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I have been asking myself whether I should write about the recent addition to my family. I don’t want to give cowardly, underdeveloped Internet nuts power over my wife and son. On the other hand, we have strong prayer lives, I can easily (both physically and mentally) kill anyone who endangers us, I’m in a jurisdiction where the police will pat me on the back for it and possibly take me out for ribs, and I feel I owe something to people who have read this blog for years.

Some people have been reading since the beginning, two decades ago. I have gotten to know a few people, even if at a distance. I have prayed for them. I have met a handful. I don’t know if I can call people I’ve never met friends, but if not, some are pretty close to it.

I think this is the first photo I took after we brought him home. It was not staged. It’s amusing, and it should also serve to send a message.

I thought it was really funny. We were extremely sleep-deprived and barely knew what we were doing. We tossed him in the bassinet and started squaring the house away for bed, and a couple of minutes later, I saw I had left him near a carry piece.

Not a problem, since he was not able to rack the slide at that point.

Second photo, equally funny:

He was due to wake up at any minute, and I wanted to shoot some video. I rushed around looking for something to weigh the tripod down. I couldn’t find what I was looking for, and then I saw some bags of .45 ACP handloads. Perfect.

He is healthy. He is happy and peaceful except when it’s time to be changed, and I wear ear protection for that. He really is as cute as the picture suggests. Not all babies have curb appeal early on, and we have learned that it’s a blessing. The staff at the hospital didn’t want to let him go home. I know they give good treatment to every baby, but it was pretty obvious that being really cute bought him some extra favor. They loaded us up with stuff we weren’t supposed to get.

I thought it was a little unusual for a baby to be this cute, so I asked people if it was just my perception as a parent, and apparently he is objectively cute.

The delivery process was a horror. They told us to go in at 4:45 a.m. on a certain day. Then after we had gotten up in the middle of the night, they told us to wait another day. Then they called us in at about 6:30 the next morning. Then they ran the air conditioner all night, and it was 53 degrees outside.

It was so cold, we put 6 blankets on my wife, and her hands still shook. I got the staff to yell at whoever ran the air conditioning, and we got them to provide two electric heaters. I slept in a winter coat with insulated gloves and two pairs of socks. The room warmed up the next morning at about the time labor got into gear. Then it got too hot.

The labor itself was terrible, which means it was normal. For medical reasons, we had to finish without an epidural.

It seemed much worse than it was, because we were both exhausted from lack of sleep and lying in a freezing room. The whole experience should have been much better.

We both had the feeling that the labor process was a crushing ordeal, but later we agreed that the main problem was that we had been deprived of sleep and subjected extreme cold. If she had gone into labor rested and warm, it would have been painful but quick and bearable, and it wouldn’t have taken us several days to get over the stress.

We are getting an acceptable amount of sleep now, although sometimes I start to doze off in a chair, and I make mistakes I wouldn’t make if I were rested.

The baby was 80th-percentile big, but he was not fat. He is heavy. He is now wearing stuff for 3-month-olds. He seems very strong. I thought newborns were like rag dolls, but he wrestles with us pretty forcefully. Yesterday he insisted on rolling onto his side. When I corrected him and put him on his back, he rolled back onto his side instantly, in spite of being swaddled. He lifts himself off his mother’s chest with his arms.

His eyes were very dark when he was born, but today, suddenly, they’re blue. I don’t know what to expect later.

He was hairy from the get-go, and the hair on his head is nearly black and pretty straight.

He feeds like a horse, so no problems there yet. He was supposed to lose weight, but I think he’s going the other way.

He seems to smile and light up when I bother him, which is a father’s duty. Web sources suggest the smile may be from gas, however. He has that to spare. He seems to like us. He appears to have fun sometimes.

For a long time, I prayed for God to give me a house of love, and now I have it, so don’t give up on your important prayers. I don’t think my son will ever have to know what it’s like to live in a dysfunctional home.

That’s about it. Don’t expect a lot of updates. We give our thanks to everyone who prayed for us.

What are They Putting in Brawndo These Days?

What planet did I wake up on today?

News outlets are disseminating video of the DNC’s suspension-of-disbelief-defying chair election. I don’t know what to say about it. I would say it’s like an SNL sketch, only not funny, but that also describes SNL.

You can see some of the antics in the video below. Particularly odd: Dr. Quintessa Hathaway making her campaign speech through song.

Yes, “Quintessa.” Like “Vanessa,” only 4 times better.

Out on a limb here, but I’m betting her doctorate isn’t in medicine, math, or science. Could it be that we have another Ed.D. to go with Bill Cosby and Dr. Jill?

BANG! Am I really this good? Nailed it. Her campaign website confirms it.

Sorry. Impressed myself there.

It could happen.

“You fight on”? What? What does that even mean? Fight what? “Your government”? The Democrats ARE the government. Okay, they lost control of all three branches temporarily, but overall, the government is a liberal institution, and while we may be getting some short-lived relief, government employees outside of the military are overwhelmingly in favor of leftist insanity.

Nothing makes less sense than a leftist who thinks he’s fighting the system.

Except maybe a person who claims retaliation for genocide is genocide. Or, you know…queers for Palestine.

You probably won’t watch the video, but if you do, check out the list of racist, sexist, realityphobic rules for committee member eligibility. Even the people reciting them don’t understand them. If I chose to side with these people, I would literally be unable to do it, because even with a law degree, I would not be able to make sense of the rules.

David Hogg ran for vice chair and apparently won. In his horrendous, self-unaware speech, he expressed his intention to end school shootings through gun control. Oddly, however, this is the same guy who thinks the police should not exist. Evidently, the way to handle crime is to disarm ourselves, give the government the job of defending us, and then disarm the government.

Many of us like to say Idiocracy has come true, but that’s not correct. The characters in Idiocracy weren’t insane. They were just stupid. The DNC is run by bona fide mental cases.

How much worse can things get before Yeshua deports us to heaven? This is becoming too weird to tolerate.

Not-so-Noble Savage

Looks like I will be receiving another .22 rifle, so I’m up to three 2025 guns, and it’s only January.

Go, me. I’m buying guns like Trump is signing executive orders.

Did he really change the name of the Gulf of Mexico? Can he actually do that? Can he change the name of Canada to North Detroit?

He wants to annex Canada. Fine, if we don’t let them vote. Otherwise, AOC or Bernie Sanders will be president for life, and criticizing the taste of hummus will be a felony.

Forget annexing Canada. Let’s force Canada to annex Detroit.

Canada is just a suburb of Detroit anyway.

And Minneapolis. Minnesotans are a Canadian subspecies.

I had a Savage A22. It was not threaded for a silencer. The barrel was too long. I found it difficult to find anyone near me who could alter the barrel, and I was hesitant to try doing it myself. I found out it was impossible to get Savage to provide a shorter barrel, although they make them.

I decided to get a long dial test indicator so I could try fixing the A22, and I also ordered a new Savage with a shorter threaded barrel. I figured threading the barrel would be a fun project and a way to get into barrel threading without destroying anything valuable, but I wanted a new gun anyway. I would make it my primary A22 while I fiddled with the other one.

The new Savage arrived.

It had grit in the threads that connected it to the stock, which was not situated symmetrically around the barrel. I had to use brake cleaner to clean one of the screws, and I still have to clean the other one. I don’t know what the grit consists of. It does not appear to be steel from machining. Could be buffing or grinding grit.

The trigger tested at 5-7 pounds. That’s the adjustment range. Insanely high. I may not be able to find a good solution without buying a $280 aftermarket trigger, which I am reluctant to do, given the gun’s other issues, the lack of other aftermarket parts (and OEM parts), and the availability of better guns.

The gun’s plastic dust cover was broken at the factory.

I have decided to get rid of the gun without even firing it. I plan to sell it and eat the loss. I could possibly change my mind, but this is how I feel now. I have already ordered a new Ruger 10/22 carbine to replace it.

A 10/22 is not a top-quality gun when it leaves the factory, but it is made by a manufacturer that seems to be on top of things, generally. The world loves the 10/22, so there is no end to what you can do to customize one. You can replace the barrel in 10 minutes. You can buy a drop-in trigger that far outclasses the gun and ammunition. There are all kinds of aftermarket doodads.

If you fiddle with a 10/22 long enough, you can make yourself a surprisingly good weapon. This is now my plan.

I’ve already customized a 10/22 Charger, so I know a little bit about the subject. But a Charger isn’t a rifle. Not until Trump kills the pistol brace ban and I can put a brace on mine. Then, yes, it’s a rifle.

I have a trigger on the way. I’ll receive it before the gun. When the gun arrives, I’ll test ammo and adjust the trigger. If the gun is worthy, I may get a good scope instead of settling for the old Vortex deer scope I have lying around.

I’ll get this thing to shoot 1 MOA or close to it at 50 yards, and then I’ll probably be able to resist buying another .22 until my son is old enough to shoot. I hope.

The .22 ammo testing continues. Guess I’ll post target photos along the way.

If I Liked Being Treated Like a Child, I Wouldn’t Have Guns in the First Place

More than once, I have written positive things about Savage firearms on this blog. I have a couple of Savage rifles, and a third one is coming. I have an A22, which is a semi-auto .22 rifle. I like it for a number of reasons, but it fails miserably in one regard: customer support.

I got myself a silencer, so I need a threaded muzzle for the A22. If I want to buy, say, a Smith & Wesson barrel, I can go to a website, place an order, explain nothing to anyone, and have the product sent to my house. I can also buy a barrel nut and a whole bunch of other things. If I want to buy a Savage barrel, well, I can’t. They will not sell me one. They won’t sell me the nut, either.

They won’t sell it to me. They won’t sell it to a gunsmith. They won’t sell it to God himself.

If you want to put a new barrel on a Savage A22, you have to ship your gun to Savage and pay them to do it. Okay, so it costs a little more. No big deal, right? Wrong. They will only give you the same kind of barrel the gun came with. Because…because of stupid, I guess.

The A22 comes from the factory with a variety of barrels. There is nothing dangerous about putting a different barrel on the gun. There is no good reason not to send people the barrels they like.

If Savage were willing to send parts out, people would buy more of their guns. Obviously. When people find out a manufacturer is anti-right-to-repair, they start buying from other manufacturers.

Good luck finding an aftermarket A22 barrel. The A22 is pretty far down on the popularity list, so it’s not like Shilen and Bartlein are scrambling to make barrels for it. There are lots of precision 10/22 barrels, though.

I plan to try altering the existing barrel myself, and if I somehow manage to fail, I’ll put the barrel in a dumpster and keep the rest of the gun for parts. I’m not poor. I can afford to destroy a cheap gun, especially one that is likely to cause me heartburn in the future due to poor treatment from the manufacturer.

Savage won’t send me a target trigger spring, either. And no one else makes them.

A company named Jard makes a high-end trigger for the A22. You can probably find one for about $270 if you look. About the cost of an A22. This is all that appetizing to most .22 shooters. The gun is 3 MOA at best, with a trigger made by the angels in heaven, so doubling the price of the gun to improve the trigger only makes sense for real enthusiasts who have a lot of money to spend.

The A22 has an Accu-trigger, which is a proprietary Savage thing intended to provide an easy, smooth trigger pull. Unfortunately, a lot of these guns have heavy pulls even after the triggers are adjusted to the minimum.

You can put a Savage target trigger in your A22, and it will lighten the pull, but Savage will not sell you the spring because you can’t be trusted with a complicated object like that. To get one, you would have to read off a serial number proving you own a gun that came with a target spring. You can also go to Gun Shack and buy one online, when Gun Shack has them in stock, but that’s about it.

Without a good trigger, the A22 is just an average gun, like a Ruger 10/22, but unlike the 10/22, it doesn’t come with a world of aftermarket parts for customization. Might as well buy an A22 and start customizing. You can rebarrel it. You can buy a new trigger. The sky’s the limit.

Gun manufacturers, unfortunately, tend to end up in the hands of stupid people. Marlin, Remington, and Smith & Wesson collapsed when firearms sales were peaking due to the efforts of the world’s greatest gun salesman, Barack Obama. If you can lose money in a market like that, you should be working for an hourly wage for someone who can do what you can’t.

I guess someone must have sued Savage over a part installed by an end user. They must have a weak-kneed attorney who told them to choke off the supply along with their customer goodwill.

Whatever. I’m all done with Savage.

Whose Past is on my Wall?

Sometimes I really disappoint myself. It’s already January 13, and I have only bought two rifles this year.

Technically, I’ve only bought one. I ordered one in late December and picked it up this year.

I’m pretty sure I’ve bought fewer than 2,000 rounds of ammunition.

The first rifle is a bolt-action .22. The second is a semi-auto. “What possible reason could a person have to buy two .22 rifles in one month?”, asked no reader of this blog, ever.

Last year, I made a tentative decision to cut 5.5″ off the barrel of my Savage A22 and thread the end for a silencer. I had received a .22 silencer, and it would have been cumbersome to have it hanging off a 22″ barrel. I tried to find someone near me who would do the work, but even though this is a huge 2A area, there is nobody. I think people here generally buy off the rack, receive no training, do very little customization, and shoot low-grade ammo.

I did some research, and I think I now know how to modify the barrel myself. I bought a dial test indicator to help me do the work.

I could have bought a new gun and sold the old one, but selling a gun is like selling a child, without the relief over not having to pay for college. Also, I have done a little work on the gun, and I wasn’t eager to do it over on a new one.

I guess that sounds silly. Not wanting to do a little trigger work on a new gun, but being willing to machine an old one. I wanted to learn how to thread barrels, though, so I wasn’t all that bothered by the prospect.

Another thing: it’s pretty unusual for a gun to drop in value. They go up and up and up. It’s almost always better to have an old gun than the money you could get for it.

While I was thinking about all this, I found out that Savage now sells the same gun, with a cute camo stock, with exactly the options I want. It has the short barrel and the threading. And it’s pretty cheap. Surprisingly so. I ordered one.

I figure I’ll shoot the new one and hold the old one until my son is old enough to shoot it. So several months, at least.

I am inclined to try cutting up the barrel anyway. It would be a good experience. If I blow it, I can buy a new barrel.

I should think about my son’s inheritance when I buy guns. If the rapture doesn’t come before I die, and 2A hasn’t been undone, my son or sons will get all my firearms. I should make an effort to leave some nice stuff behind.

My grandfather had some nice guns, but while he was alive, he failed to say who got what, and when he died, I got nothing decent except for a shotgun which actually belonged to my dad. My grandmother gave it to him after my grandfather died. The stuff I inherited from my grandfather is junk.

The worst example? A counterfeit shotgun.

Possibly counterfeit.

At some point after the nice guns had mysteriously vanished, I was given a list of things I could still have, and it wasn’t pretty. One thing that surprised me: no one wanted my great-grandfather’s gun. It had been mounted over a fireplace in my grandparents’ house. The story was that my grandfather tracked down the guy who owned it and bought it from him.

I remembered it as a fairly nice gun with a figured-wood stock.

I asked for it, and I received a double-barreled flintlock shotgun that looked like someone had painted the stock with something slightly nicer than Rust-Oleum. I don’t recall the valuation that was placed on it, but I know it was between $100 and $200. Trash, but for sentimental value.

I didn’t think too much about it. I decided to stick it on my wall.

Eventually, I remembered something from my childhood. I remembered playing with the ramrod from the gun my grandfather owned. It was a rifle ramrod, small enough to fit in a .40-caliber barrel. It was raw wood.

The crummy gun I received has a big, fat varnished ramrod. A shotgun ramrod. You could never get it into a rifle.

I don’t think this gun belonged to my grandfather. It looks like my memories were right. So now I have an almost-worthless gun which apparently belonged to some stranger, and when I see it on my wall, what I think about most is not my grandfather, but the mystery of what happened to the real gun.

Assuming my memories are correct.

Did the gun seller who evaluated the estate’s guns steal it and substitute the shotgun? Did one of my cousins take it home and tell the dealer to claim the shotgun was the one from the estate? I’ll never know.

At least I know why no one wanted it.

Now what do I do? Do I leave it on my wall?

I am thinking I might buy a nice antique Kentucky rifle, prettier and more valuable than anything great-great-granddad had. I have a practice of buying nicer guns than the ones that vanished. On top of that, I have real shooting training, and I make my own ammunition and modify my guns. And I have some excellent glass. I don’t think my grandfather owned a scope.

For a few grand, I can get something really nice, and it will appreciate.

If I had some of received my grandfather’s guns, most of what I would have gotten would have been mediocre. An old Smith & Wesson .357, maybe, with a 3″ barrel. Too heavy to carry; too short for targets. A Marlin lever action in an inferior caliber. A creaky old 12 gauge that can’t measure up to today’s standards. A .32 revolver only a pimp would carry on his person. An Enforcer M1 pistol, which is another item a pimp would like. Flashy, with very poor quality. The American Draco, except a Draco is a good, reliable weapon.

On the other hand, I have some pretty good stuff. Some beautiful 1911’s. A very nice Browning Challenger. A nicer Colt Woodsman than the one my grandfather had. An RPR that shoots 0.5 MOA or better. Some extremely accurate hunting rifles. An AR-15 with a White Oak Armament varmint upper. The Tikka .22 I got recently is infinitely better than anything my grandfather had. I also have some excellent revolvers.

I have a great shooting mat. Rests. I built my own roofed long-range platform which will last forever, along with a heavy-duty bench made from thick-walled 2″ square steel tubing. I fabricated my own gong stands.

I’ll be able to pass on some neat guns and related tools, and I’ll be able to teach my son(s) how to develop loads, mount scopes the proper way, and shoot at 1,000 yards. I don’t think my offspring will be upset about not getting a rusty Remington 550-1 .22 or a lever-action Marlin that shoots 4 MOA and has poor ballistics.

I only got one knife my grandfather owned, and like the shotgun, it came through my dad. One day he told my grandmother he would like to have a knife my grandfather owned, so she gave him one.

It’s a German folder with no lock. It rusts. It was nasty and rusty when I got it, because my grandfather used to cut apples with his knifes. It was dull. I fixed it up, because I’m the only grandson who has the tools for it, but I wouldn’t carry it. He carried junk knives. Street value? Probably $10.

On my own, I got Benchmade. Cold Steel made from CTS-XHP. Lionsteel made from M390. I have a handmade Entrek. Some Spydercos. Gerber is my low-end choice for jobs that might mess knives up. And I have a fancy rig for putting better-than-factory edges on knives.

I bought my son, myself, and my wife engraved Swiss Army knives in Switzerland. Now I have to hide his and mine for 8 years.

I’m not sure what to do with the shotgun. What if it turns out Gramps owned it, and it was in a closet or something when I was a kid? I don’t see any way it could be the gun with the skinny ramrod and the figured wood that I remember. The gun that had a powder horn with it, which vanished with the Marlin, the Remington, the Colt, and the revolvers. And my closeness with my relatives.

My relatives would lie if they were guilty, and they would say the same things if they were innocent. I already know what they would say if I asked about the guns and powder horn, so there is no point in bothering with them. One of the bad things about lying habitually is that it eventually teaches people that speaking to you makes things worse and is not worth the effort.

It would be great to have some heirlooms, but you can also make heirlooms. My grandfather’s dynasty fell apart, but mine can hold up, if we stick with God.

The new Savage should be here in a couple of days. The old one will be good for my son. Although a CZ 457 Scout with a 12″ length of pull would actually be better…

I’m going to stop now.

Cheap Ammo Surprise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“My, How Fat Your Crows Are!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who Was She Writing About?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why did he do that? He paid for them.

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

They didn’t write the obituary.

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

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

There are too many stories about my uncle to tell.

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

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

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

Why the glowing obituary?

I wonder if Mormonism is the reason.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing new there, now that I think about it.

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

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

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

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

If you didn’t pick C, you’re not me.

Actually, I’ve done B and C.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank Goodness the Weeds are Okay

Los Angeles is burning again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Receiving prophets brings blessings. Receiving false prophets brings curses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or used needles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a shame to see so much wasted.

This Cake Isn’t Done Yet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Was it a fair comparison? No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taking the Gas Out of Gaslighters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sako is Finnish, so yay for supporting US jobs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Reckoning Approaches

This was written yesterday.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are worse problems to have.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They drink a lot in Finland.

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

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

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

Deciding which scope to use has been hard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Does it Taste Like a Dodge Wiring Harness?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If I hit anything.

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

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

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

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

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

Knowing him and being with him are what matter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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