Links for Bitter Gun-Clingers

Guns and religion are killing my traffic, but they’re what I feel like writing about.

As always, I’m getting useful comments. Some mentioned web destinations. I was thinking maybe I should put up links that have been useful to me. Here are a few, off the top of my head.

1. The Other Side of Kim (Du Toit). Grand Poobah of all web curmudgeons. Proprietor of:

2. The Gun Thing. A forum, which I am way too lazy to check out as often as I should.

3. Anarchangel. Chris Byrne knows his guns, and he is no slouch in the kitchen. Well, he may slouch. I certainly do. But he IS no slouch.

4. Michael Bane. Big-time gun writer who blogs. Blogrolled me; I guess he didn’t get the memo about real-media people having an obligation to ignore bloggers.

5. John R. Lott, one of the two patron saints of intelligent gun statistics.

6. Oregon Trails (Laser Cast) ammunition. Cheap and accurate, as far as I can tell. If you can’t find load data, call or email them and they’ll fax it. Or you can ask me, since I already did that.

7. 1911forum.com. I hate starting a sentence or line with a numeral, but there it is. Lots of good info from 1911 fanatics.

8. Dan’s Ammo. Cheap milsurp ammunition in big cans.

9. Bud’s Gun Shop. I have never bought anything from them, but it’s a great reference to find out if you’re getting a good price on a gun.

10. Midway USA. Lots of gun stuff.

I’m sure I forgot someone.

Sites mentioned to me today:

1. Cap’n Bob has some gun-cleaning info.

2. Culver’s Shooting Page. Haven’t tried it, but I am told it has a great forum.

Just got off the phone with Mike. If you think it’s fun having ADD, wait until you hear one person with ADD trying to help another person with ADD shop over the Internet. If Dante had known about ADD, The Inferno would have been a few pages longer.

Mike wanted advice on a new 1911. I am no expert, but I tried to find reviews and so on. I love the SW1911, and so does he, but he ended up with five choices. Springfield, Dan Wesson, Smith & Wesson, Colt, and Taurus. I hear great things about Taurus’s current production, but he wants his first 1911 to be a nice one, and I didn’t think he should take a chance. Other than that, I thought he had four choices that were hard to beat, at his price point. People say Colt has QC issues these days, however, and my only Colt bears the rumor out, so I mentioned that to him.

The Dan Wesson Pointman looks really nice. Great reviews. It has a number of good outsourced parts in it, plus a match barrel. And Mike used to have a Dan Wesson revolver he treasured. Some idiot stole the revolver and left the three interchangeable barrels that belonged to it. I told Mike I thought he should buy the Dan Wesson just so I could shoot it.

The other option was the Springfield Loaded. Most people seem to love this gun, but I have read some off-putting complaints, too.

I hope he manages to pick something. Mike without guns…it’s just wrong. If you knew Mike, you would understand.

I remember all the fun we had as kids, sitting on the floor at his house, surrounded by loaded guns. And the times he shot his deer rifle in his suburban backyard. How different life is these days. Our parents would be in jail, and we’d be receiving counseling by tabouli-smelling Wiccans working for the county.

Okay, yes, I suppose it’s a bad idea to ignore your kids while they play with your gun collection. But we survived. I shot a neighbor’s kid in the neck once. But that was only a BB gun, and I apologized sincerely. Mike’s brother used to shoot him with a BB gun just for the joy of it. Clearly I was not as bad as I could have been.

Can’t wait till he gets that gun down here. It’s okay, letting your friends use your guns. But it’s much more fun when everyone brings something to the party.

I have a Caldwell HAMMR machine rest on the way. It’s sort of like a Ransom rest, only cheaper. You clamp your gun in it, and it shoots it for you, and you find out whether your gun is any good. The idea is to avoid unnecessary upgrades to guns that already shoot well. Unfortunately, this may prevent me from buying cool new stuff.

Enjoy the links.