Grocers Outgun Armed Doofus

Looks like Drudgebart.tv.com is taking over the NRA’s “Armed Citizen” shtick. Today it links to a story about an incident in which the owner of a grocery store successfully drove off an armed nut.

According to the Palm Beach Post, AKA “The Shiny Sheet,” one Marshall Hugo Grant is alleged to have drawn his gun on a grocery manager during some sort of dispute. The manager and an assistant manager drew their pieces as well, and Grant chickened out and ran into the parking lot, firing as he went. The grocery guys convinced him to hand over his weapon, and they held him until the cops arrived. They didn’t have to fire a shot.

Hurray, hurray. Concealed carry works once again. Neither of the good guys was injured, and the alleged crook went to jail.

I can hear the whiners now. “But the problem was caused by concealed carry, because Grant had a gun.” Uh…NO. Grant was not a law-abiding citizen, carrying with a state-issued license. He was just an immature boob who went around with a gun in his pocket, for the sake of pushing people around and being a big man. How do I know this? Because he was charged with carrying a concealed weapon. This is an impossibility, if you have a permit. The store people were not charged, proving their guns were legal.

It’s a perfect example of how privately held guns are supposed to work. A criminal has a concealed weapon, and he uses it to commit a crime. A law-abiding permit holder surprises him with a legal firearm. The criminal loses.

If not for the armed manager and assistant manager, two or more innocent people might be dead today. Instead, the system scooped a troublemaker off the streets. Added bonus: every dirtbag in the vicinity of this store will know about the guns, and when they decide to rob business in order to buy drugs, they’ll cross this grocery off their list. And decent people will know it’s a relatively safe place to shop.

Concealed carry is a wonderful thing. Open carry would be better, but it seems like Sigmund Freud was involved in the drafting of our permit laws, because concealed is the rule. When you go about your business with a weapon at your disposal, you have tremendous peace of mind, because you know the odds that you will be harmed by a criminal are much, much lower than they ordinarily would be. You can’t use it to end arguments or to prevent people from being rude to you, as Mr. Grant should have known, but you stand a very good chance of preventing yourself and those around you from being injured, raped, robbed, or killed.

In self-defense situations, martial arts are a joke. The cops are slow. Pepper spray doesn’t work on drug addicts or people who are really angry. If begging worked, a lot of people who are now dead would still be alive. But the mere presence of a firearm can save lives. It happens every day, countless times, across America. Guns even save the lives of criminals, by discouraging them from engaging.

If you’re afraid to carry, you’re saying you trust a criminal to show mercy, more than you trust yourself to be responsible.

Does that make sense to you?

Gun-violence agitators should be happy, because Grant no longer has a gun, and in the future, he will not be allowed to own one. But if logic appealed to these folks, they wouldn’t be what they are.

Next: Assembling Pipe Bombs While Wearing Mittens

I spent maybe an hour and a half working on reloading today, and that’s all I can take. I had to quit.

I got the dies set up the way I like them. That meant the next job was fixing the powder measure. The manual is a pamphlet. Naturally, it’s useless. You have to look at the powder measure and figure out how it works.

The one thing the manual is good for is reminding you to clean out the copious film of grease Hornady puts on things to prevent rust. This stuff will prevent powder from flowing. So you have to completely disassemble the measure and clean each individual part. With what? Why, with a Hornady product that doesn’t come with the press or the measure, of course! Some crap I would have to mail-order, taking a week and costing ten bucks in shipping. But they suggest alternatives, right? Uh…NO.

I tried what I had on hand. Carb cleaner and brake cleaner left a residue that took forever to evaporate, so I followed up with acetone, which seems to remove it. They even have grease on the funnel part of the measure, which is painted. Go figure. I wish I could describe how hard it is to get a swab into this part of the measure. I’m contemplating duct-taping a shotgun swab to the end of a gun-cleaning rod.

I thought I had the whole thing clean, but when I tried using the measure, my weights went 5.4, 6.1, 5.9…

I took everything apart again, and while I was wiping the little tiny funnel that puts powder in the cartridge, it slipped out of my hands and hit the concrete floor. Naturally, it’s dinged up. Will it affect the powder flow? I’ll find out soon. Maybe I can find a way to buff it out. This is one more occasion for kicking myself for not having a drill press.

Another fun problem has developed. Sometimes the shell plate refuses to drop into place after an operation. It goes about halfway down. The manual–here is a shock–doesn’t address this in its tiny troubleshooting section. There is some vague language about indexing and pawls in there. When the plate doesn’t register correctly, adjust the pawls! How? Hmm…just ADJUST those boogers! So I may have some more trial and error in front of me. I may have to call Hornady.

I can’t find anything in the manual about installing the spent primer tube. I keep looking at the press, trying to find a nipple to attach it to, but I haven’t found it. I guess I’m going to have to start running brass through it to see where the primers squirt out.

I hope the press is durable, because it’s taking a monstrous beating already, and I haven’t loaded a single round.

The recipes are confusing. I keep reading warnings. “Don’t switch primers!” But when I got my loading info from Laser-Cast, it listed a bunch of primers as though they were interchangeable. Hope they’re right. If they are, I paid WAY too much for my primers. I couldn’t get them locally.

Here’s the plan. Laser-Cast 230-grain round-nose bullets. OAL: 1.260″. Charge: 5 grains Unique. Primer: Federal 150. Oddly, another recipe says 5 grains and an OAL of 1.190. That seems like a big difference. The second recipe is from the Alliant Powder site. But it doesn’t specify the type of bullet very well. It just says lead 230-grain target. For all I know, they mean wadcutters.

Here is good news. You don’t really have to seek prompt medical attention when you get brake cleaner in your eye. Don’t ask me how I know.

I’m wondering if I have to measure all my brass. I was hoping the resizing die would make it uniform, but I don’t know. Guess I’ll find out.

The really maddening thing is that I have to test the ammunition, and I can’t do it without a trip to the range. I think I should go ahead and make 50 rounds. I would rather disassemble them and start over than waste a trip to the range. And the damned things ought to work, shouldn’t they? A low-pressure round, in a standard barrel? I don’t think I’m tempting fate, here.

Maybe tomorrow my first completed round will roll into the collection bin. But I would not bet the rent on it.

I Now Fancy Myself Capable of Vocational Training

I’ve been at a friend’s house all day, celebrating the opening of a magnificent new barbecue area. Val Prieto’s neighbor Pat has been laboring for months, carrying sacks of concrete and wheeling in loads of slate, and now he has a fantastic bar and grill setup in his yard. I kept offering to help, but fortunately Pat never took me up on it. So I got the gain but none of the pain.

Tonight I thought I’d write a bit about mystification. This is one of my many, many pet peeves. It describes the process of greatly exaggerating the difficulty and complexity of something, in order to impress people. An Internet source says the idea is to convey the impression that a subject is “unknowable.” That about sizes it up.

Here’s an example. You decide you want to learn how to make toast. And you have a friend with six months of community college under his belt, and he owns a toaster, and you ask his advice. And instead of saying, “Put the bread in and push the button,” he makes fun of you for thinking YOU of all people could ever learn to make TOAST, and then he tells you to give up and leave it to geniuses like him.

Here’s another example. A blogger named Steve, who has a degree in physics and a law degree, goes completely insane and decides he may be smart enough to learn how to make his own pistol ammunition. And he buys a progressive press, on the theory that single-stage presses are slow and–for this type of work–outmoded. I mean, progressive presses cost more for a reason, correct? And he complains that he is having trouble because the press’s manual is a piece of crap. And some people who already make ammunition respond by being as helpful as they can, but others heap abuse on him and tell him how crazy he was to presume to intrude on the purview of the high-and-mighty few, the nearly-GED-having Illuminati of the gun range, the camo-underpants-wearing Knights Templar of 65th-percentile pistol shooting performed with $3500 custom 1911s baptized in Col. Jeff Cooper’s urine…the established reloaders.

Oh, fool. To think that YOU had intellectual horsepower sufficient to entitle you to skip the ten-year learning curve and apprenticeship period and secret handshake aided by case lube!

Please.

You know what we’re talking about here? The kind of thing they teach in vocational school. You know how that works. “Not college material? Right this way. We’ll learn you how to earn fifty dollars an hour running a milling machine.” Dignified, useful work. Skilled labor. Something to be very proud of. But not rocket science. Not the kind of thing they look for on a MENSA application.

It seems like this happens to me every time I try to do anything new. Oddly, I always succeed anyway. Well, except for the times I’ve tried to grow tomatoes. I guess you have to have a research fellowship at MIT to do that.

Anyway, I emailed Kim du Toit about the supercilious cranks who were blaming me for my problems, and referring to his wife, he said, “Connie has a name for their computer systems incarnation. She calls them ‘mystics’ — people who withhold information from others so that they keep an ‘advantage.’ Mostly, these are insecure people.” And I wondered if she was familiar with the term “mystification,” because if not, it’s a truly wonderful coincidence.

I am reminded of one of the reasons we crushed Saddam Hussein’s gigantic army in about a month. It is said that when his officers and soldiers received information that could be useful to people serving beneath them, they collected it and destroyed it. For example, the army would get some high-tech system or other for tanks, and there would be manuals for each tank, and each tank commander would collect the manuals and throw them out, keeping one copy of each for himself. So nobody could break his rice bowl. He would be the indispensable magical negro everyone could go to when the system went on the fritz. He would be Jeeves. His job was secure, and he looked like a genius to everyone above him, and all the people beneath him looked like morons, because they could not do what he could do. So they were less of a threat. The only down side was that nobody could fix anything. And fighting Saddam’s army was a lot like fighting a herd of angry poodles, half of them in heat.

Not to take anything away from the brave combatants who defeated them. I exaggerate for comic effect. But let’s face it. Pound for pound, Saddam’s troops were pretty sad. There are plenty of smaller armies that would have hurt us much, much worse.

When I take on new skills, I am trying to improve myself. Has that occurred to any of the reloading Operating Thetans? Has it occurred to them that I’m not trying to steal their blinding glory? That my efforts to enlarge my own capabilities are not a direct attack on their status as ballistic deities? I very much doubt it. Clearly, my sole motivation was to emasculate the amazing people who have stunned humanity by learning how to shove a piece of lead into a brass cylinder.

I have a nutty idea. It’s bizarre, but hear me out. My idea is this: when someone has the gumption and the industry to put himself out in order to learn something new, maybe the correct thing is to try to help.

No, it’s too crazy. The world isn’t ready for hubris like that.

I can’t rewire human nature. I know it’s useless to complain. People will always be this way. A man who can see a quarter-inch past the end of his own nose is a true visionary.

I’ll tell you this. I’m going to win. You can’t prevent me from learning how to make ammunition. And then I’m going to salt the wound by learning to shoot better than you. Regardless of the fact that Jeff Cooper never peed on any of my pistols. I’ll do it without camo. I’ll do it without patches on my jacket. I’ll do it without target sights. With mass-produced guns. I’ll do it as eccentrically as possible, with maximal violation of the tenets of sheepdom, just to make you wet the bed.

Then you can say, “Man that guy who reloads for all his pistols and shoots twice as good as I do was a damn fool, thinking he could learn to run a progressive press.”

Thanks again, generous people who helped me out. You made things a hell of a lot easier.

As for the mystics, I’ll see you at the range. I’ll be the guy with the shiny Colt with abalone grips.

Short Glock Continues Outshooting Full-Size Guns

I shot fairly well today. Due to my ineptitude with the reloading press, I was not able to produce .45 ammunition, so I shot the 9mm, the .40, and the .357.

I started out with the .357, shooting double-action. In other words, I did not cock the pistol when I fired. I always get double-action and single-action confused. This is a whole bunch of shots at 7 yards. Not sure how many. I had problems because the wind was crazy today. The target kept turning sideways in the holder, and over and over, I had to wait while it was moving around. Really irritating.

I shoot the revolver so little, I actually do better with automatics. You would think the 6″ barrel would give me nicer groups than the dinky auto barrels. No such luck. But I enjoy shooting it. I don’t like the little Hogue grip. I ought to shop for a bigger one. I think the grip is intended for carry, which is a little silly on a revolver the size of a framing hammer.

Here’s the second bunch of shots. The target was still spinning and rocking. Trail Glades won’t let pistol shooters use multiple bullseyes, so I decided to make up by own by shooting at the little crosses on the target. I put 15 rounds into them, cocking the gun before firing. Oddly, I shot better when I didn’t cock the pistol. I went clockwise, starting at top left. You can see I got better on the way.

I like this target because it’s good except for a few flyers. I think it shows I was making changes that helped.

I got out the Glock 26 and steel-cased Wolf ammunition and put 50 rounds into this target at 7 yards. I cannot believe this gun. God help anybody who tries to harm me while I’m carrying it. It shoots beautifully.

You can see how much the target twisted. Look through the hole, at the guy several stations to my right. You shouldn’t be able to see him.

I decided to try the .40, and here are the results. The 9mm shoots better for me, and it’s much shorter. Go figure. My shooting improved as I worked on the lesson I learned last week, i.e., squeeze with the weak fingers first. And I’m working on getting a more symmetrical sight picture. I assume target sights leave less room for the front sight to wobble around in a big empty notch, but I don’t actually know. I made up my own second bullseye again, at top left.

By that time I was pooped, so I left.

There were some old guys with FBI hats shooting today. They all shot well, but one was just scary. I realized that I was looking at one of the great blessings of life in America. This guy was at least 75, and he was probably one of the deadliest individuals in the county. In many countries, or in states with no carry privileges, he’d be weak and helpless. An inviting target. Think of the difference the second amendment can make in a life.

Here’s a T-bird I parked near the other day. Not relevant, but impressive.

I feel like my shooting is still improving, but it’s hard to tell, with this incredible wind that never seems to go away.

I Wish Lieutenant Dan Were Here

It looks like I was spazzing over nothing, RE crimping .45 cases. As readers have pointed out, these cases aren’t supposed to have much of a crimp. I just assumed they needed one, because they looked unfinished. But I took out a sample of the closest thing I have to .45 ammunition–.40 S&W–and I saw that the case edges were perpendicular to the barrel axis.

On the up side, I learned how to adjust the die so it crimps. The instructions are completely wrong. I’m sure there is some way to construe them so they work, but I haven’t found it yet. It works like this. There is a sliding deal inside the die which seats the bullet. The body of the die does the crimping. So to crimp a case, you lower the die body until you get a crimp, and then you adjust the sliding thing down until you get the overall length you want.

I ran off a couple of crimped shells without primers or powder, just to see if I could do it. They looked okay, except that I think I may have belled the cases a little too much. If you don’t open them up a certain amount, the bullets may fall over in the cases as they are pushed up to the seating die. Instead of perfectly straight sides topped by a crimp, I got a very slight bulge around the case mouth, just below the crimp. Doesn’t matter, since I have to adjust the die all over again.

Not sure how accurate the OAL has to be. I got it as close as I could, using Vernier calipers. May be off by a thousandth or two.

I was going to try to run off 50 shells today, but I’ll never make it to the range if I do. I guess I’ll take Glocks, since I have ammunition for those.

A reader is taking me to task for being an “avowed fan” of Tucker Max. I get the weirdest comments. Anyone who read what I wrote about Tucker can see that I’m not comfortable endorsing his work. But the guy was very decent to me, when people whose values are more like mine were doing nothing to help me or even working against me. He didn’t know me from Adam, but he took the time to send me a priceless document full of PR tips. And Maddox was helpful, too. And unlike some conservatives I could name, who count every bean and extract payment for everything they do, they didn’t want a single thing in return. Neither of them has ever asked me for anything. So I’m not going to spit in their faces in order to look holy. When my spam book came out, the only conservatives I knew who mentioned it were Lucianne Goldberg and a generous contingent of small-time bloggers. And the same thing is going to happen when the cookbook comes out. At best.

Chastity is part of Christianity, but so is helping other people without demanding anything in return. So is gratitude. Think about that before comment rage compels you to tell me who I should be nice to.

Press Beginning to Function

Okay, here is what I got.

Press station 1: decapping and sizing.

Station 2: priming

Station 3: powder

Station 4: expanding

Station 5: seating

I used a combination of Lee and Hornady materials to get there. I have everything adjusted except for the powder charge and the crimp.

Here is my question. Right now, I’m producing .45 ACP shells with kind of a big lip on them. Should I adjust the seater thing so it crimps them in and makes them pretty?

I’m trying to figure out how to do that, but the tiny pamphlet that came with the die is not all that great.

It turns out my dies are titanium nitride, and the manual says no lube. We’ll see if that works.

Help Arrives

I guess I’m an idiot. This is not news. I thought none of the books I owned were of any use in setting up an ammunition press, but it turns out the handgun chapter in The ABCs of Handloading (or is it Reloading?) is pretty good. So I’m going to give it a shot.

I don’t have any lube for the cases. Damn it. Do I really have to buy lube? Can’t I just use pork fat? I guarantee you, it will cost me a mail-order fee or two gallons of gas to find lube around here.

Store Ammunition Suddenly Looks Mighty Good

I am so bummed out. I got all my reloading crap, and I put together data, and I got the press mounted to my workbench. And it still does not work.

It turns out that the Hornady Lock-N-Load AP manual doesn’t give you unimportant information such as how the press works or how to assemble it. I mean, sure, it has bad diagrams and incomplete and self-contradictory assembly directions and some general suggestions regarding operation, but you can’t take your load data and Hornady equipment and powder and brass and lead and primers and actually DO anything. It doesn’t even tell you the order of the dies the ammunition goes through.

I finally figured out the die order, after spending hours putting the press together. I got a few clues from the manual, and the rest I figured out on my own. Then I ran some stuff through the press without powder, and I managed to ding up the seating die. It may be ruined. Not sure yet. I jammed a bullet about an eighth of an inch too far down into a case, which is a lot. Ruined two cases. Lost a primer. Hey, that die was only forty bucks. Hornady probably saved over seventy-five cents by not providing a real manual.

The documentation says virtually nothing about how deep to seat the dies or how to adjust them. Is there a special, super-premium Hornady manual that contains this information? If so I would like to buy one. I have a reloading book, the documentation that came with the press and powder measure, several mini-reloading manuals that were provided with the press, and the Speer manual. And none of them actually say how to reload. Which, you would think, would be among the topics the manual might cover.

Maybe you have to hire Mr. Hornady himself to come out and tell you how your expensive machine works. Am I crazy, or is it a little weird to sell a complicated machine, in pieces, with a manual that doesn’t tell you how to assemble or operate it?

The first case I put through the machine ended up with a big giant belly in it. The top half was normal size, but the bottom half was much bigger. I kept thinking it was my fault, but apparently, I picked up a piece of stray brass some nutcase had overloaded and blown up. I guess it had been stretched all to hell, and the press only managed to resize the upper half. Or something. I don’t really know.

This is starting to look like one of those activities where you’re supposed to be born into a family that already does it. Like being a sherpa. You want to be a sherpa? Forget it. You can’t go to vocational school and sign up for sherpa class. Either you’re a sherpa or you’re not.

It reminds me of the misery I went through, trying to find basic metalworking and machining courses in Miami. They DO NOT EXIST. I like to be positive. I like to think you can do anything you want to in America, if you have the time, the money, and the ability. But you can’t! It would be easier for me to become a professionally trained circus clown (Sarasota, two hours west) than it would for me to learn to run a milling machine.

People say, “Go hang around machine shops and ask them to teach you.” Uh…are these people from earth? You can’t just wander into a machine shop and hang around. It’s called “trespassing.” It’s roughly equivalent to begging strangers to beat your ass and hand you over to the police. Do you let random strangers wander into your workplace, hang around, and ask you to teach them stuff? NO, I don’t THINK so.

Back when I was getting my physics degree, I took a course in electronics. The text was a classic: Horowitz and Hill. Completely worthless. Because it was sold to beginning students, and it was written so that you could only understand it if you had already learned everything in it. If you were an EE with twenty years at Motorola under your belt, meaningless nerd jargon like “sourcing current” (which can’t be looked up in any dictionary, anywhere) might mean something to you. But to someone who only speaks English, the book was basically a fifty-dollar doorstop. Hornady has revived those fond memories.

That’s what the Hornady instruction manual is like. “We won’t bother wasting your time with actual step-by-step instructions, since you proved you’re an expert by buying our weird, esoteric products. So we’ll just give you a few vague hints and tiny diagrams in which the machine is presented from the wrong angle, and you’ll be on your way. We’ll be happy to replace the parts you destroy while trying to figure things out by trial and error. If you pay us for them.”

If anyone knows what book I was supposed to buy in order to understand how this thing works, please let me know. I am not yet ready to believe that it is only possible to reload ammunition if you know someone who will come to your house and teach you.

Bolted to Workbench!

Even though I went to Home Depot, where everything is hidden or out of stock, I found some lag shields and a two-by-six, and I came home and got to work sticking them in my workbench. At the store, I looked at the package, and it called for 5/8″ holes. I figured I had to have a 5/8″ spade bit at home, so I didn’t buy one.

Guess what? It turns out a foot-long 5/8″ masonry bit makes a fine spade bit in a pinch. I already had half-inch holes opened up, and the masonry bit did a swell job of enlarging them.

The lag shields worked like a charm. Thanks, Ed. The press is firmly attached to the table. I’m a little concerned about how they’ll hold up when I move the press on and off the bench, but I got some spares, so I don’t care.

Incidentally, let’s have a round of applause for Ridgid power tools. They have a lifetime warranty on a bunch of their stuff. Unfortunately, if you throw out the box before applying, you lose the UPC code you’re supposed to send in, in order to qualify. I lost one or both of the UPC labels for my tools (miter saw and table saw), and I contacted Ridgid to see if I could work something out. Today they emailed me and said they had upgraded me to lifetime warranty status on both tools.

“He was Bitter, and Once I Saw Him Carrying a Bible”

You will be shocked, I know, but I now have enough brass, primers, powder, and lead to start reloading. I just have to get my behind to Home Depot and buy “lag shields” and a two-by-six to replace the front supporting member of my workbench.

Reader Ed B. tipped me off about lag shields. I appreciate that.

This is How You Break World Records, I Guess

I set the DVR to record Tred Barta’s Versus Network show, almost out of morbid curiosity. If you don’t know who Barta is, I’ll fill you in. He’s a blustery charter boat captain who rose to quasi-fame as a columnist for Sport Fishing Magazine. His column was always fun to read, although the basic and shameless message was “Tred Barta is quite wonderful and everyone else is a moron.” He also hunts, and Versus airs his hunting and fishing adventures.

I wanted to see what this guy was like, because the things he says are so obnoxious and macho, and because he toots his own horn like he’s being paid by the decibel. And he’s a bona fide nut. He does things like shooting grizzly bears at 40 yards with a bow, which is about as smart as being a White House staffer and looking Hillary Clinton directly in the eye when she passes you in a hallway. Whatever is hardest and least likely to work, that’s what Barta does.

I was prepared to hate him, but watching the show, you can’t help liking the guy. He writes like a two-fisted he-man, but on video, he turns out to be an aging dad with a big belly and an insatiable thirst for chocolate milk. How can you hate a guy like that?

Last night I watched a show in which he took two fathers and their young sons fishing for marlin, off the South Carolina coast. It was hilarious. He made one of the kids sit in the cockpit with him while they spent ten minutes practicing the following drill. Tred yells “right long,” referring to the outrigger line on the port side of the boat. Then Tred points his hand at the rod and says “rod.” He did this over and over, based on the theory that it would help the kid get to the rod faster when the marlin showed up. And of course, the kid thought he was a mental case. And when the fish showed up, Tred grabbed the rods before anyone else could get near them and set the hooks.

They didn’t get any marlin. For some reason they were dragging rigged ballyhoo; maybe that’s a great marlin bait off South Carolina, but my guess is that he would have done better with fast-trolled plastic lures or maybe live bonito. It seemed weird to me. The ballyhoo did exactly what they do here in Miami, which is, attract dolphin. They HAMMERED the dolphin, and nearly all of the fish were big. At least one looked like it was in the twenty-five pound range. Tred was upset because they couldn’t get away from the dolphin and find marlin, but like all kids, the boys were happier catching nice fish often than great fish very rarely.

I didn’t see any evidence that the “right long, rod” drill helped.

Barta wore a ridiculous captain’s uniform while he fished. Khakis with a matching shirt, and the shirt had silly bars on the shoulders. I would feel like a complete idiot in a getup like that, but for a guy who practices saying “rod” over and over, it seemed like the perfect costume. When I fish, I get so hot I can barely stand to wear shoes. If I had to dress up like Ensign Pulver every time I went out, I’d have a stroke. And how do you get blood out of expensive khakis?

The appealing thing about Barta is that he seems to be exactly what he pretends to be. A well-meaning kook. He drinks his chocolate milk and does his rod drills and wears his captain suit with complete honesty. This is what he is. A bizarre and oxymoronic phenomenon: a sincere poser. He has decided not to fight it.

He hates the liberal media and says a blessing before each meal, so score two more points in his favor.

His show is a lot more fun than other things you may see on outdoor shows, like stuffy gun writers shooting hand-fed exotic animals on ranches ordinary people can’t afford to visit.

I wonder if we could get him to put on camo, stand in a hallway, and look the Hildebeest in the eye.

Wouldn’t Surprise Me

I have a pile of bullets on the way from Oregon Trail (the Laser-Cast people). I had a hell of a time getting load data. I managed to scrounge up a few recipes on my own, and I also contacted Oregon Trail, and they kindly faxed me pages from their old reloading manual. The obvious question is, if they have a manual, why don’t they sell it? As is so often the case when I can’t get a product I want, I smell the fishy, fetid aroma of tort lawyers. I’ll bet Oregon Trail has been sued.

Right now I have an opportunity to do some tort work. My father sometimes works with another lawyer, and this guy has a client who wants to do a case on a contingency basis. I could be useful, because it’s an area of law I know a little about. At first, I was interested, mainly to make my dad happy. But now I don’t want to do it.

If the client was looking to make peace, end the defendant’s destructive practices, and get reasonable damages, I could see doing it. But I think the goal here is to get as big a cash settlement as possible. That’s perfectly legal and ethical. But is it the kind of thing a Christian gets involved in?

“Blessed are the peacemakers.” That sentence keeps rolling around in my head. And we’re supposed to be merciful. How do you reconcile that with contingency tort suits? You can’t. No lawyer ever says, “We got a giant verdict, but it greatly exceeds our actual damages, so let’s give some back.” Lawyers are greedy, and so are clients. They take every dime they can get. It may be legal, but it’s not right.

I should have realized this back when I was practicing full-time. I represented clients who wanted all the money they could get, yet when I had opportunities to sue people in my own right, I chose not to do so. I do not like the idea of putting someone under that kind of stress, unless it’s truly unavoidable. The businesses I sued on behalf of my clients were large, wealthy, impersonal, and guilty, and I still feel doubts about the money we got. I’d feel considerably worse sticking it to individuals. I was stupid to do contingency work to begin with. It was a moral mistake.

I’m glad I got out of contingency work, and I am going to have to get out of the case I’m being offered now. I’m sure there is a way for a Christian to make a living practicing law–mediation, maybe–but sticking people up with a briefcase, as though it were a revolver, is not it. People call lawyers “hired guns.” It sounds flattering, but it’s not. It’s something to be ashamed of. Where do real hired guns end up? On death row, in little cells in which the sinks are also toilets. They’re losers. Pitiable people.

Tort lawyers remind me of corporate raiders in that they let other people work to accumulate wealth and create jobs, and then they come in, take it away, and leave nothing behind. They create nothing of value. They only plunder. When you’re a tort lawyer, and you win, you don’t have to show up to help people vacate their offices. You don’t have to help them find new jobs. All you see is that clean, pretty check, when it arrives in the mail. Never mind what it may represent. That’s not your problem, right? The bar says it’s not. The law says it’s not. It must be okay.

I suppose tort lawyers have made some products safer, but they’ve also made them more expensive, and they’ve prevented great products from coming to market. And they stimulate litigation, which is something lawyers are not supposed to do. On the whole, tort law is a disease, and people who participate in it should be ashamed.

I’m glad I figured this out before spending a long career, raking in ill-gotten loot. I could very well have ended up in that position. I’ve done dumber things.

I don’t know if there is any point in fooling with law. I would truly like to continue writing. I used to be afraid that trying to please God would make my writing worse, but that isn’t true. It actually improves it. It makes it smarter and more useful to the reader. I think my voice will change considerably in the future, so I wonder if my existing work will be of any use in selling work that will probably appeal to a different market. But you can’t make moral decisions based on what will or will not sell.

Anyway, I will not be a bottom-feeding tort lawyer. I have done a lot of crappy things in my life; I don’t need to add that to my resume.

The .38 Super Curse Continues

Give me some brass opinions.

I’m eventually going to need more .38 Super brass; I only have maybe 500 cases. And I can forget about scrounging it at the range. No one shoots this caliber. I’m considering “once-fired” brass, which supposedly comes from police ranges. The prices are attractive, and it ought to be as good as my own recovered brass.

Is this a great idea or a recipe for misery?

I Proved It

It looks like reloading is going to work out okay. I drove all over town and learned that shopping for reloading supplies in Miami is a complete waste of time. It looks like there are only two shops here that have anything, and they don’t have what I need. So I’m buying almost everything online, with huge hazmat fees. But it’s still better than paying for factory ammunition.

I had to pay TWO hazmat fees, believe it or not. No one stocks all the stuff I need, so after exhaustive Googling, I gave up and ordered from two vendors. I also ordered bullets from Laser-Cast.

It appears that I will be able to put together 40 boxes of very good ammunition for .45 and .38 Super for around $8.60 per box. That’s an average. Don’t make me break it down. It does not include the gigantic investment in tooling, but that will be partly offset by around three hundred dollars’ worth of free bullets from Hornady.

The tool costs are mostly behind me, and I don’t plan to spend a lot more. So the $600 or so net expense will eventually be defrayed to some extent. I’ll kill about $350 of it on the first batch. I think. It’s hard to find decent .45 ammunition for under $15, and .38 Super might as well be bricks of cocaine. I got lucky and got a good price on my first 600 rounds, but ever since then, I’ve been seeing crap prices. And we never have gun shows any more! What’s up with that?

I hope my figures are right. Once again, I have to state how amazingly confusing addition and subtraction can be, to a person who had no trouble with advanced calculus.

If this hobby still sounds expensive, compare it to golf, which is possibly the most worthless thing you can do with your life. A few years back, I heard my cousins say they were willing to pay over a hundred bucks each in greens’ fees alone, for one day of golf. WHAT? To knock a ball around on a giant lawn and come home with nothing to show for it? Not even a useful skill? Count me out. Fishing is even worse, if you do it right. Begin by spending $35,000 on a used boat in okay condition…well, that makes the point, right there. Once you’re that far in the hole, there is no point in discussing the other expenses, like gear and fuel. You can fish well, or you can buy a second home or commercial property as an investment. That about sums it up. I know freshwater is cheaper.

Of course, now I face the predicted temptation: shoot as much as possible, because THAT WAY I’LL SAVE MORE MONEY! I don’t care. I think shooting 200 rounds of pistol ammunition a week will be great practice and well worth the effort.

It was Starting to Scare me by Making Sense

Today I’m going to drag my behind to Bass Pro Shop and see if they have any reloading stuff I can use. Their online catalog is sad, but they may have better stuff at the actual store. I’ll also see if there’s anything in the Miami phone book, but my hopes are very low. I truly do not want to pay $40 in hazmat fees to get powder and primers, but I suspect I have little choice.

I’m still confused about what I want to do. My original plan was to simulate the feel of defensive loads. However, a lot of people say lower-powered loads are more accurate. And you can learn more about shooting from accurate loads than crazy ones.

Complicating the issue still further, it occurs to me that most people can’t shoot. That applies to reloaders as well as the rest of us. Suddenly, I have no faith in forum posts saying one load is more accurate than another. Judging from what I’ve seen at the range, over 95% of shooters–even regular shooters with tactical accessories and camo pajamas–can’t keep their shots in a four-inch circle at 7 yards. You have to shoot better than that–or use something like a Ransom rest–before you have any right to say what is or is not accurate. Maybe when they say lower powered loads are more accurate, what they really mean is, they just aren’t good enough to shoot loads that are loud or produce a lot of recoil.

I shoot pistols pretty well, and I wouldn’t claim to know which loads are most accurate. In fact, now that I think about it, I don’t think anyone shoots a pistol that well.

Yesterday I was reading up on the Glock 26’s accuracy, after the fantastic results I got with it at the range. And I saw people on the web, talking about how the Glock and the comparable Kel-Tec were equally accurate, and that was when it hit me: they may mean they shoot pie-sized patterns with both. “Accurate” may mean “suitable for hitting fat burglars at close range.” For a person who shoots like that, any difference in inherent accuracy would get lost in the noise.

I’m going to stick with my plan. Around 1200 fps for .38 Super, 800-900 for the .45, and 1300-1400 for the .357. Maybe 1000-1100 for the 9mm. My best wild guess is that ammunition consistency will mean a hell of a lot more than muzzle velocity.

The goal here isn’t tiny groups by any means possible. If that was the point, I’d buy a .22 target pistol and use match ammunition. The goal is to learn to shoot, so I can do well with whatever happens to be available at the time. My assumption is that you don’t learn to shoot by pampering yourself.

I may also get an airgun, if I can find a pistol that shoots really well at 7 yards and costs almost nothing.