Cheap Ammo Surprise

Today I tested three types of ammunition in the Tikka T1x, using the Athlon Helos scope I mounted the other day. It is generally believed that one key to making a .22 accurate is to find ammunition it likes, so that’s what I’m doing.

Things were not totally optimal. I need to move the scope back one or two notches. The eye relief was not right, and it was hard to check the parallax. Nonetheless, things went pretty well. My dream is to shoot into half an inch at 50 yards with a .22, and I am getting closer.

I bought Eley Benchrest Outlaw ammo. Eley is one of the brands .22 competitors love. They also make something called Benchrest Precision, but it’s a lot more expensive.

I also bought CCI Sub-Sonic 40-grain lead round nose. Most people think subsonic .22 rounds are more accurate, and they definitely shoot much quieter from a suppressor.

My third choice was recommended by a guy on a forum. He said he had turned a couple of ladies loose with a .22 and some CCI Blazers, and they had shot really well. I ordered some 40-grain rounds.

Blazer is CCI’s cheap line, so you would expect it to be inaccurate. I paid 6.4 cents per round before tax, and that’s pretty low.

Sadly, it turns out you get what you pay for. On the high end, I mean. The Eleys gave me an average of 0.468″, or 1.28 MOA, at 35 yards. This included a flyer, but the flyer was not bad. I shot 4 10-round groups, and two were under 0.4″ Without the flyer, I was at 0.382″, or 1.04 MOA. I didn’t feel like I caused the flyer, but maybe I did. If so, Eley Benchrest Outlaw is very impressive.

The groups looked stringy, which made me unhappy and gave me the impression the Eleys were shooting worse than they were.

The Sub-sonics did not make me happy. I got a serious flyer which opened a group up to 0.840″. Without the flyer, I would have been at 0.515″ for an average, or 1.41 MOA. I don’t know if this stuff is prone to flyers or not. I am inclined not to trust it.

I forgot to shoot the last group. I wonder how it would have changed things.

The Blazers were great. They shot very pretty groups. Prettier than the other brands. I felt as though I were shooting better with Blazers, although the dial caliper told a different story. I averaged 0.555″, or 1.51 MOA. I may have had a flyer I caused, but it’s hard to tell, because the groups were still small. If you take out the worst group, I would be at 0.517″ or 1.41 MOA.

It looks like Blazers would be excellent for squirrels. They will hit harder than subsonics. The question is whether I can conclude anything about their reliability from 40 shots.

No .22 ammunition is truly reliable, as far as I know, but some are better than others.

I need to keep practicing. I laid off for a long time, so I need to get consistent, not just to shoot squirrels, but to test ammunition. I shot the Eley first today, and I was learning things the whole time. Maybe it would have shot even better had I shot it last.

People say CCI’s 38-grain Blazers are terrible, so I’m not going to bother with those.

I’m going to move the scope back and do some more shooting. Things are already looking really bad for the rodents.

“My, How Fat Your Crows Are!”

As noted yesterday, my Athlon 2-12 scope arrived, and I did what was probably a lot of unnecessary work getting it mounted just right. The Tikka Tx1 is ready for action, so today I sighted it in at 35 yards. Sort of. I didn’t use a proper bench, and I didn’t lie prone. I did what I could with a plastic tripod while sitting on my back porch. This works well enough for 2-MOA work, and it was definitely good enough to get the scope close to where it needed to be.

This photo shows what happened once the scope and rifle were just about right. I started shooting at the right, and I went clockwise and then shot at the center of the target. I adjusted the scope a couple of times between 5-shot groups.

I used CCI 36-grain HP ammo, which is fantastic for shooting coons and little hogs but not ideal for squirrels. You really need something good if you want to be consistent with squirrels at 50 yards.

So how did I do? Good enough to make me happy at this stage. The smallest group is 0.50″, and the biggest two are 0.875″. That gives me a range of about 1.35 to 2.38 MOA.

If I can manage to stay within an inch at 35 yards, which will mean practicing a lot and getting good at resting the gun in dubious circumstances, I should have no trouble at all killing squirrels with the gun just the way it is, with cheap ammo. I am going to try other types of ammunition, and I should be able to do significantly better.

I loosened the trigger once during this shoot, and the POI moved considerably, which is why I moved the turrets. I feel I should reduce the pull to the absolute minimum and count on common sense instead of the trigger to keep me safe.

I am fine off a sturdy bench or a platform, but I am not happy with my steadiness in other circumstances. I don’t know how much I can do about it. I can carry a plastic tripod when I shoot. When shooting from the house, I can lie down on the floor and eject my shells under the bed. I’m going to read up and see if there is any good advice out there beyond, “Stay really still.”

The POA seemed to be wobbling around in an area bigger than the groups I shot.

I like this scope a great deal. The glass is more than clear enough for me. It focuses pretty well at 35 yards. I was able to see the bullet holes. The reticle illumination is bright.

The reticle has a dot over the zero point. That makes it a little difficult to position the shots precisely. I guess I can sight the scope with the dot just under the POA, making it easier to line things up. Not sure if that’s a good idea.

Fooling with rifles in a systematic way shows how great shotguns are for squirrels. I can hit a squirrel a hundred feet up in a tree, no problem. Hitting squirrels on the ground that far away, consistently, with killing shots, is way harder.

If I can manage it, I’ll use my bench tomorrow.

I hope I’m not wrong about the distance at which I’m shooting. I used a Leica laser rangefinder. I have to say that 35 yards in the pasture looks longer than it does in the yard. On the other hand, the yard contains buildings and objects, and we all know how furniture makes a room look smaller.

This is a great squirrel gun. It’s not too heavy. The short barrel allows for a silencer without making the gun too long. The trigger is excellent. I am hoping to hunt with subsonics, and they make the gun extremely quiet.

Now lets just hope it’s still better than my cheap guns when I try my rifles side by side.

Who Was She Writing About?

Yesterday I learned that the wife of my first cousin by marriage had died. I didn’t even know her name. I couldn’t pick her out of a lineup. I’m not even sure this is the wife I met. I saw a photo, and the face doesn’t look familiar.

My dad and I took my cousin and his wife fishing in the Bahamas. I guess this would have been 30 years ago. I remember the wife as a chunky lady with a round face, but the lady in the photo I saw has a prominent chin. I wonder if this was my cousin’s second or third wife.

I would guess I have seen the cousin fewer than 10 times in my life. On very rare occasions, our families got together when I was a kid. My cousin’s stepmother, my dad’s sister, died in 2014, and my dad insisted I accompany him to Tennessee for the funeral. I must have seen the cousin and his wife, but I have no memories to prove it.

To me, this underscores the difference between my mother’s family and my dad’s family. When I say “my family,” I mean my mother’s family, although bad behavior involving my grandparents’ estates has led most of them to distance themselves from me. When I discuss my mother’s family without mentioning my dad’s family, I generally don’t give my dad’s family a thought.

My dad picked up on this unintentionally. Often, he referred to my mother’s father as my father.

My cousin’s wife died last year. Cousin or ex-stepcousin? I don’t know how that works. The notice I saw didn’t mention a cause.

No one called me. No one emailed. I wouldn’t expect them to. I’m not offended. If I had stood in line behind this guy at Walmart this week, I would have had no idea who he was.

My dad’s older sister was a cruel sociopath, and my dad also had sociopathic tendencies. She was abusive to him when he was a kid. She stabbed him in the head with a pencil. He was sitting on the floor making noises and pretending his hand was an airplane, and she stabbed him. She must have been trying to murder him.

The pencil didn’t go through his skull, but as an adult, he liked to show people the deep hole it left.

My aunt was obese and brassy. She was not charming. Her first marriage produced one child. I don’t know if she was at my aunt’s funeral. Can’t recall. I was just counting the minutes until I could leave. It was boring, sitting among strangers, facing an ash container that looked like a styrofoam beer cooler, listening to them talk about their abusive parents as though they were wonderful people.

My uncle had 4 kids of his own, so I guess he needed help. I don’t know why else he would have married my aunt. They didn’t seem to feel anything for each other except annoyance.

My aunt’s child was a daughter. Maybe this is why my aunt hated my uncle’s daughter, who was kind, gentle, and honest. She used to beat her for no reason. She used to give her own child candy and let her eat it in front of her husband’s daughter.

I was Googling my cousin when I found out his wife had died. For some reason, I started thinking about his first name, which is a strange one. I wanted to know if anyone else had that name.

I also came across my uncle’s obituary, written by the kids. He died 11 months ago.

I’ll tell you what. I wish I had known the guy in the obituary. But truthfully, I was not worthy.

Scholar. War hero with a Purple Heart. Educator. Beloved dad. I never met that guy!

He was awful. He didn’t have the spine to protect his kids from his wife. I don’t think he cared. They made the kids work and buy their own clothes. They worked them hard. After the kids were grown, they sat their parents down and told them exactly what they thought of them.

I thought about him again today, because norovirus is spreading in America.

My uncle was a big baby who thought only of himself. He loved to travel, fish, and hunt. He loved to freeload in order to make these things happen. His son was a pilot, so when my uncle and his wife flew, they only had to pay the taxes on their tickets. Freeloading. They didn’t care much for my dad, but he had vacation properties and a yacht, so my uncle arranged to visit from time to time.

They came to visit us over Christmas one year. I wanted no part of it. Back then, I was still close to my mother’s family, so I wanted to be with them, as usual. My dad’s two sisters and their entire tribes packed themselves into his three-bedroom house. The nicer sister and her husband were also freeloaders.

We shared common dishes. Christmas. People started throwing up. Turned out my uncle had norovirus, and he didn’t tell anyone. He knew we would have told him to stay home.

Making matters worse, norovirus is only spread via feces. If you’ve had norovirus, you touched someone else’s poop. My uncle hadn’t been washing his hands after using the toilet.

He was a biologist. A professor. It wasn’t like he had no idea how germs worked.

Every single person who was present threw up and had diarrhea for several days, except for my mother, who was spared. Maybe the viruses couldn’t take the nicotine.

When I found out my uncle was making us all sick, I left and slept somewhere else. Didn’t work. I still ended up using the toilet every 20 minutes.

I’m pretty sure my other aunt’s daughter Judy thinks I’m a jerk because I left abruptly. My mother was angry with me. I loved my mother, but common sense was not her long suit. She was overly emotional.

I didn’t care about ruining our puking family Christmas. I knew my aunts and uncles a little. The others were like strangers. It wasn’t like I had any concerns about future resentment or lost connections. There was no possibility we would go on to have relationships.

I don’t owe anyone an apology for isolating myself from a disease. It seems like women put closeness above staying healthy, however.

That might make a little sense in situations where people care about each other and aren’t together simply because relatives want free Florida vacations.

Avoiding days of diarrhea and vomiting is not rude, and even if it were, I would still have done it. If I were sick, I would expect others to avoid me.

Maybe the problem was that I was smarter and more rational than everyone else there, and I had a better conception of the connection between present behavior and future regurgitation. I really hated norovirus. I was familiar with it.

My dad’s older sister never liked it when I stood up for myself. I think this was because it bothered her to see a young relative she couldn’t abuse and boss. She must have felt like a horse that couldn’t reach an apple through a fence.

All around her, in her own home, she had had kids who ran and fetched when she barked, and they were used to feeling her knuckles on their heads. Here I was, out of range. Acting like I had rights.

I suspect she resented my mother, my sister, and me because we stood in the inheritance path. She thought my dad was much richer than he was, and he let her believe it. Even though he didn’t like her, he enjoyed being seen as a financial guru and being asked for advice.

I never understood why he liked spending his time impressing people he didn’t like much.

My dad’s relatives liked inheriting money and stuff. When my grandmother started to decline, my dad sent money and helped arrange to finance her care. When she died, my aunts backed up to her place and emptied it with no notice to us. My mother was incensed on behalf of my sister and me. She was always appalled by my dad’s people’s selfishness and greed.

Of course, she didn’t live to see what her own daughter and sister did with her parents’ estates.

My dad’s bunch picked some heirlooms for my sister and me. A Baccarat angel and a Lladro horse my dad had given my grandmother. Street value about $75, combined.

They’re both gone now. I threw the angel out because it looked like an idol to me, and I accidentally broke the horse after my sister abandoned it. It wasn’t like these were things we had seen on fondly-remembered visits to my grandmother’s apartment. I don’t miss these things. I didn’t know the angel or horse existed until my dad presented me with them and told me to choose one.

Why did he do that? He paid for them.

The thing on my mind today is the contrast between my uncle and the guy in the obituary. He was lazy. He was selfish. He always seemed gutless to me, so the idea of him fighting bravely and competently in Korea befuddles me. Maybe it’s not completely true. He probably got on the other soldiers’ nerves and let them down.

They didn’t write the obituary.

We love praising combat veterans, like they’re Yeshua himself. They can do no wrong. We don’t look after their families well, and we warehouse the crippled ones in substandard facilities, but we tend to act like anyone who has seen combat is an inspiring figure. A lot of vets use their exalted status to shut other people up. “You weren’t in ‘Nam with me and my buddies, face-down, in the muck!”

It’s not true. Lots of combat veterans–even true heroes–are horrible, trashy people. I knew a Korea vet who thought it was funny to steal other soldiers’ helmets. He said that when he got tired of his heavy helmet, he would dump it. Later, when he needed a helmet, he stole someone else’s. Serving in combat doesn’t automatically make you a role model.

There are too many stories about my uncle to tell.

My grandmother hated him, but because they lived near each other, he and my aunt had to drive her around. She used to sit in the backseat and watch the gas gauge. He would refuse to stop and get gas because he didn’t like being told what to do, so more than once, he ran out of gas with her in the car and ended up walking to gas stations. He kept a gas can in the car for this reason. She used to call him a fool.

On a Bahamas trip, his wife fell on our boat and caught her ring on something. It ripped the skin on her finger wide open. We had to go to the nearest island where there was medical help, in very rough seas.

While we were en route, with the seas pounding and things falling on the deck in the saloon, while my aunt held her bleeding hand in a paper towel, he told her to get up and get him a Coors Light.

Why the glowing obituary?

I wonder if Mormonism is the reason.

I don’t know a lot of Mormons, but my impression of them is that they have an inferiority complex about their non-Christian cult. The feeling I get is that they want people to think they’re the real Christians. They want to convey a false image of success and blessings in order to convince actual Christians we’re wrong.

“Look how much money we make.” “Look at our beautiful families.” “Check out our family photos.” They seem to be aggressive about it.

They say you should never fish with fewer than two Mormons, because if you fish with one, he’ll drink all your liquor.

My uncle’s daughter is a Mormon spiritual advisor of some kind. Women listen to her. She seriously believes American Indians are really Jews. She believes every wacky thing Mormonism teaches. Maybe she wrote the obituary.

I said she was honest, but many people who are otherwise honest lie in obituaries.

My aunt and uncle were miserable, and so were their kids. My aunt and uncle were immature. They were not good people. They were sometimes embarrassing. They hurt their children.

They didn’t actually believe in Mormonism. They were both atheists. They went to hell. Their local shaman or whatever told them not to worry about losing their faith, if they had ever had it. He said they should stick around for the social life.

I wrote a nice obituary about my dad. I did not say he was an alcoholic. I did not say he beat his wife when he was younger. I left a lot of stuff out. On the other hand, I did not craft a deceptive blurb intended to make people think he was an exemplary human being everyone should envy. That would have been wrong. The unnecessary damage he did to his family was immense.

Lying about the dead in order to make people admire them is sinful. Other people need to learn from bad examples.

Why should we make each other feel bad about our lives by pumping up the resumes of dead scoundrels?

I sound like I’m calling my dad a scoundrel now, which was not my intention. Well, he was. But he changed. During the last months of his life, he was wonderful, but the past can’t be erased.

When we laud each other unrealistically, we discourage people. We make them feel as though they are particularly wicked or unsuccessful. We destroy their hope. Everybody is a failure. Everybody is despicable. Pretending otherwise is harmful, not helpful.

My uncle was a jerk. My aunt was a wicked stepmother. If they ever did anything good for anyone else, I am not aware of it. If they ever expressed concern for people with problems, I don’t remember it. They didn’t even take us to dinner when they showed up to freeload.

I should make it clear I didn’t hate my aunt and uncle. There were times in my life when I got along well with them. But they were what they were. The person who wrote the obituary erected a monument to an illusion.

Doing the Unnecessary in the Pursuit of the Unimportant is no Vice

Today I had some fun doing something which may well have been unnecessary and even detrimental.

Nothing new there, now that I think about it.

What do you do when you want to kill squirrels at 50 yards or less?

A) Buy a cheap Ruger 10/22, a $75 scope, and a box of Mini-mags and fire at will, accepting the fact that you will miss a lot.

B) Buy a shotgun and a box of 6 shot and get the job over with.

C) Buy an expensive bolt-action rifle, put a silencer on it, and top it with a 2-12x42mm first focal plane scope with an illuminated mrad reticle, and then spend a king’s ransom on an assortment of expensive ammunition to find out what works best?

If you didn’t pick C, you’re not me.

Actually, I’ve done B and C.

I got myself a Tikka T1x rifle, and today I put an Athlon Helos milrad scope on it.

If you were going to put a scope on a rifle, what would you do?

A) Install the rail without checking the torque, install the ring bases without checking the torque, install the caps without checking the torque or lapping the rings, level the scope via wild guess, and start plugging squirrels?

B) Use a torque wrench to install the mount and bases, spend two hours lapping the rings, spend another 20 minutes cleaning lapping compound off everything, install the caps with a torque wrench, and level the scope by shoving a machinist’s parallel between it and the base?

I didn’t do A, if that’s what you’re wondering.

I don’t know how much of this stuff is really necessary. Shooters are like golfers. If a golfer hits a hole-in-one while wearing one red sock, he’ll wear one red sock for the rest of his life. No one is really positive installing scopes carefully makes a difference, but some shooters think it does, so a lot of them do it. And apparently, and lot don’t, and they make fun of the others.

I consulted some people, and most of them said lapping was stupid and was only needed for terrible rings. On the other hand, there are shooters on the web who think anyone who doesn’t lap is an idiot.

I decided the preponderance of the evidence slightly favored the lappers.

“Lapping” means polishing with fine grit. In the case of scopes, it grinds irregularities out of the inner surfaces of rings.

A scope is a straight tube except when the Chinese have an off day, and it has to be held in two metal rings that should be 100% concentric and free of bumps and so on. The theory is that if the rings don’t line up, or if the inside surfaces are irregular, the high points will mar your scope, you may put bending forces on the scope which will affect the function, and the rings won’t hold on very well.

When I took my precision rifle course, I was taught to lap rings. I think. Anyway, someone somewhere told me to do it, so I have done it a few times. I have a kit.

The kit consists mainly of a hard steel bar the diameter of a scope tube. You put lapping compound (an abrasive) inside the rings, you clamp the bar inside them, and you move it back and forth until compound grinds the rings round and true.

When you lap, you remove the bar from the rings once in a while to see if you’ve ground out enough metal to get something like 80% contact with the bar. When you do this, it’s hard to keep the compound from getting into the threads on the ring bases.

The problem with this, other than the mess, is that the caps are supposed to be torqued to certain values. The grit in the threads produces friction, so it seems to me you could end up with caps that aren’t tight enough. The grit could give you a high torque reading when the screws aren’t really in far enough. I think.

I used a sonic cleaner and brake cleaner to get the compound out. Did I succeed? No way to know. The grit may have embedded itself in the threads.

Another thing: I had to take the scope bases off the rail to clean them. So who’s to say the rings register exactly the same way every time they’re put on the rail? I hope they do, but what if they don’t? Maybe I did more harm than good.

People say to buy really good rings in order to avoid lapping, but that doesn’t help if the rail isn’t perfect. If lapping is necessary because rails can’t be trusted, then expensive rings can’t fix the problem.

Whatever. Now the scope is mounted. I really like it. It has tons of eye relief, so I had a lot of leeway when I decided where to put it. The reticle is bright. The glass is pretty good. The diopter thing works with my vision issues without glasses. It should be great.

The big problem now is that my list of excuses for not hitting squirrels just got a lot shorter.

Thank Goodness the Weeds are Okay

Los Angeles is burning again.

What a mess. Houses are coming down. Roads are blocked. People are getting out of their cars, leaving them in the street, and taking the keys with them so bulldozers have to move them.

Some Christians are saying God is showing the world what he thinks of Hollywood, but is that true? Los Angeles is like a giant boil Satan created to pump infectious pus out over the world. Great evil is done there. On the other hand, floods wiped out a lot of homes in Appalachia not long ago, and there are a lot of Christians there.

Here’s what I find interesting: there are two schools of thought as to why California keeps burning. One theory is that there is nothing anyone can do about it. The other is that the blue-state population and the officials it elects refuse to cut the brush that burns over and over, because every weed is sacred and a child of Mother Gaia, as important as an Californian and definitely more important than anyone wearing a red hat.

Today I read a web post from a guy claiming to be a firefighter. He is on the hopelessness side. He said the fires approach at 60 mph.

Sorry, but I can’t believe these fires move that fast. If they did, the fires would have gone out in a day, because they would have burned all the way to the ocean in a few hours. By now, we would be used to seeing gee-whiz Youtube videos of fires moving at freeway speeds. They don’t exist. There is no way Youtubers would miss out on catching a wall of fire moving over a brushy area at freeway speeds.

Is he saying bits of flaming material move on 60-mph winds? That is surely true, but there is a big difference between having sparks fly by you and being IN a fire.

The real speed is probably more like a mile per day. If I’m mistaken, maybe someone will show me a video of a fire moving a mile a minute.

I set my pasture on fire once. Embarrassing. The grass was very dry. A spark landed maybe 60 yards from a burn pile, and the grass started burning. I would say the actual fire moved at about 50 yards per hour. Even slower than I do while carrying a hose. Thank God. I guess it would have been faster had the wind been stronger, but it spread slower than the wind at the time. A 60-mph wind would not have spread the fire at 60 mph.

I have seen hopelessness promoters saying it’s stupid to tell people to cut brush, because it would take a billion lifetimes or something to cut the brush covering the whole state. Well, that’s stupid. You don’t have to denude the whole state. You have to manage brush around buildings and roads. And even if you can’t fix the entire problem this way, you can do a great deal of good.

If cutting brush doesn’t help, why does the Getty Museum spend a king’s ransom cutting brush on its property? I doubt they just enjoy wasting money on projects they know are pointless.

People love to say things don’t work or can’t exist even when they do work and do exist. I’ve seen numerous Christians tell people miracles don’t happen any more, because apparently God has retired while Satan has kept his miracle business open. I’ve experienced miracles, personally. You can see other people experience them on Youtube.

People also like to argue that things happen when they really don’t.

Remember the ivermectin-overdose-tsunami lie? Rolling Stone published a completely false article saying people couldn’t get into emergency rooms because poor ignorant Trumpers were overdosing on ivermectin and tying up the staffs. Never happened. Good luck finding even one example of a death caused by ivermectin. They’re about as common as deaths caused by lima beans. The myth persists, however.

The other day, some guy trying to justify buying $500 kitchen knives told me putting knives in the dishwashwer would beat them up. This is true of fragile Japanese knives, but I have been putting my cheap commercial knives in the dishwasher for maybe 15 years, and nothing has ever happened to one. He loved his theory, and all I had were proven facts.

I think clearing brush works, because it has worked all over the globe since the dawn of history, and I think the fires we see in California would be much, much smaller, if they existed at all, if everyone there were conservative.

We now live in a world where a person who catches a fish and puts a photo on the web is treated like Heinrich Himmler, celebrating the ash output of a new crematorium. People worship nature and animals with astonishing intensity, and they turn their hatred, which is literally murderous, on human beings. They say there are too many of us, like we’re lionfish, decimating snapper and grouper on American coral reefs. Like we’re kudzu, not the highest-ranking life on the world God created for us.

To me, it is completely plausible that Californians have decided flammable scrub is somehow important even though it flames up, destroys homes, and kills people. Even though it burns on its own all the time, as part of the natural process, and never amounts to anything.

Here’s what I always tell my wife: the environment can drop dead.

By that, I mean the world was put here for human beings, we are the only thing that give it importance, and it is our right and obligation to do reasonable damage to nature when our interests are sufficient.

I don’t really mean I want all life on Earth to cease. I mean we need to use common sense. But “common sense” is an oxymoron.

We need dams. We need to cut wood. We need oil. We need to kill a lot of creatures that make trouble for us. We and the rest of the biome or whatever they call it now would be better off if certain species were rendered extinct. That is especially true of microbes. The world doesn’t actually need anthrax, covid, syphilis, fleas, lice, or ticks.

Leftists love to tell us every obnoxious species is vital and that the world will collapse if we lose even one. Hmm. In 1900, the US was covered with gigantic chestnut trees. They dominated forests and provided wood, food for animals and people, and places for animals to live. They’re gone now. If the chestnut can disappear and leave us with thriving forests, why do we need every subspecies of cockroach and slug?

We lost the passenger pigeon, which used to darken the sky with its numbers. We lost most of the bison. We killed off the mammoths and mastodons. The ecosystem has not collapsed. Shouldn’t we be okay if we cut a few weeds?

I think Californians could do better. This has to be true, because people who cut brush, even in California, get better outcomes.

Maybe they love standing on their flammable decks with the inevitable white wine in hand, admiring the natural desert weeds. I could understand that, but I destroyed something like 15 big, irreplaceable oaks that made my property look nice. I didn’t want them falling on my house and shop in storms. Houses surrounded by big oaks definitely look better, but they also get crushed. When the storms come, I sleep soundly.

I could have left them up. I could have said, “When the roof is crushed and hundreds of gallons of water pour in and ruin the walls and our expensive belongings, I’ll just put my wife and infant son in the car and move to a Hampton Inn for 6 months, and when my son is older, I’ll tell him how we did the right thing for Mother Gaia.”

People love to say it’s okay if you have losses when you have home insurance. No, it’s not! You’ll always lose more than the insurance companies will pay you, they won’t give you a dime for the many hours of hard work you’ll have to do when you set your house back up, they won’t be able to replace unique items, and you will have to start over on all the things you worked hard to get just right. Not everything comes out of a box just the way you want it. And who wants to live in a hotel room?

As for who God is punishing, he hasn’t informed me. But I have some thoughts.

My wife and I pray for the destruction of the entertainment industry, including sports, every day. We pray for the filthy people and spirits involved in it to be exposed around the clock. When bad things happen that impact the industry adversely, and when celebrities are exposed as filthy criminals who hurt the innocent, it certainly comports with our requests. I’m sure other Christians pray for the same things. Hollywood leads our children to hell.

As for heavily-Christian areas that receive disasters, I think most Christianity is very weak. We don’t teach people to repent. We don’t teach them to pray in tongues. We push the fake prosperity gospel on them, and it separates them from God. We don’t teach people they need to know God supernaturally and spend time with him in order to be protected. I don’t think it should be a big surprise if bad things happen in an area where the church itself cuts people off from God while pretending to bring them closer.

Receiving prophets brings blessings. Receiving false prophets brings curses.

Lots of bad things happened to me when I was an uninformed and disinformed Christian, but as God has corrected me, things have gotten better and better.

God promises us things like healing, protection, and prosperity. If we don’t receive them, how can we not be doing something wrong? He can’t lie.

Read the Old Testament and see how he treated the Jews when they behaved well.

God has a special love for the Jews, but the destruction of Israel and the Holocaust happened anyway. They rejected their Messiah and the Holy Spirit, so they weren’t as protected as they should have been. Surely the same things happen to Christians.

Yeshua said he wanted to protect Jerusalem, holding the people under his wings like a mother hen. The false doctrine of the Jews of that time prevented him.

It is amazing that rich areas in a rich state in the world’s richest country in 2025 could have a crisis like this; the kind of crisis you would expect to see in Africa or India. But then it’s also amazing they can’t keep their electricity on or get the poop off their sidewalks.

In Los Angeles and San Francisco, it’s a crime to fail to clean up your dog’s poop in public places. Think about that for a second.

Imagine walking your Chihuahua in San Francisco. You might have to pick up his ounce of poop while leaving a two-pound pile of human poop right next to it.

You know what they should do? They should pass a law saying that if your dog poops, you have to leave it and fill a bag with human poop.

Or used needles.

Digression: I wondered why Canada gave Trudeau the boot. I knew it had nothing to do with “common sense,” because if Canadians had that, Canada would be a lot different. My wife is more aware of international news than I am, because I’m an American. She filled me in. One reason is that Canadians are sick of Trudeau letting illegals in from India. There is now a big street-pooping problem in Canada.

If you search the web, you’ll see two kinds of websites. The ones where credible public officials and citizens complain about Indians pooping in public, and the ones that swear it has never happened even once.

There are 1.5 billion Indians in India, and every single one wants to move to North America. The ones in Canada all want to move to the United States.

Canadians are concerned because in some places, Canadian culture, which is unimportant, is being replaced by wonderful, vibrant, pagan Indian culture, which is extremely important because it’s not European or Christian.

It would be wonderful if Canadian culture were completed replaced, because then Canada would be as wonderful as India. Indians have all the answers.

It’s going to be interesting, following the California story. It will be interesting to see homes belonging to billionaires and people with hundreds of millions collapsing in flames, seemingly unnecessarily, simply because weeds are more important than human beings.

It’s a shame to see so much wasted.

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.