The Evolution of Pistol Ammunition

It’s Sunday. Is that the proper day for confessing? I’m not Catholic. Anyway, I made biscuits again. They called out to me.

After getting my new PC set up, I moved on to a new project: 9mm reloading.

Why would anyone carry a 9mm when he has a 10mm? I started carrying it after my dad died. I had bought him a Glock 26 and a Crimson Trace sight. After he died, it was mine, and I liked carrying it because it had been his. I knew I was giving up stopping power, however. Another reason for carrying it was that I lacked faith in the Lasermax sight on the 10mm.

The other day it occurred to me that I had done nearly nothing to provide for top 9mm ammunition. I had a few magazines full of Cor-Bon hollowpoints, but that was it. I certainly did not have enough to allow practice with defensive rounds. Also, I knew that ammunition had improved a lot since I bought the pistol. If you go 5 years without reevaluating your ammunition, you may miss something important.

When I got my 10mm, 9mm and .40 S&W were not that great. Since then, things have improved to the point where .40 is so good, I almost wish I had my old Glock 22 back. Both calibers have gotten better. Maybe .40 is a better carry choice than 10mm now. Did I really type that? I’m cringing. But it might be true. Maybe the lower recoil and lighter ammunition make up for the lack of power.

A few years back, a site called Lucky Gunner opened. They sell ammunition. The owner actually sent me some ammunition for nothing. I shot it and wrote about it. I applaud this publicity tactic. I think Dan Wesson should send me some free 1911’s to review. Anyway, Lucky Gunner now has some very nice information for people evaluating ammunition. They have interactive charts featuring excellent graphic representations of gel tests. You can sort different rounds by things like expanded diameter and penetration.

I checked that out, and it sure looked like Remington 124-grain Golden Saber hollowpoints were the best choice. They opened up like crazy and penetrated a long way. Problem: it may be weeks or months before anyone can buy these things. I also considered Speer Gold Dots, which performed nearly as well.

Of course, I looked at other sources. The more I got into it, the more types of ammunition I came across. Coincidentally, during this time, I downloaded a book by the late Jim Cirillo, an NYPD officer who killed 11 men in gunfights. He is one of Massad Ayoob’s prominent sources. Ayoob, believe it or not, is not a gunfighter. He was a part-time cop in a sleepy town in New Hampshire. His work is wonderful, but he doesn’t write about shootings from experience. He could probably tell you a lot about writing parking tickets.

I’m not putting him down. He seems like a huge resource, and his house is probably a very bad place for a home invader to visit. I’m just saying he’s not an experienced gunfighter.

Cirillo was part of a stakeout squad that existed for a brief period, after which it was dismantled by liberal bureaucrats who thought too many criminals were being shot. The group was producing more than one outlaw casualty per month, and the liberals in power, being liberals, thought this was a bad thing. By extension, this means they thought it was preferable to continue to allow innocent people to be raped, shot, and killed.

The squad was critized by foggy-headed members of the public who called it an assassination team.

An assassination is a murder, and it is typically committed against an unarmed person. Cirillo’s team hid in businesses that were experiencing repeated robberies. Armed men entered and threatened employees, the police drew on them and told them to surrender, and the armed men did bright things like charging them, shooting at them, shooting employees, and grabbing employees to use as hostages.

Cirillo’s book may change the way you think about self-defense. It emphasized a number of factors most of us don’t think about enough.

One thing the book emphasized was the utter stupidity and depravity of criminals. In story after story, criminals who were confronted by armed cops in superior numbers with better positions and cover decided to shoot instead of surrendering. If you’re not a complete moron, you’re probably not going around robbing drugstores, so perhaps their behavior should not surprise anyone.

One of the dumbest things gun enthusiasts say is that if you rack a pump shotgun (a dubious defense weapon), any criminal who hears it will fill his pants and run away. It doesn’t work that way. Many criminals are very stupid, and many do their work on drugs that make them impervious to fear. Cirillo’s experiences show that criminals often ignore danger, and they also show that some are not discouraged at all by being shot multiple times.

Cirillo and his team were attacked on one occasion, and they fired multiple rounds into the face of their assailant. While they were getting it together after the event, the “body” on the floor asked them to help him up. Every single round had traveled around his head under the skin without penetrating the skull. On another occasion, he shot a man in the head, and the man wasn’t seriously injured. The round literally bounced off.

That brings me to another thing Cirillo thought was important: good ammunition in a powerful caliber.

Cirillo knew of a number of criminals who were still dangerous after taking fire, and understandably, it bothered him. He set out to create a new round that would penetrate well and do maximum damage. He wanted it to go through things like skulls and windshields.

He created a number of different rounds. He patented at least one. He tested his ammunition on car bodies in order to simulate skulls. He was always looking for something that would go through a hard object even when fired from an angle. He didn’t want his bullets bouncing off of criminal’s skulls.

You can understand why he did these things. He knew that if a well-placed shot didn’t do the job, the next shot might be from the criminal’s gun, and it might work very well.

His ammunition didn’t go anywhere, but there are companies that make similar things now, and their products are very interesting.

The round that has caught my attention is the 65-grain copper Lehigh Xtreme Defender. It’s very easy to describe. Imagine a Philips screwdriver bit made from copper. That’s not quite right, but it’s not far off.

The idea is that the flutes of the spinning round will stir up the wet stuff inside the body and create a huge permanent wound channel. Generally, handgun rounds can’t create such a channel because they’re slow. The Xtreme Defender can be pumped up to 1800 fps, which is rifle territory.

The maker says it will go through things like windshields and still do its job. Also, because it’s not a hollowpoint, it may be legal in insane jurisdictions where hollowpoints are banned. Another likely advantage: it’s less likely to fail. Hollowpoints can clog with fabric and fail to expand. That shouldn’t happen with a fluted round.

Does it work? If so, is it worth taking a chance on these instead of tried-and-true conventional ammunition?

It’s amazing that hollowpoints are banned anywhere. “We want you to be able to defend yourself. Just don’t hurt anyone.” Even in liberal states, the authorities know that in a defense situation, you always shoot to kill. They just want you to fail.

The simple truth is that you want the most effective bullet there is. That’s the only thing that makes sense. If they sold bullets that made people explode, they would be perfectly suited to self-defense. The purpose of a bullet is to hurt someone so badly they are instantly rendered unable to harm you. Any bullet that gets you closer to that goal should be legal.

I am not qualified to tell you whether the ammunition works, but Paul Harrell is. He’s a gun nut and former military instructor who does very informative Youtube videos. His strategy is to use what he calls “the meat target.” It’s an old leather jacket, some cloth, a layer of ribs, a watermelon, another layer of ribs, more cloth, more leather, and a bunch of fleece blankets to act as a backstop. He believes the watermelon simulates lung tissue, and you can figure out what the other parts do.

Harrell hates what he calls “hyper” ammunition, which means anything beyond a hollowpoint. He has various objections which you can hear about in his videos.

The Lehigh Xtreme Defense is unquestionably hyper ammunition. Nonetheless, he was very impressed by what it did to his meat target. It pretty much wiped out the watermelon.

His objection is that the ammunition is slightly less accurate than plain old hollowpoints. He fired it from 10 yards, and he got a 5-round group that appeared to be a little over an inch in diameter.

That’s not terrible accuracy. I would guess the group was around 50% bigger than his control group, fired with Remington ammunition. At 20 yards, you would expect around 2.5 inches. Can you shoot that well with match ammunition and a rest? It would be very good shooting. If, like most people, you can’t keep your rounds in a 10-inch circle at 7 yards, you will never notice any accuracy problems with Xtreme Defense.

I think you have to consider recoil if you’re going to consider accuracy. If the recoil from the light bullets is a lot lower than it would be with standard ammo, the advantage in ease of fast target reacquisition might override a small difference in inherent accuracy.

I feel like this is a battle between two philosophies: the Cirillo philosophy and the Harrell philosophy.

Harrell has never been in a gunfight. He shot a man in the head because he appeared to be trying to kill Harrell and his wife, but that’s not a gunfight. You don’t bring a truck to a gunfight.

When you talk to people about defense ammunition, the same people who talk about shotgun racking will invariably say, “If you don’t use standard ammunition, you will be charged with murder, and the fact that you used special ammunition will be used against you.”

Here is my response to that: you can’t be charged with murder…if you’re dead. Dead is what Cirillo and his partners almost were the time they shot an armed criminal in the face without killing him. If their ammunition had actually worked, after the first head shot, they and the civilians around them would have been safe.

If you’re mortally wounded because your prosecutor-pleasing ammunition failed to incapacitate your assailant, will you feel better because you know you minimized the risk of a murder trial?

You can object and say hollowpoints work fine. They really don’t. Not often enough. They do a fabulous job on ballistic gel, but ballistic gel doesn’t wear jeans, a jacket, a shirt, or a belt. When real criminals get shot with hollowpoints moving at handgun speeds, the bullets fail frequently.

There is no EDC-suitable conventional handgun round that “works fine.” Every pistol round is a weak substitute for a rifle or a 12-gauge. They’re all compromises.

Whether an idiot tries to charge you with murder after a justified shooting depends a lot on the circumstances and where you live. It’s not all about the gun or the bullet. Where I live, they would probably give me a medal for shooting a burglar. In order to get in trouble for a shooting which is clearly justified, you pretty much have to live in a liberal-dominated area, you have to shoot a black attacker who doesn’t have a gun, or you have to live in Florida and be the source of so much bigoted and uninformed public outcry that a dishonest governor persuades a disgraceful prosecutor like Angela Corey to perjure herself in order to get your case into court.

Paul Harrell was prosecuted, but appearances were not what caused his problem. He lived in a liberal state. He shot an unarmed man who was driving a truck around his campsite, which provided room for a prosecutor to ask if the shooting was necessary.

He killed his assailant with a deer rifle, so it’s not like he had a Desert Eagle with a red dot scope and leering skulls engraved all over it.

He shot a man who wasn’t using a gun, in a type of situation that probably didn’t sound too solid to jurors. I don’t think he would have been any worse off if he had used a highly modified AR-15 with “Trump Commemorative Edition” stamped on the side.

I’m sure scary-looking ammunition has caused problems for some survivors, but I think the odds of this happening are low. Life isn’t Matlock. Generally, the way things panned out is pretty obvious. The odds that a criminal who is not incapacitated will continue to attack are unacceptably high, as are the odds that a well-placed hollowpoint will fail to incapacitate.

Another thing I keep hearing: you shouldn’t use handloads for self-defense.

I’m not sure I agree. I’m thinking about it.

Factory ammunition is generally less consistent than handloads. That’s just a fact. It’s less accurate, and it sometimes fails to go off. On the other hand, if you get sloppy, it’s easy to make handloads that have the wrong amount of powder in them, that won’t chamber, or that will not extract without being pounded out.

Let’s see.

You can weigh the powder you put in every round. That solves the charge problem, and it’s something manufacturers can’t do. As for chambering issues, you can chamber every round and eject it before carrying it for defense. If it chambers once, it will chamber again.

It wouldn’t be a bad idea to test factory ammo this way. I’ve never seen anyone recommend it, but it’s obvious.

Do you want to trust yourself or a big machine in the Hornady factory, where there is zero possibility that every round will be inspected? I don’t think trusting yourself is a bad idea. Now that I think about it, Cirillo’s squad loaded ammo.

It seems obvious to me that all that matters is whether you handload carefully. If not, buy your ammo at Cabela’s. If you’re careful, why would you trust yourself less than strangers?

Companies that make ammunition charge a great deal more for defensive ammunition, and as far as I can tell, the prices are not in line with the increased price of the bullets, which are the only components that are different from those in target ammo.

Let me check.

Federal 124-grain HST in 9mm. Perfect. I found it for…seriously…$40.50 a box. If you add up the price of components for reloading with new brass, you get something like 50 cents per round. That’s $25. I’m talking about retail, so what is the wholesale cost? Maybe $15? You would think they could put the bullets together and sell them at a price that would put them on shelves for less than $40.50.

The lowest cost for Federal FMJ is around 24 cents, or $12 per box, retail.

Whether or not the markup is reasonable, you can make practice HST with used casings (free) for around $15 per box, and you can make carry rounds with new brass, if fired brass scares you, for $25.

Lower prices = more practice ammunition = better preparation.

Lehigh bullets are very expensive. There is no lead in them, so it’s all copper, and they are machined, not swaged or whatever. On the up side, unlike many brands of bullet, they are available.

I may try some. For that matter, I might try the 10mm version. Hollow points of all calibers fail.

You have to wonder if we’re headed for a future in which powerful, large-bore rounds are actually worse choices than 9mm or even .380. The Lehigh Defender in .380 appears to be pretty nasty.

I don’t know if what I wrote is correct or helpful, but it’s what I’m thinking about today. I’m sure commenters will have thoughts of their own.

Donate Your Masks and Go Back to Work

If you’re waiting for some great news, apart from the fact that it’s a beautiful Saturday morning, here you go: South Korean scientists have concluded that you can’t be infected with COVID-19 more than once.

In your FACES, doom-mongers.

This is the best news the world has received since we got up on a Wednesday morning and found out Hillary Clinton had lost.

I still remember that day. I felt like crying with joy.

Here is a link to the story about South Korea: LINK.

Some Koreans got test results suggesting they had been reinfected, but now we know that they were actually having relapses. It’s not good that people can relapse, but a relapse is nothing like as bad as a new infection. Once you’re really done with your first infection, it’s behind you for good. If we could be reinfected, coronavirus would continue pummeling individuals over and over until they died or got vaccinated.

We already knew about COVID-19 relapses. Relapse is one of the disease’s known features.

For months, with no apparent justification, people have been telling us the disease was likely to infect us over and over. None of it made any sense. They don’t say that about most other viruses.

The reinfection story was one of the things that made C19 seem so scary. The model was one in which you were very likely to be infected (false), you were very likely to die (false), and even if you got over it, you would probably be infected repeatedly. It was a scenario of hopelessness. No wonder people bought freezers. They actually swallowed the pitch.

Does this mean we can’t get new strains after the virus mutates? I wonder. But even if we can, there will be vaccines, and we will have a lot of experience, so there should be less panic and senseless economic destruction.

It’s very sad that people are afraid to accept good news and that it makes them angry. Neurosis is not a good thing. Neurotics can’t enjoy life. Your irrational worries make it impossible to enjoy the good things you have, and they make it impossible for you to anticipate enjoying the good things in your future. And they make you a giant pain to be around. I do not like having determined pessimists around me.

Worry is faith in Satan, and faith brings results.

All though this thing, the prophets of doom have been wrong, and those who predicted an easier time have been right. That has to be acknowledged.

If Obama were president, Time and MSNBC and all the others would be giving people hell for panicking. What a different world we would live in. A lot of businesses that have failed because of draconian measures would still be alive.

It’s the only scenario I can think of in which an inept socialist president could be better for the economy than Donald Trump.

Think how this will affect people who have recovered. They will be like superheroes now. They can go back to work. They can go anywhere without masks. I wonder if a positive test will be an asset to a person looking for work this summer.

Things are still going well in my county, although I think we will see cases increase for a while. Unfortunately, C19 has found its way into at least three ALF’s. The news says there are two ALF’s that each have an employee who tested positive, and another ALF has multiple infected staffers and residents. We are now up to 175 known cases.

I hate to say I was right again, but there is another story: over 25% of purported C19-related deaths in the USA occur in what a story calls “nursing homes.” This would include ALF’s. I wrote about this phenomenon after seeing that about half of the deaths in Massachusetts were in homes.

This is bad news for people who are confined in homes, but it should encourage the majority of Americans. Not many of us are cooped up in places where careless workers are our only protection from infection, and most of us will have mild or no symptoms if infected.

The high ALF infection rate appears to be proof that sequestering in buildings with multiple residents makes you much more likely to be infected, and it also suggests that ALF workers in many places do a very poor job of protecting people.

Now that I think about it, I was right about yet something else. People are developing an interest in rural properties. You can read about it online. I predicted this a while ago. C19 is, by and large, a city disease. Also, it’s hard to grow food in an apartment. People are realizing these things.

My guess: leftists will cling to cities, and conservatives will be more likely to move. Nothing new there.

I think a redistribution of the population will be good for the church. Cities are ruled by Satan’s stooges. They are not spiritually healthy places to live.

Christians will be more likely to leave cities, and that means they will get away from megachurch pimps and fabulists. Churches are killing us. It would be great to see toxic people like Joel Osteen and Joyce Meyer go out of business completely, but that probably won’t happen, so a significant exodus from cities may be the best thing we can hope for.

I wonder how a conservative exodus would affect elections. I don’t think it would matter in cities, because they are already electing leftists. Maybe it would strengthen certain states and rural counties, though.

Still no major-celebrity deaths. The Baldor bench grinder Ebay poverty index is holding steady in the low 40’s.

Time to move on with my day. I just bought a hunting license online. My new peach tree was loaded with peaches, and now the squirrels here are loaded with peach flesh. Something must be done. The law says I can kill nuisance squirrels out of season, but it’s not all that clear on whether I need a hunting license, so I am not taking a chance. Considering the peaches, the fuel gauge they ate, and all the other issues they cause, I feel that my long truce with the rodents must now end.

Plus Christian News

I put up a prayer request for my friend Travis, and people responded. Thanks for the support.

Ordinarily, when a person goes into the hospital, his family will keep people informed so they can provide support. This situation is different. The communication is very bad. The only reason I found out about Travis’s setback was that a friend who is bending over backward to help him got a nurse to talk to her today. I’m sure that was a HIPAA violation, but it was helpful.

I texted Travis’s brother, and he sent me a response.

1. Travis went into cardiac arrest last night.

2. He has a lung infection which was affecting the blood supply to his brain.

3. He had an operation to help with the oxygen problem, and it was successful.

4. He is back in stable condition, down from critical.

5. They are testing him for COVID-19, and the tests have been negative.

It appears that the nurse who said he was in critical condition was providing outdated information, or maybe his condition was upgraded after she provided it.

In other news, someone did multiple drive-by shootings at the homes of some of the stars of Duck Dynasty, which has been out of production for three years. A man named Daniel King shot a bunch of .380 rounds from a pickup truck. He claims he was checking the gun’s safety to see if it was on. Not very credible, given the multiple rounds and the fact that shots were fired at two properties. And this is not how you check to see if a safety is engaged.

King had a minor in the truck with him, and he was drinking vodka. It appears that he did not plan his attack or escape meticulously.

He is very lucky to be breathing, as is his unwilling companion. He was using a weak pistol, and he attacked people who have AR-15’s. Phil Robertson says he considered grabbing an AR and confronting the threat, and Jase says that within 10 seconds of the attack, he had a rifle in one hand and a shotgun in the other.

A bullet entered a window in one house. Eight people were in the houses. The attack was not a trivial or harmless thing.

I find this interesting because I think it was a deliberate act directed at the Robertsons because of their image. You don’t just wander around drunk and end up shooting a pistol accidentally, many times, in a gated community, at homes that happen to belong to famous conservative Christians who are members of the same family.

The Robertsons now have restraining orders in place, in case this man is released. His got bail, and it was surprisingly low. Maybe he’ll get out.

I keep telling people leftists and other enemies of Christianity are full of rage and perfectly willing to commit atrocities against us. I say lack of will is not what restrains them. They’re just afraid of being arrested and having their lives disrupted. They are not kidding when they talk about killing us, raping the women, molesting the kids, and mistreating us in other ways. It’s not just talk.

Americans have a hard time making their guts absorb the fact that their neighbors are capable of murdering them, taking what they have, and committing other vile acts that have no place in a civilized nation. When you’re not a vicious person, and you’re used to living in an orderly country, your instincts tell you your compatriots will never jump your fence and drag you out into your yard. But many, many of them would do it in a split second if they expected to get away with it.

Don’t forget what Lot’s neighbors tried to do to him and the angels. Don’t forget that Jesus’ neighbors in Nazareth tried to throw him off a cliff, after a few minutes of provocation. The apostles were beaten by civilized religious Jews repeatedly, and they got similar treatment from civilized Romans and Greeks.

A lot of people think the ancient world was savage and full of anarchy, but that’s a misperception. The Greeks and Romans had very orderly nations for the most part. Unsanctioned physical attacks were just as out of the ordinary there as they would be here. The Romans who beat Paul were terrified when they learned he was a citizen.

I suspect that God is going to use Travis’s misfortune to cut his ties to Miami and put him in a safer place. He might end up here for a while. As America becomes more polarized, God’s people are leaving cities. Cities will not be transformed. They will get worse. Perhaps there are exceptions, but this is the general rule. Christians who think God put them in cities to save them are imagining things.

I don’t know what kind of person Daniel King is or where he lives. Maybe he lives in the country. Maybe he loves Jesus, the Robertsons, and Donald Trump. But generally, cities hold much higher concentrations of people who are dangerous to God’s children.

The homes that were affected by the drive-by are in a suburb. The Robertson rural image is a TV myth. Not all of them live in the woods.

Trump won’t be president forever, and things won’t go our way politically. When Trump leaves office, leftists will be like rabid monkeys that just broke out of containment. They will blame us for Trump and everything else they can think of.

We’re actually seeing persecution ramp up, and very few people even notice.

I Like Stuff That Works

I think I may finally be able to carry a 10mm Glock with some confidence. Today I installed a Crimson Trace Lasergrip on my Glock 29, which is a compact pistol.

Long ago, when people with Confederate flags roamed the earth openly and Bruce Jenner was a man, I bought a Glock 29 and put a Lasermax laser in it. I had a benighted notion that it actually mattered if the laser beam was aligned perfectly with the gun’s barrel, and I also thought the Crimson Trace couldn’t be adjusted. In reality, when you’re forced to use a pistol with a laser, you’re in a situation in which a little misalignment means absolutely nothing, and the sight has two screws that let you move the beam to your point of impact.

A Lasermax is a guide rod with a laser in it, so it’s pretty well aligned with the barrel no matter what.

The Lasermax eats batteries like crazy. Install them today, and they’ll be dead a year from now. Also, in order to use a Lasermax, you have to push your Glock’s slide lock to the left before you shoot. Lasermax includes special slide locks with their lasers. Finally, my Lasermax has a cap that holds the batteries in, and after a time, these caps fall apart. It took something like 10 years in my case, but I didn’t like it.

One of the things they always tell you about emergency equipment is that it has to be simple. If you have to remember to do three things before you can fire a round, you’re likely to forget two of them, and then you get shot. This is why I carry my gun with a round in the chamber. The world is full of stories of people who got shot because they hadn’t chambered rounds.

I was always concerned that a) my batteries might be dead when I needed the laser, and b) I would fail to turn it on in a timely manner. A Crimson Trace doesn’t pose these problems. The batteries last for years, and as soon as you pick the gun up, the laser is on.

There are a lot of people who hate lasers, and that mystifies me, because they really, really work. You can shoot a 12-gauge shotgun accurately from the hip with a laser. Ask me how I know. The projectiles really do go where you point the laser.

I’ve seen people say you shouldn’t depend on a laser. As if you’re suddenly going to forget how to shoot if your laser doesn’t work. “Which end do the bullets come out of again?” Every gun owner should become a good shot, but once you’ve done that, a laser can’t do anything but help. If it fails to turn on, you’re no worse off than you were before you bought it.

I know how to shoot, so it’s too late for me to become a person who “depends on a laser.”

I don’t know, but I suspect that a laser would help with putting multiple shots in a small area quickly. Reacquiring a sight picture takes time, but any idiot can point a laser in a hurry.

You can tell I haven’t practiced multiple-shot drills with lasers. Sorry. It sounds like a great idea.

I am enduring a reloading hiatus. I have lost confidence in my powder scale. It’s a Lyman something or other. Maybe it’s deteriorating from age. It seems to drift a lot. Scales have gotten accurate and cheap since I bought it, so I ordered a new scale for about twenty bucks. Amazon is taking forever to ship it, and I don’t want to eat up my brass making cartridges that may have too little powder in them.

I’m thinking of making some 9mm defensive ammo. Somewhat irresponsibly, after my dad died, I started carrying the Glock 26 I bought him, without thinking about, or updating, the ammunition. I have a lot of target ammo, and I have a lot of brass and lead bullets, but I have precious little defensive ammunition.

I could buy defensive ammo, but it’s always overpriced, and that discourages practice. Nobody wants to put 100 rounds of 80-cent pistol ammo into a target. Defensive ammo is sold in tiny boxes, like jewelry, and the natural tendency is to treat it like a Faberge egg collection.

I also put Truglo sights on my new 10mm. It was quite a pain. In the past, I had always ordered Glocks with night sights installed, but I didn’t see anything like that available this time around. I learned that you have to have a tiny 3/16″ nut driver to remove the front sight. My choice was a Wiha precision nut driver, not the ones gun-related companies make. Wiha makes great tools. I don’t trust a gun company’s Chinese offering, especially when it’s more expensive.

To remove the rear sight, I needed a sight pusher. The rear sight was hard plastic, and it was pressed sideways into a dovetail. There was no way a punch was taking it out. I bought a fancy sight pusher from NC Star.

I thought the sight pusher was a good tool, because I saw gunsmiths using them on Youtube. In reality, it was very crude. It had a bunch of screws in it to provide pressure, they went through aluminum, and none were lubricated. There were a couple of screws that were supposed to rotate in tight steel pockets, and they weren’t greased, either. They kept locking up. I worked on the pusher for quite some time, opening things up, adding grease, and so on.

It works. No doubt about that. But you need to spend the first half hour working on the tool itself.

I am tempted to scrap the aluminum frame and make a better one from steel on the mill.

Now the sights are installed. The old rear sight was in so tight, the sight pusher deformed it. If I ever went crazy and wanted it back, I would have to buy a new one.

I may not be a gunsmith, but a lot of the time, I can buy tools and use them myself for an amount comparable to what a gunsmith would charge. That seems like the smart choice. When a job is done, I have a tool and some new skill, as contrasted with nothing.

It’s nice to have both carry guns functioning correctly. Now if I can just get the spot of dried pipe dope off the 9mm.

Hope I’m Doing This Right

I don’t know if any reloading-genius readers want to help me out, but I am posting some casing photos anyway.

I loaded some defensive rounds for 10mm. The recipe is from Speer, but they recommend CCI primers (surprise), and all I had were Wolf.

Powder: 10.7 grains Blue Dot
Bullet: Speer 0.400″ Gold Dot
Casing: new Starline
Primer: Wolf large pistol
OAL: 1.250″

I shot a couple of rounds in the yard. I haven’t chronographed them yet. I am hoping for a 1200 fps from a Glock 29’s short barrel, with a little more pep from the Glock 20. I used the Glock 29 to shoot the reloads.

Down near the rim, the cases bulged from about 0.420″ to about 0.433″. The primers are flush with the rims. There are rectangular marks from the hole around the gun’s firing pin.

I looked at a Hornady (factory) little-old-lady round I shot, and the bulge is identical. The impression from the firing pin is a bit less pronounced, as is the impression from the hole the firing pin rides in.

Is this an acceptable casing, or am I going to blow the gun up?

I put my Chrony together. Lost a couple of the steel rods that hold the diffusers up. I ordered 36″ of 5/16″ drill rod so I could make two more. Some people recommend using wooden rods instead, because if you shoot a wooden rod out of the Chrony, it won’t do as much damage.

MORE

Got some input from an experienced reloader. He says a rectangular mark on a primer is normal for Glocks, as is a “firing pin drag mark.” Guess I’m ready to shoot. Weather and the good Lord permitting, I’ll be chronographing these dudes tomorrow.

I’ve been reading a lot about Gold Dots in 10mm, and it looks like speed may not be everything. You can push them to over 1300 fps, but some people have found that they come apart at that speed, while speeds in the 1200’s do a great job of damaging the target while maintaining integrity. That would be good news, because shooting this caliber at any speed is work, and not having to use maximum speed will reduce recoil.

New York is the New Wuhan

Is it time to stop talking about coronavirus numbers? The new infection rate is still dropping, and it’s not going to stop. Repeating this every day doesn’t make it interesting or illuminating.

I guess I can report something of special relevance to me. The known-case number in my county seems to be frozen. It barely moves. We’re still stuck under 130 cases. Days ago, we were at 121.

But that doesn’t mean I’m safe at the grocery, because of all the unreported cases, right?

I don’t think it works that way here. If we had a lot of unreported cases, we might still have a low number of reported cases, but we would have a high transmission rate. People who didn’t know they were sick would be infecting others. A low transmission rate, when coupled with a low known-case number, seems to indicate a low actual-infection number.

I think we simply don’t have many sick people here. Don’t ask me why. I don’t think the sparse population is the entire answer. Maybe it is, but there are rural counties that have done worse.

It’s funny how the disease is distributing itself. It’s really not a big deal in most places. If you remove New York State from the USA total, the numbers drop by about a third, and New York isn’t as populous as you think. COVID-19 is much more common there than in most places, and it’s also more common in Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Miami, and New Orleans. Other places that may make the list: Cleveland, St. Louis, DC, Baltimore, and Kansas City.

Should we call it the Chinese virus or just the Democrat virus? Very strange.

L.A. isn’t too bad, though, and San Francisco is doing well.

It’s important to note that COVID-19 isn’t “common” anywhere. It’s not like the flu. It’s “more common” in some areas, but it’s not common by cold and flu standards. When New York City (not State) has well over a million cases, you can say it’s more common than the flu in that location. At least 10% of Americans get the flu every year, so you would expect nearly a million obvious cases in New York City. The lab-confirmed rate is much lower than 10%, but the CDC doesn’t limit itself to tested patients when compiling flu statistics.

I wonder how COVID-19 will affect rural home prices. I hope they go sky-high so I can make a profit when I sell this place, but I hope they stay really low so I can get a great deal when I buy another one.

I’ll bet it won’t help property values in New York City. If people leave, I hope they go to California, which is already destroyed. Please, God, keep them out of the South. If they ruin the South, there is no place left to go.

The bias of the press is still astounding. I saw an article saying what you buy these days depends on how you vote. It said Republicans were more likely to buy guns while Democrats were more likely to buy toilet paper. It said Democrats were rationally preparing for lockdowns and time at home.

That’s so idiotic, it hurts to think about it. How can anyone try to rationalize selfish, senseless, destructive hoarding of a product that is in no way related to the disease? How does “time at home” relate to a need for 300 rolls of toilet paper? There was never any danger, real or perceived, that we would not be allowed to buy toilet paper. It was an absurd Satanic mass delusion.

If they were worried about being stuck at home, they would have hoarded canned goods, but they have gone much easier on canned goods than toilet paper. If they were worried about being stuck at home, they wouldn’t have hoarded bottled water in the beginning, but they did. The water supply, which doesn’t depend on bottles, was never in doubt.

Hoarders can’t be excused. What they did is utterly nonsensical. The person who wrote the article was just trying to make leftists look better.

As for guns, a whole lot of non-conservatives have been trying their best to get them. It’s not just right-wingers. Coronavirus converted a lot of gun-haters. I still don’t understand why a Democrat or anyone else would think an epidemic would make a gun more useful. I suppose a gun may help you if you live in an area where they’re releasing criminals and refusing to send cops to crime scenes.

There have always been big buyers on the right. Some are profiteers. Some are irrational hoarders. Some are preppers. Some are just getting ready for the banning of lead and our leftist future without easy access to guns. Then there are people like me who like to buy ammunition in bulk to save money.

Things continue to go well here. Life is easy. I’ve made lots of ammunition. I must sound like a scared pandemic prepper, but I was already at work before the hysteria started. I think my Hornady Lock-n-Load AP press is finally working correctly.

This press is like a Chinese lathe. Basically, there is nothing wrong with it, but the factory didn’t finish manufacturing it. It came with a lot of rough edges. They say a Chinese machine tool is really a kit. When it arrives, it may be unusable, but after considerable work and study, it will do just fine. Same thing with the Hornady press.

Here’s something that plagued me. The press refused to prime brass. Every so often, a shell would go through with no primer. This allowed powder to leak out onto the press. As a result, the press’s column was generally coated with grey residue, and I had problems with gummy crushed powder clogging things up.

It turned out the base plate the shell plate sits on was too thin. I’m only writing about this in case some Googler has the same problem. The spring-loaded punch that seats primers screws into the base plate. The top of the punch should be level with the top of the plate or slightly lower. My punch protruded through the plate. The primers are loaded by a slide that moves back and forth over the punch, so because the punch protruded, it caught the slide and prevented primers from loading.

The simple answer was to Dremel material off the bottom of the slide so it could pass over the punch.

It was annoying to find that this problem existed, because manufacturing a flat piece of steel to a desired thickness is a very easy task for a machinist. There is no excuse for getting it wrong and then passing the product on to a consumer. If the base plate were 20 thousandths thicker, the primers would always have loaded correctly.

I know that was boring, but someone on the Internet will eventually need the information.

I’m expecting 3,000 more rounds of .22 LR to arrive today. This will bring me up to over 9,000 Mini-mags. It’s not enough for a lifetime, but it’s enough to sit back on while I wait for prices to drop so I can accumulate a final stockpile at relatively low prices. As I’ve said earlier, I would have left it for other people to buy, but they were ignoring it, so too bad.

I have to make defensive ammo for the 10mm pistols. I’m not really that interested in self-defense these days, but I am interested in tools, guns, reloading, and shooting, so I want to do things right. I’m planning to load 180-grain Hornady Gold Dots to about 1200-1250 fps. That ought to be fine.

I don’t want to kill you, but I do want to be able to kill you. Not because I like killing people, but because I don’t like getting involved with firearms and then making bad ammunition choices. I guess I’m like an old lady who puts plastic covers on furniture she never lets anyone sit on. Shooting people isn’t the point. I just enjoy learning about guns and ammo and trying to do things well. The fact that I don’t want to use my carry gun doesn’t mean I don’t want it to work correctly.

Ammunition technology keeps improving. The .40 S&W has started to look a lot better. You can get very good performance with the same Gold Dots, with a little less recoil and weight. Makes me wonder if buying another 10mm was the right idea, but I know it will work. I can get 1200 fps from the 10mm, compared to maybe 1100 from the .40, without over-driving the 10mm. That can’t be a bad thing. I still think .45 ACP is a great option.

If I didn’t make my own ammunition, I wouldn’t go near the 10mm. Hot factory ammo is just too overpriced.

I’m enjoying life and continuing to improve. I don’t know God’s plans for me, but I am content to putter around and have fun until I find out.

Let’s All Play Trivial Pursuit on Zoom

The coronavirus curve looked really good last night. It continues to oscillate, but if you do what math people do, more or less, and draw a line through it to approximate its basic direction, you will see that it points downward.

This is somewhat startling, because testing is ramping up. Yesterday, I read that a test of Los Angeles jails revealed 200,000 cases, generally asymptomatic. Did I read that right? That’s a lot of cases. If testing is getting better and more widespread, and the curve is still dropping, then things are even better than they seem.

Maybe one of the upward spikes was assisted by this event.

The press is still deluded. I saw an article claiming Kentucky cases had spiked two days after anti-lockdown rallies. Ridiculous. Coronavirus has an incubation period longer than two days. There is no connection. Of course, whoever wrote the article didn’t point this out. He probably didn’t know it. It’s probably some snowflaky millennial who maxed out with Algebra I and has to call his mom to change a flat tire.

It’s very unfortunate that journalists are so…I will go with “unintelligent,” since it’s not a term created in order to insult. I will steer away from harsher terms. It’s a pity there is nothing like an LSAT for journalists. It would be a First Amendment problem, but think how much better life would be while it was going through the courts.

I applied my prediction equation last night, to see how it was doing. Wonderful result. The equation’s prediction was about 47% high. The reported numbers adhered very strictly to an exponential equation for weeks, and that’s over with. A figure of +47% is still remarkably accurate, but it does indicate that the disease is petering out. Not that you need it, because official sources say the same thing.

People want to go back to work in order to save the economy, but will it work? No. I think it will be very helpful, but it won’t be anything like a true recovery. Americans have been conditioned to believe the following falsehoods:

1. COVID-19 is extremely contagious.
2. COVID-19 is a severe disease.
3. COVID-19 is very dangerous for all demographics.

Taken together, 1 and 2 are not true. Number 3 is not even close to true. The disparate impact of COVD-19 is one of its remarkable features.

Regarding contagion, either the disease is not very contagious, or it is generally extremely mild, or both. If it were contagious and severe, we would have something like a billion known cases, as we do with the flu, every year. If it’s very contagious, it is generally extremely mild, because severe cases are obvious, and we only know of about 2.7 million cases. As for severity, we know how severe it ISN’T, because we have seen 2.7 million purported cases, and something like 85% were mild or asymptomatic. That puts an upper limit on the average severity. We don’t have a lower limit, but the Los Angeles testing suggests the actual infection numbers may be very, very high, and that would prove the disease is generally barely perceptible.

As for COVID-19 being very dangerous for all demographics, we already know this isn’t true. If you’re under 50 and healthy, even if you get a symptomatic case, you’re very unlikely to get really sick or die. If you’re considerably younger, the odds are worse than those of going to Las Vegas with 20 dollars, playing roulette, and driving home in a Bentley.

Well, maybe not that much worse. But a lot worse.

There probably billions of young, healthy people who think they’re facing a high risk of severe illness if they go back to work or mingle with other people in public, when in reality, they’re much more likely to die from the flu or in a car wreck.

My guess is that this belief will continue to kill restaurants and other businesses involving gatherings for at least 6 months. And it will be hard on people like performers, ticket agents, event organizers, venue owners, mall owners, and so on. If you’re a musician, your parents were right. Get a haircut and apply at Walmart. On the plus side, touring makes a lot of money for people who are very corrosive to our morals, so maybe rappers and rock stars will be less powerful and annoying. Many famous performers don’t make much money from royalties. Imagine a future with less Lady Gaga. Nice.

Plagues really scare people. Even when they’re not plagues.

By the way, this epidemic will be the final blow to many familiar chains and businesses. It’s a big step in the direction of a future where a huge portion of the things we need have to be bought electronically. Daddy Beast likes.

Will the pandemic come back? I’ve been thinking about it. Here is my answer: no.

How can I say that? The “experts” say it will always be with us. The explanation is simple.

From now on, we are going to test like crazy. Everyone who so much as coughs will be tested. Big Sister will work hard to gather data, and what will she do when a local outbreak occurs? She will put the boot on it, fast and hard.

COVID-19 can’t just appear everywhere, all at once. It has to start in identifiable, discrete locations. We can address that, and we will. Any place where a case is detected will be locked down. Patients will be quarantined. It will be much harder for the disease to spread next time.

We will also have a vaccine pretty soon, and believe me, we will take it. The pressure will be overwhelming. Even anti-vaxxers may be forced to submit. There may be arrests for people who refuse, even though no one cares if you get a flu vaccine. The flu just isn’t glamorous. Tom Hanks didn’t get it.

I think COVID-19 will pop up here and there, and it won’t get much traction. But the news will still cause hoarding, so buy stock in Georgia Pacific. They make toilet paper. Still the only known cure.

Maybe when people realize the flu was worse, they’ll force us to be vaccinated for that, too. The implications are disturbing. Auntie Sam may be extremely powerful and personal next year.

I wonder about our current status as rights-deprived subjects. Will that continue? Leftists will argue for it, because they always do. They have always been against any civil right not protecting sexual sin, the murder of the unborn, crime, obscenity, or recreational drug use. They love gun control, restraint of free speech that isn’t obscene, the forced purchasing of insurance, over-regulation of commerce, and all sorts of other dangerous infringements.

They routinely advocate for the restriction of political speech, which is the type of speech the First Amendment was written to protect. It wasn’t written for Hugh Hefner, who surely regrets what he did in life.

It’s bizarre how they characterize themselves as proponents of freedom, because they adore government and cede their rights to it eagerly in order to obtain a false sense of security.

Leftists may not realize it, but most would be happy to live in government-financed cages, eating Soylent Green, as long as they got to sin all they wanted and didn’t have to pay for medical care.

We already have those cages. They’re called “housing projects” and “rent-controlled apartments.”

The idea that human beings love liberty is a myth. Generally, we love security, and we will debase ourselves all day every day to get it. People who really love liberty are anomalous. It’s remarkable that there are so many of us in America. It’s probably not sustainable. The pet hamster mindset tends to prevail when times get hard.

We’re looking at a scenario in which we have to balance our natural cowardice and love of security against our knowledge that we will be poor if we aren’t free. I hope the desire for a decent lifestyle will prevail, because it will tend to preserve our freedom.

If you want to be lifted above this mess, get to know God. Pray in tongues every day. Repent. Spend time with him. Let him change you. Your happiness and success depend on your relationship with God, not on what happens around you. Think about Daniel in the lions’ den. Think about Noah. Think about Jesus, walking away unseen in the midst of a crowd of friends, relatives, and neighbors who were trying to throw him off a cliff.

Think about Passover.

The fact that most Christians have lived in defeat for centuries doesn’t mean Christianity doesn’t work. Think of the horrible doctrine that held them down. You don’t have to believe that garbage.

I should talk about masks. The “experts” keep leading us in circles. They said masks didn’t help, perhaps in order to discourage sales so they could funnel them to care providers. Now they’re saying they do help, and in some places, you have to wear one or you can be kept out.

I believed the “no work” line, except that I thought a mask might help a person not to touch his face, and I thought it would reduce sprays of things like snot and droplets. Now the consensus, which seems somewhat more sound this time, is that masks are helpful. So I think I was mistaken.

I can get quality masks from my friend Mike, but I think they should go to people who really need them. Like people who are financing their retirements by selling them for a hundred bucks each.

In other news, I’m afraid I turned my reloading press into a bomb.

I was running my Hornady Lock-n-Load AP some years ago when I noticed that the plastic restraint on top of the primer tube was not reliable. It’s supposed to hold the tube and primers in place. It kept coming loose. I blamed Hornady, and I believe I was correct, but recent research suggests I can make the plastic cap work if I do little things to fix the press’s fit and finish.

Anyway, I turned on the lathe and made myself an aluminum primer tube cap. I’ll show you a photo. It’s basically a counterbored tube with two set screws to fasten it to the primer tube. I don’t use the lower screw. It’s not needed. The cap does a great job of keeping things together.

The primer tube on this press is a skinny aluminum tube, and there is a steel outer tube around it. I thought the steel tube was there to hold it up. This is true, but yesterday I learned that it’s also a shield. On very rare occasions, primers inside tubes have exploded.

The force of a primer explosion is small, but you can put 100 primers in a tube, one on top of the other. They can set each other off, and then you have a bigger explosion. How much bigger? I don’t know. Not big enough to blow a shield apart. The gas exits upward.

Problem: my cap is firmly attached to the shield, and it only has one small hole through which gas can escape. Also, it’s heavier than the stock device. What happens if the primers blow up? Will the cap’s restriction force the exploding gases to blow the shield open? I would not like that. It would be bad, and because the shield is next to a big container of powder, it could lead to even worse things.

Now I see why Hornady gives you a rubber cap to cover the top of the powder measure.

It pains me to give up my beautiful aluminum cap, but I may do it. And I’m going to wear eye protection from now on. And I’ll put a fire extinguisher in the gun room. What a pain.

I’ve had a few issues since beginning to reload again. I found a great series of videos from a guy who really knows how to set this press up. They’re a bit long-winded, but I’m going to watch all of them. You might like them, too.

Hornady provides an inadequate manual along with the press, and there is no way you can make it run using only this tiny amount of information. You need more sources.

I’m thinking that in the future, I will do my best to manufacture all of my own ammunition. I won’t do rimfire because I can’t. I may or may not exclude shotgun shells, because I don’t use many. Not sure. But I want to make my own pistol and rifle centerfire ammo. I can make exactly what I want, and in many cases it will be a lot cheaper than factory stuff. In the case of all-lead bullets, I will even be able to make the projectiles themselves, and they will cost almost nothing.

They’re going to take factory lead ammo and bullets away from us before too long, so if you want to keep shooting lead, you’ll want some bullet molds. Either than or buy bullets this year.

I probably have 30 pounds of lead. I saved some downrigger weights from my dad’s boat. It’s not hard to get free or cheap lead from other sources.

One benefit of reloading is that when people panic, factory ammo sells out faster than reloading components.

I’m hoping supplies of everything will open up during May, and then I can start laying things in. If I have to spend a couple of thousand dollars, so what? It’s important. It’s better than paying for car and home insurance. I’ll have something permanent I can keep.

I’m not one of those nuts who wants a pile of lead so he can shoot it out with the feds when the familiar substance hits the fan, but I don’t want to be an 80-year-old man who polishes his empty guns and misses the days when he could actually shoot them.

I hope to crank out maybe 200 rounds of target 10mm today, and I’ll also create an ample number of defensive rounds. I may as well accept the fact that I’ll need more 10mm brass. You have to practice with your carry gun.

I don’t know if 10mm was the best choice, because .45 ACP is very, very good, and it’s easier to shoot. I can always get a Glock in .45 if I change my mind. Maybe I should look for an alternative brand which is just as good or better. Glocks are wonderful tools, but carrying one is like marrying a homely woman who makes great pies and changes her own oil.

MORE

I don’t know where my brain was this morning. I read a story about a big number of positive COVID-19 tests in L.A. County jails, and, later, I posted what I thought I remembered. I said 200,000 inmates had tested positive.

I always write and then go back and check to see if anything I wrote was incorrect, but somehow that system failed to engage today, as did common sense. As bad as L.A. is, there is no way it could have 200,000 inmates (unless you consider all Californians inmates), let alone 200,000 who have coronavirus.

I must have been distracted. It’s amazing that I could have written something that stupid and then let it make it to the blog. Thankfully, a reader has used a comment to point the problem out.

My best guess is that I saw a story which mentioned the jail test in addition to the fact that 200,000 people go in and out of jails nationwide every week. Either that, or I need to stop drinking so much hand sanitizer.

Anyway, I hope the rest of what I wrote was reasonably lucid. I will check.

Paul Harrell Would Slap Me

I’m going to tell on myself.

I cranked out a bunch of 10mm rounds today, and then I decided to shoot a few and see if they blew my hand off. I took the Glock 29 and the new Glock 20 to the pasture. I had 11 Hornady factory rounds. I shot those from the new gun because shooting reloads would void the warranty. I don’t care about voiding the warranty on the old gun, because I know it was okay from the factory. The major parts have no defects. Whatever goes wrong from here on out, I can probably fix. If it turned out the new gun had a giant crack in the frame or a ringed barrel or something, I would want to find out while I still had a warranty.

Glock is a real pain about warranties. They void you if you shoot reloads, which seems ridiculous. I guess most people lie, but I prefer not to.

The Hornady rounds shot fine, but three of the first 11 handloaded rounds failed to fire because of light primer strikes.

That’s a pretty high ratio of duds to viable rounds.

The second magazine only had one dud. That told me the cartridges were probably okay. I rounded up the cartridges that failed, ran them through the gun again, and they fired.

My conclusion? Somebody let lint gum up his firing pin.

I can’t even remember the last time I cleaned the gun. I never shoot it. Evidently, Glocks will suck up lint and become useless. It may be because I have an Uncle Mike’s pocket holster, which sheds little fibers until it’s broken in.

Man, it would have been unpleasant if this had happened with my carry ammo on a bad day. “RELAX, LADY, I’LL SAVE YOU!” “Click.” “SORRY! BEST OF LUCK! WORK THE JAB!”

I brought the gun inside, and for the first time since I’ve owned it, I disassembled the slide. It only takes a second. I went through it with swabs and alcohol, among other things. I went online and ordered 220 pipe cleaners to ream out the deep holes in the slide. I cleaned everything with Powder Blast, which is brutal, and I also used Hornady One Shot. I used a tiny bit of Mobil 28 grease on the slide when I reassembled it.

They say you should not lubricate anything on a Glock but the slide, and they recommend oil, but I can’t resist trying out my super-duper Mobil 28 grease in the special made-for-gunsmithing skinny syringe. Since I’m the one who has to clean it, I figure I’ll do what I want.

I was not happy with the way the gun acted when I put it back together. It has a Lasermax guide rod laser, which I never should have bought. The laser replaces the guide rod and spring, and it doesn’t feel great. Also, you have to install a Lasermax slide lock, which can actually fall out. And the batteries die fast, unlike those in a Crimson Trace.

I decided to reinstall the original rod and spring. Then I got them out and noticed they had separated from each other. This is something that happens with Glocks, but this was the first time I had seen it happen to a spring that wasn’t used. The manufacturer, unbelievably, considers the guide rod assembly a disposable part, so they don’t make them very well, and they come apart. This would be fine if you could predict when it would happen, but you can’t. It looks like my original assembly fell apart under the stress of sitting in a box in a closet.

This is at least the second Glock spring failure I’ve had.

I can’t deal with this. Personal safety is important, even to a guy who doesn’t clean his guns. I’m getting a Wolff spring and rod, and I will never buy them from Glock again. As if I planned to. I’m also getting a Crimson Trace.

The new Glock has a horrendous trigger. I don’t know why it would be different from the old ones. That will have to be fixed.

The ammo appears to be fine. It shoots very accurately, and it cycles when you actually hit the primer correctly.

I’m getting a few boxes of factory ammo for the new gun. I’ll shoot it up, and if nothing breaks, I’ll go ahead and void the warranty. I’m not going to be stuck with factory defensive rounds for $45 per box just so I can have a warranty.

The funny thing is that what happened to me today has happened in a number of dreams. I pointed my gun at someone, pulled the trigger, and got nothing. It’s as though God were trying to warn me about my gun. But I’ve always assumed those dreams were about cleaning up my act so I would have authority to cast out spirits.

Cleaning your carry gun really is important. I repent.

Any Demographic that Actually Needs “No Spitting” Signs Should Expect Problems

It’s a banner day. I’m blogging from the gun room instead of the upstairs Chamber of Manliness.

Yesterday I set up a second set of Home Depot (only the finest) shelves, and I got the vast majority of my junk off the floor. I can walk in and out without tripping. My monitor is connected to a laptop, so it’s running. I have a nice comfy overpriced ergonomic chair. I’m within 20 feet of the refrigerator. It’s heaven.

I have Roku on the TV, so I can watch Youtube and Amazon Prime without using a browser.

Are you tired of the horrifyingly inappropriate “At Home Together” Roku home screen? Roku forces it on people, to remind them that a company that helps people watch Keeping up With the Kardashians is entitled to tell customers they can’t leave their houses. I kept getting rid of this theme, and it kept coming back. I finally found that if you go to the theme menu and select the customizing option, you can disable Big Sister themejacking. You’re welcome. Maybe I can find an AR-15-related theme, or one about whale-meat recipes.

I’m actually considering NOT blogging about coronavirus today. It’s yesterday’s news, unless you live in a place like New York. I don’t mean nothing is happening. Just that there isn’t a lot to say.

I talked to my cousin yesterday about the dirty habits of Northeasterners, which must surely be contributing to the epidemic. She started telling me how disgusted she got when she saw people sharing drinks and eating from each other’s plates. She told me about turning down things friends from the Northeast handed out at ball games. She said she watched them like a hawk. She was right there with me. It’s strange how people from the Northeast think germs are imaginary.

I just checked, and New York City is a major VD hub. Big surprise.

I have to say that I wonder what life will be like now that the lockdowns are about to be forced out of action. Will people flock to malls and restaurants? Will they pack places like T.G.I. Friday’s? I’ll bet they don’t. I’ll bet in-person commerce will still be pretty subdued. But at least we’ll have a choice.

By the way, I was wrong about the flu being as bad as coronavirus. It’s worse. I checked again, and they think the flu may have killed as many as 60,000 Americans this season. That’s on top of the 80,000 we lost last year. Remember all the mass graves and the economic hysteria? Me neither.

Coronavirus is on track for somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000. Hasn’t caught up with the flu yet.

Last night, I decided I was going to make 10mm ammunition. That didn’t work out. I set up my powder measure, and when I started weighing charges, they went like this: 9.3, 9.4, 9.7, 10.0…something was wrong.

Could it have had anything to do with the fact that I left the powder measure in the workshop for several years, where it rusted? Could it be in any way related to the fact that I had never, ever cleaned it?

I don’t want to jump to conclusions.

Cleaning a powder measure is not all that easy. I had already cleaned rust off the outside. I did that a few days ago, using the buffer. The inside was more of a challenge. I came up with a solution. I remembered that I had a big gun-cleaning kit with wire brushes of various sizes. I stuck brushes in a drill and reamed out the hollow parts of the powder measure.

I also noticed that powder was sticking to parts that were not rusted. I blame Hornady One Shot gun cleaner for this. It’s a phenomenal gun cleaner and dry lube. Hornady says to spray the insides of powder measures with it. Hasn’t worked for me. When I used it, powder stuck much worse. I think it leaves a residue powder likes.

I had to clean everything out with window cleaner and alcohol.

When I got this thing years ago, I broke it. Hornady said to spray the inside with One Shot, but this was impossible. The plastic hopper tube is about 8″ long, and you have to spray through it to get One Shot into the metal parts from above. I figured it must have been removable, so I tried to unscrew it. It popped out of the metal part. Hornady had pressed it in.

Nice.

Ever since then, I’ve held it in place with tape. I now think this is the smart way to go. If you ever need to clean your powder measure, it will be hard with the plastic in place. By fastening it with black electrician’s tape, I made it removable.

But thousands of people have used these things successfully without breaking them and putting tape on them, so I may be totally wrong.

It was a mistake following Hornady’s instructions. That, I’m sure of. Maybe the insides of the measure shouldn’t be lubed at all, or maybe a good-quality spray silicone is the best answer. I could also hit it with brake cleaner first. Some people pour graphite powder through them before using them.

Before long, I’m going to toss some Accurate No. 7 in there and weigh some charges. Hoping for the best. I don’t see any parts that could be considered ruined, so I don’t think a new powder measure is the answer.

Powder measures that were made more recently than mine come with internal baffles that supposedly make powder flow better. I have not been able to find them sold separately. I don’t know if they work.

I finally ordered a Powder Cop, which is a little device that gives you some warning when you fill a case too much or too little. I don’t plan to wait for it, because you can avoid problems simply by being careful. I think it’s a good buy, though. Blowing guns up in your hand is bad.

My plan is to make a whole lot of lead 10mm rounds for practice. After that, I’ll think about defense rounds, which would require me to change the settings on the press. I overbought defensive bullets. I think I have around 500. I believe I could go the rest of my life on that amount, including a little practice.

When 10mm is done, it will be time for .45 ACP. Then .38 Super.

I better start weighing charges. These cartridges aren’t going to create themselves.

They Hear Their Master’s Voice

It looks like the coronavirus graph for the US is struggling with a plateau. This is my best guess. The steady upward progress we saw in earlier weeks is over, but the rate is oscillating.

Good enough. Even the government is acknowledging that things are winding down, so I’m satisfied.

Yesterday, I made an essential trip to an essential store. I hit Harbor Freight and bought a TV mount for the gun room. Now I have a TV/monitor on the wall, and I no longer have a TV on the floor.

I’m not sure what’s going on with the mounting. I used a stud finder to locate good places to put the two screws that hold the TV. I got positive results, and when I drilled, I didn’t pop through drywall and then hit air. On the other hand, I didn’t get any sawdust. It’s like I drilled into plastic. The TV isn’t coming loose, so I’m happy.

I moved my dad’s old $1400 office chair into the gun room. In my opinion, it’s really a $300 chair that got a lot of help from insurance. I went with him to buy it, years ago. We went to Relax the Back, a chain that specializes in furniture covered by medical insurance. His back had been bothering him. He had to pay for it. I think that if the manufacturer and the store hadn’t been using to suckling on the insurance teat, the chair would have been much, much cheaper. It’s not significantly more expensive to make than a chair from Office Depot.

Whenever loans and insurance get involved, prices go up, as anyone who has sent a kid to college or paid for medical care can tell you. It’s sad, because responsible people who pay cash and cover their own costs get taken to the cleaners while irresponsible people who rely on others get big breaks.

After my dad became demented, Asians started calling him, trying to sell him special belts for his back. These things don’t work. It probably costs ten bucks to make one, and they charge Medicare $1200. A famous huckster who calls himself Dr. Ho sells one on TV. If you were wondering where your tax dollars were going, now you know. I’m sure it will make you feel better about giving half your income to the government. Dr. Ho really appreciates it. He probably needs a back belt to help him lift your money.

He ought to be in prison, but this is how the world works.

Today I’m putting more shelves in the gun room. I have to clear the floor. I ordered shelves yesterday from the Home Depot site, and they didn’t clear the order until the store was closed. I suppose the curbside pickup policy is slowing them down.

One reason I need more shelves is that I broke down and bought 3,000 more rounds of .22 ammo. I was going to quit, because I thought other people needed a chance. But no one was answering the ad. I figured it was fine for me to buy more if no one else had the good sense to take it.

The ammo panic is teaching people to shoot odd calibers. The panic patrol is stocking up on common things like 9mm, .22 LR, and .40. Supplies are tight, but I can get all the .204 Ruger and .17 HMR I want. I haven’t checked .38 Super. Let’s see. Yes, it’s available. Some types are out of stock at Midway USA, but others are not.

I got a .38 Super pistol because I thought it was cool, not because I wanted to shoot burglars with it. It’s a great defensive round, though. The FBI used to use it to get through the heavy steel of old car bodies. Special Agent Earl Hamer carried one when he and his crew thoroughly ventilated Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker.

Maybe this is the time for people to start carrying .357 SIG, a caliber experts refer to as “useless.” It approximates .40 S&W performance, for only twice the price. Maybe shelves are full of .357 SIG rounds no one wants. There is also a weird .45 ACP variant out there.

Harbor Freight has a doorman now, like Studio 54. I had to stand in line outside, hovering over my social-distancing decal, hoping to be chosen. I tipped him $50 and asked for a table near the band. Then I found out he was letting everyone in eventually. And he wasn’t even selling molly.

I actually cautioned a guy who got too close to me. I like social distancing. I don’t think I’ll get COVID-19, but the disease does exist, and there is a much bigger chance that I’ll get the flu. Why not stand 6 feet apart when it’s not inconvenient? It’s a good thing to do even when there is no virus panic. It’s good manners.

If you’re a man, you should be used to social distancing in stores. Men in their thirties and forties have problems with strange women chasing them at the grocery and other stores, and it can train us to maintain space barriers. Women’s magazines, which are full of heinous advice provided by homosexual men and single women who will never be married, tell women this is a great way to land a husband.

I always hated it. I wasn’t going to ask a strange woman out because she kept turning up beside me at Barnes & Noble. It made me wonder what was wrong with them. Of course, when you get old and they stop, it’s not flattering.

Then when you hit 65, they start up again, and they’re rabid and unrelenting. And they’re not attractive young women worried about their biological clocks. Also, it shouldn’t be taken as a compliment. It doesn’t mean you’re attractive or charming. They just want something to lie next to at night, which other women can’t get. Terrifying.

I was in line for the register when a guy took the decal behind mine. He was wearing a carpenter’s dust mask. Don’t get me started. The problem was that he stood in front of his cart, about three inches away from me. I mentioned the decal, and he apologized and moved back. He had moved close to me so he could get a better look at an item I was standing next to. Of course, he would have been next to it himself a minute later, even without the strange decision to increase intimacy. He just thought he’d save time by doing something he clearly thought was dangerous.

My friend Mike lives in New Hampshire and works in Boston, which is a hotspot. He has become militant. He has taken to standing in the middle of aisles and saying, “You’re not going past me. You can try if you want.” He’s a pretty big guy, so he can do that. Probably not the best approach.

I told him about my theory that Northeasterners were getting hit hard because they’re dirty and don’t believe in germs. I thought he might disagree. He said, “I hate them.” That was a little over the top. He gave me a long speech about how rude and narcissistic they are. He is really fed up. He said people up there are ignoring the distancing rules wholesale, while voting for Democrats who are much more likely to impose draconian measures than Republicans. I guess they think having a rule, not obeying it, is what counts.

That’s actually very normal for leftists. Make a rule that’s unsustainable and irrational, and then violate it as a matter of policy while expecting the government to make other people obey.

He says Michigan’s liberal governor won’t let people go outside. Yeah, that’s totally reasonable and science-based. We have all gotten used to the stories of people who gave other people coronavirus from 50 yards away while mowing yards. He says she won’t let people buy anything that isn’t essential, even when visiting a store for a good reason. So if you go to Target to buy canned soup, you can’t get your kids a Monopoly board to keep them from tearing the walls out of your house.

Sounds like a total nutcase, but she’s in charge because people don’t vote with their brains. It makes me dread the emasculating post-Trump future, when her kind rules the nation. Look what they’re capable of. I knew they would be socialists, but I didn’t think they could incarcerate everyone on a whim.

Death, for Christians, is pleasant and rewarding. In this respect, it is different from, and generally preferable to, living under anti-Christian leftist nanny-tyrants.

Mike has 5,000 N95 masks, with more on the way. He ordered them weeks ago for his employees, but he uses them, too. I don’t know what good they will do him, but he has real reasons for taking unusual measures. He has had heart and immune system problems. He offered to send me masks, but I wasn’t interested.

In other news, I saw a neat video from Messianic Rabbi Zev Porat. He works in Israel, reaching out to Jews. He’s from an Orthodox family, and he has helped a number of heavy-duty Orthodox Jews, including rabbis, come to Yeshua.

He spoke about the coronavirus panic, using the word “panic.” He knows what’s happening. The hysteria is from Satan.

He talked about the Hebrew word for panic. He says it’s “panikos.” Pretty creative. It comes from the name of Pan, supposedly the oldest false god. His name means “all” for some reason. I recall being taught that the reason was that he was originally the greatest of the Greek false gods.

Pan looks like our typical depiction of Satan. He’s a man with goat’s horns, a post-90’s chin beard, and a goat’s lower body. Some equate him with Satan.

It’s interesting that the ancient Jews chose to associate panic with a pagan deity.

The word “pandemic” comes from roots meaning something like “all (Pan) people.”

Among pagans, there was a belief that if one woke Pan up from a nap, he might yell and cause livestock or people to stampede. So a panic is really a stampede. Isn’t that perfect? We’re acting like scared cattle. Instead of listening to the Holy Spirit, we look to see what the other cattle are doing, and we do the same. This is why you can’t find toilet paper, which is a product totally unrelated to caring for coronavirus victims.

I’ve been telling people the Beast isn’t just a man or a spirit. It’s the herd of human beings who aren’t led by the Spirit of God.

The other day, while considering the coronavirus hysteria, I thought of a flock of birds flying in random directions as one simply because the birds in front turned this way or that. We’ve all seen this. Human beings are supposed to be smart, but we do the same thing every day. I hate it. I have always hated it. Even when I was a little kid, I could not understand other kids who did and thought as others did, without thinking. I noticed that sometimes they seemed to lose their minds. It was like something else had taken over. I didn’t understand why they couldn’t see it.

When I was in the second grade, I knew a kid named Dave. We were friends. He was a great guy. One day I went up to him after school was out, and when I spoke to him, he puffed out his chest and started barging toward me. He bellowed, saying he was a Gator fan, and he said something or other about how you have to get out of the way for Gator fans or else. I had no idea what he was talking about. He acted like he didn’t know me. I actually asked myself if I had mistaken someone else for Dave. I was seeing the Beast in action. Didn’t know it.

You’re supposed to be the head, not the tail. If you hoarded toilet paper in March, you’re a follower, not a leader. You don’t think. You’re disconnected from God, and you’re displeasing him.

Porat mentions the Banias, which is something I’ve written about. It’s a hole in the side of Baal-Hermon (“lord of the curse”), which is one name for Mount Hermon in the north of Israel. “Banias” means something like “place of Pan.” It’s an Arabic term, and the Arabs don’t have a “P” sound in their language. I suppose it would be “Panias” if they did.

According to the book of Enoch, Baal-Hermon, a snow-capped peak, is the place where Satan (or Semyaza) and a bunch of other angels came down from heaven, took physical form, and agreed to defy God and have sex with women. They exchanged curses binding each other in a pact. This is where the name of the mountain comes from.

These were angels who gave rise to a race of dominant freaks who oppressed mankind, and the flood was sent to clear them off the earth.

It’s not clear to me how Satan could have been cursed after he tempted Adam and then gone on to fall at Mount Hermon, much later. Maybe Satan and Semyaza are different spirits, or maybe the serpent wasn’t the spirit we call Satan. The book of Enoch says the angels who had sex with women tried to get forgiveness by sending Enoch to talk to God, but it certainly looks like the serpent was already damned and would not have bothered trying to get forgiveness. There is an explanation, but I don’t know what it is.

Mt. Hermon is one of three sources of the Jordan.

In the past, the hole at the bottom of the mountain contained a powerful spring with a very vigorous flow of water. Pagans used to throw their sacrifices into the spring, presumably contaminating the Jordan as it made its way through Israel to the Sea of Galilee and then the Dead Sea. An earthquake eventually reduced the flow.

The Banias was the location of Caesarea Philippi. This is the place where Jesus called Peter Satan. He said the gates of hell would not prevail against his church. The Banias was a gate of hell. It was surrounded by pagan structures. Still is.

It’s remarkable how things fit together. The Beast is the false god of the flesh. He will rule humans as a herd, and he will do it largely through panics. People who pretend to be kind and rational in normal times will turn hard and even vicious in enforcing a panicked herd’s irrational dictates. We’re seeing that now among coronavirus hysterics.

People who wouldn’t hurt you during normal times will burn your house with you in it if they think they have to do it in order to stop a plague. People who don’t know God are terrified of death. They are not like solid Christians.

A few years back, God put this word in my mind: “I will not be rushed.” I didn’t see how prophetic it was until now. When Satan rules you, you are likely to be rushed. A rush and a panic are the same thing.

There have been many times when I felt like I needed to act fast because of some perceived threat, and I deliberately chose not to do anything, simply because I remembered what God had said.

Here’s something else God showed me: worry is faith in Satan.

People don’t like to hear that, because many people think worry is good. The Bible is against worry. It tells us not to do it, over and over. It says it leads to evil.

If you watch Zev Porat’s video, you will see him say a remarkable thing. Talking to a man who is worried about coronavirus, he asks him who he has faith in. He says essentially the same thing God told me.

Worry is faith in Satan. Worry spawns panic. Worry leads to counterproductive herd behavior. Satan is using coronavirus to teach us to obey him, so we can become the body and bride of the Beast. It all fits together.

It also fits in with another thing God taught me, which is that there is always symmetry in the supernatural. God’s imitation is Satan. Faith’s imitation is worry. Being led by spirits of panic is an imitation of being led by the Holy Spirit. The counterpart of Jesus is the man who becomes the incarnation of the Beast. The counterpart of the body of Christ is the body of Satan, which is the body of the Beast.

The Beast’s prophet is probably the counterpart of Elijah.

It’s wonderful to see a rabbi saying things I’ve said. God tells everyone the exact same things. When people who claim to be Christians disagree, somebody is out of the loop.

I don’t know what it’s like to be terrified of death. I’m grateful for that. My mother was the same way. When she found out she had cancer, she only underwent treatment to make the rest of the family happy. She didn’t pity herself or spend her days crying. My sister, on the other hand, became hysterical and even more selfish. She was the picture of a bad cancer patient.

My great-grandmother was a healthy 85-year-old charismatic who refused to go to doctors, and one day, she got in bed and told everyone she was going to die. No shrieking or whining.

Maybe our consciences tell us where we’re going if we die.

If so, this is a bad time for leftists, who seem to be getting hit much harder than people in Christian areas.

I guess that’s all I have. Still no major celebrity deaths. Not one. Still many fewer known infections than the flu. Still below last year’s flu death total.

I better get to Home Depot.

Fodder for the Math-Challenged and Panic-Prone

My prognostications concerning the pandemic have taken a hit!

For days, the world coronavirus new-case graph has been dipping, creating an apparent maximum followed by a decline. Over the last couple of days, it has turned upward again. It’s still down from the peak, and it’s WAY down from where it would be had there been no dips. That’s the important thing. If the epidemic weren’t faltering, we would have many, many more new cases today, and the lookout for next week would be much worse.

Here is today’s graph, which comes from last night’s figures. If the epidemic had not dipped, the graph would run up and out of the frame to the right. It would be as high as the word at the beginning of this sentence.

I’m not going to keep downloading and posting this graph. I did it today so people would know I was acknowledging the upturn, but it’s getting to be a drag.

Was I wrong? I can’t know, but I don’t think so. Maybe a new country is having problems, or maybe testing or counting is changing. I’m still betting on a continued decline through the month and, well, forever, until and unless we get a second epidemic.

Here’s something I’m thinking about: why is the death rate worse than they said it would be a week ago? This disease is far less common than the flu, regardless of what anyone says, but the death toll will probably be comparable when all is said and done.

I’m going to make another wild guess: it’s because very old people are extremely susceptible, and we don’t protect them. I’m going to guess that if we ever see real figures, we will learn that the vast majority of the dead were over 70, and many were confined in homes.

A few days back, I noted that about half of the deaths in Massachusetts took place in facilities where old people live, and they were generally elderly people, not staffers. What percentage of that state’s citizens are elderly? Not half. Believe that. People in homes have an abnormally high death rate. My friend Mike, who runs a hospice up there, says it’s wiping out old folks homes.

I was talking to him about it today. I told him to imagine that he lived with his son, and one of them had the disease. Would they be able to keep the other one healthy? His answer: of course. You stay apart. You wash your hands. You watch what you touch. All of us have shared homes with people who had diseases more contagious than coronavirus, without getting infected. It’s just not that hard to protect yourself.

When my dad was alive, I was generally able to isolate him from diseases, but I only had one patient, he wasn’t cooped up with a bunch of other people, and I actually cared about him.

I guess I seem obsessed with pink eye, which I had earlier this year, but it’s one of the most contagious diseases imaginable. You spew viruses from every possible outlet for weeks. Your doctor will tell you to take your clothing to laundromats because it needs the high heat of commercial machines in order to be rendered safe. That’s how bad it is. I had pink eye when I was a kid, I lived with three other people, my mother did not use a laundromat, and no one else in the family got the disease. It’s not that hard to protect people from contagion when you know there’s a danger.

When I was looking for a home for my dad, I saw a number of local ALF’s. I toured the cheapest and the most expensive. None of them were truly clean, by the standards of ordinary houses. Even in the cleanest one, there were always smears of things that hadn’t quite been removed. There were smells. And the places were full of things old people would touch, like books, tables, and chair arms.

I don’t think my area is exceptional. In fact, the ALF industry is competitive here because of the huge number of elderly residents. This county is probably doing a better job than other places.

In my opinion, we’re letting them die. Keeping them safe is a lot of trouble, and there isn’t much motivation, because we see them as people who are nearly dead already. They’re easily replaced, from the perspective of ALF managers. There are people waiting to move in. That’s the hard truth.

When you get past a certain age, and the inconvenience of keeping you well reaches a certain threshold, people will do less and less to keep you well. It’s human nature. I’m not endorsing it. I’m pointing it out. We all know it.

We keep hearing about young and supposedly healthy people who have died, and very often, their ages have been mentioned in the headlines, to make sure we see it even if we don’t read the articles. The obvious intent: to prove that this is a disease that is equally dangerous to people of all ages. It’s a lie. The death rate for people over 80 is over 10%. Kids almost never die. If you’re under 60, the rate goes down close to 1%.

It’s like AIDS. They kept trying to convince us we were all at risk, and it wasn’t true. It’s impossible for a heterosexual man to get AIDS from a woman. Somewhere, there is probably someone who really did get syphilis from a toilet seat, but it’s considered impossible. Female-male AIDS transmission is the same way. Women who think their infected husbands are straight are living with homosexuals or intravenous drug users. You can check WHO if you don’t believe me. The “heterosexual” men in the African AIDS epidemic have had sex with other men.

Magic Johnson is a homosexual. Accept it. Either that, or he shot up. The odds against any other type of transmission are astronomical. One famous group of people were infected deliberately by a murderous homosexual dentist named Acer, but if Johnson had gotten the disease in a similar way, there would be a cluster of fellow victims. There isn’t.

They used to terrify us with numbers from Italy, and then we found out the average age of the dead was about 80. Italians didn’t look out for the elderly.

My guess is that we are going to find out that all or nearly all countries with high death rates will have unusually high average ages for their fatalities. The rest will turn out to be places with terrible medical care.

The Swedish government is with me. Their policy is to look out for the elderly and the sick, while refraining from locking the rest of the population down. I assume this is still their policy. It was last week, and it was working very well.

I’ve seen emotional guilt merchants accusing people who mention the age disparity of being insensitive. They say we don’t care about old people. Where is the basis for that claim? What if I say death in general is more likely to hit old people? It’s true. Does it mean I think they’re disposable?

The effect of age is very important, because, while it’s bad news for the elderly, it’s very good news for nearly everyone else. There is nothing wrong with spreading good news. When did good news become a bad thing?

The special vulnerability of the aged and sick is useful information. It could have been a great help in strategizing. Instead, our politicians listened to the ignorant, emotional mob and wrecked our economy unnecessarily.

It’s a terrible thing when a young mother dies from COVID-19, but it’s also a rarity, and we have to acknowledge that. We shouldn’t put her on the news and make her the face of the disease. It’s like making a lottery winner the face of the average American net worth. The most typical COVID-19 victim is a healthy-looking person who has no symptoms or coughs a little.

Where are the heart-wrenching videos of the tens of thousands of Americans who died from the flu this season? Don’t they matter? Many of them were babies and toddlers. If their tragic deaths didn’t rate coverage, why are we zooming in on atypical COVID-19 deaths?

The press made healthy heterosexual Americans the faces of AIDS, and it turned out to be baseless propaganda. We’re letting them do the same thing all over again.

Maybe if we focused on protecting the most endangered, we could save more people.

To sum up, I’m doubling down. Again. So I’m quadrupling down. No one can predict the future except God, but I’m betting on greatly reduced new infection numbers before April ends. If I’m wrong, sue me for medical malpractice. I’m just a blogger.

Now I’m going to try to make some 10mm ammunition. I can’t wait. I may also hit Harbor Freight for a mount to put a TV on the wall in the gun room. I have to have a computer in there, and I have a 37″ TV gathering dust on the floor.

Still no big celebrity coronavirus deaths. John Prine is at the top, and he was about as famous as Larry Hovis.

Dining Room Furniture is for Losers

All you single males out there, and males with wives who have their priorities straight, listen to me. Convert your dining rooms to gun rooms. You won’t believe how great it is.

Yesterday I found a way to mount a Hornady Lock-n-Load ammo press on a Rockwell Jawhorse. Today I’ve been getting out my reloading junk and putting the press in working order. It’s fantastic.

The thing that concerned me most was the state of the powder measure. This is a complicated dispenser that drops powder into cartridges. Before I understood just how bad rust is up here, as contrasted with Miami, my powder measure developed a nice orange-brown coat. This would be a problem for most people, but not for Eccentric Man, strange visitor from planet Heaven. I had a Baldor industrial buffer waiting for me with a wire wheel and an assortment of buffing compounds and buffing wheels. I disassembled the measure, cleaned off the rust, and moved on.

I found my Lyman powder scale. It can be operated using an AC adaptor or a 9-volt battery. Being me, I stuck a battery in it years ago, for no good reason. Then I left it in there. When I opened the scale up, the battery was in bad shape, but no chemicals had touched the scale. I was in business.

It almost looks like Duracell made the battery in such a way that failure would be less likely to damage anything but the battery itself. Are they that smart?

I stuck 10mm dies in the press, and now I’m trying to remember how it works.

I just downloaded a manual. With God’s help, I may be able to make some ammo tomorrow.

I learned something useful: you shouldn’t clean your brass until you remove the primers. Heh heh. I ran a 10mm shell through the deprimer, and the pocket is filthy. I soaked the shells in citric acid and water to clean them, and it looks like I’m going to have to do it all over again.

It’s amazing to see that the Jawhorse is rigid enough for this use. You could literally hold up a pickup truck on my workbench, if you could balance it, but it flexes when you make ammunition. The Jawhorse weighs about 75% less, and it doesn’t seem to move at all. We’ll see if that holds true when I’m pushing shells into dies.

I received some night sights for the new Glock. What to do? They don’t install themselves. Eccentric Man wasn’t intimidated. He has workbenches, tools, and a Panavise with Pana-hands in his dining room. I stuck the Glock’s slide in the vise and went to work. Then I realized I really needed a sight-pushing tool to do it right. I also needed a tiny 3/16″ nut driver to remove Glock’s silly front sight screw. That’s okay! Eccentric Man has Ebay and Amazon apps on his phone. The tools will be here very soon.

I’m going to make a new lever and handle for the press. I’ve seen some things other people have done, and I like their ideas. I could pay a lot of money for a new lever, but why? Eccentric Man has a propane torch, vises, and a lathe. He can make his own lever for $10.

I guess it’s odd for a Christian who is obsessed with God’s love and who has zero interest in violence to enjoy firearms so much, but I do, just as I enjoy nice tools and good kitchen knives. It makes me wonder what will happen to me if I’m ever involved in a defensive shooting. They say cops and prosecutors really don’t like it when you defend yourself with quality equipment. They prefer you use your grandma’s rusty .25 automatic, filled with ammo your grandpa won in a poker game in 1952. It makes you look like a harmless creampuff who never thought about firearms until he was ambushed.

People say that if you use things like a laser, a 10mm, and excellent expanding hand-loaded rounds, you’re as good as indicted, even if you did nothing wrong. I would probably be very well equipped in a shooting situation, but it’s not because I’m a potential serial killer. I just like getting gun-related stuff right.

I’m not a psychopath. Really. I don’t fit the profile. I don’t start fires, except, well a few dozen times a year, because I have to get rid of downed trees. I don’t torture animals, except, yes, I do shoot squirrels because they’re annoying. You don’t know what they’re like. If Ellen DeGeneres lived here and shared the place with Richard Simmons, THEY’D shoot them. And I hardly ever wet the bed these days. Probably not even once a week. I’m not the droid you’re looking for. Pay no attention to the AK with the green laser under the rear seat of my truck.

I could carry a Kel-Tec with cheapo 9mm JHP and hope for good shot placement. That would make me look like a bona fide gun moron. Of course, it didn’t help George Zimmerman. It’s what he used, and he refused to shoot until he was on his back having his head pounded against concrete, and his prosecutors literally perjured themselves in order to railroad him. Now he’s so crazy, he may actually be what they claimed he was before they drove him around the bend.

It probably helps to live in the right county. Zimmerman lived in Seminole County, which, like Wyoming, is far to the left of my county. Where I live, the cops would probably help me hide the body.

You really need a gun room. You should even convince your doctor it’s a medical necessity, for your nerves. Then it’s deductible. If they can give you a note that forces restaurants to accommodate your filthy, smelly, stupid, untrained dog, and if they can prescribe blunts for insomnia, and if they can prescribe castration for an 8-year-old boy just because he enjoyed watching The Turning Point, surely they can prescribe gun rooms.

It might even cut some ice with your wife.

Navy Beans and Poached Squirrel

I still have not set up my reloading press. I made a platform for it yesterday, but I haven’t followed through. I plan to get on it shortly.

I thought I would say something about the epidemic, since I have been writing about it for so long. Today, again, the infection rate is dropping. At least that’s what’s happening according to the Johns Hopkins graph page, which I have linked to in the past.

The rate at which the rate is dropping seems to be slowing at the moment, but bumps are to be expected.

Toilet paper is still unavailable online, unless you order questionable Chinese coronavirus scam paper, or you get really lucky, or you pay some low-life 5 times what the paper is worth.

At some point, the expense and trouble make using the curtains an intelligent choice.

I can’t figure the toilet paper problem out. I was wrong to think the problem would only last a couple of weeks. I read that factories would keep churning it out, and I figured people could only continue buying three dozen rolls per day for a short time. I figured online sources would rebound quickly because they could limit per-person orders and no one could go in and clean them out.

Still, the paper is hard to find during reasonable shopping hours, and online sources are useless. I check because I get bored.

I saw someone trying to explain it online. The theory was that people were using home-quality paper instead of commercial-quality. They make you stay home, you can’t use the toilet at work, and you end up using ridiculous fluffy paper with baby ducks stamped on it instead of the military-looking stuff. Somehow or other, increasing the demand for fluffy paper threw things out of whack.

I don’t believe it. I never used that stuff, and I still can’t find the kind I buy. Not online. I can’t find anything that isn’t Chinese or overpriced. Several months from now, this could become a problem. I’ll have to get up early and get to the store before the hoarders, and I may have to have a late breakfast. This is how you get toilet paper. Be at the store when it opens. While you’re there, make sure you use the can. Free is free.

I think the explanation is a crock. If the only problem were the difficulty of making fluffy paper, we would be able to buy non-fluffy paper, and we’re not. The problem is that people are still buying every roll they see. The system, which isn’t designed for a 2000% increase in demand, is just not built to cope with it.

If people don’t get over it, some morning in July, I will have to be at Winn-Dixie as soon as the special old-people-only shopping hour is over.

Manufacturers are ramping production up, and distribution, contrary to what some people claim, is not out of commission due to the the millions of dead truck drivers who can’t show up for work. They don’t exist. More people have died from the flu this year.

It’s amazing how people think there are overflowing hospitals and bodies on sidewalks. Does anyone actually read the news?

I still don’t know a single person who has coronavirus or who has mentioned a relative or loved one who has it.

There are STILL STILL STILL no major celebrities who have died! Inexplicable! But there are celebrities who are trying to capitalize, and I don’t just mean the ones who are virtue-signaling and trying to tell us what to do on social media. Bill Cosby, Michael Avenatti, Bernie Madoff, R. Kelly, and Julian Assange are all trying to get released so they can avoid the virus.

Here’s how out of the loop I am: I had no idea Avenatti, Kelly, and Assange were incarcerated. I’m thrilled to see how little I know about such things.

I have to read up on Avenatti. That guy is not to be believed. Is he still posting cocky Tweets? When it comes to denial and lack of remorse, he rivals the pre-conviction Harvey Weinstein. I feel sorry for him. I’m astounded by what he did to his life.

In other news, I’ve escalated my own fight against COVID-19. Having heard that quinine will keep me well, I have committed to having a gin and tonic every day, no matter how difficult it is to choke it down. It’s definitely working. I started two days ago, and I’m as healthy as a horse.

I found a very nice brand of tonic water: Q. I’ll bet Patrick Stewart drinks it. Is there really any quinine in it? Observe my symptom-free status and judge for yourself. That’s science, right there.

I didn’t realize how nice a G&T could be. A good mixer really helps. It makes me want to buy cinchona powder–the source of quinine–and make my own tonic. Summer is coming.

There’s a good chance my resolve will fail when my 4-pack of tonic is gone, but I might want one or two G&T’s later this year.

I believe you would have to buy something like a pound of cinchona bark in order to get a therapeutic quinine dose every day for a couple of weeks. I was curious, and I checked. For malaria, you take 200 mg per day. That adds up to 4 grams of cinchona, so one ounce per week.

Okay, you have to have two or three ounces. Still a lot.

Now that the known rate of COVID-19 here is above one in 3,000, I have to admit I think more (i.e. a little bit) about protecting myself. I think about that with the flu, too. I really hate getting sick. I’ve been pretty bold about running errands. Will I still be this brave if we get up to one in 100? That would probably mean the real rate was more like 10%. The world would be a sea of cooties.

Here’s something I wonder about: what do single people do for food when they get sick? When I had pink eye, I still went to buy groceries, taking what precautions I could. Would I do the same thing if I thought I had coronavirus? Would I have a choice? I guess I could order food. I don’t know if I could eat Domino’s for three weeks. It’s hard enough to eat it once.

I bought two bags of navy beans. I wasn’t afraid stores would run out of food and leave me starving. I was afraid hoarders would buy all the navy beans in existence and that I would not be able to get them again until after the harvest. I don’t know how the bean supply chain works. I really like to have beans with cornbread occasionally.

I guess that with those beans and a canister of oatmeal, I could get through a week of quarantine without crippling constipation. Beans by themselves would be worse than coronavirus. Those things can lodge in your system for days, doing what beans do the whole time.

When the week was up, I would have to poach squirrels, in both senses of the word.

No, I guess I could still use drive-throughs.

I have some .38 Super brass soaking in water and citric acid. I should take them out and work on the press.

If I die, the first one here gets the toilet paper. It’s in the master bath in a cabinet. Sorry it doesn’t have baby ducks printed on it. This is what happens when men do the shopping.

Gun Room Starting to Blossom

I’ve been dreading attaching my ammo press to an indoor workbench because I didn’t want to drill holes in the bench. I was inventing devices that would clamp to the table without gouging it. I had some ideas for welding a plate to steel tubing. I could screw the press to the plate, put rubber under the tubing, and clamp the tubing to the bench.

Today, I realized I needed to do something if I ever expected to get started. I decided to go quick and dirty with the Rockwell Jawhorse.

The Jawhorse is a weird steel tripod with a foot-tightened vise on top. It’s very heavy. It’s awkard to move. If you can get past those problems, it’s a startlingly useful tool. It holds things for sawing. You can clamp a little table in it. You can get special attachments for sheet goods.

It’s one of those tools which is so annoying, you peridically consider selling it, but then you find yourself using it, and you’re glad you have it.

Harbor Freight now makes a good clone.

My plan: construct a wooden platform for the Jawhorse, clamp it in the jaws, and mount the press on it. Then I could keep the platform, and when I wanted to make ammo, I could slap it in the Jawhorse and go to work. IF it was rigid enough. That was the question.

I used to have my press mounted on my garage workbench, which is very sturdy. For reasons too boring to go into, even though the bench was strong, the press still tended to wobble during use, and I had to add some wood to the bench to make it stop. When a Hornady Lock n Load press wobbles, it can cause rounds to fail to complete the reloading process. It’s a problem.

I don’t want to make ammunition on my old workbench, which is now in my un-air-conditioned shop. I want to do it in my gun room, a few steps away from the refrigerator. This is why I got the Jawhorse out.

Using a Sawzall, I cut two pieces of 2 x 8 from a wet board I found behind the shop. I cleaned them up on the band saw. I used 4 Tapcons to screw them together. This gave me a platform. I drilled two 1/2″ holes in it. I found some mismatched 1/2″ bolts and some washers. I stuck the press on the platform and used the bolts to fasten it down. I guess this took 20 minutes.

I gave the press a few test pumps. I think it’s going to work. It seems more rigid than my old workbench system. How about that?

This will give me time to create a real reloading stand or come up with a device to mount my press to the indoor bench.

If I can get the press to run, I’ll be able to produce a lovely stash of 10mm, .38 Super, and .45 ACP from my components. I may use some of my endless pile of .40 S&W brass to make ammo for my buddy Mike. Then I won’t have brass overflowing from my brass container, and I’ll be able to shoot my new Glock 20 without paying ridiculous prices for ammo. It will be nice.

Seems like I have gotten much better at finishing projects. I used to be very good at starting them but not so great at following through.

Now I need to machine a handle for the press. That plastic ball loves to unscrew itself.

What Goes Up…

Warning: I’m pretty full of myself today. I hope people will consider that unusual. I just checked the daily Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Sky-is-Falling graph, and guess what’s happening? The curve is picking up speed…in the downward direction…in April…as a certain blogger predicted.

I’m not even looking at the numbers and my equation. What’s the point? Here’s what’s happening: the actual figures are diverging downward from my equation’s numbers, exactly as I said they would. I don’t need to get out my calculator to see that. It would be like looking at my phone to find out what the weather is like, instead of getting out of my chair and opening the front door.

I actually do that.

If this was so easy for me and maybe 4 billion other people with common sense, why couldn’t our government figure it out? No, it was better to hit the rest of us with a $17000 per capita tax bill in order to fund a bailout to respond to a self-inflicted recession.

That number is 6 trillion (6000000000000) divided by 350 million. Of course, the actual number for your household is much worse, because half of us don’t pay taxes. It also doesn’t include things like lost wages and investment crashes.

I should have just bought a new Porsche for a struggling crack addict. It would have been faster.

New prediction: get ready for a squabble which will break out between largely urban leftists who reject God and largely rural conservatives who believe in God. The question of when we should lift the ridiculous lockdowns will be put before the public, and leftists will demand they remain in place, possibly forever.

We don’t need to work. Just keep taking funds from that imaginary stockpile of money the evil rich are sitting on. Find out where they keep their golden geese and nationalize them. Why didn’t we do that a long time ago?

Leftists don’t care about freedom. They are obsessed with merely continuing to exist. Put them in kennels. Feed them Purina. Take away their right to vote. They’re fine with it, as long as they think they have security. Conservatives think more about the quality of life, both before and after death.

I’m wondering when the paper-goods hoarding will stop. By the end of May, I will have to think about buying paper towels. By July, I may need toilet paper. I can buy these things right now, but it means leaving the house before 10 a.m. Unacceptable.

I hope the ammo situation loosens up, but maybe it won’t. I heard a rumor that some crazy guy in my neighborhood bought 60 pounds of .22 cartridges.

Someone tell me if I’m guessing right: Google is in the tank for Bernie. Is that correct? I keep seeing video recommendations involving the election, and they are consistently anti-Biden. Someone at Google is steering this junk at me.

The website The Hill has a show. It features a big, loud young woman and a not overly masculine young man. Shockingly, they are leftists. Google is shoving their videos at me, one after another. I keep taking the bait. They HATE Biden. They’re making several videos every day, exposing the MSM’s dishonesty in promoting the Biden campaign.

At first, I had a hard time figuring out whether they were liberal or conservative. I’m not kidding. Here are some things they were saying:

1. Joe Biden is demented.

2. Joe Biden gropes women.

3. The Democrat establishment has chosen its candidate instead of letting democracy work.

4. The evidence against Brett Kavanaugh was much weaker than the evidence against Biden, but Kavanaugh was treated as though he were guilty because he’s conservative.

5. The MSM is completely dishonest and generally treats liberals better than conservatives.

Wait. Is this Fox?

The semblance falls apart when they start talking about how they want to give Bernie Sanders full-body massages. They’re clear-headed enough to see what’s happening with the MSM and Biden, but they still think money falls from clouds populated with generous vegan transgender fairies.

What happened to the, “There is no media bias,” party line? Did we forget about that? Did Soros fire up the bat signal and send everyone texts telling them to change the narrative?

It’s quite a spectacle. As out of the loop as I am, even I can perceive it. There is going to be a WWE-style battle royale to get Biden off the ticket and resuscitate a man who is already confused without the need for dementia.

It’s imperative that the Democrats replace their elderly privileged white male with another elderly privileged white male.

Had to get that in there.

What’s more remarkable about it? The fact that leftists are being honest about bias? The fact that they would knowingly vote for a mental deficient? To me, really, it’s the fact that college graduates would vote for a socialist. Don’t they teach history in college?

Biden must be beside himself with anger and confusion. They let Bill Clinton treat women like unfeeling airline hot towels. Why can’t he do it? They let Al Gore run for president right after his term as Vice President. Why not Biden? They didn’t try to gut Hillary when she was anointed, even when they had to buy her a special van to roll her into when she fainted. It was her turn! How come it’s not Biden’s turn?

It’s never Biden’s turn! Is that fair?

I don’t know what would be worse for America: putting Trump up against a man with dementia, or putting him up against a socialist. Which one will get more support from Democrats? Wait. Democrats don’t matter. Either one will get support. Which one will get support from swing voters? They’re the ones who choose our presidents. The least-perceptive people in America make that choice for us every 4 years. God bless our system.

Leftists are apparently going to be at each other’s throats until Biden steps down or the election is over, whichever comes first. Conservatives can relax and make popcorn. When this is over, we will have a candidate most people think is a demented rapist, or we will have an eccentric whose discredited, dangerous ethos is–one hopes–so offensive it will give Trump the edge.

I hope Biden gets the nod. It’s terrible to see him exploited and exposed, but on the other hand, he lacks the capacity for self-examination and embarrassment, so it probably won’t bother him.

My guess is that a demented candidate will be so disturbing to watch that even swing voters may dimly perceive that something is wrong.

Imagine a Trump/Biden debate. It would be like watching a bullfight. Not good. Trump isn’t the greatest debater on earth, but he knows where he is, and he can remember and respond to questions.

My guess is that God is steering things. He wants 4 more years of Trump so God’s children will have some time to prepare for our socialist, persecution-heavy future. Leftists are behaving even more irrationally than usual, destroying their own effort to retake the White House, because God is confusing them. There has to be a supernatural reason for that.

I’m going to Youtube, and I’m going to remove political videos from my history and feed. I can’t believe I watched Joe Rogan. Staring at a wall is a better use of my time. It’s embarrassing. I hate this political stuff.

Here I go. “Don’t recommend channel.” “Don’t recommend channel.” “Don’t recommend channel.” They need a batch mode.

Man, my feed looks better now. It’s like someone bleached the bathroom floor after an unfortunate accident.

Rogan is a mess. He’s a middle-aged man who still thinks drugs, alcohol, and tattoos are neat. It’s like someone grabbed him when he was 17 and injected him with Peter Pan serum. His opinions are useless. He has nothing to offer me except someone to pray for.

If you have to use weed in order to feel okay, how can you not know you’re in deep trouble? That’s not normal. It’s like alcoholism. You need to get to know the Holy Spirit. He’s what you’re really looking for.

Drugs merely simulate things the Holy Spirit does much better and with no bitter aftertaste.

I’m going to see if I can avoid even thinking about the election. Here’s something God told me: “Your circumstances DO NOT MATTER.” If you let politics into your head, you’re letting tens of millions of ignorant, deluded people decide how you feel. God kept Noah happy during a flood. I’m sure he will look after me during an election year.

MORE

I always say the Trump economy can be judged by the lousy market for used tools. When Obama was president, you could find a lot of deals. As the economy improved, they dried up. People were using their tools to make money. They didn’t need to sell them.

Here’s an Ebay search I’ve done for years: “Baldor bench grinder.” I set the condition to “used.” Before Trump won, there used to be a lot of them available. A couple of months ago, they were rare, and the prices were high.

I just searched. There are 42 items for sale. Some of the prices are good.

If we don’t go back to work, I expect the number to increase. Check it out yourself and see what happens.