New Trigger Spring for the Savage

I think I now have the world’s most dangerous .22 rifle. From the perspective of squirrels. I have also had an extremely satisfying session with the new workbench. Putting this thing together was a stroke of genius. Which I failed to have until I was really old, unfortunately.

I started out with a Remington Nylon 66. I could not put a scope on it, so I looked for something new. People recommended the Ruger 10/22 and the Marlin 60. They said the Ruger 10/22 was a very accurate gun…once you gave your life savings to a gunsmith to make it work. Uh…no. If I want to spend way too much on a .22, I’ll get a CZ 512 or Browning, not an entry-level rifle which is a small step up from a BB gun. I bought a Marlin 60.

The first 60 I got literally would not hit a soda can at 100 feet, so I sent it back to the factory, and they sent me a new one which shot pretty well. Then I found out how hard it was to attach sling studs to it. I also found out how hard it was to get a trigger that worked. The guy who sells the best trigger, which he calls the “KAT,” did not answer email inquiries or social media messages, so I bought the second-best trigger, an M*Carbo, and installed it myself. I also added an M*Carbo recoil spring, because the Marlin 60 is too fragile to shoot hypervelocity rounds with the factory spring.

Finally, I had an okay rifle, but it still didn’t make me all that happy. Because of Marlin’s firing pin design, it could not be dry-fired without damage. With the new recoil spring, it was SUPPOSEDLY able to stand up to powerful .22 rounds like CCI Stingers, but I didn’t trust it.

I bought a Savage A22. It can be dry fired all day without damage. It comes with sling studs. It can be disassembled in about 10 seconds with one hex key. It has a real milled receiver. The Marlin has no receiver. It has two sheets of pot metal bridged by removable pins. The A22 has a Savage barrel, obviously, and Savage makes barrels that are accurate when you buy them, not just after you pay a gunsmith to finish the job the manufacturer should have done. It was also pre-drilled for scope mounts, and it had real iron sights, not the cheap sheet metal flap that comes with a Marlin.

The Savage, which was only slightly more expensive than the Marlin, had an adjustable Savage Accutrigger. This is a wonderful adjustable trigger that sets Savage apart. You can adjust it in the field with a tiny wrench, lowering or raising the trigger pull weight to suit you.

I shot the Savage, and I found that it was accurate. I had failures to fire, but I was using highly questionable Obama-era Remington Golden Bullets, so I wasn’t disturbed by that.

Problem: I had been under the impression that the Savage’s trigger could be taken down to 2 pounds, which sounded very nice to me. In practice, I found that it was fairly stiff even when I adjusted it as far as it would go.

Solution: a company called Gun Shack sells a special spring for the Accutrigger. Apparently, Savage makes at least two springs. One is a somewhat stiff spring that comes with certain models, and the other is a lighter “varmint” spring, for varmint rifles. The springs are interchangeable.

You know I had to have that.

I got myself two springs, because I have two Accu-trigger rifles.

Today I put the new spring in the A22. It was very easy. Well…it should have been easy. I had no instructions, so I wasted some time taking out and replacing the wrong spring.

In case you’re Googling “A22 Accutrigger spring replacement,” let me tell you what to do. I am too lazy to take pictures, but this is really easy.

Take your gun out of the stock. You will need to engage the safety, because it gets in the way when you try to pull the gun out.

Remove the trigger assembly (a plastic box) from the gun. You have to drive out one pin at the rear in order to do this. Your manual has a picture. Make sure the gun isn’t cocked, because the pin won’t move if it’s cocked.

See the fat spring at the very rear of the trigger assembly? That’s your trigger spring.

Insert your trigger adjustment tool and tighten the spring all the way. Your spring is like a screw. It sits in a threaded hole. You have to screw it up out of the hole so it comes loose. That’s why you tighten it. Once that’s done, you can pull it out with tweezers.

There is a little wire pin sticking up from the top of the spring. It rests in a hole in the trigger assembly housing. It acts as an axle. When you turn the spring with the adjustment tool, it turns on this pin. Once you have the spring unscrewed and released from its threaded hole, you can pull the pin out of the hole in the trigger housing and take the spring out of the gun.

To install your new spring, which is lighter and easier to work with, just do everything in reverse. Get the lower end of the spring into the threaded hole and screw it in as far as you can with the adjustment tool. Then you can take tweezers and fit the spring’s pin into the trigger assembly housing hole.

You’re done. Adjust the spring and give yourself the trigger pull weight you want.

I finished working on my gun a few minutes ago, and man, is that trigger easy to pull. I could not get the original trigger spring to give me a weight I liked, but the new spring is so light, I had to back it off from the lowest setting. You can give yourself a bona fide hair trigger with the varmint spring, and if you do that, you might have problems with the gun going off before you want it to.

This is sweet. I look forward to taking it out in the pasture to see what it will do.

I’m also going to fix my 93R in .17 HMR. It’s already extremely accurate, but a lighter trigger pull will surely improve it.

It is said that gun companies make trigger pulls heavier than they have to be in order to avoid getting sued when unskilled people shoot themselves and others accidentally. This is probably true. A heavy trigger pull is helpful for idiot-proofing. Sadly, it also makes it hard to hit anything. The other day I read that NYC cops are forced to use pistols that have extremely heavy triggers. That may help explain why they miss the people they shoot at.

I don’t like heavy triggers. When you go the the range and shoot 50 rounds, you will lose accuracy if your finger gets tired. When you shoot slowly and carefully, your finger spends a lot of time working, and after a few dozen rounds, it can start to tremble. This is a problem you don’t need when you’re wrestling with breath control and God knows what else.

If you’re happy hitting a man-sized target at 7 yards with a pistol, or hitting a deer’s huge kill zone at 100 yards with a rifle, a heavy trigger is fine. If you want to shoot WELL, it will be a problem.

My short-range pistol goal is to keep nearly every round inside a 1″ circle at 7 yards. I want to shoot 1 MOA (or as close to it as my guns will permit) with a rifle. I don’t want to fool around with heavy trigger springs made for old ladies and bro dudes.

I criticize the Marlin 60 because in the end, it cost me 15% more for a modified Model 60 than it did for a Savage A22 that worked perfectly out of the box. Even with the modifications, the Marlin was still completely inferior. Here I am, though, adding an aftermarket part to the Savage! Hey, it cost something like 9 bucks. Go price an aftermarket Model 60 trigger. No comparison.

Now I just have to learn how to use a scope correctly. I need to know where a bullet will land, regardless of the distance between me and the vile rodent in my crosshairs. Scopes are great for putting bullets exactly where you want to at the distance at which you zero them, but change that distance, and everything goes nuts.

I think accurate hunting must be much harder than shooting paper. A target shooter always knows his distance, he always shoots from the same position, and he should know exactly what the wind will do to his shots. Also, targets cooperate. They don’t run around or go behind trees. A hunter has to deal with unreliable targets at unknown distances, and he has to shoot from various positions, most of which will not work as well as shooting from a bench.

When I decided to shoot squirrels, I thought I was entering the minor leagues, but I was wrong. Minor leaguers hunt large animals. I can hit a deer over and over without understanding my scope. A total idiot can hit a deer. To hit a squirrel with a rifle, I have to know exactly what I’m doing. I have to know my ammunition and the way my bullet will behave at various distances.

If I shoot a .308 at a deer anywhere within 100 yards, even if I can’t figure out how much error there will be, I will still hit the kill zone. The error from shooting at a distance different from that at which I zeroed the rifle will never be more than a couple of inches. Big deal. But if you have a one-inch error when you shoot at a squirrel, you’ll probably miss him.

I feel like I finally have the right tool, and the right adversary, for learning how to use a scope. If I can learn how to nail squirrels, I’ll be able to hit anything. And I’ll be doing the world a favor, because squirrels are obnoxious.

If tomorrow brings me a couple of hours without rain, I’ll go out and see what the new gun will do. Wish me luck.

How Intuit Lied to Mess With Your Civil Rights

The other day I explained why tech gangsters were morally wrong to attack gun buyers, sellers, and manufacturers, after using us to make them rich. Now I will explain why Intuit’s new policy of rejecting certain firearms transactions is completely dishonest.

Intuit does credit card processing. Credit card commerce is convenient, and convenient is what our leftist masters want gun sales to not be. Inconvenience will discourage many sales, they hope.

News stories don’t give many details, so one has to guess what Intuit actually did. We know they reversed many gun-related transactions and left buyers and sellers in very awkward positions.

Intuit claims it is yielding to pressure from its “banking partner,” whoever that is. It says the partner does not want to take part in certain types of transactions unless the related credit card transactions take place face-to-face. In other words, ALL online firearms transactions are banned.

Intuit is trying to make us think it’s afraid online transactions will cause guns to go to people who haven’t been checked out. They’re lying.

Intuit attempts to bury firearms transactions in a sea of other sales it won’t allow. Intuit’s propaganda statement mentions things like alcohol, tobacco, and pharmaceuticals.

Here’s why that is dishonest: every gun sale, apart from certain curio and relic sales (generally old creaky weapons sought by collectors) involves a FACE-TO-FACE background check. If you buy a gun online from Cabela’s or a Gunbroker vendor, he can’t just pop it in a box and mail it to your house. He can’t even mail a C&R gun unless you have a federal C&R license. Any gun a you buy, as a non-licensed individual, has to go to a federal firearms licensee. If it’s a non-C&R gun, that licensee can’t be you, and he will be required to do a background check, in your presence, with identification, before he can release the gun to you.

If you’re a C&R licensee, you’ve already passed a background check. The BATF checks C&R licensees out.

Is there a background check for tobacco products? No. Is there a background check for pharmaceuticals? No. Is there a background check for alcohol? No.

My dad gets a ton of pills every year from an online supplier. They dump the bottles in flimsy bags and mail them to his house. We pay his copayments with credit cards. I pretend to be him, and I place the orders. Is that a felony? I don’t know. I confess. No one cares.

Would you like some free gout pills? Hide outside my house and wait. Eventually they will appear in my unlocked mailbox. If you want them bad enough, I can’t keep you from getting them. You won’t be able to get the guns I buy online, though, because I have to go pick them up and pass background checks.

My dad is demented. He can’t order his own pills. There is no way in hell I’m going to put him in the car and force him to swipe a card several times a month, and I don’t even tell him to come sit with me when I order pills online. I don’t tell him I’m doing it. His pills arrive, and he has no idea how it happens. Lock me up.

Is there a gout pill online loophole? Yes. Does Intuit know about it? Yes, and I guarantee you, they’re not doing anything about it.

Old people across America buy huge amounts of prescription drugs online, every day. I promise you, Intuit isn’t going after them. We would have heard about it. Intuit doesn’t really care about prescriptions. Every day, elderly spouses place prescription orders for their husbands and wives, logging on with their credentials. Intuit will never stop them.

It’s dishonest to compare laxatives and whiskey to guns.

Intuit is lying.

Intuit can’t even blame lawyers. There is no threat of litigation. No lawyer is going to waste his time suing Intuit or related companies because a nut passed a face-to-face background check and then killed someone with a gun Intuit helped him buy. Even tort lawyers, scum-sucking, malignant, prosperity-destroying tapeworms though they be, have their limits.

How many sensational murders have we seen? How many of the guns that were used were bought with credit cards? How many times have American Express or the other card companies been sued? Leftist nuts don’t even bother suing them. It’s a waste of time. It would be like suing the mint for printing the dollars used in a cash transaction.

Intuit knows it’s going after responsible sellers who obey the law. They went after Gunsite. This is a respected firearms training organization that also sells pistols. The Gunsite people made Intuit’s people understand that Gunsite only sends guns to licensees who are then required to do background checks. Intuit didn’t care.

I rest my case.

Are you a felon? Want to buy a gun without a background check? Here’s what you do. Go to your criminal buddies and tell them you want a gun. Someone will eventually offer you a stolen gun for less than a store would charge, there will be no background check, and there will be no waiting period. If you think you can buy a gun from an online retailer without a background check, you’re in for a big disappointment. Even if Intuit does everything it can to help you buy a gun, you’re SOL.

There is no “online loophole.” You can buy guns ILLEGALLY over the web, by avoiding legitimate retailers who process credit cards. You can hook up with random dirtbags on the dark web, meet them in parking lots, and give them cash. But you can’t go to a website belonging to Bass Pro, Bud’s Gun Shop, or even Gunbroker and use a credit card to have a firearm shipped to your house illegally. Not possible.

In reality, if Intuit wanted gun transactions to be safer, they would encourage the use of credit cards, because credit card transactions leave trails and drive people on both ends to do things by the book. No criminal wants a credit card record to tie him to a firearm. Intuit isn’t trying to make gun sales safer. It’s trying to prevent them from happening.

Intelligent people have been predicting this kind of thing for years. Conservatives and Christians are being pushed out of the marketplace. Here’s my new prediction: when the Mark of the Beast (our future means of participating in a cashless economy) arrives, you will have to get rid of your guns in order to get it.

Intuit is disgusting. I seriously hope they lose business over this attack on our civil rights.

There; I Fixed That for You

In case anyone is wondering, I can tell you why it’s wrong for Google and the other leftist-controlled tech giants are wrong to use their power to censor Second Amendment supporters and starve their businesses.

Many people are upset because the Googsters are punishing users who support the private ownership of firearms. What’s happening isn’t new, nor is it limited to Google. Paypal will not let you use its service to buy firearms. Ebay sells parts but not guns. These policies are pretty old.

By the way, Google just banned the channel for Brownell’s, an old and respected firearms-related company that appears to have nothing to do with the black rifle fad or politics. If Elmer Fudd were real, he would have a Brownell’s account. It’s not a scary company. Google banned them anyway. The account reappeared later, but it’s disturbing that the ban ever happened.

Years ago, Google had no problems with guns. I used to use Google Shopping to look for firearms deals. At the time, it was the best game in town. Google killed firearms ads, and now there are other sources that are as good or better. Google lost business, and gun sellers worked around them.

Google’s new Youtube restrictions are a lot like their Google Shopping firearms ban. Channels that disseminate useful information about guns are disappearing, but in the past they were very common. A huge amount of content is still present. Google hasn’t been able to remove everything overnight. If you see what’s still available, it shows that whatever Youtube may look like in the near future, it has been a prolific disseminator of gun-related content.

People who are angry about the censorship like to talk about freedom of speech and the First Amendment. They’re wrong. Google isn’t bound by the First Amendment. If they want, they can announce a new policy saying all videos have to be about chickens, and it won’t conflict with the First Amendment at all. The Constitution guarantees (supposedly) our freedom from GOVERNMENT censorship. It doesn’t control private companies.

Somehow, we feel that the tech snowflakes are wrong, but we can’t seem to articulate a good reason. I’ll tell you the reason. They’re wrong because they have always been against us, yet they used us for years to build their businesses and get us to rely on them, and now that they feel secure, they are abandoning us.

Gun people helped build Google, Youtube, Paypal, and a bunch of other tech companies. We all know these companies are run and staffed by sissies from America’s coasts. They never wanted to do anything for us, but they whored themselves out anyway because they needed us. They wanted income. They wanted market share. They knew excluding us would prevent them from gaining market dominance, so they choked back their rage and worked with us. Now they’re fat and cocky, so they think they’ll be okay after they stab us in the back.

Is what they’re doing illegal? No. At least I don’t think so. It’s still wrong. It’s still “evil,” to use a word Google self-righteously used in its old corporate motto.

Remember that motto? “Don’t be evil.” Google got rid of it recently. Does this mean they decided it was okay to be evil? No. It probably means they realized how fatuous and naive it sounded.

Imagine if God had told the Jews, “Don’t be evil,” and vanished. What a worthless admonition it would have been. No guidelines. No description of evil. It would have been a catastrophe.

Who decides what “evil” means? “Don’t be evil” is something a two-year-old would say. It means nothing. It’s not surprising that leftists would use it as a motto, because they love claiming moral authority without providing any substance. Conservatives know that righteousness requires thought and effort. It involves close decisions and hard choices. Leftists like to march with banners and wave rainbow flags, but they don’t like being pinned down and asked for real guidance. Their purpose isn’t to fight evil. It’s to be admired. You may sound righteous and intelligent when you say something like, “Don’t be evil,” but as soon as you have to defend your remark and define it, you start to look just as confused as everyone else.

Google’s motto was idiotic, but one would hope that it reflected a sparkle of sincerity. One would hope that the Googsters would ask themselves about the righteousness of using people and then throwing them away. One would hope that they would understand the ugliness and cruelty of deliberately choking off a huge segment of the population, based purely on political differences. It’s not like we’re being denied access to Waffle House when Cracker Barrel is right next door. We’re being denied access to important, unique services.

The posture of the tech overlords is a confirmation of the right’s perception of dismissive leftist elitism. Flyover people are not human beings to be listened to and respected. They are livestock, to be controlled and ridiculed. All the brilliant, correct people are on the coasts. In between, there are only filthy potato eaters. Truck pull watchers. Bible believers. Their beliefs and desires are infantile, and they have no right to govern themselves or participate in the marketplace of ideas.

To the tech overlords, we are like dementia patients. You don’t ask permission when you change the circumstances of a demented person’s life. You go in, wrap him in a wet sheet, shoot him full of Valium, and do what you want. Take his guns. Take his car keys. Block his favorite TV channels. Change his menu. Whatever you want. You are correct to do it, because you are RIGHT.

In the classic novel The Time Machine, the world consisted of two groups. Below ground lived the hairy, brutal morlocks. They concealed themselves in their tunnels. Above ground lived the eloi. They were feckless vegetarians who lived on fruit and vegetables that appeared mysteriously in their midst. From time to time, the morlocks snatched a few of the eloi and ate them. The eloi lived in a fool’s paradise, and the morlocks were realists who controlled the system.

It seems like we live in a funny inversion of the eloi/morlock scheme. The pampered, perfumed eloi, who live in apartments and think food comes from stores, are trying to control the morlocks, who make the country function. The eloi want to force the realists to live by rules based on a distorted perception of the world.

We’re out here growing crops, mining metal, pumping oil, and manufacturing important products. We’re in military bases and on ships around the world, protecting the eloi so they can organize riots and throw urine on the police. They’re in cities drinking $6 coffee and working at jobs with titles like “diversity counselor” and “pet aromatherapist.” They’re working at colleges, teaching real courses like “The Sociology of Miley Cyrus.”

We have effete, utterly unproductive people like Camille Paglia and Joy Behar, trying to explain the world to cattle ranchers and wheat farmers.

Economists love to tell about the impossibility of an island on which everyone makes a living doing laundry for the others. Imagine an island populated by Andy Warhols. Who would make canapes and clean up after parties?

I guess it would be Andre Leon Talley. They could ferry him in. He needs the money.

The contempt, misplaced and nonsensical though it is, is very real, and leftists have proven themselves ruthless enough to act on it. They don’t just promote their toxic ideas through talk. They gag the rest of us and even make it impossible for us to buy and sell.

It’s legal. They can do it. Is it ethical or kind? They don’t care. The left has never been kind, and leftists jeer at ethical consideration. One of leftism’s big draws is that it frees cruel people to mistreat others in the name of “higher” ideals.

If you want to throw red paint on someone or burn down a business without remorse, you need to become a leftist. It’s hard to find justification for such things in conservative or Christian organizations. You won’t see NRA members or Operation Rescue volunteers wearing masks and turning over police cars, but things like that are common among organizations like BLM, Antifa, Occupy Wall Street, and the Environmental Liberation Front.

Back when the tech lions were scared tech kittens, we fed them, with the best of intentions. Now they’re big and strong, and they can do what they’ve wanted to do all along. They don’t realize they’re creating a dystopia. You can’t embark on a policy of oppression without developing a malevolent heart that will never stop looking for new targets. Malice is habit-forming, and so is denial. If you mistreat conservatives and Christians at work every day, you will also mistreat your loved ones and friends. You won’t be able to turn it on and off.

We have laws banning monopolies. A monopoly is a single entity that controls a market niche. We don’t have laws banning ideological monopolies. If every Internet company belongs to a larger leftist cabal–pretty much true–there is nothing we can do. One wonders if there is a way to address the problem. I think that if these companies were all controlled by the Catholic Church or the Assemblies of God, legislators would be looking for a solution.

In truth, we probably need laws (I hate to say that) similar to the laws that govern hotels and transportation companies. Some services are so important, they have to be available to everyone. Holiday Inn can’t ban gun shop owners, and Delta Airlines can’t ban Republicans. Maybe the tech despots need a little bit of the regulation they want to impose on the rest of us.

The Googsters and their ilk don’t get a pass just because what they do is legal. Oppression is oppression, regardless of the source.

I Need Elves

Now that I’m done writing important things for today, I will relax. With more writing.

I am still working on my indoors workbench. I got myself some Stanley pegboard hangers and installed them. They’re on the flimsy side, unlike the hangers that came with the workbench. That makes them look “off.” What can you do? Life isn’t perfect.

The hangers came with little plastic anchors that hold the steel hangers in place. One problem with pegboard is that the hangers tend to come out with the tools. Anchors prevent this from happening. Kudos to Stanley. Now they need to make their hangers heavier.

The pegboard hanger market is wide open. Almost everything made is junk. I’m not buying anything else until I find a good solution.

I have sad news to report. As much as I love my new Bondhus hex wrenches, I am getting new ones. The explanation is simple. Bondhus puts its wrenches in little plastic holders. You have to do a lot of pushing and pulling when you use them. Pull a wrench out. Find out it’s too big. Push it in. Pull another out. It sounds unimportant, but during a long session involving different screws, it gets old.

My solution: more Bondhus hex wrenches.

I have an old Craftsman folding hex wrench set. The wrenches are set in a handle, like pocketknife blades. If you fold out the wrong one, you just fold it back in and pop another one out. Bondhus makes something similar, but you get three sets. You get metric, standard, and Torx. Small, convenient, and tough.

I hate Torx fasteners. There is no reason for them to exist. Generally, in my opinion, they are used to make things hard to work on. I really believe that. If you buy a set of “tamper-proof” driver bits, it will include Torx bits. That tells you something. I hate spending good money for something and then finding out the manufacturer has sabotaged me in order to get me to pay someone to fix it.

When I work on my own property, I’m not “tampering,” but screwing with my property so I can’t fix it fits the definition pretty well.

The folding wrenches won’t replace the L wrenches I already have. The long wrenches have ball ends which are very handy. Ball ends let you turn fasteners when you can’t insert wrenches parallel to the fasteners’ axes. Sometimes I’ll need the long wrenches. Most of the time, however, the folding sets will do the job.

I also learned I needed a workholding device. I will tell you how I found out.

The other day I sold my dad’s NordicTrack ski machine. He can’t use it, and it was in the way. It’s sad, but sometimes I have to do things he doesn’t want me to do. There was no way he would have agreed to sell it, because he feels compelled to hold onto things. I put it on Craigslist anyway, and now it’s gone. AHHHHH.

The machine had a cheap electronic monitor on it, to provide pulse info and so on. It didn’t work because my dad didn’t change the batteries. It was corroded inside. I took it off to work on it, and it slid all over the workbench. It was very annoying. I wanted it to work for the guy who bought the bench, and he was on the way in his truck, so I didn’t need the bother of fighting with a slippery monitor. I also had problems when I tried to fix my Dremel’s armature.

You can screw a vise to a workbench, but it wouldn’t be appropriate for me. I want to have the workbench top clear most of the time, and I don’t need the solidity of an attached vise. I have such a vise in the workshop if I need it.

I found a thing called a Panavise. It’s a crazy vise that opens to 9 inches. The jaws are held on a ball mount, and the mount can be moved around and fastened in position. The jaws have rubber on them, so they would have worked fine on my dad’s plastic monitor.

You can screw or clamp a Panavise to a table, but they also make a base which is a weighted tray. You attach the vise to it and rely on the weight to hold it in place. This will work 99% of the time. The tray has little compartments for parts. SOLD! It ought to work very well for me.

Bonus: you can buy an attachment with four long flexible arms with alligator clips. It fastens to the base. The arms reach up to the vise and help you hold little things like wires. I need that. Obviously.

I haven’t sprung for the arm thing, but I’m getting the vise.

Panavise makes a special kit for soldering. I like the special clamp for circuit boards, but the other stuff seems gimmicky and useless. The full kit includes a solder iron holder and a tip cleaner. Every decent soldering iron comes with these things. The clamp is sold separately. I will consider it.

I also needed something to hold guns while I work on them. I learned this while working on my new rifles. I decided to get a Tipton Gun Butler. This is like the little housecleaning trays maids use. It’s a rectangular buckety thing with a handle in the center. It has two V-shaped mounts you can set up at the ends. You rest the rifle in the mounts, and you keep your cleaning stuff in the bucket. Yes. I want it. It’s cheap, and I think it will be perfect for me. It arrived today.

My previous gun cleaning kit was a cardboard box half-soaked with Hoppe’s No. 9 and Break-Free CLP.

As I think I mentioned previously, I also ordered a gunsmith’s mat. This is a rubbery mat you put down on a table when you work on a gun. The one I bought is just the right size for my bench, and it has a few plastic compartments for parts. I would want this even if I didn’t have guns. It’s okay to beat up the surface of a bench you made from raw lumber, but I don’t want to destroy a nice factory hardwood top prematurely, and I will really need those part bins. Also, the hard bench top can damage things, so a cushion is desirable.

Speaking of bins, I have discovered plastic bins that attach to pegboards. I plan to get some. I hate watching small parts slide off of workbenches. I hate having no place to put small parts I’m not ready to throw out or put away. A few little plastic bins would be very helpful.

I hate to say it, but a rolling tool chest is under consideration. I’m pretty sure I can get a good price on Harbor Freight’s new “Series 2″ chest. The first version was very good, and the new one has drawers that open farther.

I’m disgusted with the companies that make expensive boxes. Look at Youtube, and you will see people comparing Snap-On to Harbor Freight. The verdict? Harbor Freight gives 90% of the performance for 15% of the price, and 90% is more than you need. And Snap-On is manufacturing in China now! You’re not even supporting America when you let them gut your retirement fund.

You can get SIX Harbor Freight tool carts for one Snap-On. Not four. Not three. SIX!

I spent $400 on a gigantic Milwaukee rolling chest, and it has been phenomenal. It’s tough. It’s practical. You can stand in the bottom drawer. It has a power strip built in. If Milwaukee can do it, so can everyone else. A similar Snap-On product sells for…sit down…$2600. The Snap-On is 6” shorter and has a couple more drawers. It probably has some features the Milwaukee doesn’t. Good luck convincing me those features are worth $2200 plus shipping.

A rolling tool chest may be overkill for my little work area, but a total piece of garbage with much less capacity will run me about a hundred bucks, and Harbor Freight will fix me up for life for about $230. Tempting.

Harbor Freight boxes aren’t just very good “for the money.” They’re very good, period. Not great. Very good. And very good will do.

I wanted a farm, and now I have one, along with a big house. That means I find myself using tools a lot. I actually need the things I’m buying. I still need other stuff, like a trailer, fencing pliers, and post-hole diggers.

This sure beats spending money on things like golf and fishing, which are inherently frivolous. You can use a couple of poles to feed your family, but no one needs a seagoing boat and big-game reels.

Life is good, especially with tools. I will continue to report as my techno-arsenal grows.

I Really do Have a Screw Loose

I had a little fun today. The rain we’ve been having for about a century has dried up somewhat, so I got to take the Savage A22 out and shoot. It now has a Nikon Prostaff 3×9 on it. I wanted to check the scope, and I also wanted to see what I could do with Remington Golden Bullets.

Golden Bullets attract a lot of criticism. They’re dirty, and they have a reputation for failing to fire, plus poor accuracy when they actually go off. Remington started selling “new and improved” Golden Bullets at some point, but some people say they’re still crap. Golden Bullets would be a godsend if they worked well, because they’re cheap hollowpoints. Hollowpoints are more humane when you hunt small animals. They do more damage. It would be good to have a cheap round that works equally well for practice and hunting.

I set up my folding table in the pasture, along with my cheap Caldwell front rest and my new rear bag. I’m not sure a rear bag is a big help. A front rest or bipod makes a huge difference when you’re trying to be precise, but I can hold the butt of a gun pretty well without a rear bag, and rear bags are something of a pain to use.

I’ll show you my target. I used it for a lot of things, so there are many holes. Only two groups are important to this blog post.

I started shooting, and after I found the paper and got sighted in, I shot 6 holes that connected (right side of target, halfway up). That’s pretty good. Maybe 7/8″?

People say they shoot 1 MOA with .22 rifles at 50 yards, and that’s a half-inch group, but people lie a lot, and they shoot groups of very few rounds (as few as three) and then bury their bad groups. I shot a 3/8″ group today at 50 yards, and the the next shot opened it up. I won’t go around saying I shoot 0.75 MOA (3/8″ at 50 yards) with Golden Bullets.

The .22 LR round is not inherently accurate, compared to an insanely accurate round like the .17 HMR. Also, .22 rounds are manufactured cheaply, so it’s not like you’re getting match-grade ammunition when you shop. I don’t know what the cheap-ammunition potential of the .22 is at 50 or 100 yards, but I’ll bet it’s not over half an inch at 50 yards for 5 rounds.

I was quite happy with 6 rounds that connected, so I kept shooting, thinking I was onto something. My groups went nuts. It was bad. I didn’t know what was going on. I thought I had screwed up my trigger technique. One thing was certain: it wasn’t the scope. I had used blue Loctite to hold the scope base screws in place. I was sure I didn’t have to check. But I did.

The scope base screws were loose. All four of them.

I tightened the bases down and shot again, aiming at the little cross at the top left, by the Caldwell logo. As you can sort of see, the group (9 shots) was pretty tight.

After that I had to drive back to the house for something, so I called it a day.

I should add that I had two failures to fire, and I could not find firing pin marks on the rounds. I need to investigate that.

What did I learn?

1. The Nikon is very nice. I paid $89, and I feel like I got a good deal. The glass is clear. I’m not sure I’ll be able to focus on anything closer than 50 feet, though. I may have to read the manual. I hate doing that.

2. Remington Golden Bullets are not that bad when used in rifles. I think I can get near-half-inch accuracy at 50 yards from a bench, so I should be able to do an inch or less at closer distances when shooting animals. That’s good enough for most squirrels.

3. Golden Bullets are more than adequate for pistol practice at 7 yards. I want ammunition that will stay under one inch at that distance, because otherwise I won’t be able to tell flyers from bad shooting, and a round that will do 1 MOA at 50 yards will definitely do one inch at a seventh of that distance. Golden Bullets are more accurate than I am, and if you want to learn anything while you’re shooting, you need a gun and ammunition that will shoot better than you can.

Now I have to decide on a sighting distance, stick to it, and learn how to adjust my aim for shorter ranges. I read that squirrel hunters should zero their scopes at 75 yards. Interesting article. Something about the error being fairly small at a wide range of distances.

I don’t look forward to sighting a .22 at 75 yards, because I’m not sure it will group well enough to allow me to figure out where to move the reticle. Five clicks left…four clicks down…three clicks right…two clicks up…I’m afraid I’ll go nuts chasing problems caused by the ammunition itself. One nice thing about a really accurate rifle is that you always know how many clicks to move.

I’m going to lighten the Savage’s trigger. I think I wrote about that. New springs for the A22 and my .17 HMR are on the way. I love a light trigger. As long as it’s safe, it can’t be too light for me.

Tomorrow I hope to do some pistol shooting, and I want to shoot the Marlin 60 with the new peep sight. I have to try to maintain a serious practice schedule. Everyone gets rusty between sessions.

In a few months, I hope to be a much better shot.

Rifles Finally Ready for Rodent Ragnarok

Good things are happening. By my somewhat mundane standards.

I got my workbench set up, and I have been ordering stuff to complete it. I got a set of metric and standard Gearwrenches for about $40. Can’t beat that price. That’s about $2 per wrench, and I already have some Gearwrenches, so I know they’re pretty good. I also got metric and standard Craftsman ignition wrenches. Seems like they’ve gotten pricey, but there is always someone on Ebay…

I still don’t have enough pegboard hangers, but they will be here shortly.

Anyway, the workbench is functional, and I have a little plastic table next to it. Today the peep sight I ordered for my Marlin 60 arrived, and I decided to install it. I also decided to put my new Nikon scope on my Savage A22.

By the way, I had a great experience with Gander Outdoors. It’s related.

A lot of people hate Gander because a guy named Marcus Lemonis owns it. After Trump correctly (if generously) said there were fine people on both sides at the infamous Charlottesville rally, Lemonis said something about how he didn’t want anyone who agreed to shop at his stores. Okay, we get it. You hate racism, and you love all the puppies and kitties and warm fluffy bunnies. Anyway, a lot of 2A people now hate Lemonis, so going to his store is a big sin, like buying a Smith & Wesson was after they agreed to install “Hillary Hole” locks on their guns.

Lemonis put his foot in his mouth, and he is probably wrong about politics in every conceivable way, but it’s not a great idea to judge someone by what he says right after a notorious murder. People say smarter and more accurate things after they’ve had time to think.

I shop at Gander for a few reasons. For one, I started before I knew about Lemonis. Also, the prices are great. I can pretty much match Internet prices at Gander. Also, I don’t have a lot of choices. I have some very bad mom and pop joints. I also have Wal-Mart, which is limited. I have Rural King, which has no selection. I also have Dick’s, which is where Satan shops.

The crazies who run Dick’s decided to melt down all their black rifles after David Hogg shook his rattle at them, more or less, and then they went further and decided to hire pro-gun-control lobbyists. No idea why they would do that. Why try to get laws passed to limit what you can sell? You can just stop selling things you don’t like. Whatever the plan is, Dick’s appears to be legitimate 2A poison, so I am reluctant to walk in the door.

I’m thrilled that they’re destroying their guns, because it will be a big boost to manufacturers. People will still want black rifles, and a bunch just disappeared, so other sellers will place orders to replace them. The net effect is added profits for the manufacturers, added profits for other sellers, and a big hit for Dick’s.

Journalists are telling us Dick’s is doing very well. That’s probably true, because Dick’s is inhaling other businesses. When you’re buying up other companies, one would expect your sales to increase. The question isn’t whether Dick’s is doing well but how well they should be doing. A whole lot of people won’t go near the place, and they will be developing relationships (moving market share) with other retailers.

Springfield and some other arms companies cut Dick’s off. Springfield makes very popular, very nice pistols. Dick’s losing Springfield is like a grocery store losing Pepsi. I think they will suffer in the long run.

Here’s another reason I shop at Gander: because I joined their loyalty club, I get small discounts on nearly everything, and I also get a steady stream of 10%-off codes and free shipping offers. Their prices are already very good, and when you throw in a discount and free shipping, the deals are too good to ignore.

The other day they sent me a 20%-off code. I decided to get a Remington Bucket of Bullets. It’s good to have a few thousand .22 rounds on hand, because the .22 is an extremely useful tool, and we will probably have ammunition droughts in the future. For all I know, I may be shooting crows to ward off starvation some day, and ammunition may be more precious than rubies. A Bucket of Bullets contains 1400 rounds at an attractive price. The shells are Golden Bullets, which are not highly regarded, but they are good for nearly all purposes, and they are excellent for pistol practice.

I ordered the shells and two other things, and then I could not get Gander’s site to digest my code. I called them up and talked to Tamisha, who could not have been sweeter. She looked my products up and learned that the discount could not be applied to the shells. I noted that it would have been helpful if the site had told me something about this instead of just rejecting my code over and over, and she agreed. She gave me the discount anyway. In the end, I got the club price, plus a 20% discount on that already-discounted price, plus free shipping.

I love these people. I don’t care if Marcus Lemonis has George Soros’s baby. I want to send Tamisha a pie.

To get back to today’s adventure, I had the peep sight for the Marlin, and I also came across some “free” rings for the Nikon scope. I bought a UTG BugBuster scope a while back, and it came with quick-detach rings. For some reason I no longer recall, I used a one-piece base instead, and yesterday, I remembered that I had the rings. I had been shopping for rings for the Nikon, and now I had them.

It was pretty glorious. I put the wooden Marlin down on my non-marring plastic table and used my Grace gunsmithing screwdrivers and my Bondhus hex wrenches to take the Marlin’s scope off, remove the factory sights, and install the new Tech-Sights peep apparatus. It looks beautiful, and if I can hit squirrels with it, it will redeem the Marlin. I just want to be able to nail the little creeps consistently within about 75 feet.

The UTG rings fit the Weaver bases I put on the A22, and they worked fine with the Nikon scope. That rifle should be murderous now. The trigger is great. Because it’s a Savage, the barrel should be very accurate. The Nikon scope should be clear and tough. God help anything smaller than a hog that gets near me when I’m holding the Savage.

Of course, I now see that I must have a gun vise. I had a hard time holding the guns while I was working on them. I already have a gunsmith’s mat on the way, and it will fit the workbench beautifully and reduce dinging and scratching, but I also need a vise. I wanted the mat anyway because it will be very useful for just about any task, whether or not a gun is involved.

If I understand things correctly, a gun vise is just a sort of rectangular plastic bucket with two padded vertical forks. You plop your gun in the forks and go to work. Maybe I’m wrong.

I’m super happy with my .22’s now. The Marlin should be great for times when I don’t want a scope. The Savage will be there when the situation calls for glass. The Nylon 66 is around, just for fun. And then there are my pistols.

I still want a Colt Woodsman, just because, but things are looking good right now.

I can’t say enough good things about the Savage A22. Looking into the guts of a Marlin 60 and then opening up a Savage A22 is like seeing Jerry Lewis in his underwear and then watching Arnold Schwarzenegger pose. The Marlin is a kid’s first gun, if you don’t like spending money on your kid. The Savage is a real rifle. It has an adjustable precision trigger. It shoots every type of .22 Long Rifle ammunition known. It can be dry-fired without snap caps. It’s drilled for Weaver mounts instead of coming equipped with a mere dovetail. It has a synthetic stock that will last forever.

Hard to criticize.

Even if you put every known aftermarket part on the Marlin to improve it, you will still end up with improved junk. It will still have two sheets of mystery sheet metal instead of a receiver. And if you want the best trigger for it, you’ll have to fork out around $80 and rely on one vendor: a guy who doesn’t answer his email.

To make things even better, Savage sells a lighter spring for the A22’s Accu-trigger, and I have one on the way. Actually, I have two. I have another Savage.

The Marlin is a friendly, light little gun that feels great in the hand, but it has serious problems, and it has been royally outclassed for only about 20% more money.

We will see how the squirrels feel about the Savage. New ones show up to replace the ones I kill, so I should have no problems finding rodents to practice on.

And so is Pizza Law

I was just thinking about the gun forum where I caused a stink by saying I was able to do my job.

Someone I knew started a forum, and I joined because I thought he was a decent guy. At some point, gun laws were being discussed, and random people who didn’t know very much started trying to tell me I needed to consult an attorney in order to understand a federal firearms law. I told them I was an attorney, myself, and that I would not have any problems figuring things out.

You wouldn’t believe the storm of bile I brought down on myself, simply for saying I was able to do my job! It’s as if I worked at Firestone and caught hell on a forum for saying I could change a tire. I was egotistical. I was naive. Unbelievable nonsense, from people who had no idea what they were talking about. You don’t have to be a “gun attorney” to understand a gun law, but you do have to be an attorney in order to tell an attorney his business.

There is a well-known Florida attorney who specializes in firearms law. He wrote a book, and he has a website. If I recall correctly, they were pushing me to rely on him instead of my three years of postgraduate education. He seems to be doing Florida a great service, and he’s probably a fine lawyer, but I was no slouch, either, and–sorry to say it–firearms law is far from cerebral. The areas in which I practiced required more brains, not that I’m claiming they were cerebral, either. I don’t need this man’s help to read a statute.

Law is not that hard. If you have an IQ of 140, which is common, you can probably be a fine Supreme Court justice.

Lawyers hate reading things like that. They want people to think they’re brilliant. Your dentist is probably smarter than your lawyer.

Here’s another interesting fact: there is no Florida specialty called “firearms law.” The whole idea is a bit of a joke. You can’t go to the Florida Bar and get certified as a firearms lawyer, but you can be certified in recognized areas like elder law and aviation law. Here is a list of the certifications the Bar provides. You can bill yourself as a gun lawyer and do fine work related to gun laws, but it’s not a real specialty.

A “firearms lawyer” is really just a criminal attorney who deals with cases involving alleged violations of certain gun laws. No one goes into “firearms law” in order to do civil trials. Gun-related cases are about criminal charges. People represented by “firearms lawyers” are criminal defendants. If you’re a “gun attorney,” you should also be a qualified criminal attorney. You should be able to defend rapists and purse snatchers with complete competence before you branch out into “gun law.”

You can proclaim yourself a firearms lawyer and study the law on your own until you become a legitimate expert, but it’s still not a recognized specialty here. Also, even if you are a gun-law expert, you may not know much about guns.

I know a guy who was considered to be a firearms lawyer. The word “expert” was tossed around. He’s no longer an attorney, but he was promoted as a gun lawyer when he was active. This was a person who never spoke of hunting in my presence. I never heard of him competing in any shooting matches. A person who knew him quite well said she shot as well as he did when he took her on her first trip to the range. I don’t think he had a serious gun collection. The only gun I ever heard about was a carry pistol.

Was he really a gun-law expert? No idea. There is no exam. If you Google him, you will see him mentioned in connection with “firearms law.” People seem to have accepted him as an expert, without investigating.

Lay people can’t evaluate professionals. They take their claims at face value. When we say so-and-so is a good doctor, we mean he’s polite and not too expensive. When laymen say another guy is a good lawyer, they may mean he won an easy case for them or even that he must be good because they saw him on TV.

Do you know how Fox and CNN get their legal “experts”? It’s hilarious. You call the networks and say you’re willing to appear for nothing. Bang. You’re an expert. My sister was all over CNN and Fox for a time. She had a PR agent who hooked her up.

Call Fox and CNN today. Tell them you went to the Duke University School of Law, you work in Manhattan, you’re an expert in constitutional law, and you like being on TV. They will take you seriously at first, believe me. I’ll bet they won’t even check your background. I seriously doubt they called my sister’s former boss. They might have gotten an earful.

There is no way to prove the guy I knew was or was not an expert, without an extensive history of court opinions from cases in which he participated. There is no real training or oversight for “firearms lawyers,” unless there are a few ridiculous CLE courses out there. You can’t go to law school and “major” in gun law. There is no such thing as a postgraduate course for gun lawyers. Every person in Florida who claims to be a firearms lawyer is self-educated and self-anointed, and because there is no certification process, there is no easy way to know if they know anything.

I might become a “firearms lawyer.” I can sit here and read case law for a month. I’ll buy a couple of CLE’s. After that, I’ll know as much as anyone.

Lawyers love making up new legal fields. There is a glut of lawyers, and most lawyers are not very good, so it pays to have a niche and pretend you can do things other lawyers can’t.

Maybe I’ll make up a legal field. I want to be the first expert in pizza law. Did you burn the roof of your mouth at Chuck E. Cheese? I’m here to get you MO’ MONEY MO’ MONEY MO’ MONEY!

What I’m trying to say is that laymen shouldn’t get the idea that there is a big guild of highly trained gun lawyers out there, who have special skills other lawyers don’t have. A smart attorney–and I stress the word “smart”–can pick up any field of law with a certain amount of homework. Because gun law is part of criminal law, which is very simple as law goes, it should be particularly easy for people in other fields to get up to speed.

A dermatologist can’t walk into a hospital and do a lung transplant, because medicine is much harder than law, but any clever lawyer can look at a common statute about a simple subject, and the surrounding case law, and make an intelligent decision.

Here is my advice concerning gun lawyers: stay away from them. If a criminal lawyer can’t get business without advertising a dubious specialty, there may be something wrong with him. Hire the best criminal attorney you can afford.

Googling around, I see that gun lawyers are using “gun trusts” to scare people and drum up business. Something to do with “NFA devices.” This means guns and devices that have to be licensed by the BATF. I would stay away from such things. We raise hell when we have to do background checks, fearing that the FBI is making lists of our guns, and then some of us go ahead and file “NFA device” paperwork, INSURING that the feds keep records on us. I dunno ’bout that.

Of course, many of us tweet, Facebook, Instagram, and blog pictures of our guns every chance we get, so maybe there is no point in discussing privacy.

At least one website says gun trusts are a crock. Don’t ask me. I’m just a lowly litigator. Here is a link.

I’m billing all of you for this, and if you’ve read this far, you already owe me. Email me for Paypal information.

Mossberg’s Crazy, Legal, Short-Barreled Shotgun

I saw the craziest thing during my breakfast routine. The BATF has cleared the general public to buy short-barreled (“sawed off”) shotguns.

Because of weird quirks in federal firearms law, it is legal to sell a smoothbore shotgun with a barrel shorter than 18″, as long as it is (and always has been) fitted with a pistol grip. You can’t buy the same shotgun with a buttstock and replace it with a pistol grip unless you want to go to prison.

The Mossberg company sells a gun called the Model 590. It’s the typical Mossberg pump, with a little pistol grip and a very short barrel. It will hold 6 rounds of ammunition. Of course, the amount changes depending on the length of the shells.

A long time ago, someone told me it was impossible to control a 12-gauge shotgun without a buttstock. This is completely wrong. I put a laser on a Saiga 12 and fired it from the hip, and I had no trouble hitting what I shot at. It looks like the Mossberg is no less controllable.

Here’s a video that starts out with a man shooting the Mossberg held at his side, more or less. He doesn’t fall down. The gun doesn’t fly out of his hands. He doesn’t have problems holding it on target. Later on, he shoots a dummy at 7 yards and puts the pellets right where he wants them.

The man in the video either runs or works for Gunblast.com, which is a very nice site. They do excellent gun reviews.

Would I buy this gun? Of course. Because it is a gun. But other than that, would I recommend it? I don’t think so. The capacity is very low. Miss six times, which is something that happens every day in shootouts, and you’re done. Sit down and wait for Enrique the MS-13 Dreamer to walk over and plug you. You can reload it, but by the time you find the first shell and pull it out of your ammo holder thing, your brains will be on the wall behind you.

Also, it’s a pump, and pumps are stupid. They’re slow, and it’s very easy to screw up and fail to chamber a round properly.

Me, I will continue to rely on the 31-round, 100% reliable Eastern Bloc rifle, shot from the folded state. If I miss someone with that 6 times, I will still have 25 tries left, and if I carry a magazine with me, I’ll have another 30 rounds I can load in three seconds.

“If pumps are so stupid, why do the cops and the military use them?” I don’t know. Probably because committees choose their weapons. They also use the .308 for sniping, and it’s inferior to other well-known choices. They used revolvers when criminals were using Glocks.

“Pumps are more reliable than semiautos.” In what way? Semiautos fire chambered rounds just as well, and they chamber rounds just as well, only much faster, without requiring you to take your mind off your target. If your semiauto has a malfunction, so what? Yank the bolt handle and keep shooting.

Time for a tangent. Why do movie guns jam irreparably? You know what I mean. The bad guy pulls his trigger, the gun doesn’t go off, he pokes around at it like a confused monkey, and then he throws it away and reaches for a knife or something. What kind of gun jams so badly you can’t clear it?

I’ve been on Gunbroker a lot, and I’ve never seen this: “My AR-15 jammed while I was trying to shoot up a tractor pull in the name of Allah, so I am forced to sell it for parts. Barrel and furniture are fine.”

Movie bad guys don’t just put their jammed guns down. They throw them. Why is that? I hate watching actors throw valuable guns or slide them on concrete. They don’t act like it bothers them. Let me tell you something. If you took the cheapest gun I paid for (or even a gun you just took from Enrique) and dragged it across your driveway, I would have kittens. No one in his right mind throws or drags a gun he paid for.

Actors don’t pay for their guns, and sometimes they’re not even guns. They use replicas and dummy guns. Bruce Willis doesn’t care about the finish on an M4 his studio paid for, and he definitely doesn’t care about the finish on a fake Glock made of black plastic.

Actually, that sounds like the description of a real Glock.

If your AK-47 jams while you’re working things out with a burglar, you don’t throw it away and go after him with a throw pillow. Clear the jam and resume hostilities.

Am I wrong? I have never seen or heard of a jammed semiauto that couldn’t be cleared in a hurry. Is there some special case where a shell folds up and wraps itself around a gun’s internals? I’m not omniscient, but it sounds unlikely.

The Mossberg looks like fun, but I don’t see it as an intelligent choice for self-defense. I don’t see any real advantages, unless you live in a house with 18″-wide hallways and really need a short gun.

If you really need a short gun, buy an AK pistol and put a vertical foregrip on it for control. This is illegal, but you can always take the extra grip off before the cops arrive. Even if you live in Massachusetts, they’re not going to think to ask you if you used an illegal grip, and turning you in for an NFA violation will be the last thing on a wounded burglar’s mind.

Can you even have an AK-47 in Massachusetts? I don’t know. I know MS-13 members can have them. Not sure about law-abiding citizens.

Yes, the Mossberg shoots a larger pattern than a rifle, but it may be as small as three inches and won’t be bigger than maybe 8, so you still have to aim, and if most of your 8″ pattern misses, the few pellets that hit the burglar may not do much harm.

In order for a shotgun to work, you need at least one pellet to hit your guest in an important place, and if most of your pellets are off to the side, the ones that hit are probably going to land in areas that aren’t vital.

If you get a center-mass hit with a 12 gauge, the mess will be incredible. No doubt about that. But it’s like betting your life savings on one lottery ticket. I would rather shoot 31 30-caliber bullets at someone, getting 31 chances to aim, than shoot 30 or so 30-caliber shotgun pellets at someone with two or three shots and only a few chances to aim.

Is the Mossberg good for defending a vehicle, because you would be shooting through a small window at short range and probably wouldn’t miss? No. It’s a pump. Do you really want to have to swing your elbow around, racking a shotgun while confined in the front seat of your car, behind the steering wheel? Of course not. You want a semiauto.

I was just looking at an article by an “expert.” Experts used to tell us not to give water to fever patients. They also told us to eat trans fats. Anyway, an expert has cited the “intimidation factor” of a home-defense shotgun. Really, dude? Really? That’s irresponsible. What burglar looks at your gun and says, “I only give up for shotguns”? What criminal looks at an AK-47 and feels good about facing it?

Criminals are stupid and sadistic, and many are crazy or on drugs. Many will shoot back at an armed homeowner. Google the stories and see. If you think the scariest gun wins, you’re dreaming. The gun that wins is the one that incapacitates fastest and most reliably, period. Also, the gun that wins is the one that doesn’t run out of ammunition during the fight.

I’ll tell you where I saw the “intimidation” remark. It was on the Chuck Hawks site. Really dumb. I love the site, but they dropped the ball this time. I hope no one took their advice seriously. It’s like they channeled Joe Biden.

The writer cites unnamed “experts” who favor the pistol as a home defense weapon. I am shaking my head. He, himself, says a pistol won’t damage your home as badly as other guns, and it won’t “overpenetrate.” Oh, man.

What’s worse, when you’re trying to avoid being raped? Two holes in your drywall, or 6? No intelligent person thinks about things like this.

Second thing…there is no such thing as “overpenetration.” The idea is that a bullet will go through a perp or a wall and hit your kid, or, worse, your new TV. You know who doesn’t worry about overpenetration? Cops. They shoot what works, and you should, too. An “expert” once pointed out that a round that won’t go through a wall may not go through a criminal, either. Believe it or not, things like clothing and skin slow bullets down a lot.

Many “experts” test cartridges on ballistic gelatin, which has no skin and no clothing. Ballistic gelatin doesn’t wear leather jackets or heavy metal belt buckles. Ballistic gelatin rarely uses PCP. It doesn’t hide behind drywall.

At least when it comes to pistols, the FBI’s official position is that you want a big caliber and huge penetration. They came to that conclusion after some of their agents fared very badly in the famous Miami Shootout. Rifles are somewhat different because of higher velocities, but still, you want tissue damage. The cops shoot M16’s in cities, and they don’t use rat shot or rock salt. The theory, I presume, is that the small chance of hitting an innocent person is greatly outweighed by the danger of being killed by a criminal your mouse gun failed to put down.

Overpenetration injuries in police shootings are very rare. They have happened, and there have been lawsuits. The cops still use guns that “overpenetrate,” even after having lawyers flung on them. What does that tell you? It tells me, “Use serious ammunition and try to point your gun away from innocent people.”

The article’s author also says that when it comes to home defense pistols, he prefers revolvers. I just don’t know what to say. Six shots, and then a lengthy reloading process. Meanwhile, your enemy has 18 rounds in his Glock, and he may have two magazines in the pocket of his saggy pants.

Semiauto, semiauto, semiauto. That’s my motto. And try to stick with long guns. Eastern Bloc rifle in the house (and under a truck seat), and Glock everywhere else. If you have to use the Glock, if possible, use it while making your way to the rifle.

Guess I’m wandering.

The Mossberg 590 Shockwave is a neat gun, and it shows how clever gun makers can find ways to make our silly gun laws look even sillier. That being said, I can’t see handicapping myself intentionally by using one for self-defense. Reasonable minds may differ, but I am right.

I hope.

Because Squirrels are too Fast to Club

I had some fun with the John Deere today.

I love being able to type that. I have a John Deere. I’m not in Miami. I hear English every day. Everyone is polite here. Today I took my dad to a barbecue joint, and we were waited on by an attractive young lady who was so nice, it would have been a privilege just to sit at her booth and drink water.

I’ve spent a lot of time in Miami and New York, so I suppose it’s understandable that I would forget that women can be positive factors in one’s life. They really are wonderful when they function correctly.

With all the female prizes I’ve known, when I think of women, my first thoughts are of things like whining, verbal abuse, endless manipulation, constant demands for insincere affirmations of attractiveness, the danger of having one’s house given to a person who will then use it to fornicate with the man she cheated with during one’s marriage, endless alimony, emasculation, bickering, and being seen as an annoying but necessary ATM with feet.

There are women out there who make men’s lives better instead of much, much worse. There really are. I’m pretty sure.

Anyway, I was mowing the yard, and I ran out of diesel. In my brilliance, I thought the best move was to drive toward the workshop (and the diesel can) until I got as close as possible. That turned out to be a poor strategy. It takes quite a while to get the air out of the fuel system when you run one of these things dry. On the up side, I saved myself maybe 9 seconds of arduous walking.

I got the tractor running and put it away, and then I started working on guns. On my cool new workbench.

I have been trying to get outfitted for quality squirrel extermination. I don’t want to wound them and have them sue me later. I want to be able to nail a squirrel reliably anywhere within a hundred feet. It’s not as simple as one would think.

I love scopes. Unfortunately, in order to use one at varying distances with squirrel-level accuracy, you have to know what the bullet does at every range. If you don’t, you can miss a squirrel four feet away. Figuring all this stuff out is surprisingly challenging. Then you have to add in the inherent inaccuracy of the .22 rifle and the small size of a squirrel’s kill zone.

I thought I would try a peep sight on the new Savage A22. A peep sight lies closer to the bullet’s path than a scope, so when shooting up close, it should work nearly perfectly. When shooting at longer distances, it should be nearly as accurate as a scope, with a much easier target acquisition process.

I ordered a peep sight, and then I started thinking about it. I only have two rifles a peep sight will fit: the Savage and a Marlin 60. The Savage is superior in nearly every way, and it has a dynamite Accu-trigger. It seems like it’s the prime candidate for a scope.

The peep sight I bought only works with Weaver and Picatinny mounts, and the Marlin has a dovetail. This means I need to consider a different sight. I can cobble an adaptor together, but it will raise the rear sight too high.

My current plan is to get a Tech-Sight made for the Marlin. This company makes aperture (peep) sight packages. You get the front and rear sight in one box, so you don’t have to buy the rear sight and then try to figure out which front sight you need.

This is where things stand at the moment. I now have a Nikon scope for the Savage, and I’m going to pick up some rings and install it. I already put Weaver bases on the rifle.

If this works out, I’ll have two pretty good options for killing squirrels.

I am still banned eternally at Rimfire Central, and no one ever responded to my requests for information as to the cause. I’m wondering if there is a nut over there moderating. Is it some firearm person I offended during my blogging heyday?

I dealt with some real jewels back then. I remember getting all sorts of flak on a gun forum because I said I, as a lawyer with three years of graduate education, was smart enough to read a firearm statute and understand it. There was no way to make ignorant laymen understand that this was what people paid me hundreds of dollars per hour to do, and that there had to be a reason why they were willing to cough it up.

The guys I argued with thought I was earth’s greatest egotist because I thought I could do my job. They were incensed because I said I could figure out a statute. Imagine what would happen if I told the Florida Bar I couldn’t interpret a statute! “Dear Steve: as a newly suspended attorney…”

It’s kind of astonishing that they thought they knew enough to argue with me. I don’t tell dentists they’re wrong when they tell me about my teeth.

There are a lot of insecure jerks in the firearms world. Guys, wearing tactical pants and owning guns doesn’t make you a superhero, a sniper, a SEAL or…much of anything. Lighten up and get over yourselves. Anyone who can stand in line at Walmart can have a house full of guns.

Could it be the forum poobahs are mad because I said the guy (“Arrowdodger”) who makes KAT triggers for Marlin rifles didn’t respond to my efforts to contact him? If so, they really blew it by banning me, because very few people saw my remarks there, and thousands will see them here, where they are beyond the reach of forum bans and will be on display in perpetuity. I certainly didn’t mean to disparage him or cause him any problems. I admire anyone who comes up with a product like that.

Other people have complained about being unable to reach him, and they haven’t been banned, so I suppose my ban has nothing to do with him.

I will never know. You can’t get closure when communication is impossible.

It doesn’t matter. I can live with the 3000 forums I already belong to, and besides, I can always rejoin from a different IP address. There is no way for them to track me.

I hate to lose a neat username, though.

I’ll try to get out and get scope rings tomorrow. Then comes squirrel Ragnarok. I hope.

Thinking up Mischief for Vermin

I should quit writing, but I have unexpected freedom, so I am suffering from “runaway slave” syndrome. I thought I had to take my dad to the dentist to get a crown fixed, and it turned out he wasn’t due for two weeks, so I am reveling in the unexpected gift of time.

I am trying to find a way to put a peep sight on my new Savage A22 .22 rifle.

When I do things like this, I completely understand why people buy the Ruger 10/22. It’s not the greatest .22, but there are a trillion aftermarket parts for it. Scope bases, peep sights, trigger kits, stocks…you name it; it’s out there. The A22 is like the Marlin 60. No one cares about customizing it, so products are few.

I shouldn’t compare the Savage to the Marlin, because the Savage is three times the gun. I took the stock off mine last night to get it ready to shoot, and I saw why it weighs more than the Marlin. There’s a real gun in there! No pot metal plates held together by pins. Just lots of machined steel. In comparison, the Marlin is a toy. It’s like comparing a $700 Home Depot John Deere mower to the old diesel job (original price $9800) I bought for the farm.

I can’t find a peep sight made for the A22, but it has tapped holes on the receiver for a scope base. That means I can put a Picatinny rail or Weaver bases on it. Once I get that done, I can attach a peep sight made to fit the rail or bases.

Believe it or not, Williams, the big name in peep sights, doesn’t make a Picatinny or Weaver sight. They make one that fits a crappy .22 dovetail.

After much searching, I located a UTG air rifle peep sight that fits a rail. A Williams sight runs over $75. The UTG is about $16. I’m sure it’s less fancy, without click adjustments and so on, but it will be just as accurate when adjusted correctly. I found Weaver bases for about $7 a pair.

I can slap this stuff on the gun and see if it works. I might have to get a new front sight. I’ve located those already. Williams makes them in various heights. I think I should get the rear sight, use it with the existing front sight, and see whether I need to go higher or lower.

I wonder if I could cut a Weaver base down to look like a .22 dovetail. That would allow me to use the Williams dovetail sight.

There are a lot of peep sights out there for AR rifles. I don’t think I’ll ever be an AR fan. AR peep sights are way high, so they’re far from the line of fire. I think that has to cause issues when you fire at varying distances. I don’t want to use a tall AR sight on the A22. As it is, the Weaver base will jack things up a quarter of an inch or so.

I wish the weather would clear up so I could shoot. I have a good feeling about this gun.

Marlin Needs an Intervention

I hope no one thinks I would be self-indulgent enough to buy another firearm this year. Even though this is what I just did.

Shut up, okay? It was another case of entrapment. Gander Mountain is selling the Savage A22 .22 semiauto for $209. Are you seriously suggesting I wasn’t going to buy that? Bud’s Gun Shop, which is cheap even by online standards, charges $239.

I have a Marlin 60 which is not even three months old. I acknowledge that. But the Marlin is not the greatest gun in the world. I paid $170 for the gun, maybe $5 for sling studs, and about $70 for a trigger kit. The trigger I ended up with, which is made by a company called M*Carbo, is pretty good, but it’s not the best. I couldn’t get the guy who sells the best one to answer an email. Annoying.

I joined a rimfire forum to get help with the Marlin, and yesterday they banned me for spamming. No idea what that’s about. I can’t get them to tell me. Obviously, I don’t spam anyone. I think they’re so mad at me for spamming, they won’t tell me why they’re mad at me. But I didn’t spam. I have maybe 6 posts on the forum, all about the Marlin.

The Marlin has a lot of appeal. It’s light, it looks great, and it feels great in my hands. It even has a nice figured stock. It’s a classic American firearm one is expected to own. But it seems like it keeps bringing me problems.

The Savage costs $40 more (with a fantastic deal), but look what you get: sling studs, a Savage barrel (Savage makes great shooters), a vastly superior magazine which can be replaced quickly, a milled receiver, and the famous Savage Accu-trigger, as contrasted with the famous Marlin slop trigger. Another plus: the Savage will shoot all sorts of ammunition, whereas my Marlin needed a new recoil spring in order to digest hypervelocity rounds which have been on the market for years.

The Marlin 60 doesn’t have a receiver. Not really. It has two cheap plates of stamped mystery metal joined by a few pins held in by E-clips. You can call that a receiver if you want, but to me, a receiver is a steel box, not two sheets of metal.

The Savage A22 has a dumpy black plastic stock. It doesn’t look cool or feel cuddly in the hand. The other side of the coin is that it will last forever and it can’t tear, splinter, or stain. Modifying it, if necessary, will be easy and free of risk.

The A22 magazine has a lower capacity (10 shots instead of 14), but let’s be real. You don’t need 14 rounds in your magazine to go hunting. If you need more than three, you should stay home.

Well, that’s coming from the guy who shot a squirrel in the head three times and didn’t kill it, so maybe I lack credibiity, but I still think it’s true. You’re not supposed to spray and pray. You’re supposed to wait for good shots.

A company called Butler Creek sells a 25-round magazine, if you absolutely must.

I hope the gun shoots well. The squirrels are getting to me. Today I saw one climbing around in a hedge by the pool. They have the whole farm to defile with their presence, and this thing was right up against the house, probably trying to make sure it didn’t leave me any blueberries the last time it visited.

I am thinking about a scope. First…do I want one? I am considering a peep sight. I have come to terms with the fundamental crappiness of the .22 LR cartridge. People on the web get excited when a .22 rifle shoots 1.5″ groups at 50 yards, which is pathetic. I now believe that despite the fraudulent nonsense about people shooting squirrels in the head consistently at 50 yards, the .22 is useless for squirrels more than 100 feet away. Since this is the case, is there any point in paying for glass? A peep sight should work very well at 100 feet, and it has advantages over a scope.

A scope starts out 1.5″ above the barrel, so the line of sight points down toward the line of fire and eventually crosses it. When the bullet drops, it crosses the line of sight again. This means the scope is zeroed at two distances. The rest of the time, you have error. If you’re shooting a deer 50 yards away, it may not matter, but squirrels are small, so you really need to know the deviation between the point of aim and point of impact.

Squirrels are not helpful. They don’t march off your zeroing distance, put on blindfolds, light cigarettes, and pose for you. They can show up at any distance. I had one stare me down from about eight feet. At very close range, a scope’s point of impact is not easy to guess. You may end up shooting very low.

I don’t know, but my guess is that peep sights are easier to deal with, because you start out 3/4″ above the barrel, not 1.5″. If I shoot a squirrel 20 feet away using a peep sight, the point of impact will be danged close to the point of aim.

Another advantage: field of view. When you look through a scope, you only see a small area. If your scope shows you a circle 5 feet across, and the squirrel is 3 feet from the center of the circle, you won’t see him. To find things, you have to move the scope around and hope you guess right. With a peep sight, you use your unaided eye, so you aren’t looking through a tiny tunnel.

Of course, with a scope, you can see things you can’t see with your eye. You can see little bits of squirrel sticking out from behind things. That can be helpful.

I can’t find a peep sight made for the A22, so I’m not sure it can be done without paying someone.

Scopes are fun, but killing squirrels dead, reliably, is even more fun.

If I get a scope, I may try a Nikon. A nice one is on sale cheap right now.

I can’t try the gun out today. We’re having a flood. It hasn’t been raining long, but it’s raining very hard. Water is rising all over the place. I assume it will go away fast. The ground isn’t saturated. Anyway, I can’t do anything until tomorrow.

Forgot to buy a sling. Where is my mind?

Pray I come back with a good accuracy report. I really need to crack down on these scrofulous rodents.

Deer are for Wimps

Every week, I find new justification for my war on squirrels.

I put a blind in my yard. I sit in it and shoot [at] squirrels. I leave it set up so I don’t have to go through the hassle of taking it down and setting it up all the time. I have been leaving one of my precious plastic red Adirondack chairs in it.

This area was soaked with rain last week, so I couldn’t shoot. Yesterday I went out to resume my campaign of rodent “harvesting,” and when I looked at my chair, I saw rodent poop, bits of acorn, shreds of red plastic, and chew marks.

That tears it. You can slash my tires, toilet-paper my trees, short-sheet my bed, and make me watch Ellen, but you do NOT mess with my Adirondack chairs.

I take back what I said about Ellen. That was extreme.

One good thing about the chair damage is that it assures that I am on solid legal ground, shooting nuisance squirrels out of season. They are damaging my property, and that’s all I need to prove.

I got myself some special squirrel ammunition. It’s called CCI Quiet. The version I bought has bullets that fly into three pieces after hitting a squirrel. The word CCI uses to describe it is “segmented.” The package advertises a low speed of 710 fps, which is about like an air rifle. You can shoot it without ear plugs.

Yesterday I set up some targets to sight my rifle in for it.

I have neat targets, by the way. I think I’ve solved my expensive-target problem. Birchwood-Casey sells 2″ Shoot-N-See bullseye stickers. You get 9 to a sheet.

This is a great product. Most of the time, my shots stay in a 2″ circle, so why am I paying for 5.5″ and 8″ targets? It’s stupid. Now I only pay for the paper I use.

As background, let me say that I’ve been having a discussion on a shooting forum. I withdrew because the thread turned into a loop. I say A, and another person responds with B, thinking he has proven me wrong. I respond with C, proving him wrong. His response: B. I don’t want to read B 300 times.

I was trying to find out whether experienced squirrel hunters thought it was humane to try to shoot squirrels in the head. I shot one in the head three times and still had to stamp on its skull with my boot in order to kill it, so I was highly suspicious of people’s claims that they always went for head shots.

Given their stupidity, squirrels have surprisingly large brains. They are about an inch long. Nonetheless, they are not easy to hit with a .22 unless you prepare and do things right. As I found out, you can hit a squirrel in the head and not even knock him out.

Typically, squirrels get shot with .22 rounds at distances of 50-100 feet. Hitting a 1″ target with a .17 HMR at 100 feet is very easy. A .22 is another story. They’re not very accurate. To be able to hit a 1″ squirrel brain at realistic hunting distances with a .22, you should be able to hit a 1/2″ target reliably when you’re seated and using a rest. It’s harder to shoot accurately while hunting. If you can hit a 1″ target over and over from 100 feet with a typical .22, under suboptimal conditions, you need to join a circus, because you’re a phenomenal shot.

I set my targets up yesterday to see what I could do. I found that the rifle was pretty accurate at around 60 feet. Hitting a squirrel brain was not out of the question. Then I shot at a squirrel at 100 feet, using a chart to allow for bullet drop. He did a backflip, and I figured he was toast. He landed behind a tree where I couldn’t see him. Later, when I went to check, I found no squirrel and no blood. I had missed.

I set the targets up at around 90 feet, and I found that I shot 2″ groups. That’s not good enough for squirrel head shots at 100 feet. It’s not even good enough for body shots.

I looked around on Youtube, and I learned that my results were not bad. I saw a video of some guy shooting the same ammunition from a bolt action .22 (more accurate than my semiauto) with a rest, and his groups were huge, too.

He didn’t shoot ridiculous, misleading three-shot groups. He shot 10-shot groups which actually mean something. Everyone occasionally puts three consecutive rounds into a very small area. It’s meaningless unless they can do it consistently. Shooters don’t talk about this, because 10-shot groups would turn a lot of 1-MOA shooters into 3-MOA shooters.

In the video, the shooter is getting 12 MOA. That’s 2″ at 25 yards. Fine for shooting coons by your trash cans or for shooting squirrels 10 yards off. Useless for my squirrels.

Here’s a shot of his target.

The lines are 1″ apart. There is no way this guy could hit a squirrel brain at 25 yards. If you stapled the squirrel to his target, which is an unusual occurrence in a hunting situation, almost none of his shots would hit the brain.

His aim point was the bottom of the black bar. Assuming he corrected the scope, he would still be putting most shots around the edge of a big circle centered at the point of aim. And predicting the point of impact would be hard at different ranges. At 10 yards, he was pretty much dead nuts on the center of the bullseye, but at 25, he was not only high, but off to the left. I wouldn’t be able to predict that. If I moved up or back, I would compensate for elevation, but I wouldn’t expect big changes in windage.

I’m assuming this guy isn’t a horrible shot. I think that’s true, because his results seem typical.

If I can’t do it, and the guy with the bolt action .22 can’t do it with a bench and rest (really a clamp–a Caldwell Matrix), how are all these other guys doing it while walking around in the woods?

There are two answers.

1. Most of them aren’t doing it. They lie like crazy.

2. The ones who are doing it are using better ammunition. And still lying a little.

You say you only shoot squirrels in the head. Okay. How many shots did you take last year? How many produced dead squirrels with ruptured brains? How many wounded squirrels did you have to chase? How many missed entirely?

How about a simpler set of questions? How many rounds did you shoot? How many squirrels did you bring home?

I think my gun, with CCI Quiet segmented ammunition, is only good for 60 feet. I think it’s good for 100 feet with better ammunition, provided I shoot at the upper body, not the head.

People told me some nutty things. One guy said that if I took body shots, I had to shoot for the aorta, not the chest. I had to point out that I can’t see a squirrel’s aorta. Besides, it’s tiny. It’s probably as thick as a pencil lead. If I can’t hit a 1″ brain, how am I supposed to hit a microscopic aorta I can’t see?

He then said I should aim at the aorta in order to get a good chest shot. “Aim small, miss small.” This is a sound shooting principle. It means you find the tiniest point of aim you can and focus on it. If you miss while shooting at a dime, you will probably confine your shots to a smaller area than you would had you been trying to hit an orange. Unfortunately, this only works when you can see what you’re shooting at. It’s dumb to even discuss it when you can’t see your point of aim.

I can find a squirrel aorta on a squirrel anatomy chart. I can sort of guess where it is on a live squirrel, if he looks at the chart and then poses exactly like the squirrel on the paper. Show me a real squirrel in a typical random squirrel position, and I can’t tell where the aorta is.

Incidentally, someone put up a squirrel anatomy diagram, and it was wrong. Having pulled out a few squirrel hearts, know where they are. they are way up high in the chest. On a person, it would be the top of the sternum, below the neck. The diagram showed the heart down near the belly. The aorta comes out of the heart, so if you put the heart in the wrong place, you also misplace the aorta.

I can’t believe I’m dignifying terrible advice with all this discussion.

It was a poor suggestion. That’s my point. If an aorta is a good aim point, a squirrel eye (which is visible) is even better, but a squirrel eye is not a good aim point at 100 feet, for a gun that can’t be trusted above 60.

If you shoot for the chest, you shoot for the center of the chest. That’s the best you can do, and any hit to the chest ought to do the job. If the bullet goes through the chest wall, you have a kill. You’ll shatter the heart, collapse the lungs, break the spine, tear up big blood vessels, ruin the diaphragm, or so something else that will turn the squirrel off.

I’m not sure what I should do. I like the quiet cartridges, because I don’t want to annoy people who live nearby, but I need to kill these miserable squirrels, and I don’t want them to suffer.

Should I take the scope off? If I’m going to shoot at 60 feet or less, a scope may be more trouble than it’s worth. For really close shots, the scope will make the gun shoot an inch or more low.

I have an air rifle which seems very accurate at 85 feet. I believe I can do head shots with it under 50 feet, and chest shots should work farther out. The pellets are light, however, so the stopping power may be lacking compared to a slower, heavier .22 round.

I could get myself some segmented high velocity .22 rounds, which should be more accurate than the quiet jobs. They will be noisier, but this is a farm, so I don’t really need to coddle the neighbors. Maybe I should stop worrying about the noise. It’s possible to spoil neighbors. I don’t want them to feel entitled to tell me what to do.

The .17 HMR will flat get it done, and range is irrelevant. As long as the wind is low, you will hit what you aim at. It’s noisier than a high velocity .22, though.

I no longer care about saving the meat. Pest control is job one, and butchering every squirrel will slow me down. The .17 HMR may open a squirrel up like a book, but I’m planning to throw the carcasses over the fence anyway.

I’ve learned that the word “accurate” means nothing on the Internet. A person will say a pistol shoots accurately, and then you’ll find out he shoots horrible 4″ groups at 7 yards. You have to see targets in order to judge, and you have to see large samples, not three-shot groups.

The .22 is an extremely disappointing gun for small targets. Clarification: to me, a coon’s skull is a big target, and a squirrel’s brain or chest is a small one. Also, people are completely full of it when they describe their accuracy (“My grandkids never miss golf balls at 50 yards”). Look at how serious shooters do using sleds, and then tell me you can hit a soda can, from the shoulder, every time at 100 yards. You’re a big fat liar. Man up and say it. The .22 is not an accurate weapon. Not in the same world where the .17 HMR and .204 Ruger exist.

Maybe your granddaughter hits the golf ball 50% of the time. Maybe you hit the soda can every third shot. Misses count, unfortunately. If you’re not hitting something 90% of the time, you can’t use the word “reliably” or the word “consistently.”

I understand why people say squirrel hunting is challenging. It really is, unless you use a shotgun. Any fool can hit a deer or a hog. They’re gigantic, they hold still, and they generally stay out of trees. Squirrels are small and jumpy. They sit on the ground. They climb a hundred feet up in trees. They’re hard to spot. The only advantage they give hunters is their abundance.

They’re stupid, too. I should admit that. You can shoot a squirrel in a certain spot and then shoot another 5 minutes later. I don’t know if larger animals will stick around like that.

I think I should put up some targets and see how well I can shoot Golden Bullets and Mini-Mags and so on. Then I should stick with whatever is most predictable. I can save the Quiets for the pistol and use it to blast wounded squirrels at close range.

I may get rid of the scope or even switch to the Nylon 66, which has no scope. Lots to think about.

People should respect my opinions. After all, I once put two .204 rounds through the same hole. I’m a 0.3-MOA shooter.

Mrs. Lanza

Today I am planning to shoot. I don’t know if the weather will cooperate. A highly reliable source tells me Ocala is usually dry in May, but we have had a week or so of rainy weather. It’s supposed to rain like crazy today, but right now it looks okay.

The Santa Fe High shooting is on my mind. I noticed something interesting about the weapons the shooter, Dimitrios Pagourtzis, used. One of them is magical. On the day of the shooting, it was an AR-15 rifle. Later on, it turned into a sawed-off shotgun. After that, it turned into a Remington Model 870, which means it almost certainly was not sawn off.

The Model 870 is a pump gun with a tube magazine. On defense-oriented models, the tube is nearly as long as the barrel. Sawing one off would be pointless and stupid. You would end up with a magazine longer than the barrel. You would gain nearly nothing in maneuverability, and you would expose the magazine to hot gases on their way out of the gun. If the barrel were short enough, it might be possible for pellets to hit the barrel as the pattern opened up.

You can find sawed off 870’s on the web. The magazines are also short. What’s the point of that? A pump shotgun is already a poor home defense weapon because it holds few rounds and is very slow to reload. Why shorten the magazine and make things worse? The Model 870 will hold up to 7 rounds, which is pretty bad. A short version will only hold 5, which is terrible. Cut one down, and you get what? Three rounds? Come on.

My guess: the Santa Fe gun was a legal Model 870 with a pistol grip instead of a buttstock. Journalists are notoriously stupid (and dishonest) about guns, and whoever started the “sawed off” rumor probably didn’t realize “sawed off” only refers to barrels. A true sawed off shotgun has a barrel length below the legal limit. Shotguns also have a minimum legal overall length, but this is not what people think of when they talk about “sawed off” guns.

I am not a great fan of pistol-grip shotguns (except for the great fun you can have shooting watermelons with them). It’s not because you can’t control one. I have been told it’s impossible to control a 12-gauge without shouldering it, but I found that to be untrue in my own experience. I think it can be controlled, but control isn’t the same thing as aiming. The fact that you can keep a gun pointed more or less at an attacker doesn’t mean you’ll hit him. If you didn’t use the bead, you may have been pointing in the wrong direction when you started shooting, so you may be maintaining a bad point of aim as you continue to shoot.

Many people think you don’t have to aim a shotgun. Here is my take on that. I took a Saiga 12 to a gun range, and I fired buckshot at a target 50 feet away, from the hip. It was not hard to hold, and I used a laser, so aiming was not a problem. I made holes around the size of a silver dollar. When your pattern is that small, you need to aim. You can’t just point it in a general direction and expect some of the pellets to hit your burglar. In a bedroom, the pattern would probably be the size of a nickel.

Of course, this was a shotgun with a legal barrel, shooting a type of buckshot that stays pretty tight. Don’t ask me what happens when you saw it off.

It’s actually sad that people think shotguns don’t have to be aimed, because a person who believes that is likely to be killed in a gunfight.

I am not a gun expert, so I may be wrong, but these conclusions are what my common sense provides.

When the shooting happened, journalists were pretty excited. They told us all about the AR-15 Pagourtzis used. Then it turned into a sawed off shotgun, and things got quieter. As a participant on a gun forum put it, the killer used “the wrong gun.”

Are journalists busy retracting the AR-15 nonsense? I won’t check. You can do it if you can. I have my suspicions.

If Pagourtzis used a short Remington 870 and a .38 revolver (the current description of his armament), he had either 10 or 11 rounds in his weapons, maximum, when he started shooting. A .38 can hold either 5 or 6 rounds. Let’s assume the worst: 11 rounds loaded. So he had only 11 rounds to work with, in weapons which are very slow to reload, and he still shot 23 people. Moreover, in spite of not having the supposedly godlike power of the AR-15 on his side, he killed nearly half of his victims.

Shotgun wounds can be extremely damaging. The .38, on the other hand, is not a great caliber for killing. These days, it’s used by old women and people with arthritis. The velocity is low, and the wound channel is not big. Even the 9mm semiauto, which has more energy and whole lot more magazine capacity, is a lot better.

Pagourtzis proved the man, not the weapon, makes the difference. At least when shooting tightly packed, unarmed victims in a gun-free zone.

Press coverage has been relatively muted. RELATIVELY. Obviously, a highly successful mass murderer armed with primitive firearms of types that existed over a hundred years ago does not fit in with the “AR-15 = ‘assault weapon'” mythology. Journalists jumped at the bait, and then they pulled back and decided to reserve their real hysteria for the next AR-15 crime.

Journalists want to go after the low-hanging fruit first, and the AR-15 hangs even lower than the AK-47, which does most of the same things, only much better (face it). They want our revolvers and shotguns, but right now the big focus is on black rifles, which have to be more dangerous, because they look mean.

Journalists have largely ignored another school shooting that took place yesterday. Two people were shot, one fatally, at the Clayton County Schools Performing Arts Center in Jonesboro, Georgia. The shooting took place at a graduation ceremony, following an argument. The graduates were students from the Perry Learning Center, also in Jonesboro. Basically, you can say it happened in Atlanta. That’s the metro area involved.

Why is the Georgia shooting not important? For one thing, no AR-15; not even an imaginary one that later turns into a shotgun. For another…black people. The Perry Learning Center is a black school. Go online and look at the center’s photos.

Most murders in America are committed by black people, and journalists want to keep that quiet, even though most victims of black killers are black. Although they were arrested yesterday, we still don’t have photos of the suspects. When they turn up, at least one of them will be black. In all likelihood, the suspects and victims are all black. Four or more people are involved, and it would not be easy to come up with four white people at an event associated with this school.

No AR-15, no white or Asian shooter…nothing to see here.

Big-time school shooters tend to be white. People who shoot up social gatherings tend to be black. That’s just how things are.

When black people commit sensational crimes of violence, very often, suspect photos take a long time appear. Not true with white criminals. When you Google “graduation shooting georgia suspects,” you get no photos of the suspects, but you do get photos of white Dimitrios Pagourtzis, who wasn’t even there.

On the day of the Santa Fe shooting, I went to town wearing a Smith & Wesson shirt. I was not trying to make a point. I didn’t think about it until the day was over. It just happened to be the shirt I grabbed when I got dressed.

I’m glad I wore it, though, because when you’re right, it’s important not to act like you’re doing something wrong. Conservatives are right about our civil right to own and carry firearms. You shouldn’t hide your beliefs just because an evil person somewhere far away uses firearms to do something very bad.

I used to go to a gun show in Fort Lauderdale. They held it at a building called the War Memorial Auditorium. That gun show is gone now. They have to hold it somewhere else. After the Parkland shooting, near Fort Lauderdale, the organizers of the show agreed to cancel one event out of respect for the victims and their families. Now the people in charge of the auditorium won’t let them return. Is this because the organizers put the idea in their heads with their ridiculous display of submission and false guilt? Could be.

It was the wrong thing to do. If we’re right about 2A before a mass shooting, we’re right while it’s going on, and we’re right the next day. It’s not smart to act like we’re meeting to sell pornography or use heroin. Who will stand up for you, when you won’t even stand up for yourself?

I didn’t shoot up a school. I never will. I’m not the problem. I won’t pretend to be the problem just to make deluded, hostile people like me. Gun-grabbers have already decided to dislike and persecute me. Nothing I can do will change that, but acting guilty can certainly motivate them to keep swinging.

All that being said, it’s time 2A people started pushing people to secure their guns VOLUNTARILY VOLUNTARILY VOLUNTARILY. I use repetition to underscore the point that I am NOT SUGGESTING WE NEED NEW LAWS. In order AVOID NEW LAWS, we should be pressuring each other to keep guns away from nuts and incompetents.

Adam Lanza had a head the size of a grapefruit, his eyes were about half an inch apart, he had full-blown Asperger’s plus unknown personality problems, he had threatened to kill his mother and students at his school, and his mom bought him weapons and stored an AR-15…in a $200 gun “safe” a determined person could open with a spoon. Then she stored it in a computer room next to his bedroom.

I’ll just say it. The Second Amendment is not for everyone. Some people should voluntarily keep guns out of their houses. This woman’s son was very smart, and he was an angry mental defective. When it comes to gun ownership and the Lanzas, the danger to others clearly outweighed the necessity of keeping one family safe. At the very least, she should have had a real gun safe IN HER OWN BEDROOM. Lanza opened her glorified medicine cabinet, entered her bedroom, and put 4 rounds in her skull, long after he had threatened to kill her. There is no way to excuse her irresponsibility.

Why would anyone think shooting was good therapy for an Asperger’s patient who had screaming fits and threatened to kill people?

Shooting is not for everyone. That’s a fact. Ask Chris Kyle’s widow.

You don’t have to do a thing simply because you can.

Nikolas Cruz was another head case. The cops visited him many times before he killed. He put scary things on social media. His guns were taken away. His dad gave them back! Indefensible. What possible excuse could he have had? The danger was clear.

It appears that Pagourtzis was a known nutbar. He went to school every day dressed like a killer from a video game. How could his parents have thought he should be trusted with guns?

Eric Harris, one of the Columbine killers, had a web page where he wrote about killing people. He and his pal Dylan Klebold got guns through private sales, from idiots who didn’t care about their ages.

We pressure each other to stand up for 2A. We pressure each other to vote GOP. We pressure each other to support the NRA. How about devoting a little time to talk to each other about keeping guns away from our crazy relations? A lot of behaviors and beliefs draw heavy criticism in the 2A ranks. We police each other all the time. Somehow, we don’t find time to talk to each other about securing our weapons.

That looks bad. It also invites legislation. If you don’t look after your own house, liberals will come do it for you.

There are lots of people out there who have access to guns in spite of clear signs that they shouldn’t. Parents, siblings, and spouses live in denial. It’s better to have uncomfortable conversations now than to read about our crazy acquaintances on the news.

We worry that the government will pass laws enabling leftist stormtroopers to come in and take guns away from every person who has ever been depressed or suffered from PTSD. Then we fail to deal with individuals we know are dangerous. A person’s personal acquaintances are much better qualified to assess his mental issues than a government goon in a Crown Vic. Why aren’t we trying harder?

Smart people don’t wait for their enemies to address their failings. They get out in front, take over the issues, and decide where the goalposts go. We need to take the gun security issue away from socialists, Wiccans, and ignorant snowflakes.

Will we do it? I doubt it. The NRA would be the obvious organization to put in the lead role, but they would probably see the effort as suicidal.

Anyway, I am going to try to shoot today. If not today, this week. Let’s make hay while the sun shines.

One Bubba’s Experience With the Marlin Model 60

This week’s big triumph: I got my Marlin Model 60 .22 rifle set up so it actually works. I installed an M*CARBO trigger kit, plus sling studs.

I needed the trigger job badly. The Model 60’s trigger is so bad people complain about it all over the Internet. To shoot, you pull it back about half an inch, and then you squeeze like crazy and hope something happens. The factory pull weight is so hard, if you shoot a Model 60 after shooting a normal gun, you may think the safety is on. That happened to me.

When a gun is hard to fire, you will tend to take longer to shoot, and the gun’s point of aim may wander while you’re focused on making it go off. It’s very annoying. I suppose you can overcome it, but who wants a lousy trigger?

There are two outfits that I know of that sell Marlin 60 triggers: M*CARBO and some guy whose Internet handle is Arrowdodger. Mr. Arrowdodger sells the KAT trigger, which is supposed to be the very best. I will never know, because he doesn’t respond to inquiries. I don’t know if he’s ill or what, but I gave up. M*CARBO sells a kit which includes a trigger, a bunch of superior springs that go in the general region of the trigger, and replacement recoil springs.

One of the irritating things about the Marlin 60 is that it is not up to the task of firing hypersonic .22 ammunition like CCI Stingers. It’s 2018, and you would think Marlin would have gotten with the times. They have not. According to M*CARBO, you can shoot Stingers and similar rounds if you use a better recoil spring.

They sell two springs with their trigger kit. One is for hypersonic rounds, and the other is for standard velocity. They claim the hypersonic version will work with standard velocity rounds, so I decided to install it, failing to see the advantage of a weaker spring that only works with one kind of ammunition.

M*CARBO (boy, is it annoying typing that) has excellent videos on its site, telling you how to install stuff. I used the video for the trigger kit, and things went well. One minor thing: you should use plastic tools to remove the E-clips on the gun’s receiver. I used a screwdriver, and now I have tiny scratches in the bluing. These scratches are not visible when the gun is assembled, but still.

I got the gun put together and took it outside. I only fired a few times. I used standard velocity ammunition to make sure the recoil spring worked with it. No problems. The trigger is wonderful. You can tell when the gun is going to go off, and you don’t have to be a bodybuilder to shoot it.

Now I can use a wider array of ammunition, and there is some hope that my game will not run off while I’m straining to shoot.

I needed a sling for the gun. It’s annoying, carrying a gun in your hand all day, and without a sling, you have nothing to wrap around your arm to give support when shooting offhand. I had some studs I bought when I got the gun. Studs are little metal things slings attach to. Many guns come with them. The Marlin only cost $170, so you don’t get a lot of frills.

When I bought the gun, I didn’t know it was hard to put a sling on it.

Ordinarily, you run a wood screw into the forward part of a rifle’s stock, or you put a nut inside the stock and use a stud that has a machine screw for a base. To do these things, you have to have some wood to work with. You need maybe half an inch of wood for a wood screw, and in order to use a machine screw and nut, you need to have at least a quarter of an inch of wood clamped between the nut and the stud base.

The Marlin has a tube magazine, like a second barrel, under the barrel of the gun. This takes up room in the stock, and it displaces the wood you need in order to attach a stud. The wood up front appears to be less than 1/2″ thick.

The classic solution to this problem is very bad. You put a normal stud on the buttstock, and you use a special front stud with a ring on it, to clamp around the tube magazine. This puts a lot of strain on the flimsy magazine. It’s a stupid idea. I wasn’t having it. I decided to use the machine screw stud and nut.

The nut on the stud was about 1/4″ tall. That’s too much. I wanted to have at least 1/4″ of wood under the nut after the installation, and I needed the nut to be sunk into the inside of the stock so it would be out of the way of the magazine. I needed a nut somewhere between 1/8″ and 3/16″ tall, and I needed a counterbored cavity inside the stock for the nut to sit in.

I took a belt grinder and thinned the nut down to a little over 1/8″ in height. I didn’t need 1/4″ of threads to make the stud work. It wasn’t going to be under that much stress. What I ended up with was more than adequate.

I used a 3/8″ Forstner bit to start a hole inside the stock. I couldn’t use a drill, because the U-shaped bottom of the inside of the stock wouldn’t permit the bit to rest flat and stay in place. I held the bit in my hand and turned it slowly until I cut away enough wood to get the bit down on the bottom of the interior. After that, I put it in a drill and made a cavity deep enough to sink the nut.

I took a very small drill bit, placed it in the center of the cavity, and drilled through the stock. I put paper towels and a block of wood under the stock to minimize tearout. This gave me a pilot hole for the machine screw hole. I used a bigger bit to enlarge the hole, and I was all set. The nut fit in the cavity, and the stud tightened up in it nicely.

I still had about 1/4″ of excess screw sticking out into the inside of the stock. I took everything to the belt grinder and slowly shortened the screw until it was below the deck. Sweet.

It looks fantastic, and it works perfectly. Much better than yanking on a magazine tube.

The buttstock stud, which should have been easy, was harder to install. The wood used in the stock is very chippy and teary. I knew that from installing the front stud. I had to drill a hole for a wood screw in the rounded bottom of the buttstock, without ripping up the wood.

The directions said I had to create a 1″-deep 5/32″ pilot hole for the screw, and that I had to open the first 1/4″ of the hole up with a 7/32″ bit. No problem, I thought. I drilled a starter hole with a very thin bit and finished with the 5/32″. Then, thinking I was clever, I used a rotary stone from my Proxxon kit (like a Dremel) to chamfer the daylights out of the hole’s opening. I thought this would make tearing impossible. I was wrong. It tore anyway. Now when you look at the stud, you can see a tiny area of torn wood.

This was exasperating. I did my best to prevent it from happening, and it happened anyway. I should have done the entire counterbore with the stone.

I can fix the tearout with filler and stain, and I guess I will. No one will ever see it unless they look at the picture I took. Lesson learned.

Now I’ll be able to carry the gun like a civilized person. I’ll be able to shoot it with a sling. I’ll have a pleasant experience when I pull the trigger.

This gun has really shaped up. It’s going to be superb. Much better than I had hoped. If you don’t mind tinkering with your firearms, you would do well to get one of these things.

In the end, with a sling and scope, it will be about a $350 .22 rifle. That’s not so bad. I felt great about paying almost that much for a .22 pistol with no additional doodads at all.

It’s going to be a real squirrel killer. It may do well on coons and other things, too.

The wood is gorgeous. It has tiger stripes and swirls all over it. It’s so nice, I am tempted to have someone refinish it to bring out the grain. I’m afraid to do it because I am not good with finishes.

I’m no gunsmith, but I had no choice here, unless I wanted to pay a real smith a fortune to fix up a lowly .22. That was not going to happen. I think I did well. A few tiny scratches no one can see, a tiny tear I can fix, and a new and superior method of attaching a sling to a Marlin 60…I’ll take it.

Now that I have a forward stud, I can use a bipod. One of these days I’ll go out back and see what she’ll do. I fully expect 1/2″ groups at 50 yards. I don’t think I can be highly consistent with 3.5-cent ammunition, but I should do well enough to make rodents tremble. That’s all I’m after.

Hope your shooting endeavors are going at least as well as mine.

Tree Rat Feast

I had to fry squirrels again today. I had 5 in the fridge, and they were taking up a lot of room. I had them soaking in water mixed with salt and baking soda. The soda was there to kill any gaminess. It works.

The first time I fried squirrels, I had problems. I used shallow oil in a big pan, and it was not that easy to get the meat to brown correctly because some bits liked to stick up out of the oil. Today I did what I should always do. I used deeper oil. I put maybe 1-1/4″ of cheap olive oil in a saucepan. This allowed me to submerge the meat.

I cut the squirrels up differently. I divided them into arms, legs, and torsos. I kept the ribs on the torsos. There isn’t a lot of meat on a squirrel ribcage, but there is enough to make it worth keeping.

I didn’t soak the meat in buttermilk. I didn’t have enough. I drained the brine off with a colander, and then I tossed the meat in a small amount of buttermilk and drained it again.

I used the following seasonings: salt, pepper, paprika, chipotle powder, and garlic powder. The ratio was about a tablespoon of each per cup of flour, except for the garlic and pepper. I guess I used half a teaspoon of each per cup of flour.

I put 3 cups of biscuit flour (no leavening) in a bag with the seasonings, and I shook it like crazy to mix it all up. As I was cooking, I would throw one batch of squirrel parts in the bag, shake it to coat them, and extract them with tongs. It worked well but made a mess.

I added a tablespoon or so of bacon grease to the olive oil, and I used cheap olive oil with virtually no flavor. I would never fry anything in extra virgin oil or any oil that tasted like olives. It’s the wrong oil for high heat.

I used a thermometer and tried to keep the frying temperature around 350 degrees. This is important because if frying oil gets too cold, breading falls off.

I made buttermilk biscuits. The shortening was half butter and half bacon grease. I added a little cream to the buttermilk, and I put a teaspoon or two of sugar in the flour just for kicks.

After the last batch of squirrel came out, I used some of the oil (plus more bacon grease) to make gravy. I used the seasoned flour from the squirrels. I also added sage, more salt, and more pepper.

How did it come out? It was fantastic. The meat was cooked pretty evenly. The breading stayed on. The seasonings were right on target. The biscuits were perfect. The gravy was exceptional. I poured the gravy on the squirrel pieces as I was eating them. I had gravy all over me, but it was worth it.

The only complaint I have is that not all squirrels are tender. Some cook up like rubber bands. You can still eat them, but you have to work at it.

I can’t tell a tender squirrel from a tough one until I cook it. I don’t know what to do. My plan is to continue eating the tough ones along with the tender ones until I have a solution.

The brining is a great move. The squirrels had no gamy flavor at all. They were better than dark chicken meat. The taste is a little richer, with nutty overtones. Makes sense, considering what they eat.

The sight of squirrels doesn’t bother me the way it did between the end of the season and the day I found out I was allowed to shoot nuisance squirrels. After the season, they paraded around in front of me every time I left the house, as if they were trying to make a point. They ate my blueberries off my only producing bush. I was powerless. Then I got cleared to take them down, and that’s what I did. I took them down to Chinatown. Now I see them as opportunities for hunting practice as well as cheap meat.

I don’t think I’ll work too hard to exploit them for meat, however. They’re a pain to clean, they stink, and cooking them is a lot of work. I will try to train myself to throw their dead bodies out into the woods.

I gave Maynard and Marvin some squirrel arms. I thought they would enjoy picking the meat off the bones, and it saved me the aggravation of heating up their regular food.

The new trigger for the Marlin 60 .22 arrived. I’m going to see if I can install it now. It may turn out to be a much better gun than I had hoped.

I learned something disturbing about the Model 60. It’s hard to install a sling. The tube magazine takes up room in the stock, and that means there isn’t much wood to hold a front stud. You need to start with around 1/2″ of wood when you install a stud. I have about 3/8″. I think I solved the problem. I bought a stud with a nut about 1/4″ in height, and I ground it down to a little more than 1/8″. The screw isn’t very thick, and in order for a nut to work, its threaded height only has to equal the width of the screw that goes through it. I should be able to recess the nut into the inside of the stock and still have 1/4″ of wood below it to provide support for it.

I don’t want to ruin this stock by splitting it. The wood is beautiful for the price. Lots of figuring. Can’t figure out this wood found its way into a stock for a $170 rifle.

I need to make a hole inside the stock, wide enough and deep enough to hold the nut for the stud. The nut needs to fit tightly in it so the knurling on the outside of the nut will hold the nut still while I tighten the screw that goes through it. What I need is a counterbored hole. It has to be 1/4″ wide inside the stock, and then it has to decrease to about 0.090″ across for the screw.

I looked at various solutions for this, and I think a 1/4″ Forstner bit is the way to go. This is a wood bit that makes cylindrical holes accurately centered around a chosen point. I can drill the hole for the screw, put the point of the Forstner bit in it, and open the hole up, to a depth of around 5/32″.

They make sling studs for tube magazines. They have little rings that use the magazines for support. I don’t want that. Tube magazines are weak. They’re not made to hold slings, especially if you wrap your sling around your arm to steady your aim. I want a sling, but I’m not willing to bend the magazine in order to get it.

I’m wondering just how accurate a cheap .22 can be. I was hoping for 2 MOA, but maybe it can do better. We will see. Once the stud is installed on the stock, I’ll be able to use the gun with a bipod, and that will allow me to test its accuracy better than I can right now. It would be a hoot to have a .22 that would hunt at 100 yards.

Squirrels, pigs, and rabbits are the only animals I can hope to cook until the hunting seasons open up again. I could try armadillos, but the thought of handling and eating an animal that may be full of leprosy is not appealing. There are recipes for coyote, but I’m not Korean. I’ve read that bobcats taste surprisingly good. Could I enjoy eating a cat, even if it tasted good? It would be hard to get used to.

My grandmother ate possums. I just can’t. Maybe some day I’ll work up to it.

In the fall, deer season will start. I like venison. I’m not crazy about it, but it’s pretty good.

If I get the new .22 trigger to work, I’ll blog it. I look forward to having a trigger I can pull without wondering if I’m about to break it.