligarchs, he can’t be charged unless there is a way to turn his crimes into violations of state law.

Maybe Alvin Bragg could help us there. He’s exactly the kind of unethical prosecutor we would need.

I’m sure it’s a coincidence that Big Biden’s pardon goes into effect retroactively just before Little Biden dove into Burisma.

The diary isn’t real, but we’ll imprison the lady who stole it anyway. The laptop isn’t real, but we’ll go after the people who publicized it anyway. The Burisma scandal isn’t real, but let’s pardon Hunter anyway.

It’s totally reasonable to pardon people who are clearly innocent. In Biden World.

So what’s happening here?

Little Biden had a sweetheart deal that would have spared him prison time, ending prosecution on the tax and gun charges, but the judge blew it up because she felt it was unfair and would have had the effect of a blanket pardon for unrelated future prosecutions. On the surface, it looks like a) the prosecutors were in cahoots with his defense team or b) the prosecutors were stupid and the defense team fooled them into writing Biden a lifetime pardon. Option b is completely plausible. The best and brightest generally do not go into government work.

Little Biden did not try to restructure the plea. Instead, he pleaded guilty. Why?

Let’s go ahead and be cynical.

By pleading guilty, he saved a ton of money in attorneys’ fees. Biden has very expensive representation. A second trial and two appeals would have cost him millions, in all likelihood. I don’t know why high-profile defendants hire such overpriced lawyers, but they do. Dealing with a sentencing should be much less work than a trial. Little or no research. No witness prep. No expert witnesses with huge fees. The list goes on.

Once he pleaded (not “pled”) guilty, all he had to do was sit back and wait to be pardoned.

Did he know he would be pardoned? Of course. He and the Big Guy had a deal. Otherwise, why plead guilty? It saved him money, but barring a pardon, it also assured he would go to prison.

Big Biden is one of the most notorious and shameless liars ever to stink up the Oval Office. Of course he lied, repeatedly, when he said he would not pardon Little Biden.

Trump would almost certainly have pardoned Little Biden. He is going to pardon a bunch of J6 martyrs, and he wants to be able to say he was as good to a political enemy’s son as he was to them. Even if they didn’t exist, he would still want to pardon Little Biden in order to appear magnanimous and get a distraction out of the way while putting his regime in place.

What about Kamala?

That’s a tough one.

I’m sure she originally planned to pardon Little Biden. She probably discussed it with Big Biden before he shuffled out of the race and used her to gut Barack Obama. It was probably a condition for his agreement to, for all practical purposes, appoint her as the Democratic candidate.

It appears that Biden sabotaged her repeatedly, however. I believe he appointed Kamala in order to prevent Barack Obama, who was in the process of knocking him out of the candidate spot for a second time, from installing his own protege, Chris Coons, who will now join Admiral Stockdale and Tim Kaine on the list of forgotten could-have-beens.

If Kamala had won, it would have been in spite of Big Biden. Maybe she would have backed out on a promise to pardon Little Biden. I doubt Big Biden was willing to take a chance.

I think Kamala was not a sure thing, and Biden did not want to give Trump a PR victory. I believe this is why he relieved himself all over his already-tainted legacy.

Is Hunter out of the woods now? Not yet.

There is some chance Trump’s DOJ will start to take the Biden family bribery operation seriously. If that happens, Hunter can be forced to testify. Thanks to Big Biden, he will not be able to refuse to answer questions. He can’t assert his Fifth Amendment rights because he can’t incriminate himself. He can, however, be imprisoned indefinitely for contempt of court for refusing to testify. He can also be imprisoned for perjury or lying to the FBI.

Sometimes prosecutors get people to testify against their accomplices by threatening them with prosecution. That won’t work on Hunter now. Another tool is immunity. They can give people immunity in order to strip them of Fifth Amendment protection. Big Biden just did that for future prosecutors.

What will the Bidens do now?

If Big Biden wants to kill the scandal permanently, he will have to pardon himself and every other individual involved in the family’s crimes. Alleged. He could also pardon everyone but himself, counting on the GOP to be unwilling to prosecute a former president.

Whatever Biden’s many faults are, he is very protective of his children. His DOJ got a woman imprisoned for the petty theft of his daughter’s diary. I don’t know whether his passion for nepotism extends sufficiently to other relatives to motivate him to pardon them.

It’s wild, seeing leftists scream about the pardon. They are very angry at Joe, but, predictably and incredibly, they have managed to turn Trump into the problem. Now Trump will pardon all the J6 defendants! The dangerous revolutionaries who pretty much took over the entire country by getting buzzed on cheap beer and throwing a halfhearted, weaponless, planless riot that lasted a couple of hours and resulted in no deaths except for the murder of an unarmed woman who tried to climb through a window.

If Batista had faced this kind of coup, Castro would have died in prison. This is the kind of revolution deposed tyrants wish they could have faced.

If the J6 defendants, and not Barack Obama, had staged a coup against Biden’s presidential campaign, he would have been on the ballot through November 5.

Trump was going to pardon the nonviolent J6 scapegoats anyway. No one should spend years or decades in prison for walking through the Capitol during a riot. Some of the J6 people are in prison for doing much less.

Is Joe Biden crazy and corrupt enough to pardon himself and his family? I guess he is. If he is willing to abandon all pretense of honesty and respect for the law in order to save Hunter from a year or two at a Club Fed, he is probably willing to go all the way.

I don’t care about Little Biden skating on the gun and tax charges, because rapists and murderers are acquitted every day, but the bribery thing is important. It needs to be fully exposed and investigated, regardless of whether he can be charged.

I don’t know whether Trump has the stomach for it. Guess we’ll find out.

Leading Democrats Express Concern

Was I wrong about the left’s response to the second Trump election? I was sure the usual spindly, stoned, spoiled white kids would be out in the streets burning buildings and attacking the cops by now, but it has not happened.

What’s going on? They have gone berserk so many times. Why not now?

I wonder if it’s because even leftists are tired of them. I saw that Oregon’s governor, a lefty wackjob (I didn’t actually check, but I am willing to guess) threatened to meet Antifa with the National Guard. Are Antifers intimidated because they think blue-state officials might actually do their jobs this time?

Maybe leftists are tired of Antifa because it was a fad. BLM seems to be drying up. Maybe kids no longer think it’s cool to post selfies and videos from riots, not because they have grown up, but simply because it has been done already, and other kids are not as impressed as they once were.

I just saw a video from Seattle, where a group of about two dozen black-clad punks with a combined chest measurement of 35 inches tried to buffalo a few bike cops. It went nowhere. They ended up wandering off, chanting some nonsense questioning the cops’ parentage.

Aren’t we supposed to refrain from shaming the unfathered?

Is the rain killing their drive? Leftist nut riots generally occur in decent weather. American leftists are soft. They may dress like the Viet Cong, but they cry when the cops intercept their Grubhub orders. Literally. Maybe they’re afraid rain will wash the food coloring out of their hair.

Riot-prone punks are generally drug users. Has the dope gotten so good, it destroys their motivation to leave the basement? We all know weed kills motivation, except for the motivation to eat Frito-Lay products.

Could it be they’re planning action for later, on the assumption it will surprise THE MAN, who was counting on post-election chaos?

I don’t think so. I don’t think they plan that far ahead. I think they are bad at thinking about the future. After all, Jew-hating leftists at Harvard showed their faces while expecting to receive legal internships in New York City. That’s like showing up for a job interview with an ankle bracelet.

Maybe they’re waiting for a spark. Someone has to go first and make protesting cool again. Someone has to get a whole bunch of likes for fighting the police naked or something.

Herd creatures don’t like to be the one who goes first.

Tiktok gals are telling other gals to poison men. Is that the new leftist intifada? The police can beat you up, and felony arrests can keep you out of cushy jobs, so perhaps it makes sense that crazy, unfulfilled women whose cats aren’t getting the job done would go on Tiktok with their faces uncovered and tell other women to poison husbands and boyfriends they will never actually have.

The poison girls practically worship a long-dead Italian lady who (probably not true) sold poison to women with abusive husbands. The poison is called aqua Tofana, and it contains lead, arsenic, and belladonna.

It’s not like we know these women had abusive husbands. It’s not like there were trials. Maybe their wealthy husbands abused them by not dying soon enough.

By the way, as long as we’re revealing top secret information, McDonald’s special sauce is thousand island dressing. I know you had no idea. Nearly every secret sauce is ketchup plus mayonnaise with or without pickle relish.

The Tiktok assassin wannabes tell other girls aqua Tofana is undetectable after the fact. And that is true. If it’s 1650 A.D.

Lead, arsenic, and belladonna can be detected with no problem, and this has probably been true for over a century.

Girls really are bad at science. I’m sorry.

I don’t know why anyone would think lead was a good poison. Pretty sure cigarettes are faster.

When I was young, I did not understand that lead was bad for us, and I liked the taste of it. Sometimes I chewed on lead split-shot fishing sinkers. You’re supposed to close split shots with pliers, but I used my teeth, and I noticed that lead was kind of tasty.

Maybe this explains a lot of things about me now. Anyway, I did not die or even get sick.

Opponents of the aqua Tofana movement have speculated that very few of these women have access to men on a regular basis, for reasons that are obvious when you watch their videos. But, as an Internet denizen said, going to Starbucks could be scary. And I’m not talking about the prices.

Where are these girls going to get arsenic? Amazon? Let me see. Let me search and put myself on yet another secret list.

Amazon lists a homeopathic medicine made from arsenic trioxide. It’s called arsenicum album, which probably means “white arsenic.” Given that it’s sold openly as a medicine, and the fact that it’s homeopathic, i.e. ineffective, this stuff can’t contain enough arsenic to change election outcomes.

“Homeopathic” is a funny way to spell “placebo.”

Well, this is something. I just found a 100-gram bottle of pure arsenic metal on Amazon for $380. God bless the Internet. I should have expected it.

I just checked, and I can buy a cobra online for $1,000. Not at Amazon, so forget free shipping.

Never doubt the power of online commerce. I can use Paypal. I can’t use Paypal to buy a box of .22 shorts, because Paypal thinks selling gun-related items is harmful to society. But I can get a highly venomous snake that will breed just fine in my yard.

I can buy an inland taipan. Look this thing up. It’s worse than 10 cobras. These things will chase you and bite you over and over until they’re dry.

They’re like long, skinny scorned women.

I don’t like gun control, but shouldn’t we have cobra control? Isn’t that obvious? A gun just sits around until someone uses it, and it can’t reproduce. It can’t eradicate or displace native species, either. We should be controlling dangerous animals like cobras, pit-type dogs, and Will Smith.

If the kooky aqua Tofana girls get serious, maybe some witch with the prerequisite nose hog ring, who works at a university chemistry lab, will start filching arsenic and mailing it around to girls who will end up poisoning themselves and their cats accidentally. Or maybe some girl who doesn’t know Amazon keeps records of sales will just order some.

I can already see the cop videos in my mind. Girls in cuffs, screaming “THEY SAID IT WAS UNDETECTABLE! Oh, and I CAN’T BREATHE!”

I don’t know why America hasn’t erupted in violence, but I am confident it will happen, because you can’t say we’ve changed just because Republicans won elections by small margins.

Maybe the riot-prone are avoiding important dates like the ones like January 6 and January 20. Maybe they’ll flip out and go berserk over minor provocations, when we don’t expect it. Maybe they’ll hear there will be no Barbie sequel.