Poodles Everywhere Would Breathe Sighs of Relief

I am still not quite determined enough to quit looking at the news. I saw a few stories this morning. Man, it’s crazy out there. The US has gone certifiably insane, and I don’t think we’re going to recover. I think this is the end. Seems like all we can do is evangelize and try to stay saved.

I don’t know what will happen in November. The utter lunacy of the antichristians is surely scaring millions of people. Maybe enough voters will swing to the right to buy us 4 more years of Trump and conservative federal judge appointments. It won’t mean America is okay, but it could give sane Christians time to situate themselves as well as possible for the pogroms, killing fields, and gulags.

This stuff isn’t the talk of fantasy, nor is it related to far-off events. As of this year, we are officially in the gravity well of the Antichrist. We are sinking quickly into Satan’s singularity of evil.

It was bad enough when you could get fired for saying you didn’t support homosexual marriage. Now people are getting fired for saying things like, “The coronavirus threat was exaggerated.” It proves conservatives were right about the antichristian hype and bias surrounding the disease, but antichristians have never been very concerned about being proven wrong, because logic is not something that concerns them.

If you think they’re vicious now, wait till they’ve spent 4 more years under Trump. When they finally get the White House back, they will be like rocks flying out of a sling. The pent-up energy of years of restrained rage will escape containment like ball bearings from a pipe bomb.

How long am I going to be here? How long will the world be permitted to exist in anything resembling the form we are used to? The age of the Gentiles is clearly over. How long will it take for the end to manifest fully?

I guess it’s okay to buy green bananas, but I would be surprised if Jesus will stay away long enough to let anyone pay off a 30-year mortgage.

I wish I had accomplished more for God. I will be evaluated like everyone else.

The word says Jesus won’t return until the whole world is against Israel. We always assume that refers to a military attack, but does it? The UN is already against Israel. When pro-Israel matters come up, only a handful of countries stand by Israel.

If the Bible says “all nations” will be against Israel, does it really mean every single nation? I will make some people mad when I say this, but sometimes when the Bible says “all,” it really means “most.”

I’m not a prophecy scholar, so I don’t know exactly how things are expected to proceed.

What do I do while I wait? I’ll fool with my hobbies, of course.

I think I have a plan for the AR15. That’s news.

I wanted my AR15 to be a fun target and varmint gun. I put a scope on it and shot some cheap FMJ ammo which ought to produce 2 MOA groups. I got more like 5 MOA, which is smoothbore territory. That motivated me to do more research. Along the way, I read some things I didn’t like too much.

For one thing, I saw depressing things about the 5.56 cartridge, which is what military AR-style rifles shoot. For in actual use, it’s interchangeable with the .223. Many guns, mine included, will fire either round without a barrel change. I read that the military liked the 5.56 partly because it was weak! The idea is that if you wound an enemy soldier without killing him, you take more people out of the battle, because at least one person has to stop fighting to help him. If he dies, everyone else can keep fighting.

I’ll bet this is true. Soldiers have complained a lot about the 5.56 failing to stop enemy troops. It has to be a bummer when enemy soldiers charge you and you’re stuck with a gun designed to not kill them. It turns you into a statistic. Somewhere, a defense analyst is happy with your situation, because even though you may die, overall, the gun you’re using may be more effective in achieving victory for the people who outlive you.

Weak rounds may be great for winning wars, but civilians don’t fight wars. They generally have to shoot somewhere between 1 and 5 criminals, and in those situations, they need their assailants to be incapacitated as quickly as possible. Wounding isn’t enough.

I know murderers who have used the AR15 to kill innocent people have used the .223 (or 5.56) round, but when these things happen, you generally see a very high ratio of survivors to fatalities. Would that happen if they shot M1 Garands?

People who are critical of the .223 call guns that use it “poodle shooters.”

Why do I care, if I don’t plan to use the gun for self-defense? I don’t know. It just seems silly to buy into a specialized pair of calibers that clearly were never designed to solve civilian problems. I can also say it highlights the 5.56’s total unsuitability for hunting anything bigger than a coyote.

The .223 doesn’t seem all that accurate. I should add that. A really good AR15 with great ammunition generally won’t shoot as well as a $350 .204 Ruger bolt action rifle with cheap Fiocchi cartridges. I believe this is true. Feel free to correct me. My .204 Ruger rifle appears to give match-grade performance for a budget price.

I also read about the 6mm ARC, which is the newest hotshot AR15 cartridge. The AR15 has been chambered in a bunch of calibers, partly, I’m sure, because of the problems with the 5.56. Some cartridges have done well, and some have bombed. If the current hype is to be believed, the 6mm ARC is a monumental step forward, and it solves a lot of problems well.

It’s better for self-defense because it’s much harder on human beings and obstacles than the .223 or 5.56. It’s better for hunting because it will kill deer and bears reliably. It’s better for varmint hunting because it’s crazy accurate. It’s better for long-range shooting because it’s powerful beyond distances at which the .223 poops out.

What’s the drawback? The only one I’ve seen is that it takes up more room. A 30-round magazine full of 6mm ARC rounds will be larger than a .223 magazine. I don’t really care about that. I’m not going to be carrying 20 magazines up and down hills in Afghanistan.

The 6mm ARC has more recoil than the .223, but not a whole lot more.

If it’s really what people say it is, it sounds perfect for me. I can get a new upper and some magazines, and I’ll be all set. I’ll be able to shoot deer, if I ever get around to it. It will be great for target shooting. It will work fine on coons and coyotes. It would probably tear them up pretty badly, but who cares if a coyote has a closed-casket funeral?

The big problem right now is that 6mm ARC ammunition is expensive, for no good reason. I can’t find any ammunition not made by Hornady, and Hornady charges a lot. I’ll bet Fiocchi will make an excellent version for less, but it hasn’t happened yet. If I got my upper, I would have to wait weeks or months to see ammunition below 90 cents per round.

If I do this, I can keep my .223 Wylde upper and use it to shoot up my stock of .223 in good time. I have some tiny V-Max cartridges on the way, and I think they would still be useful even in a post-6mm-ARC future.

I think the smart move is to get an 18″ barrel of very high quality and try 6mm ARC out on the berm.

I can also get a .204 Ruger barrel for my gun. That would be interesting. It’s far superior to .223 for shooting little pests. It would do everything I want .223 to do, better. If I had a .204 Ruger barrel, I could just sell my .223 ammo. Why would I want it? It’s slower and less accurate. It hits harder, but I would have 6mm ARC for that.

I ordered better .223 ammo 9 days ago, and UPS says it has been sitting in Salt Lake City for 4 days. Not normal. I feel like I can’t make a decision until I’ve tried this stuff.

If 6mm ARC and .204 Ruger work out, I can put two nice uppers or guns together and then forget all about the AR platform. I’ll have my AR experience, I’ll have the performance I want, and I won’t have a good excuse to buy anything else from the realm of Stoner.

The New Crazies Make me Miss the Old Crazies

Today I had fun mowing my yard in a T-shirt and a shoulder holster. And pants. Then I came indoors, made hot dogs, turned on Youtube, and found out Seattle had been taken over by leftists with AR15’s.

Okay.

By the way, something seems to have gone wrong with hot dogs. I am not a big hot dog eater, so I’m not an expert, but I’m pretty sure they used to be a lot bigger. I picked some up at the store the other day, and no matter which brand I looked at, they all resembled pink noodles. I grilled a couple of Ball Park bun-length hot dogs yesterday, and when I added the requisite ketchup, mustard, relish, and onions, the meat disappeared. I can only guess how awful it would have been had I gone to a full-throttle chili-cheese-slaw dog.

Let me digress from my digression. Smoked sausages are the best hot dogs. Unless maybe bratwurst counts. A Hillshire Farms smoked mystery meat cylinder is actually a lot thicker than hot dogs used to be, and it tastes a lot better, too.

To digress even further…”bun-length” hot dogs??? Isn’t this a blatant admission that most hot dogs are too short? It looks like they shrunk the dogs lengthwise even before they went after girth. Now they’re selling length back to us, like they’re doing us a favor.

This tyranny has to end.

Slob cooking tip: when grilling hot dogs for one, nuke them first. Then they’ll be nice and hot in the middle, and you can grill them a lot faster. Just burn the outsides a little, and you’re off to the races.

So. The exact thing I predicted has happened, except that the rioters are white, not black, and the authorities are in favor of it.

The other day I pointed out that there was a huge danger BLMtifa nuts would realize they could take over cities, and when that happened, we would be in big trouble. Not “we,” really, because I live on a farm surrounded by wonderful people and zero targets of leftist interest. But still.

I figured black rioters would be the culprits, because they have gigantic support from huge ghettos. It didn’t occur to me that white lesbians and man-bun-sporting baristas would beat them to it.

Seattle is a very white city. Less than 10% of the population is black. Compare New York with 25%. Even with the huge white and black exodus and Latin influx, Miami is almost 20% black. Chicago checks in at around 30%. Black people like cities. They just do. But they don’t like Seattle. Maybe it’s the rain.

The takeover includes City Hall, and one of the rioters’ demands is that the mayor, who looks like someone on the editorial staff at Cosmopolitan, resign, immediately. Not one to take this lying down, the mayor says…wait, she agrees completely. I think. In any case, she is on the news forcefully defending the people who put her in the street.

She may not have a good answer to the problem of displaced people and illegally seized property, but she has pinpointed the true source of all of Seattle’s ills. Of course, I refer to Donald Trump. Obvious?

Why do I call these people rioters, given that they don’t seem to be very violent at the moment? Look, if you take over a city using semiautomatic rifles, it’s a riot. It may be a nice, polite, Caucasian-heavy riot, but it’s a riot.

It’s a wonder to behold. I knew white liberals were suicidal, but it’s still amazing to see them self-actualize.

There are a lot of weird things about the takeover. When did leftists decide it was okay to carry AR15’s openly? When did they even decide it was okay for AR15’s to exist?

Part of me wants to cheer them on for buying rifles, because it will be hard for leftists to keep throttling our civil rights if they’re also carrying guns. But capturing cities is not really consistent with the intent of the non-trans cis men who wrote the Second Amendment.

Here’s something weird: leftist crazies can legally carry rifles in Seattle, which is insanely off to the left, but I can’t do it here in Florida, where we are constantly under attack for our “loose” firearm laws. How did that happen?

I’m allowed to carry openly in two places: my home and my business, which, sadly, is my home. It’s really one place. That’s all I get. And I can’t permit you to carry openly on my property, in case you’re wondering. Of course, I would let you do it, if you’re a friend, but that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t be committing a felony.

I saw a fascinating video by a guy in North Dakota. He calls himself Tiborasaurus Rex, if I spelled it right. Weird guy. I thought he was just another grumpy dad bod with various beefs he wanted to air, but I looked at some of his old videos, and I saw a young military-looking guy teaching viewers how to be snipers. Is it really the same guy? It’s terrible what a few years and some kids can do to you.

I’m kidding. You can’t spend your whole life living on the edge and looking like a recruiting poster. Sooner or later, you will probably find yourself wearing Crocs and driving a minivan.

This is why they always kill the girl before James Bond marries her.

Anyway, he apparently lives near a town called Dickson, which is across the state from–you guessed it–Minnesota. BLMtifa terrorists decided to send rioters to various small towns in North Dakota, perhaps because they thought they were good places to commit violent crimes and take selfies. Soft targets, they must have thought.

Oh, you didn’t hear about this on the news? Amazing!

The folks in Dickson knew they were coming, so they got out their guns and invited some bikers. When the BLMtifers showed up, they were greeted with a wall of barrels, more or less. The local mall was completely blanketed in parked Harleys. The people of Dickson must have realized that stealing TV’s was always high on the BLMtifa agenda. You can’t protest from the heart when you don’t have Ultra 4K on the wall in your mom’s basement.

According to Mr. Rex, the BLMtifers packed up and went home without damaging anything. Total buzzkill.

He says he sat at a table in a local restaurant and listened to BLMtifers planning violent crimes and thefts. He said they even planned rapes. He says they were intercepted outside a bank they intended to knock over. For the cause. Hey, lattes and American Apparel shirts aren’t free.

What he said was highly disturbing. It shows how dangerous and cruel these people are. They’re no joke. Well. They ARE a joke, but they’re still very dangerous.

What would have happened had Mr. Rex and his friends lived somewhere else? Exactly what happened somewhere else. There would have been looting, beatings, and fires. Fortunately, he and his friends had the full cooperation of the police, and with their help, they not only kept their town safe; they made a name for it so BLMtifa will be very afraid to return.

Seattle, now…that’s another story. It’s BLMtifa paradise. But it’s relatively safe because the population is mostly whites and Asians who don’t want police records to prevent them from getting jobs at the Genius Bar.

I’ll tell you what I wonder. How are small-town Floridians supposed to be safe if we get arrested when we show up to deter BLMtifa with rifles? How can we help the police if open carry is a crime? It’s illegal to carry a rifle openly, and a concealed weapons permit doesn’t cover rifles, so it’s also illegal to carry openly.

What have we learned?

1. BLMtifa now knows it can take over cities.
2. Leftists may respond to BLMtifa aggression by apologizing and asking what they can do to assist in their own destruction. This feeds back into observation 1.
3. Open carry is the immediate answer to BLMtifa threats in small towns.
4. Open carry won’t be possible in Florida unless the cops issue statements waiving arrest in exchange for help.

One city has fallen. How long will it take for the next one to surrender? Of course, you could say places like Compton, Overtown, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Chicago’s south side already exist in a state of perennial surrender. I grant you that. But when will we see blatant, Seattle-style takeovers spread, with more violence?

I would love to be a fly on the wall, watching girls in short haircuts waving rifles telling Seattle…ites? What to do. They’ve declared their area to be a “cop-free zone.” Okay, so that means you can do anything you want there, right? Probably not, because people would be going in and taking their property back. So if the short-haired ladies are not permitting that…wait for it…aren’t they…the POLICE?

What if someone resists them? Will they shoot? Will they get out the cable ties and pepper spray? How do you restrain suspects–people accused of eating meat or whatever–without force? What if they kick you or punch you? What if they grab you by your blue mohawk, pull your head down, and rain blows on your skull? Do you just walk away? Do you knock them down and kneel on them for 9 minutes? One wonders.

There is a musical called Pippin. It’s about Charlemagne’s son. It’s not all that historically accurate, because Charlemagne’s father was named Pepin the Short, and while he did have a son named Pepin, the son who succeeded him was named Louis. But let’s go with it.

In the play, Pippin gets all soyed up and woke, and he finds his father’s harsh treatment of his subjects reprehensible. He murders him and takes over, eager to show how nice life is under an enlightened king who loves chick flicks and walks on the beach. Of course, he finds he has to be tough in order to prevent everyone from taking advantage of him. Things come to a head when he tells the leader of a besieging army he wants to begin a new day of peace, joy, hot yoga, and pointless sham recycling. The leader sends word that he agrees wholeheartedly and will depart. As soon as Pippin sends him his severed genitals.

At this point, he pulls the knife out of Charlemagne, who magically comes back to life to say, “I told you so.”

In a truly dark country with heartless, despotic rulers, change may be a good thing, but here in the US, every insurgent who gets anywhere will eventually have a Pippin moment. It’s like the first time you open your mouth and, to your horror, hear yourself say something your dad used to say.

Maybe I shouldn’t take such a lighthearted tone, but what else can I do?

Since I appear to be predicting the future successfully, appling a mystical gift known as the ability to perceive the obvious, I’ll say we should expect more takeovers with a more violent, race-tinged (i.e. hostile to whites, Jews, and Asians) flavor. If it doesn’t happen during the current wave of insanity, it will happen during the next one. I’m not sure the current one will end, though. It may be of of them “new normal” deals.

I foresee people using cyberspace to rule through mobs. We are not quite at the point where that would be a slam dunk. Maybe the bread needs to rise a little longer. Maybe America will succeed in getting the current crop of babies to take their pacifiers and nap for a bit, and we’ll see them return with more power when Skynet gets its fingers into all of us sufficiently deeply.

I could totally see Google and Facebook working to make that happen. I’m sure there are Google kids talking about it already. If I’m smart enough to see true technocracy on the horizon, people who actually work for social giants must have seen it years ago.

They saw it if they read my blog.

If you don’t know the Holy Spirit, you better introduce yourself. You’re already way late for boot camp. You can’t save yourself, and the government will either be unwilling or unable to help. You need to know someone who can surround you with favor and tell you where to move and what to do.

Sometimes You Just Have to Troll

I spent a lot of yesterday learning about AR-type rifles. Now that I have two of them, I need to be up to speed. I guess I’m trolling, but the more I learn about these things, the more I think they’re like Porsche 911’s.

Porsche invented a very ugly platform about 80 years ago: the VW Beetle. It was fine for poor people who wanted to get to work, but that was about it. They turned it into a sports car, it had lots of handling problems, and instead of admitting they screwed up, they continued making rehashes and claiming the problems were actually virtues. It seems like the AR works the same way.

It’s nothing like the 1911. John Moses Browning made it nearly perfect, and it is still wildly popular a century later. Just like his .50-caliber machine gun. Just like his lever guns. Just like the Hi-Power. Just like a bunch of stuff he created.

As for the AR15, I’m not sure where to start.

Okay, how about this? AR15’s are still not too reliable. Enthusiasts will say, “THEY ARE, TOO! YOU JUST HAVE TO MAINTAIN THEM!” Okay, well, I have a whole bunch of other guns which go off reliably every single time whether I clean and lube them or not. Some of those guns, like the AR15, are civilian versions of military rifles. If they don’t require nannying, and the AR15 does, isn’t it fair to say the AR15 has a problem?

I like typing “AR15” more than “AR-15,” by the way. I don’t care if it’s wrong.

When I bought the other guns, no one gave me special lessons on how to keep them working. No one said, “If you don’t want your AK to bind up, you need to use this special grease on the gas tube.” No one said, “Once a month, you have to scrub your K31’s bolt with toothpaste.” I just put ammo in them and fired away.

When I bought my AR15 from the manufacturer, which had ample reason to give me the impression it was reliable, the guy who sold it to me took me all the way over to the accessory display and told me I had to buy a very unusual wire brush for cleaning the chamber. He said reliability problems were almost always caused by failure to clean the chamber.

He expected his product to not work, and he was doing damage control in advance. The manufacturer!

On to the next issue. Can someone explain the charging handle to me? Who puts a charging handle directly in front of a shooter’s face? How is that smart? Pulling it back with the left hand is very awkward, and you have to move your eyes off your target. Also, I’m not an engineer, but it sure looks like the handle could be fired into a shooter’s face if it caught on the bolt carrier.

How about the bolt assist? This is a device that helps you ram your cartridge into the chamber when it doesn’t want to go. The very existence of the bolt assist tells me Mr. Stoner knew there was something seriously wrong with his gun. An AK-47 doesn’t have a bolt assist. A Ruger 10-22 doesn’t have a bolt assist. I have to wonder if there is any gun on earth, apart from the AR family, that has a bolt assist. If Stoner chose to put this weird device on his gun, he must have known the gun was going to give people problems.

Today I learned there are AR15’s without bolt assists, and you can even get one with the charging handle on the side of the receiver. I must not be the only person who thinks something is amiss.

The AR15 has a little projection on the receiver for the purpose of knocking spent casings away from your face. What does this tell you? It tells you the gun originally shot hot brass into people’s eyes, and the answer was to put a bump on the gun so the brass could slam into it, remove some paint, and bounce off into the grass. That seems strange to me. I have no other guns with brass deflectors. Amazon sells a special pad you can glue to your brass deflector in order to keep the brass from eating your AR’s finish.

The word “kludge” means a clumsy solution to a problem. A kludge fixes the symptom, not the disease. Most repairs made with duck tapes are kludges. Duck tape is the Excalibur of kludge artists. The brass deflector on an AR15 is a kludge, and the special brass deflector protection pad is a kludge on a kludge. It’s a second-order kludge.

I’m going to put electrical tape on my gun. Duck tape is the wrong color.

What else? AR triggers are bad. Not mediocre. Bad. You can say this is because it’s a military weapon, and they chose reliability over accuracy, but if that’s the case, why does a K31 have a magnificent trigger? Lots of guns, including military weapons, have nice triggers fresh from the factory.

What about the AR’s incredible, unparalleled usefulness for self-defense? Unfortunately, it does not actually exist.

Let’s say someone breaks into my house, intent upon stealing the growing collection of parts I discarded in order make AR-style weapons work. If I have a choice between my $800 (base price) AR15 and my $400 AK-47 with cheap steel-cased ammo, which will I choose?

Wrong. I’ll choose the AK-47. Here’s why.

1. Reliability. The AK-47 WILL go off. No question about it. I dont have to clean it. I don’t have to oil it. I don’t have to buy just the right ammo. It’s going to shoot every time I pull the trigger. Won’t the AR15 go off, too? Probably. I estimate the chance of a malfunction at one in several hundred, as compared to one in thousands for the AK-47. I have had guns fail to fire, many times. It’s a real thing. If the odds are one in 500, that’s just too high when my life is on the line.

2. Better terminal performance. The .223 round or 5.56 or whatever is great, but it’s easier to stop than a 7.62 soft point and it won’t penetrate things like walls and furniture as well. If you’re in my house without permission, I want to be able to hit you wherever you are, no matter what you’re wearing. If I have to shoot through a chair, I don’t want to worry that the hard parts will save you. If you’re standing behind a wall, I want to know that I can kill you through two layers of drywall. The AK-47 is just plain better for these jobs.

People say the AR15 is more accurate. I put this to the test this week, and I got 5 MOA, which is abysmal. I can add a $250 barrel and fix it, I guess, but as of this moment, the gun appears to be no more accurate than an AK-47. But that’s a side issue. What if the AR shot 1 MOA and the AK shot 5 MOA? Who cares? Inside 100 feet, shooting at a large, i.e. human, target, 5 MOA will do just fine. Before people got all excited about accuracy, hunting rifles typically shot something like 4 MOA, and people were very happy to use them on deer.

So if I need to defend myself, the AR15 gives me less reliability, the same capacity, less ability to incapacitate, and no more accuracy.

“You can tune your AR15 so it’s just as reliable as an AK-47!”

Here’s a question no one will be able to answer: why?

It reminds me of what people say when they want to convince you cats are real pets: “My cat is just like a dog!” Why didn’t you just buy a dog, then? No one ever says, “You’ll love my dog! He’s just like a cat!” This is true for the same reason no one ever tries to make fake vegetables from meat.

Of course, my AR15 is not set up for personal defense, so if I had a home invasion, I wouldn’t care about its problems any more than I would care about my .38 Special’s problems. If it had any, which it doesn’t. I’m not going to use either gun to defend myself.

I’m no expert, but I think the AK-47 is still way better than an M-16 or similar gun on the battlefield.

I can hear people gasping.

Okay, the AK-47 is still more reliable than the M-16, after decades of trying to fix the latter gun. It’s cheaper to produce. It’s much easier to operate. You may have a problem with the heavy 7.62 ammo. Fine. Make AK-47’s in a different caliber. It has already been done.

Even with the heavier ammo and the slightly reduced accuracy, the AK works just fine up to 300 meters. With a different cartridge, couldn’t that be extended? The cartridge is the whole reason the AK doesn’t hold energy at longer distances.

There are a lot of things I don’t know, and maybe I’ll feel totally differently in a year, but this is how things look to me right now. It will be interesting to look back and see how my opinion has changed. If it does.

Would I still buy AR rifles if I had it to do over again? Yes and no. I would not have an AR10, because there are bolt guns that do the same thing better for less money. I would definitely buy the AR15 again, and I will explain why.

It’s fun. I think this is the reason most people buy them. When you buy an AR15, you enter a world of modification and problem-solving which is very enjoyable. If the gun actually worked when you bought it, you wouldn’t have any of this fun. It’s a blast picking out and installing parts to get different results. I guess it’s like buying an old leaky Harley and making it run right.

The gun is also very versatile. You can change the caliber. You can change the barrel type. You can try new triggers and optics. You can turn your AR15 into a defensive gun, a pig-hunting gun, a target rifle, or just about anything else.

If you own an AR15, you become part of a sort of club. You get opportunities to talk to other AR15 owners, mostly about fixing the gun’s problems. It makes you feel more like part of the firearms “community.”

It’s a toy. That’s the bottom line. It seems to be a very flawed weapon, but as a toy, it’s hard to beat.

I could see rigging one gun up for targets and varmints and another, in 6mm ARC, for deer and long-range shooting.

I just can’t imagine defending myself with one. A Glock would be better. A Glock would go off.

AR15-armed intruder: I HAVE YOU NOW! I’LL JUST CHARGE MY $3000 DANIEL DEFENSE AR15, LOOK THROUGH MY $1500 RED DOT SIGHT, AND PULL MY $250 GEISSELE TRIGGER! WAIT! WAIT! IT’S NOT IN BATTERY! HANG ON WHILE I BEAT ON THE BOLT ASSIST!

Me, armed with $400 AK-47 and cheap Russian ammo: BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

AR15-armed intruder: [hacking and wheezing] I got it in! Now you die! I will RAIN tiny bullets on you! BANG! [casing sticks in chamber]

Me, armed with $400 AK-47 and cheap Russian ammo: [mag swap] BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

AR15-armed intruder: [gurgling] I…I spit at your rifle! Rack-grade…surplus…

Me, armed with $400 AK-47 and cheap Russian ammo: [mag swap] BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

The M-16 and similar guns seem to be awfully popular with armies around the world. Is that because they work, or is it because America arms a lot of people? I don’t know. Googling around, I see a lot of “experts” who still criticize AR guns. Some say H&K has a much better offering.

The complaints about Vietnam-era guns are well-founded. I just read an article that said “80 percent of 1,585 troops queried in 1967 had experienced a stoppage while firing.” The article says many stoppages involved failures to extract. When this happens, your spent (or live) casing is stuck in your chamber. You can’t just eject it and start shooting again. At best, you’ll have to shove a rod into your gun’s barrel and knock the round out. This may not work, and you may have to take the gun to an armorer with special tools.

Eighty percent!

Failure to eject still happens today. There is a Youtube video of a guy whose round was so tightly ensconced, he had to use a special fitting to connect a grease gun to the barrel so he could force the cartridge out with high pressure. When it emerged, it hit a wall and made a deep hole. It was jammed in the rifle pretty good. Has that ever happened with an AK-47?

Imagine how you would feel if RVN soldiers were converging on you, and a casing got stuck in your chamber.

I’ll just publish this and let it ferment for a year. Maybe I’ll come back and say I was wrong about everything.

Doubt it.

Ballistics Just Were not Complicated Enough

I’m finally able to carry a full-size automatic while wandering around my property. My Galco Miami Classic II holster arrived.

Until I started looking at it, I didn’t see that it was the same holster I already had for the subcompact Glock. I could just use one holster for both. They have different weights and lengths, however, and adjusting them is difficult, so I decided to have one set up for the Glock 20 and another for the Glock 29.

The Glock 20 is a far superior weapon. It holds almost 50% more ammunition, making it nearly 50% better. The added capacity is more than enough to make it much better than the smaller gun. It has the advantage of being somewhat more comfortable to hold, and it has a longer sight radius, but those things don’t mean nearly as much as 5 extra rounds per magazine.

The big drawback to the shoulder holster is that it has to be adjusted carefully in order to allow the gun to be drawn without a lot of yanking and dancing. It also requires a lot of breaking in before it can be trusted to release a weapon.

It will never compare to the $5 pocket holster I use with the subcompact. That thing lets the gun go instantly and reliably. But the shoulder holster gets things out of the way, and it holds two spare magazines. It also looks nice and could make a useful impression on potential intruders. Open carry is legal on my own land.

Now that the 29 has a Crimson Trace laser on the grip, the Miami Classic will not snap shut on it. The retention strap is obstructed by the laser. I have to decide whether the laser is really a good idea. It works beautifully, but it would require me to cut up my shoulder holster, and it bruises my thumb when I shoot more than a few rounds.

Do I really need it? The gun has night sights, and I’m not the kind of person who needs a lot of help with accuracy. It’s a nice tool, though, and what if I were in a situation where I couldn’t use my usual grip on the gun? That could happen. I might have to use my left hand or something. The laser would make it very easy to aim effectively.

I have some leatherworking skills. I could cut the holster to fit the laser without completely ruining the appearance.

I haven’t decided whether to put a Crimson Trace on the Glock 20.

I’ve been trying to figure my AR15 problem out. I’m just about sure yesterday’s terrible accuracy was not my fault, so the gun or the ammo has to be the problem.

A reader offered a helpful comment about barrel twist. A rifle barrel will turn a projectile 360° in a certain number of inches. Barrels are rated according to that number. For example, a 1:9 barrel has a one-in-nine-inch twist. Different projectiles need different twist rates. A big projectile needs a fast twist to give it a lot of spin, but a small projectile can have problems with too much spin.

What do “big” and “small” mean? I’m not sure. Traditionally, people have said heavy bullets need fast twists and light bullets need slow twists, but I’ve been reading a site that says length is what really matters. Longer bullets need more spin because they’re harder to stabilize. Heavier bullets are usually longer, so people think heavy bullets need more spin. This is the argument.

I don’t know what’s true. As a physicist, I would guess that length is what matters, because a long object will have mass far from its center of rotation, and that mass will have a large effect on rotational stability, so there has to be increased angular momentum (provided by spin) in order to fight any torques that come from that mass.

My barrel has a 1:9 twist, and the sort of bullet it’s made for is not clear. Different “experts” say different things. I saw a source that said it was fine for 55-to-68-grain bullets, but other sites disagree.

I was shooting 55-grain bullets when things went badly. I am guessing, but I don’t think a 1:9 twist is so far off it could account for shooting 5 MOA.

Of course, I am learning these things after spending money too quickly. I ordered a bunch of 40-grain cartridges for the gun days ago. After learning about twist, I was concerned that my non-returnable 40-grain bullets might have been a waste of money.

Not so. I have found out that a gun like mine with a 1:9 twist can shoot the 40-grain bullets I bought with incredible accuracy.

An old guy on Youtube bought the same ammunition and shot it through a gun with a 1:9 twist, and he shot four rounds that made holes that touched each other…at 200 yards. He had some flyers, too, but they were also extremely close to the four adjoining shots. He couldn’t figure out why cheap ammo with the wrong bullet weight worked so well for him.

If the bullets I bought won’t shoot, it won’t be because I have the wrong barrel twist.

I decided to get some 50-grain and 55-grain ammo of the same type, just to see what the story is. I won’t try smaller bullets because I read that really tiny bullets can fly apart and disappear when they spin too fast. They literally disintegrate in front of you while you shoot.

For anything up to the size of a coyote, 40-grain bullets are jim dandy, and light bullets recoil less, so I figured they were a good choice. Now I don’t know. It’s not like the maximum recoil from an AR15 is bothersome, and heavier bullets could be better for some things.

I don’t think any of these bullets are good for self-defense, because they do a subpar job of going deep into large creatures, but the gun isn’t intended for self-defense.

If I can’t get this gun to work, I will talk to the manufacturer. Maybe they’ll take a look at it and find a problem. I’m not too worried about it, because I always thought I was likely to replace the barrel. If it turns out the OEM barrel just isn’t that great, and it’s not bad enough for a warranty replacement, I’ll recrown it myself to see if I can improve the accuracy. After that, if it’s no better, I’ll get an aftermarket barrel and whatever AR15 tools I need to install it.

Sooner or later, we will see this gun shoot 1 MOA at 100 yards. That is for certain, God willing of course.

Learn from my Bad Example

God changes lives with supernatural revelation, and he has been very generous with me lately. He gave me a compound revelation this month involving my attitude.

He showed me that I need to be much more reluctant to complain. I’ve had a lot of bad experiences in cultures where people were pressured to bury their heads in the sand, and I have come to love exposing the truth, but I haven’t done a good job of separating exposure from pointless bellyaching or from reviling or ridiculing. Revealing the truth is very important, and it’s very important to do it in situations where it will destroy your popularity, but you can’t let yourself obsess on what is wrong or let it become an excuse for giving up too early.

It’s good to say, “I hear a noise coming from my front end, so I need to have my bearings checked.” It’s bad to say, “I hate this car. It’s always letting me down. Why can’t I ever have a car that works right? Other people have good cars. I can’t believe this is happening again. I’m so sick of this thing.”

You have to appreciate what you have and what happens to you.

Here is what God has shown me: you have to have what I call an immigrant/orphan/warrior attitude.

Consider immigrants who move the USA. I know many of them are curses to us. Many come filled with hostility toward us. Some perform acts of terrorism. Some expect us to mold ourselves to their toxic, backward cultures, which they themselves fled, instead of adapting themselves to our superior culture. Many come here out of pure selfishness. All those things are true, but I’m not suggesting we be like them in those ways. I’m suggesting we be like them in our appreciation of what we have.

I read an anecdote about a visitor from Russia. This person kept telling her hosts how wonderful the USSR was and how inferior America was. She could not shut up. Then there was a trip to an American supermarket in the winter. The critic looked around at the packed shelves and the fresh fruit and vegetables and started to cry.

That individual appreciated a blessing I have enjoyed every single day I’ve spent in America. I, on the other hand, feel deprived when my local store doesn’t have the exact cut of choice beef I want to buy or the right brand and variety of tomatoes for pizza.

Consider orphans. Many are hard to place, so they get stuck in orphanages for years, or they go from one foster family to another. They dream of having their own homes, with siblings and parents. The rest of us don’t feel much gratitude for situations older orphans pray for every night.

My family did me a lot of harm, but at least I had a family. My bills were paid, and we never had to live in a shelter or even an apartment. My mother was wonderful. I knew my grandparents. I knew my aunts, uncles, and cousins. Both of my parents left me inheritances. My family damaged me more than most white American families, but it also did me a great deal of good.

Think about warriors. When a warrior in a superior force goes into battle, and enemy soldiers start shooting at his position, he doesn’t say, “I am cursed. These people should have given up as soon as they saw us, but they’re trying to kill us anyway, and now I have to go through a miserable battle.” A warrior expects conflict. It’s what he trains for. He sees it as a normal obstacle he has to pass in order to get to victory.

The other day I bought a new stove. My old primitive stove was very hard to clean, and it only had 4 burners. I was reluctant to cook because it was so difficult to get the stove back in order afterward. I found a great induction cooktop at Home Depot for something like 45% off. I measured the existing stove, and while I couldn’t get at the cutout in the stone counter to measure it, I made a reasonable assumption: because appliances are standardized, a 36″ induction cooktop would fit in a cutout made for a 36″ conventional cooktop.

I got the old cooktop out, and I found that the cutout was 3/8″ too short. I had expected the switch to take about 30 minutes. Now I was looking at hiring someone or buying unfamiliar tools, making the new cuts myself, and enduring a long, messy job. I also learned that the manufacturer had not included some brackets for supporting the new stove in a stone counter. I’m talking about two small pieces of steel plus a tube of glue. Should cost about 10 bucks. In fact, these things should be included in the package with a stove that retails for $1800. I looked online, and the price for the “kit” was about $135.

I felt defeated, and that’s ridiculous. I knew it was ridiculous. I apologized to God even while I was feeling defeated. I rejected the feeling.

I said I knew the stove was going to fit. Victory was already mine. No doubt about it. I wasn’t experiencing defeat. I was just having a setback. I was blessed with an $1800 stove for which I paid about $1000, I didn’t have to use cash to get it, I got free delivery, I didn’t need help removing the old stove, I was sufficiently handy to know I was going to be able to get the cutout enlarged, I was putting it in a beautiful kitchen in a magnificent house in an extremely pleasant county in the United States of America…what possible excuse was there for feeling cursed and defeated?

I didn’t have a warrior attitude. I had a snowflake attitude. An Antifa/BLM attitude. I knew it. I hated it. I refused to continue in it. I asked God to help me.

I knew that on the other side of the work and the mess, a fantastic new stove was waiting. The new stove has a top which is a continuous sheet of glass. Cleaning it after a messy cooking session takes less than 5 minutes. It has 5 burners, one of which is gigantic, which is a nice feature. It’s much, much faster than gas, conventional, or radiant cooking. It won’t work with certain cookware, but I can get new things, and I have additional portable burners anyway. When I’m not cooking, the surface functions as temporary counter space.

God was blessing me like crazy. Feeling defeated and wronged was not just incorrect; it was offensive.

I made a terrible mess when I installed the cooktop, but a tradesman would have made the exact same mess. Instead of getting a new stove for $1800 plus maybe $500 in installation costs, I got it for $1000, no cash left my bank account, and I learned a lot.

Along the way, I found out I didn’t need the expensive tube of glue and sheet metal brackets.

The Bible promises us victory over and over. It doesn’t say we’ll never have to fight or that things will go exactly the way we want. Victory is not the same thing as lack of conflict. When we win wars decisively, we still have to fight, and we still lose people. No one with any common sense says that makes us losers.

Sometimes God has shown me what it’s like to deal with me and my bad attitude. I have been in situations where I’ve been in charge of people who were doing various things. If you have employees, or if you have hired people temporarily, you’ve been there. I have dealt with people who whined and complained. I have dealt with people who stood around conversing instead of working, while I, the one who was paying them, worked. I’ve dealt with people who were so slow and lazy, they were literally much slower than I would have been had I done things alone. I’ve experienced resentment from people I was paying. I felt I was being punished for giving them money.

When I was slaving away as an armorbearer at Miami’s Trinity Church, I worked a couple of Richie Wilkerson’s Rendezvous meetings at the Fillmore Theater on Miami Beach. People volunteered to help the armorbearers. We were there mostly to manage crowds. I had a lot of experience, and I was in a position of authority. A young black man was part of my team.

I set things up the way they were supposed to be, in cooperation with the other armorbearers. Then this young man decided he was in charge. He started moving cordons and changing the way traffic flowed. He started telling me how things were going to be set up, as though I had volunteered to work for him!

His ideas were inept and would have caused problems. I immediately moved things back, and I told him I was running the team. I said if he wanted to help us, he had to follow orders.

He got so mad, he walked off and quit. He could not understand that he we were not equals on the team. It was impossible to explain this concept, which 98% of human beings chosen at random would have understood without being told. No one on the team could figure him out.

I never interacted with him after that. I forgot his face. I don’t know what happened to him. Another young man from the same area had also volunteered, and he could not have been more helpful. He kept making sure he was doing what the team wanted him to do. He never complained. After the conference was over, we would always wave at each other in church and converse a little.

I’ve dealt with a lot of people who could not submit, honor, or appreciate. I have often shown similar attitudes toward God.

If someone is willing to pay you and advise you when he has other options, and you make him miserable, he’s going to limit what he does for you. It’s just not worth it when you have to be treated like you’re imposing. On the other hand, when people have a good attitude, it makes you grateful. It makes you want to do more for them and to be more closely involved with them.

Surely we punish God when we aren’t grateful and respectful, and surely he responds by holding back our blessings. Surely he must increase our blessings when we have better attitudes. I believe there are things I wanted which God kept from me, and now I believe he will provide those things because I will reward him instead of making him wish he had a better son to work with.

Here is something Jesus said:

A certain man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came and sought fruit thereon, and found none.

Then said he unto the dresser of his vineyard, Behold, these three years I come seeking fruit on this fig tree, and find none: cut it down; why cumbereth it the ground?

And he answering said unto him, Lord, let it alone this year also, till I shall dig about it, and dung it:

And if it bear fruit, well: and if not, then after that thou shalt cut it down.

When you’re push-starting a car, you don’t push forever. If it doesn’t start to run eventually, you quit pushing.

Every day, I need to see my blessings as though they were new. When I get in my car, I should feel as though I were driving a new car off a dealer’s lot. When I sit in my air-conditioned house, I should feel as though I had been living in a tent in insufferable heat all my life. When I eat and drink, I should feel as though I had just been rescued from a month in a lifeboat. I live in a world where billions of people don’t have the good things I have. I could easily be replaced with someone more grateful.

That’s what happened to the Jews. I’m not talking about replacement theology. They are still God’s chosen. But if you read the Bible, you will see that they got in trouble over and over for taking God’s blessings for granted, and in the end, most didn’t appreciate the greatest blessing of all: their messiah. So most of what he offered went to Gentiles. Now, of course, most Christians take God and his blessings for granted, so we’re in the same boat.

I believe this revelation is extremely powerful and that it will bring me things I couldn’t get before. I pray, and I have faith, but faith isn’t everything. How effective can faith for a result be if God knows you’re going to make him wish he had never granted your request?

I’m astounded when I look back and think of all the blessings I’ve spat on and ruined. My education is an example. I barely did anything in high school, but one of the world’s best universities sent me a letter, asking me to apply. When I was accepted and my parents paid my tuition and expenses without hesitation, I didn’t appreciate it at all. I behaved like a character from the movie Animal House. I thought the administration was my enemy. I thought drunkenness was cool. I made trouble.

I wish I could go through high school again. I went to the best school in Florida. I could have focused on math and science. I could have gone to MIT or Caltech. Even Columbia, the school that accepted me, was a top-notch STEM school.

I know I couldn’t have done much better as things were. I didn’t know God, and I truly was cursed. My family was a constant source of discouragement and pain. Things didn’t go well even when I did things right. But if I had known God and had a better attitude, I would have excelled.

I know people who were thrilled to be able to go to community college. I know people who were thrilled to go to state universities. I know people who have student loans. I had a full ride at one of the best Ivy League schools, and I resented it!

I can’t complain about mowing the yard. Most people don’t have a yard. I can’t complain about doing bookkeeping and taxes. Most people have no money to manage. It’s amazing to me that I ever complained about cleaning up after my pets. Who chose to buy them? How many people are there who would love to have two beautiful exotic birds who love them?

I have to remember that regardless of what happens while I’m here on Earth, I have victory. Under the worst circumstances imaginable, which are nothing like my actual circumstances, I would still be saved when I died. The rejection and problems I face here are like the heckling and reviling Cubans used to experience when they chose to move to America. People would spit on them and call them worms. The speed bumps I deal with are temporary and unimportant, and they precede blessings that will make me forget them.

I think my new outlook will improve my life tremendously, so I want to tell other people who make the same mistakes I did. I hope someone else can make the change earlier and have a better life than the one I’ve had.

I see Why the Viet Cong Loved the AK-47

I had my first negligent discharge today.

Actually, that’s not true, and there is more than one reason.

First, I shot my house once when I was a teenager. So what happened today was actually my first possibly negligent discharge since becoming an adult.

Second, I knew the gun was likely to go off at the wrong time, so I held it aimed at the ground while I was fooling with it.

Negligence is the absence of due care, and I did take measures to prevent problems before the discharge, but I didn’t fire the gun intentionally, so it’s not like it was a normal discharge.

Should I call it an accidental discharge?

I was shooting my Thompson/Center Venture in .204 Ruger, and I was having a hard time getting the bolt to close. This gun has not been fired much, and it’s very tight. I noticed that the natural thing to do was to put my ring finger and pinky inside the trigger guard while trying to shut the bolt. It was hard to remember not to do this. I came up with a safety strategy, in case I touched the trigger at the wrong time. When I had trouble with the bolt, I aimed the gun at the ground. I got so frustrated trying to close it, I forgot about the trigger for a fraction of a second, and the gun reminded me.

According to web sources, accidental discharges take place when you pull the trigger on purpose at the wrong time, and negligent discharges take place when you fail to observe one of the 4 safety rules. It looks like I had a negligent discharge.

I love the .204. It’s a wonderful rifle, but I have to figure out what’s going on with the bolt.

The safety won’t function unless the gun is cocked, and you have to run the bolt to cock the gun, so you can’t just engage the safety and then close the bolt.

I guess the answer is to sit on the couch and operate the bolt a thousand times to loosen it up. And maybe there is something in there that could use some filing.

The Venture was the second gun I shot today. The first was my new CORE15, which is an AR15 with a 16″ barrel. The AR shooting went very badly.

I bought this thing last week, and I got a moderately priced scope with it. I also bought Norma Tactical .55-grain ammunition to get me started. This is the ammunition I used today. I knew it probably wasn’t fantastic, but I assumed it would be good for maybe 2 MOA. Today, I would say I shot more like 5 MOA. I had no idea where the shots were going to land. Things seemed to get better after the first 40 shots or so. Maybe it took a few rounds to wear the new off the bore. After that, things improved, but only up to a point.

Now I don’t know whether the problem is the ammunition or the gun. Frustrating. I’ll have to see if there is ammunition other people do well with.

The trigger is great. I would be very surprised to learn that the barrel can’t beat 5 MOA. I’m pretty sure I can do better with a .22 and Mini-mags, so the AR15 has no excuse.

I wonder if Fiocchi cartridges with V-Max bullets would help. In the .204, they appear to be extremely accurate, although I’m not positive, because every time I start to get the .204 working, something bad happens, and I have to quit. Last time, the ridiculous battery that operates the scope died. This time, it started raining. From what I’ve seen, though, it appears one-hole accuracy is easy at 60 yards. Actually, I was shooting at 58 yards. I wanted to shoot at 50, but there was shade at 58.

I don’t know if .204 is inherently more accurate than .223. I haven’t been able to find good information. I do know my Venture is guaranteed to produce 1 MOA 3-shot groups at 100 yards, and my AR15 isn’t.

It’s somewhat amazing that you can buy a relatively cheap .204 rifle with a guarantee like that and an adjustable match trigger and then shoot it well with cheap factory ammunition, but that’s how it is.

If .223 is not inherently less accurate, then I ought to get 1 MOA with the AR15 and Fiocchi ammo, unless the rifle itself fails to get the best out of cartridges. If .223 is less accurate across the board, the manufacturer can point to that and claim not to be at fault, but if .223 is not less accurate, then T/C is just plain shaming the folks who made my AR, which cost twice as much and still came with a mil-spec trigger.

As luck would have it, I have a crate of V-Max .223 ammo on the way. It got stuck in a UPS hub in Oregon for two solid days, and now it’s in Salt Lake City. I need to try it as soon as it gets here.

I also need a shooting table. I thought I didn’t, but I do. I thought my folding Home Depot table was actually better than a dedicated shooting bench, but today I learned I can move the aim point of my scope down about an inch must by resting my left hand lightly on the table. I had not seen that before. I got very good accuracy with my .17 HMR using the same table, but maybe that was luck.

I have to take the flex out of the table or get a new bench. I guess I could put a piece of plywood or something on the table under the gun. That would be somewhat aggravating. More stuff to carry. I could preload the table somehow, but again, more stuff to carry.

If the table is flexing when I put my hand on it, it may also be bouncing when the gun fires. For all I know, that could move my point of impact.

The flexing didn’t bother the .204 at all, and it’s heavier than the .223. I don’t really know what’s going on. Flexing can’t be a good thing, though.

Should I just be a man and spend for a prefab table? Arggh.

My rest is not great. It doesn’t have enough vertical travel. Maybe I should get a big bag instead. I’ve never used a front bag, though.

I wish things had gone more smoothly today, but they did not, so tomorrow I’ll just have to adapt. Hopefully, I’ll master the .204’s bolt. I can’t wait for the V-Max .223 to show up.

Doing Things Right Feels Weird

Today I installed LaRue MTB-2S triggers in my AR15 and LR-308.

These guns are based on military rifles, not target guns, so they come with military-style triggers which are probably good for shooting terrorists but not much good for hitting small things at substantial distances. The standard thing, for people who care about accuracy, is to buy aftermarket triggers.

As far as I can tell, the most respected trigger manufacturer is a guy named Geissele, and believe it or not, that name rhymes with “precisely.” It’s not “gazelle.” Geissele triggers cost something like $250. LaRue triggers used to cost that much, but for some inexplicable reason, the company decided to give them a price that more accurately reflected the ease and low expense of making them, so you can buy them now for $80. It looks like LaRue is making genuine high-end triggers for almost-reasonable prices.

Even at $80, they are probably making a ton. Think of all the complicated steel objects, including entire rifles, you can buy for $250. “They have to charge a lot because they don’t sell a lot of triggers.” I can sense commenters typing that. Okay, have you ever heard the phrase “America’s favorite rifle”? It’s not the Ruger 10-22. It’s the AR15. It should be possible to sell a lot of AR triggers. My guess is that if the manufacturers don’t sell many, it’s because they charge too much. If I sold shovels for a living, and I charged $300 each, I would not expect to have high volume, either.

Maybe trigger makers have to charge too much because they charge too much.

This is just me and my guessing, based on what appears to be obvious.

FYI, Cabela’s sells Ruger 10-22 rifles for $230, triggers included.

Let me give a more apposite example. Cabela’s sells Savage’s match-grade, adjustable Accutrigger for $249, and they throw in a very nice A22 semiauto rifle.

Seems to me the AR trigger guys should be able to do very well with lower prices.

I started off with the AR15. Basically, you isolate the lower, pop the trigger pin out, remove the trigger, remove the grip, remove the safety, pop out the hammer pin, remove the rest of the trigger group stuff, install the new stuff, and have a beer.

I was very impressed when I took the CORE15 rifle apart. Here’s something I noticed: the big screw that holds the grip in place is hardened steel or something close to it. It’s a slotted screw (BAD), and slotted screws are easy to strip, but because the steel is so hard, it still works.

Someone at the CORE factory must have been fed up with stripped screws.

It’s extremely obvious it should be a socket head cap screw. Why isn’t it? I’ll go out on a limb and guess. Back when Mr. Stoner made his first AR15 in his dad’s garage in 1852, all he had was a slotted screw, and by God, if it was good enough for him, it’s good enough for every easily triggered Stoner fanboi today!

If that’s not the explanation, then there isn’t one, because slotted screws are simply wrong for this application. Not “less suitable.” Wrong. To install a pistol grip on an AR, you have to feed the screw through the long hollow handle and into a hole at the top of the grip. With a slotted screw, you have to depend on luck to get it through the hole, and the screwdriver WILL slide out of the screw while you’re tightening it. You could put a socket head cap screw on the end of a big Allen wrench, and it would stay on the wrench while you inserted it in the hole. Then the wrench would stay in the screw while you tightened it.

CORE used a very high-quality screw. Which is still the wrong screw. They also put something resembling Loctite on it, which is nice.

The finish on the interior of the gun is beautiful. I have yet to see a rough edge.

LaRue includes two new pins for the trigger, and they thoughtfully put dimples on the ends so punches won’t slide out and scratch the daylights out of guns. Neither of my two guns came with dimpled trigger or hammer pins. The CORE has a dimpled pin for taking the gun apart, though.

I used a Real Avid bench block to hold the gun up while I banged on the pins. I found out Real Avid makes a huge bench block just for AR-type rifles. That would be nice to have in the future. The little block I have now is wonderful, though.

I installed the new parts in the wrong order, so I had to remove the hammer and start over, but things worked out fine. I applied a lot of Mobil 28 grease to everything that rubbed against anything else. I am now firmly in the camp of people who believe guns should be heavily greased.

When I was done, I was an AR trigger installation expert, so installing the second trigger in my LR-308 only took 10 minutes, and I didn’t have any problems.

HA.

Of course I had problems.

The LR-308 has a spring detent for the safety and another one for the takedown pin, and of course, I screwed all that up. It worked out fine in the end, however.

The LR-308 was made by DPMS, which, at the time, was considered one step above cheap AR’s. I would say it’s not as pretty as the CORE15. The finish seems a little coarser and less uniform, although I suppose any finish becomes less uniform after 11 years. The fit on everything was nice and tight, however, so I can’t say it seems like a inferior gun.

One big difference between DPMS and CORE: DPMS used a cheap screw to hold the pistol grip on the gun. I can tell by looking at it that I gouged the screw up the past time I messed with it. DPMS FAIL! It would be very hard to damage the CORE screw.

I already had a new trigger in the DPMS. I think. I must have, because I found an AR trigger in a plastic bag in the case with the gun. A long time ago, someone recommended I order a polished trigger from some guy who rehabilitated mil-spec triggers, and I believe I ordered one. The one in the bag must have been the OEM trigger.

Doesn’t matter. The polished trigger would have been a cheap end-run around the real thing, and now I want the real thing.

After a little research, I believe I paid a guy named Bill Springfield for a polished trigger. I’m sure he does great work, but even when its potential is maximized, a mil-spec trigger is still what it is. Before I installed the new trigger today, I checked the one that was already in the gun, and it felt good. Hard to tell that way, though.

I am allowing myself to indulge in a bold fantasy. I may be able to shoot tomorrow. I could have shot a little today, but the weather kept toying with me. I thought it was going to rain, and then I decided it wasn’t, so I chose to risk putting a charger on the lawnmower to make sure it would start later. The instant I walked outside, raindrops started striking all around me like suppressing fire.

If I can shoot tomorrow, I’ll try to find out what Norma bulk ammo can do in an AR15 with a free-floating non-luxury barrel and a really good trigger. I might conceivably try out the new 1911.

Prairie Dogs Never Have a Nice Day

It irks me that I know nothing about long range rifle shooting. I bought a .308 over a decade ago for the purpose of learning to shoot at long distances, and nothing came of it. I bought something like 1700 rounds of military ammunition made for machine guns, figuring it was good enough to start with and good enough in case I ever needed the gun for zombie hordes. I shot maybe 200 rounds. Then I quit. I have a million interests, and I flit from pursuit to pursuit like a fly meandering through a pasture full of unusually alluring cow pies. I’m fickle. Also, I lived in a city where shooting over 100 yards is impossible, except when firing into the air on holidays, if you’re Cuban.

The authorities actually had to inform citizens that shooting guns into the air on New Year’s Eve was a bad idea. They were not able to figure this out for themselves.

Yesterday I started looking around for a book on long range shooting, and someone said I should go take a class.

I scoffed. Long range shooting classes near me? Maybe in Montana or New Mexico. Not here.

Then I actually made an effort to find out what I was talking about, and it turned out I was wrong. Florida has been home to a number of facilities that teach long range shooting. Some are still around.

I emailed a couple of outfits, and naturally, I only got one response. Human nature never fails. I’m trying to blow hundreds of dollars, and only 50% of the people I’m trying to give it to thought it was worth their time to acknowledge me.

The guy who emailed me is a teacher. I sent him an email asking if my equipment was okay. The site says you need a rifle capable of 1 MOA shooting, plus a scope that doesn’t have a duplex reticle. I had to look that up to find out what it was. As for the rifle, how do I know if my guns will shoot 1 MOA? My .17 HMR definitely will, but it’s not useful past 200 yards. I have some other guns that probably will, but I haven’t been able to prove it, so does that mean I should go ahead and bring one, or do I wait until I’ve proven one of my guns will work?

Single-MOA shooting at 100 yards is no joke. It means you can usually hit a large grape a football field away. Most rifles can’t do it regardless of the ammunition or the skill of the person shooting. The rifles that can have to have the right ammunition, and you have to be able to shoot very well. You can’t just grab a random deer rifle at Dick’s, fill it with random ammunition, shoot leaning against a tree, and shoot 1 MOA. They do it in the movies, but movies are for idiots. I saw a movie where Will Smith threw a sperm whale.

The teacher said my .204 Ruger and my .308 would work, but he said my scopes were no good. What?

When I got the .308, I thought I splurged on the scope. The rifle was a screaming bargain at $775, and I probably paid $650 for the glass. I got a Leupold 20x scope with a 52mm objective and a varmint reticle. It’s not a 25x $2000 sniper scope, but on the other hand, it’s 10 times the scope Carlos Hathcock used to kill half the Viet Cong. I figured it had to be good enough for a hobbyist.

The course requires “target turrets.” Turrets are really dials. They move the crosshairs in your scope to the point where you expect your bullets to land. Most scopes have screw-on caps over the dials to keep them from getting banged up. A target turret–I am an expert after 15 minutes of Googling–is a big dial with large characters on it, and it’s not meant to be covered. If you’re a typical hunter, you don’t turn your dials much. You sight your scope in before you go hunting, and you cover the dials. If you’re a serious shooter, you want your dials–your turrets–available all the time so you can fiddle with them.

The teacher said I could rent a scope from the school, but then I would be paying someone to teach me how to set up a scope I would then remove and give back. That seems stupid. I want to set up my own scope.

I’m still not sure how turrets work, but it appears I can get aftermarket turrets to replace the ones that came on the Leupold. It’s very complicated, though. My existing turrets aren’t specific to any particular ammo, distance, or weather. Companies that sell turrets customize them to account for variables like these. I’ll bet that’s not necessary for what I want to do. I think the custom jobs are intended for people who want to be able to zip to predetermined settings for certain situations. There must be non-custom turrets out there for people who aren’t professional snipers and don’t mind doing more work.

This is my hope, anyway.

So this is where I am. If I can make the Leupold work, I will do just that. I know it can be done, because other people have done it. I just need to know what it will cost and whether it can be done in a time frame I can accept. I don’t want to wait for January to take a course.

While I’m figuring the scope out, I’m waiting on my LaRue AR triggers. Barring a negative miracle, they should fix my AR guns up so they shoot as well as possible for what they are. Both have free-floating barrels, so I don’t think I can improve them a whole lot after the triggers are installed. I may get a better buttstock for the LR-308B. The one that came with it is like the one on Elmer Fudd’s shotgun. A better buttstock will include some kind of riser for a better cheek weld.

I should bite the bullet and get a bipod for the AR15. I’m not a huge fan of rests. They always seem to be too low or too high, and for some reason, bipods have more range. Also, a bipod can’t fall off your shooting table.

I’ve been thinking of getting or making a dedicated shooting bench, but I have realized it’s a waste of time. I thought a dedicated bench would be lighter than my Home Depot folding table, but if it was, it wouldn’t be by much. Snob shooters may object to a table without a cutout, but the truth is that if you angle the table to the line of fire, it works just as well as a table with a cutout. On top of all this, it has a lot of extra area for ammunition and beverages. I would love to convince myself I need a new bench, but I can see that I don’t. I may need a new table, though, because I like having my only spare folding table in the house, and when I put it in the pasture for shooting, the cattle lick it and smear snot all over it.

What will I do with my long range shooting skills? Take a prairie-dog-killing vacation, maybe. I can shoot targets up to about 400 yards here at home.

The .204 Ruger is supposedly good for 500 yards with prairie dogs. That would be neat.

That’s a great caliber, because you can do match-grade shooting with cheap ammunition. I pay about 50 cents per round.

I think I’ve picked the final must-have caliber for my armory. Hornady just released something called the 6mm ARC. It’s blowing people away. You can shoot it from an AR15. It’s super-accurate, and at long distances, it outshines the .308. It doesn’t have much recoil. It’s supposed to be superior to other miracle cartridges like the 6.5 Grendel, to the point where some of them may be rendered obsolete. You can shoot big animals with it, so if I got one, I would no longer feel there was a gap in my capabilities. Right now, the only deer-worthy rifles I have are pretty strange.

If I can get 1 MOA from my CORE15 in .223, I’ll probably buy another one in 6mm ARC. I don’t know if CORE will offer it, but they’ll offer a lower and upper. I can get a barrel and scope myself.

I thought the CORE15 would be an entry-level weapon. I’m not so sure now. I keep learning whatever I can, and it appears that a suspicion I had is true: the guys who insist on $3000 AR15’s are buying flash, not function. My understanding is that an $800 rifle will do everything just as well, once you fix the trigger and possibly buy a barrel. If that’s true, do I really want to spend for something like a Daniel Defense? What do you really get? A prettier gun?

I saw a guy on Youtube going over an extremely expensive AR. It wasn’t available to the public, but it would have cost something like three grand. It had a weird bolt carrier with holes in it to lighten it, and everything was finished with some kind of space age stuff. He said it would cycle faster than a mid-tier AR. So what? A normal AR will do 600 rounds per minute if you can pull the trigger that fast. Am I missing something?

The lower on my AR is generally aluminum and plastic (“polymer”), so it should last 200 years. The barrel is a consumable item, easily replaced. The trigger I’m buying should be phenomenal. If there’s a good reason for moving to the top tier, I don’t see it. Maybe someone can explain it to me.

Let’s see. It looks like I can get most of a new AR for maybe $500. A precision barrel would probably run $200-$500. Trigger: $80. Then a minimum of $250 for glass. Not too bad, considering what a 1911 costs. And it would turn prairie dogs into vapor, if not plasma.

Know your enemy.

I think just about any gun purchase I make after 6mm ARC will have to fall under the heading “collecting.” I won’t be able to say I need anything else.

Well. Maybe a 12-gauge hunting shotgun, as contrasted with the video-game-looking semiauto I already have.

I’m going to try to get into a shooting class this summer. Thousands of miles away, prairie dogs are snickering at me, and I simply won’t have it.

Spiritual Blindness Pushed America to Communal Suicide

I am not doing a great job of avoiding reading the news. I’m doing a lot better than I was a week or two back, but I need to be more determined. I’m still reading a few things here and there.

Some of my friends are not helpful. They contact me with political messages, and they tell me about things that have happened in the outside world. Outside of my farm, I mean.

One of my friends told me there were cities where antichristians were striving to defund police forces. It sounded disgraceful, but I didn’t think it would amount to anything. Leftism is all about posing and pretending. I thought it was just antichristian leftists huffing and puffing for Facebook and Instagram, and I didn’t think there was any possibility that it would go anywhere.

Today, sadly, I read that it’s a very serious movement with considerable support.

What can I say about that? Imagine life near a city without police. Do I have to explain what a bad idea that is? It’s like trying to make people understand that setting themselves on fire is stupid. If it’s not obvious to you already, there is no way to make you understand it.

I didn’t understand how far gone Minnesota was. Americans tend to think of midwesterners as solid people with conservative morals, but that’s apparently far from the truth.

The friend who shared the story said he hoped the police would be defunded. He was strongly in favor of it. He wanted people to find out what life without police was like.

I marvel at the poor judgment of those who want cities without police, but I don’t want to see them get what they want. Essentially, they’re in favor of taking a problem normally found only in certain minority ghettos and extending it to entire counties. In ghettos, people can get away with murder and other violent crimes, not to mention property crimes, because the residents refuse to cooperate with the police and because the police are reluctant to respond in the first place. As a result, ghettos are full of bullies who get their way every day. This is what the defunders want for their cities, except it will be worse, because the police won’t exist at all.

What would happen in a city with no police? Would the governor bulk up the state police and send them to take over? Would the National Guard take over? I don’t even know if these things could be done legally.

It’s obvious that gangs would fill the vacuum. There is no point in pretending it’s debatable. They would exert much more power in cities, and they would do as much as they could to take over affluent suburbs. That’s what gangs do.

I got up this morning and started looking at homes in Tennessee. Florida is going to be a blue state soon, and even though I live in the reddest county in the state, the thought of having leftists take my firearms, plunder the wealth I need for my old age, and force me into a lifestyle in which I am on trial every day simply for being a white male Christian is too much. I don’t think I could stand it.

I don’t know a single person in Tennessee, unless you count an uncle who is about as close to me as you are. I can’t tell the good places from the bad. If God doesn’t guide me, I could end up in a place where I couldn’t be happy. I love northern Florida. I love my house and my farm. I love the people. But if I stay here, I’ll just be waiting for the waters to rise and drown me. When it happens, I’ll have to say I was warned.

I always feel frustrated when I think of friends and relatives who live in godless areas. I warn them about the future, but I don’t think many of them take me seriously. As long as things are tolerable this week, they think the places where they live are acceptable. They don’t really believe antichristians are going to take over and torment them. They’re inviting disaster for themselves and their children, and I believe stubbornness is the reason.

How can I criticize people who won’t listen, if I won’t listen?

For years, I’ve been saying America was going to collapse and be taken over by antichristians, but it’s still shocking to see it happen. It’s shocking that we could be so stupid. How can anyone take white privilege seriously and view it as a valid reason to persecute and censor? How can anyone think it makes sense to burn his own neighborhood? How can anyone be enraged to the point of murder by a handful of police-on-black homicides while feeling virtually nothing about the thousands of black-on-black murders which are committed every year? How can people not see how wrong they are?

If black lives matter, why aren’t the rioters enraged by the fact that people in their ranks have murdered multiple black people during the riots? How is killing innocent black people a valid form of pro-black protest?

How can so many people who are not black or Hispanic participate so zealously in their own slander and destruction? The rioters can’t be won over or placated. They’re not interested in peace or justice. They just want to hurt the rest of us. Kissing up to them doesn’t work. They’re attacking liberals all over the country, including journalists they know to be with sympathetic outlets.

They’re not mistaking their allies for enemies. They just don’t care. The riots aren’t about justice or logic. They’re driven by racism and envy. If you’re not black or Hispanic, or if you’re successful, they want to take what you have, hurt you physically, humiliate you, and kill you.

The Bible says God gives persistent sinners over to sin. He stops trying to talk them out of it. When he stops talking to them, they develop a type of insanity, believing good is evil and evil is good. How true that is.

It’s terrible to see the truth die in America. Human beings can’t be saved without the truth that comes from God. There is no other way to be helped. Without God’s truth, we go to hell, plain and simple, and hell grows inside us while we live, preparing us for the destination where we fit in so well.

If I leave and go to a safer place, it won’t mean I’ve located a haven where the antichristians will never rule. They’ll take Tennessee over, too. They’ll take over the entire world eventually. I think God is just telling me to move so I’ll have more years of peace and victory. With any luck, I’ll be dead before the fleas and leeches show up on my doorstep with authority from the government.

How will I move all my things? It would take a month just to box things up. Should I have a sale and go with very little? I don’t think so. I believe God has a purpose in my tools and firearms and so on. I don’t have much furniture, so that won’t be a big problem. I would call the Salvation Army to get my mother’s remaining bedroom furniture and my dad’s coffee tables. I don’t like those things anyway.

I thought God might provide a wife by now, but that has not happened. Not even close. Moving by myself would be difficult. On the other hand, I moved once with no help while caring for a dementia patient, so maybe I’m concerned about nothing.

I wish the world would change, but it never will. Fitting in is an impossibility and not to be desired.

I may have 30 more years left. Argh. Experiencing old age on this deteriorating planet is not something I look forward to. It’s daunting to think there is so much time left in my tour of duty. God has kept me safe, comfortable, and prosperous, though, and I assume he will continue to do so. Surely I will have a purpose that will make staying in this place worth it. I don’t have a choice, so I have to make the best of things.

Magic Cartridge Still Evades Me

How long have I had my AR15 and my new 1911? Like a year? Well, days, anyway. And I can’t shoot them. Not without getting wet. A ridiculous storm is in the Gulf, and it’s raining all the way over here.

Part of the fun of having firearms is the illusory sensation that you’re a tough guy and a potential sniper, ready to rise up and save his neighbors and livestock from bothersome zombies. When men shoot, they feel like soldiers and spies. When women dance, they feel like dancers. It’s pathetic, but this is how we are. Rain ruins everything. I can’t indulge my Chris Kyle fantasies if it means I have to get wet. I’ll be here when my country calls, as long as it’s dry and I get to shoot in the shade. From a reasonably nice chair next to a full cooler.

Yesterday, we had a tornado scare. They actually said we should seek shelter. Of course, I prayed. Not much else I could do. I texted my friend Amanda to see if she got the warning. I said I promised to wave if I flew by, and I said I hoped the next time she saw me, I wasn’t wearing Hillary Clinton’s slippers.

I have not solved my 10mm problem. I thought I was getting over 1200 fps with Accurate No.7, but yesterday, I made up a few rounds, and I got an average down around 1150. I had maxed out the charge according to whatever data I was using. I had to figure out what to do. New powder? Go a tenth past the maximum? After all, published charge limits ought to be pretty conservative.

I was using a new Storm Lake barrel. Maybe it killed my velocity.

I decided to make 6 rounds with 12.1 grains of powder instead of 12.0. If that doesn’t work, maybe it’s time to look at a different powder.

There are a lot of things to consider when you reload. If you’re making defensive rounds, you might want to think about flash. Criminals like to show up at night, and for all I know, a big flash would make landing a second shot hard. Alliant has a powder called BE-86, and it might be good for my purposes.

I read up on this stuff. When an Alliant powder has the letters “BE” in the name, it means it’s based on a powder called Bullseye. That being said, the Alliant people say it’s like another one of their powders: Power Pistol. It’s like Power Pistol with a flash suppressant added. I guess Power Pistol must be descended from Bullseye.

I would love to have some BE-86, but getting it in my county is an impossibility. There are tons of gun owners here, but it appears that nearly all of them are unsophisticated. Buy a gun at Rural King, leave it unmodified, get bulk ammo, shoot 5 MOA, and be happy. That’s not me. I modified my AR10, my Marlin 60, my two Savage rifles, my SW22 pistol and its magazines, the magazines for my Colt Woodsman, my PSL, and probably some other things. I’m going to modify my AR15 shortly. I reload for all my centerfire pistols.

When you order reloading stuff online, you may have to pay big fees. Primers and powders require hazmat fees. If I order a $22 jug of BE-86, it will cost me at least $50. It’s best to order large sizes when possible and to wait for occasions when you want multiple items.

At the end of that sentence, I remembered there might be a gun show in town, so I looked it up. Turned out I was right, so I shot over there to see if there were any reloading components. No luck. You could probably get together with 4 of your friends and have a bigger gun show in your backyard. The usual venue has been closed because of the epidemic, and it’s still not open, so they had the show in what I would describe as a banquet room. I didn’t see good prices on anything, and I saw nothing I had to have, so I hit the road.

I don’t know why Florida is such a lame state for reloading. Georgia seems pretty bad, too. Tennessee has Midsouth, Natchez, and Widener’s. Kentucky has a number of stores. Maybe deep-Southerners aren’t as gun-savvy as Appalachian Southerners. Maybe they’re happy as long as they can point a gun at a quail and make it go boom.

People are saying I need to use Accurate No.9. My only concern is the flash. Maybe it’s better to have more flash and more velocity.

Anyway, these are fun problems to work on.

59 Buffalo Cops Failed to Understand the Memo

The reasons America is devouring itself right now are not natural, and it’s counterproductive to focus too much on natural reasons. We are having problems because we turned away from God and rejected the Holy Spirit. Nonetheless, it’s interesting to look at the symptoms as long as you don’t misdiagnose the disease.

Today something very unpleasant happened. I found my self agreeing with a Cuomo and even Chris Hayes, who could arguably be said to represent 75% of what is disappointing in current American males.

I saw the video of the Buffalo incident. An old man approached riot police and waved a cell phone while he was talking to them, and one of them shoved him hard. He fell backward, and immediately, so much blood poured out of his right ear it formed a puddle beside his head. He’s alert and in stable condition, and he is urging people to react peacefully.

Here’s a Youtube of the incident.

I guess it’s a good thing the victim doesn’t appear to be black. BLM doesn’t take much notice of police brutality toward white people, so maybe the incident won’t stir the violence up very much.

Am I upset about the attack itself? Sure, but it’s not what I sat down to write about. According to the news, the two cops involved in the attack were suspended. Then 57 cops resigned from the unit…in support of the attackers.

That’s the part of the story that should bother people the most. The cops will always hurt a certain number of people without justification, no matter what we do. I accept that. But I don’t accept the culture of cops who stand up for other cops who are clearly criminals.

The cops who quit supported two criminals, and they also decided it was okay to diminish their city’s ability to control rioters. What priorities. At least they’ll be welcome in the sack race at the department’s next picnic.

As a lawyer, I don’t ordinarily like to draw conclusions from news videos or early stories, because I generally don’t have enough evidence to make up my mind. For example, George Zimmerman shot a larger attacker in what was textbook self-defense, but if I had listened to the biased initial reports, I would have thought he was a murderer. There are exceptions, though. When a Cleveland cop leapt out of a car and shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice without trying to communicate with him or give him a chance to drop his toy gun, I said it was second-degree murder. It was too obvious to allow doubt. I’m also confident that what happened in Buffalo was a crime, and there is no excuse for backing up the men who committed it.

When I learn about cases like the one in Buffalo, I always think of the time I spent working with a DV prosecutor in Miami. She said she dealt with a lot of domestic violence cases involving male cops, and she said it was very hard to get anywhere with them because other cops obstructed her work and refused to cooperate. Yes, Miami cops–the people abused women were expected to call for help–stood up for men they knew to be wife-beaters. They didn’t do it because of the evidence. They did it simply because the wife-beaters were their co-workers.

Many people will get angry with you unless you side 100% with protesters, black people who are hurt by the police, or the police themselves. The truth is that it’s a complicated picture. Life isn’t a cartoon.

Rioting can never be excused, but on the other hand, police brutality is very real. Bad attitudes among cops are very common. How many times have you had an obnoxious cop treat you rudely? I rarely interact with the police, but it has happened to me on a number of occasions. How many times have you seen a cop give orders that go beyond what he knows he is authorized to command? This stuff is normal and widespread.

The police need to operate in the sunlight. Body cameras should be used every time they interact with us, and we should always be allowed to film and record them at work, except in unusual cases where information really needs to be restricted. There are still places where shooting video of the police can get you in legal trouble. That’s astounding, and if it doesn’t violate the letter of the First Amendment, it certainly conflicts with the spirit. The primary reason the First Amendment exists is to allow us to criticize the government.

I support the police. I know they are almost always right when people accuse them. I know their jobs are very hard and that our support is necessary if we expect them to get anything done. But the complaints we are hearing about them now weren’t fabricated from thin air. They arose from a long, consistent history of abuse.

The police are probably in the right in 95% of the incidents that draw accusations. In relative terms, they’re much less culpable than their accusers. But in absolute terms, they’re wrong too much of the time. Let’s go crazy and increase the figure to 98% for the sake of argument. How long would you expect your restaurant to stay open if you gave 2% of your customers food poisoning or you got angry and called 2% of your female customers sluts?

It’s not that hard to run an organization with a very low rate of employee misbehavior. Not in the world of business, anyway. It shouldn’t be any harder for the police. It should be easier, because we expect the police to be people of good character.

All this being said, I don’t think what I’m saying is very important. If we don’t address the supernatural roots of conflict, putting cameras on cops and passing new laws won’t improve things enough to matter.

The cops who committed the battery have been charged, so things could be worse.

Choose a Side While You Can

Generally, I don’t blog until after breakfast, but today I felt I should go straight to the keyboard, and I don’t feel like eating.

Sometimes God gives me words and phrases. There have been several occasions on which I felt God was telling me something about the future, and I turned out to be wrong, but as far as I can recall, the phrases I have heard have proven legitimate.

Last night I heard this: “AFTERBIRTH…AFTERBIRTH…AFTERBIRTH…AFTERBIRTH.” I heard the word many times.

There are only two races on earth: the childen of Satan and the children of God. The children of God will go on to live forever in love, peace, and invulnerability. The children of Satan will be discarded and burned, forgotten and unable to communicate with us in any way, because they have chosen to be afterbirth.

The earth is like God’s womb. It’s where he reproduces. Until God inseminates us with his Spirit, human beings are like unfertilized eggs. Those who are not inseminated or who don’t go to term are like miscarriages, afterbirth, and eggs that wash out with menstrual fluid. They are just by-products of reproduction.

All over America, we are seeing people who have chosen to become afterbirth, abusing others in our streets.

When we look at the news, we see higher-placed people who are also afterbirth, glorifying their own kind. The riots aren’t about police brutality or improving the lives of blacks and Hispanics. They’re about hatred for everyone else and a total lack of Holy Spirit guidance. They show how people act when they have no fathers to correct them. Many have no earthly fathers, and they certainly have no heavenly father. The children of God are growing. The others rot as though they had already died.

You have to step back from the fray and set your course for heaven. You’re not going to be here long, and the things you care about down here are generally worthless and often toxic. You have to set aside things like race and promotion. You should be headed for a place where real, lasting rewards have been prepared for you. If you knew you were about to be released from prison, would you care which pedophile or bomber got your bunk or your seat in the cafeteria?

What was done to George Floyd was very bad. The riots are much worse. What’s worse than the rioting is the response coming from many Americans: approval and encouragement. The response ensures that the bad behavior will increase. It also shows that Americans are willingly blind and deaf. They have given themselves over to idiocy, even though they know better. Thousands of years of building up morals and standards are being nullified. We are putting the wealth of our ancestors in piles, burning it, and dancing in celebration as though we had done something wonderful.

The insanity is obvious to anyone who isn’t supernaturally blinded. It’s a major disaster if one black man is harmed by the police, but it’s progress when numerous black people are killed and hurt by rioters or shot legally by police while rioting. That’s the attitude many Americans are taking, and it’s so irrational, there is no way to counter it with reason.

When your mind and heart are so closed to reason there is no point in communicating with you, you become like the people who were killed in the flood and the burning of Sodom. A point comes when the appropriate thing is to shut you out, replace you, and let you do what you want, even though it will ruin your earthly life and end with you burning forever in the fire of God’s anger.

Expect to lose people you think are on your side. I do. I think I might have lost my friend Travis had he lived to see this crisis, regardless of what I had done for him or how many prayer sessions we had shared. I may lose other black friends even if I support police reform. Jesus said we would be betrayed by those close to us. It’s a time of sifting. The test won’t select for people who have been nice to you or who go to church. It will save only those whom God has chosen and who are truly willing to hear the Holy Spirit. We will all be surprised to see who makes it and who doesn’t. People you are sure are solid will turn on you, and people you expected to fall will stay by your side.

I don’t feel depression. Maybe I sound depressed, but I’m not. I feel grief and dread. I feel grief for the hundreds of millions of people who are discarding themselves. It’s like watching people drown from a long distance. I can’t do anything for them, and I have to accept my own safety. I dread what’s in store for them. As for me, I expect joy, success, abundance, healing, love, and deliverance.

Call it holy privilege. All inheritance is privilege.

I have the feeling you get during the hours before a hurricane hits. If you’ve felt it, you know what I mean. I sense a stillness I know is temporary.

I’ve been praying for God to save anyone who can listen. I’ve been praying for him to expose what’s really happening, and to give victory to those who tell the truth. That’s all I can do.

It’s remarkable that so few people are pointing out that rioting is the wrong solution. Imagine how different things had been had we taken the sort of path intelligent adults who are not insane ordinarily take. There would be prayer meetings all over the nation, without segregation. There would be protests that truly were peaceful. America would be much more united. The movement would be huge. It would be successful, and there would be no backlash later. Instead, one part of the population is tormenting the rest of us for the sheer animal joy of causing us pain and destroying things other people built, and there is no way we can join them without being defiled.

What we are seeing is coercion, not persuasion. It’s happening on a national scale, and it’s happening on a small scale.

My friend Mike has a son who is a professional musician. He married a young woman who is half black. She was raised by white people in an area where she knew very few blacks. Now she’s all about white privilege, and she feels entitled to tell Mike what to think and do. She and her husband, whom Mike helps out financially, are telling Mike that if he doesn’t use his social media presence to support the rioters, they may not want their children, when they have them, to be exposed to him.

Mike’s brother was beaten by police, and he was paralyzed on one side. He died young, and according to Mike, the beating shortened his life. Mike is not in favor of police brutality. He’s just smart enough and sufficiently moral to object to rioting, gaslighting, and manipulation. He’s on the right side of the issue, but even if he were wrong, he should not have to put up with this display of gall, entitlement, and disrespect.

Mike is a Spirit-baptized Christian who prays in tongues. His son and daughter-in-law, who want to control him, are not. They’re leftists.

Mike has done nothing to invite this mistreatment. He’s a very warm person. He’s outgoing. He’s always counseling his friends and trying to help them. He was a great father. He sacrificed a lot for his sons after his wife abandoned them. He still does things like paying to fix his son’s brakes, even when his wife won’t let Mike do the work himself and insists on spending much more money having a repair shop do the same thing.

This kind of abuse is happening all over America. The stench of the ugliness must be filling God’s nostrils. He won’t subject us to it forever.

Obviously, we have to keep serving God and helping anyone who can be saved, but we have to be ready to lose most of the population of Earth. Every one of us will have to choose a side. A lot of people you know are going to go to hell, no matter what you do. You can’t let your devotion to individuals drag you down to eternal agony.

I got that written. Now I intend to enjoy the beautiful day God has given me in spite of myself.

Hope the Girls Get Along

Today I picked up my new 1911. I started my NICS check yesterday between 2 and 3 p.m., and I didn’t receive notice that it was finished until 10 a.m. today.

I can’t help wondering if the FBI is slow-walking checks for people who buy multiple guns in one month. It would serve as a nifty, sleazy way to create an illegal waiting period for people like me who have permits and are used to taking their guns home on the same day they buy them.

I guess some type of incompetence is at the root of the problem. It can’t be anything special about me. I cleared a background check fast on Monday, and if I were having problems because of some red flag or other, it should have come up both times.

Aren’t they supposed to destroy all records of background checks as soon as they’re performed? I’m sure the FBI would never lie.

The gun is very nice. It’s a Smith & Wesson Performance Center PC1911 with weird weight-reducing holes machined into the slide. It has G10 grips so grippy you could use them to file your way out of jail. The bead-blasted finish is gorgeous, and the blue and black coloring in the grips borders on pimpdom.

It also has target sights.

I decided to clean it before shooting. People keep telling me I should do this because manufacturers leave crud in new guns. The AR15 I bought on Monday came straight from the manufacturer. They make them in the building where I bought it. The guy who sold it to me said I should clean it.

The PC1911 has what is known as a hard-fit barrel, which means a gunsmith removed metal from the barrel until it fit the gun very tightly. It also has a tight barrel bushing. This is a round part that comes between the barrel and slide. It has an incredibly strong recoil spring. It’s much stiffer than the one in my SW1911.

Taking the gun apart was not terribly hard, but it took some effort because the parts were so close together.

I greased the gun pretty heavily with Mobil 28 precision bearing grease, which, of course, I already had, along with special syringes for shooting it into small cavities. I used to believe the people who said to oil guns sparingly, but I now think they’re ignorant, so this time, I didn’t hold back. Then when I tried to put the gun back together, I had problems. The recoil spring retainer, bushing, slide, spring, and guide rod did not want to work together. I got the gun to a point where everything was back together, but there was no way to rotate the bushing into position so I could shoot.

I wrestled with it for what must have been nearly an hour. I took the SW1911 apart so I would have similar parts to look at for reference purposes. Finally, I got a clue on the web. Ordinarily, you disassemble a 1911 by loosening the barrel bushing first and removing the spring retainer and spring. Some old guy on a forum said the best way to disassemble a 1911 was to remove the slide stop first. It removes tension from the spring. If it works when disassembling, it ought to work for assembling. I removed the slide stop, and the gun finally came apart. After that I was able to put it together correctly.

Some modern 1911’s have features the old World War Two jobs didn’t. Some of the features make them more accurate, but they can make them harder to strip and reassemble. A fighting soldier could die if he took too long to put a pistol together. There is no way the Army would let you have a pistol that fought you for 45 minutes. I see why the old-style parts were made the way they were.

Once I got the new gun together, I took my other 1911’s apart, cleaned them, greased them, and put them back together. I’m anxious to see if the heavy grease is helpful. I don’t know why I ever listened to people who said LESS lube was better. It makes no sense. Grease attracts grit, but so does oil, and a guy on the web pointed something interesting out: grease forms a barrier to keep grease out. Also, grease doesn’t fly off in all directions when you shoot, and it doesn’t drip onto your clothes.

The new gun is heavier than my SW1911 even though it has holes in it to lighten the slide. I wonder where the extra metal is.

I tried using the new assembly and dissassembly method on my Colt .38 Super, but it didn’t work. I learned something about guide rods. John Moses Browning originally put short rods in 1911’s, but many manufacturers later went to full-length guide rods. The Colt has a short rod. The Smiths have long ones. The spring in the Colt can bend and cause problems if you try to install the slide with the barrel and spring already attached. The rod is too short to keep the spring straight.

So now I have to strip the Colt one way and the other guns another way.

Supposedly, the short guide rod does not adversely affect accuracy or anything else. I saw a guy online making a very good case for the superiority of short rods. It’s much easier to assemble a gun with a short rod.

When I saw the difference between the Colt and the Smiths, my first instinct was to get a long rod for the Colt, but now I’m wondering if I should get short rods for the Smiths.

I have to get this thing to the berm tomorrow. I’m going to shoot it beside the older gun and see if either gun shoots better for me.

A lot of bullets, powder, primers, and brass have arrived, so I have to get started on that stuff soon.

It’s all coming together. The berm and I have a hot date.

Are we Done?

It’s surprising how hard it is to find a simple timeline of the end times, including the rapture. I am Googling today, and I haven’t found it yet.

The rapture is a real event. It has been foreshadowed clearly more than once. Noah and his family were lifted up above those who hated God. Lot was drawn out of Sodom before it was destroyed. Moses and the Hebrews were protected from the plagues of Egypt, and they were moved to a place of safety while their enemies drowned behind them. God does similar things over and over, and he expects us to notice and understand that there is a pattern he follows.

The Lord and his prophets gave us information so we would have a general idea when to expect the rapture. Certain events have to occur first. I’m trying to find out what those events were. The world is descending rapidly into unprecedented turmoil, and it seems to me, for various reasons, that it will be unsustainable. It won’t be like past challenges that left mankind standing. Because things are going so badly, and for other reasons, I’m wondering if the rapture is closer than we thought.

The end of the current age will lead into the tribulation, which will be a time of terrible suffering on earth. It will be as though the upper boundary of hell had been raised above the surface of the earth. Christians who are really on board with the Holy Spirit won’t be here to see it. Like Noah’s family, we will be extracted in advance.

Unfortunately, we will still suffer, because Jesus made it plain that we would be here long enough to experience terrible persecution. We will be murdered and imprisoned. We will be hated. We already see these things happening. It’s nothing new in the Muslim world, and it’s spreading to the US. We’re not being murdered for our faith very often, but we are being driven out of jobs and we are facing increased ostracism and reviling. Anti-Christian sentiment is now mainstream.

Powerful Christians suffer less. I can tell you that right now. I’ve seen it. God puts bubbles around people he has chosen. Weak Christians have less help and protection. They don’t listen, and their prayer lives are not good. They leave doors open.

My understanding of the way things work is that even a powerful Christian may be martyred, but that such a person’s suffering will ordinarily come toward the end of his life, over a relatively brief period. I don’t believe strong Christians can live in defeat for decades on end. It’s not consistent with God’s promises.

Paul suffered a lot, but he seems to have been an unusual case, and my feeling about Paul is that he didn’t always do the right thing. He appears to have been an angry, argumentative person, and he may have gotten ahead of the Holy Spirit and exposed himself to danger unnecessarily from time to time. We know he had a problem with pride, because he said God allowed him to have a thorn in his flesh to prevent him from being overly exalted.

We tend to think of great Biblical figures as perfect role models, but that’s not true. They were flawed.

The Bible says “the son of perdition” must be revealed before the rapture. Does that mean we can’t go until a single identifiable person becomes famous as the Antichrist?

Maybe not.

First of all, even if there is a single man who will be called the Antichrist, he’s just part of a bigger entity. Satan has a body of people who are controlled through their flesh because they aren’t Spirit-led. Satan, who is the real Beast, speaks and acts through this body. The voice of the mobs we are seeing now is the voice of the Beast, even though we don’t know of one man who can conclusively be called the Antichrist.

Second, the Bible says the son of perdition will be “revealed.” Does that mean we have to know the name and face of one person? God has shown me that the Beast is here, in the mob movement. Doesn’t that mean the son of perdition has been revealed? I got it by revelation. Revelation is what happens when something is revealed.

It’s interesting that Paul used the term “son of perdition,” because Judas was called “the son of perdition” in John 17:12.

Judas was a disciple. He probably believed Jesus was God. A lot of Christians think the Antichrist will be a Muslim or some kind of sorcerer, but the term “antichrist” actually comes from the discussion of Christians who turned against God because they didn’t listen to the Holy Spirit. The Bible talks of antichrists who “went out from us.”

Some people believe Judas did not want Jesus to be killed. They think he tried to manipulate him into overthrowing the Romans and defeating their puppets in the temple. The idea is that if Jesus were in trouble, he would have to use his power to crush the people who were against him. This may well be true.

God showed me that his human enemies don’t promote evil while calling it evil. They call it good. I use the term “alternative righteousness” to describe it. They claim they’re doing good when they promote homosexuality or they burn cities or martyr Christians for Islam.

Christians are supposed to do what the Holy Spirit tells them, and they are supposed to rely on God’s power. Instead, most of us strive in our flesh, doing what we wrongly think is right. We exalt ourselves. We brag about how hard we work for God and how much we suffer for him. We feel that our accomplishments, which are worthless, are our own, and that we should be admired. We rely on natural tools instead of supernatural power.

Jesus had a plan, and that plan was to be crucified in order to crush Satan. The Holy Spirit gave him this plan. Judas didn’t care about the Holy Spirit. He was a natural man, like a pope or a rabbi. It may well be that by betraying Jesus, he wanted to force him to advance the Judas plan. Get rid of the Romans, get rid of the priests, put the Jews back on top, and make Judas a wealthy and powerful ruler.

It would certainly explain why a man who knew Jesus was powerful would sell him to the priests.

Most Christians rely on natural tools, and they try to advance their own plans, so they are children of perdition and antichrists. Many, many of the rioters who are abusing us now identify strongly as Christians.

If the mob is part of the body of the Beast, and at least one Christian is saying so publicly, hasn’t the man of perdition been revealed?

In the Bible, “man” doesn’t necessarily mean one person. Paul used the term to describe the entire body of Christ. Look at Ephesians.

For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us;
Having abolished in his flesh the enmity, even the law of commandments contained in ordinances; for to make in himself of twain one new man, so making peace;
And that he might reconcile both unto God in one body by the cross, having slain the enmity thereby:
And came and preached peace to you which were afar off, and to them that were nigh.

“In himself” appears to mean “in the body of Christ,” or, to state the same thing another way, “in the group of people who are led by the Holy Spirit.”

If the Christ is one man and many people, how can the Antichrist not be one man and many people?

There is always symmetry in the supernatural.

Smug Christians like to sneer and say, “People have always said the end is near.” They’re not good at math or analyzing current trends. They’re asleep because they like to sleep. There are nearly 8 billion human beings now. The earth has a limited capacity, and we are filling it up. That has never happened before. Technology is destroying free will, and that has never been possible until now. Without free will, there is no reason for the current age to continue. Free will is essential in order for God’s work of separating the righteous from the wicked to continue.

I keep having the feeling that what I do in the natural doesn’t matter now. I keep feeling that I don’t have to take care of my earthly responsibilities because something is going to happen to make them unimportant. If you knew your house were going to burn down, you wouldn’t paint the kitchen or fix the roof. I keep wondering if the end, or at least my own end, is very close.

The mobs are divided. We have a violent, murderous mob on the left, and we have a carnal, civilized mob playing defense on the right. One mob behaves like a pack of animals, hurting even those who make it clear they side with them. The other mob thinks hard work, AR15’s, and voter turnout will save them. Neither mob hears from the Holy Spirit, who always brings agreement between those who listen to him. The Holy Spirit is the one who creates one new man.

People identify with colors, parties, and nations. We are supposed to identify with the body of Christ. We divide ourselves in accordance with trivial distinctions, and we don’t seek the only unity that works.

Patriotism has some usefulness, but I can’t see myself primarily as an American. I can’t think of myself as someone who has obligations to the white race, either. I can’t have conflicts. God has to be number one. Not many people feel this way. Right now in America, most black people are taught that their earthly race has to be the most important, most controlling thing in their lives, and that they have to believe what their leftist leaders tell them. Blacks are just like Jews. They have no freedom of thought or allegiance.

I’m not black or Jewish. I can belong to any political party I choose. I can believe Jesus is the Messiah without having my family and friends tell me I’m a Nazi. I can associate with most gentiles without worrying that I’ll be reviled for thinking for myself. If I were black or Jewish, I wouldn’t have any of this freedom. Blacks and Jews live in straitjackets, and so do many Hispanics.

Non-black, non-Hispanic gentiles have much more freedom than anyone else, but it isn’t helpful if we align ourselves primarily with anything other than the body of Christ.

Jesus said the end times would be marked by betrayal. How can our friends betray us if Christians aren’t vulnerable to delusion? If our enemies are against us, it’s not betrayal. It has to be people we loved and trusted. It has to mean weak Christians. I wonder how many black friends I’ll lose. I’ve already lost family members, and I have certainly been betrayed by preachers and the cult members who follow them.

All of us have to be ready to put the body of Christ before loved ones. You have to be prepared to drop people so they won’t pull you down and drown you.

I feel grief for America. I’m not unhappy, but I feel cut off from my country. Should I call it my former country? I feel separated from the people who will not make it in the rapture. There is nothing I can do for them except talk and pray. In the end, they have to save themselves by giving in. I can’t force that, and God won’t.

I am concerned that the grief I feel may actually be the grief of the Holy Spirit, warning me about the future. If so, then it’s well-founded, and things are worse than I thought.

Is there any way the rapture could be far off? Our population’s growth would have to stop. There could be a real plague, unlike coronavirus, but it seems improbable. We are very good at dealing with infectious diseases now, even when we can’t cure them. We might develop strict laws regarding who gets to reproduce. Forced abortion might make a move from China to the rest of the globe.

What about technology? Can we slow down the destruction of free will and privacy? I think this is impossible. Technology never goes backward. It’s like a fatal viral disease. Once you’ve got it, you can’t get rid of it or make it stop progressing.

Things aren’t proceeding linearly. They’re getting worse exponentially. Our decline is accelerating. It’s not a steady thing. How much faster will it be moving in a year?

Part of me hopes the rapture will come ASAP. The world is looking more and more like a dish of moldy food with a few bits that can still be cut out and eaten. Participating it is becoming very unrewarding. It would be nice to move on to something better. But the rapture will be followed by horrible suffering, and people I know will be here to feel it. The Bible says receiving salvation during the tribulation will be a terrible experience. It would be nicer for those who are not ready if they had more time under the current rules.

Let’s see where we are a month from now. If our cities still look like Mogadishu, it may be a sign that the end is very close.

FBI Refuses to Release new Girlfriend

While America collapses under the weight of its own pride, I’m keeping up with my frivolous interests.

On Monday, I bought my first AR15. I didn’t even try to shoot it until Wednesday. My new induction cooktop arrived on Monday, and I had to install it, and that took up a lot of time. It should have taken half an hour, but you know how things like that go.

My house is built beautifully, but if you pick at the construction of any home, you will find problems. My problem this week was an improper cutout in the stone countertop. My stove is just a cooktop, so it has to sit in a cutout. The problematic, uncleanable old stove sat in a cutout 33-1/2″ long. Guess how long the cutout for my new stove had to be? Here you go: 33-7/8″. Either the person who installed the old stove screwed up and then covered his tracks by dropping a cooktop over them, or Frigidaire screwed up by making a new cooktop that required an oversized hole.

My guess is that Frigidaire got it right.

I had to buy a diamond saw blade for an angle grinder. I put on a quality respirator, moved my pets to another room, marked the counter with painter’s tape, and went to town.

Grey dust went everywhere. There was no way to control it. The blade sliced right through the granite or whatever it is, but the mess was apocalyptic. I didn’t finish the job until late afternoon, and then the dust cleanup started. I’m still working on it. I mopped the downstairs for the third time this morning.

Of course, the wiring for the new stove was in a larger flex conduit than the one on the old stove, so I had to install a new handy box in a hard-to-reach location.

I know a fair amount about metalworking, basic electronics, and basic woodworking, but when it comes to the kind of work contractors do, I’m not the guy you want. I don’t know how to do drywall or install tile. I don’t know how to replace windows or carpeting. I have to figure this stuff out by looking at Youtube and other websites. My buddy Mike remodeled his own house. It must be nice to have those skills on tap. I have to create them on demand.

Yesterday I finally got to shoot the AR. I put some Norma bulk ammo in it and went to the berm. Unfortunately, when I got the gun, I didn’t think about the length of the magazine. Apparently, 30-round mags are standard except in places where 2A means nothing, and these magazines project downward so far, it can be impossible to shoot a gun from a rest.

I managed to pop off enough rounds to get the scope pointed more or less at the place where bullets landed when fired from 50 yards, and I was happy. I probably fired fewer than 20 shots before the rain started falling, and I was done.

I lost considerable time adjusting the eye relief. As any experienced shooter would have predicted, the fact that a salesman and I set my scope up in the store meant nothing. It was a good half-inch too far back, and I have read that this particular scope is not tolerant of big variations. That seems to be true. The rifle has a continuous rail on top, but there is a place where the rail has an oversized step between picatinny slots, and one of my scope’s mounts was right behind that place. I couldn’t just slide the scope forward in the mounts, and I couldn’t just move the mounts forward one slot. I had to move one of the mounts forward on the scope and then move the whole mess forward.

The AR surprised me a little. I thought it would have less recoil, but it does jump a little. It’s a joke compared to a .308, which is one reason our soldiers carry the military version of the AR, but recoil moves the gun, and there is no way to keep the scope on target. You have to bring the scope back down to see where your bullet landed.

The trigger seemed fine when I dry-fired the gun, but when the shooting started, it became obvious to me that it was unbearable. There was a certain amount of resistance until I pulled it back to the point where it was about to go off, and then it was as if it hit a wall. At that point, I had to pull much harder to get the gun to go bang. Not acceptable.

Last night I watched a video, and I learned how to do an AR trigger job. A monkey could do it, so I may have a chance. I also researched replacement triggers. All basic (i.e. mil-spec) AR triggers are terrible. They’re made to be reliable, not to shoot for money. There are tons of replacements out there, and the good ones generally run around $250. I have two mil-spec AR triggers, so I was not eager to spend $500.

I caught a break. I learned about LaRue triggers. LaRue is a top-tier trigger company, and the make a replacement trigger which gets rave reviews. They used to charge $250 for it. Now, for some unknown reason, they have dropped the price to $80. It’s still the same trigger they used to charge big money for. I was all over that. I placed an order, and we’ll see how it works out. In the meantime, I plan to do a trigger job on the parts I have. It should take about 40 minutes, and it ought to work well enough to make me happy while I’m getting to know the gun with cheap FMJ.

Today I went to the CORE Rifle Systems factory and got myself two 10-round magazines plus a sling stud that fits my M-Lok hand guard. If it ever stops raining, I should be ready to shoot.

I shot from a folding table and chair, and when I went back home to work on my scope, I left them in the pasture. I was gone maybe 10 minutes. When I got back, there was a slimy substance all over both.

The miserable cows had slimed my furniture.

My grandfather had cows, and I spent a lot of time with them, but I guess I didn’t know them, because it wasn’t until recently that I learned that cows are completely insane, not to mention mischievous. I can’t imagine why cows would run over to my table and lick it as soon as my back was turned. Maybe it looked like a giant salt block. Maybe they thought the cow messianic age had begun, and that a cow savior had come to fulfill their wildest dreams. Anyway, I had to hose both items off.

I can put a sling on my gun now, but I don’t have the sling I want. Something else to look for. I’ve decided to go with a two-point sling. The whole single-point sling seems like a weird and unfortunate fad to me, and I don’t understand why anyone would want a gun barrel to bang against his crotch all day.

Maybe it works well when you’re in Fallujah and you really, really need to be able to shoulder your gun in half a second.

One reason I went to CORE was to see if there was a post-riot panic. It didn’t look too bad. Caveat: CORE is a manufacturer, so it may not be that easy to deplete their supply of rifles.

One thing I really wanted to see was their ammo supply. The pallet of Norma .223 from which I took a crate on Monday was over a foot lower today. I think the coronavirus panic was worse than the riot panic has become as of today.

I have more ammunition on the way. I got the Norma because I needed something to get started and because my policy is to keep a certain amount of bulk ammo on hand for any weapon which could be useful if my home is attacked. It seems silly to buy a gun and not buy fuel for it. I have enough 30-ish-caliber high-powered bulk ammo to shoot a whole town full of violent agitators, should they choose to visit.

I didn’t buy this gun with people in mind, and I am not excited at all about future zombie scenarios that seem increasingly likely, but I want to be in a position to decide what I want to do. Also, someone who is more gung-ho about the whole pre-tribulation dystopia picture might need the ammo or even the rifle, and if I have these things, I could be a resource.

The fact that I want nothing to do with that kind of shooting doesn’t mean I don’t recognize other people’s right to do it. Not everybody is ready to be a martyr.

I ordered myself some Fiocchi 40-grain V-Max rated at 3650 fps. I don’t know how fast it will fly out of my 16″ barrel, but my guess: pretty fast. I read about people getting sub-MOA groups with it, and I’m hoping that’s true, because it would allow me to do some real shooting while getting my .223 reloading game in order.

This particular load is supposed to be very good for pest control. I have no idea whether it’s appropriate for self-defense, but it seems unlikely. It wouldn’t be a GOOD thing to be shot with it, but it’s not made for shooting people.

I’m hoping I can use it on coyotes and whatever.

Some people have gotten MOA performance out of 16″ CORE rifles shooting factory garbage. That would be fantastic. I want this gun to be accurate, and I’m expecting to have to buy a designer barrel, but what if I can shoot well with the barrel I have? I’ll just keep it and save money.

Fiocchi is typically not expensive, but it’s excellent. The brass should be great for reloading. I hope. Haven’t Googled to find out what people think.

I finally broke down and ordered a couple of holsters. I’m tired of putting my 1911’s down in the back of the utility cart when I shoot, so I have a Miami Classic II on the way. I also got one for my full-size Glock. This is the holster I wore to church as an armorbearer. I’m very familiar with it, and I like it a lot. I don’t know whether the tacticool crowd likes it, but then they poop all over pocket holsters, and I am completely certain they’re the best option for concealed carry of compact guns.

Digression: I watched the upsetting video of the West Freeway church shooting. This took place in Texas. A nut (Caucasian, if that’s of interest) entered the church with a shotgun. He seemed to whisper to an usher, which was oddly polite considering he was wearing a hood and carrying a long gun. He apparently asked the usher a question, and the usher seemed to answer him, pointing to the rear of the church. A security team member sitting on a nearby bench saw him, stood up pretty slowly, and fumbled around for a rear belt holster. The gunman shot the security and then shot the usher in the upper body. Both victims died.

What if it had been me with my pocket holster, instead of an usher with a tight, uncooperative belt holster? I would have had a better shot at winning. I wouldn’t have had to stand up. I could have straightened my right leg and drawn in about half a second, without throwing off all sorts of signals. I hate belt holsters that require a lot of struggling. I can’t believe anyone wears one. Speed is really important sometimes.

Looking at the video over and over, I get the impression that the security guy may have caused things to go haywire. It looks like the gunman was calm until the security guy started talking to him and reaching for his gun. Things might have gone better had he pretended to be a harmless usher, waited for the murderer to focus his attention elsewhere, and then shot him from behind or from the side. But with that terrible holster, he might have alerted him to his intentions with all of the reaching and yanking.

The dead security guy is a true hero, but he may not have handled things well. Impossible to say from watching a video. I don’t know what the murderer said before the shooting started. He may have made it clear that there was no time to wait.

I don’t know if I would have been as brave as he was. I might have jumped under a pew. How can you know unless you’ve been there?

The man who killed the murderer shot him about a second after the first shot went off. No intelligent, informed person can say speed isn’t important. He only fired at the killer once, and that seems like a huge mistake. He was also very slow to go check on him after he fell out of view. Maybe that’s attributable to age.

When you shoot an armed assailant, you shoot him as many times as possible in the first volley unless you have a very good excuse. You don’t stop until you’re sure he can’t hurt anyone. That’s what I think. Most armed people are still dangerous after being shot.

The Miami Classic II is much faster than the belt holsters I’ve seen in person. It’s a little slower than a pocket holster, but it’s not a dreadful two-second belt holster.

Unlike a belt holster, it will hold two spare magazines.

It’s what I’m getting. I’m familiar with it, it’s very comfortable, and if I want to carry while working outdoors, it will be out of the way. I know that from experience.

In late May, I ordered a new 1911, and it arrived today. I actually fondled it briefly at the gun shop where the transfer will take place. The FBI is acting funny right now. Some NICS checks take a couple of minutes, and some take an entire day. Earlier this week, I was cleared in a pretty short time, so I thought I would have a similar experience today. Not so. The shop closed three hours after I filled out the form, and they still had my new gun.

Maybe the FBI deliberately sticks it to people who bought another gun recently. They’re not pro-2A conservatives. They’re bureaucratic Deep Staters. If they’re anything like other Deep Staters, they lean left. Look at Comey, McCabe, Page, and Strzok. Maybe the NICS workers received a memo telling them to slow-walk frequent buyers.

Or maybe it’s a fluke.

It was rainy today, so I wouldn’t have been able to shoot anyway. I do wish I could do all the usual new-gun things. I wish I could clean it and caress it and name it Naomi and so on. Maybe put a little Chanel No.5 on the slide. Just the normal stuff every guy does.

While I was at CORE, I picked up a box of cheap Aguila .45 ACP FMJ. Some firearm makers void their warranties if you shoot handloads. Smith & Wesson doesn’t have that policy, but they do object to ammunition they don’t like. They call it “improper” or something. It gives them weasel room which could turn handloads into a problem. I want my first 50 rounds to be from a box. A lot of things that go wrong with new products go wrong right at the start, so if this gun has a defect, I want to see it while I’m shooting crummy, unimpeachable factory ammunition.

The 1911 is not for self-defense. The caliber is great, but if you carry a 1911 for self-defense in 2020, you have a religion, not a reasonable preference. They’re heavy and they only hold 9 rounds. You would feel really stupid if you carried one, fired at an attacker 9 times and missed, and then got a clear shot.

No one ever said, “Gee, I wish I had brought less ammunition to this gunfight.” No one ever said, “I may be dying from multiple stab wounds, but it’s better than carrying a plastic gun.”

I got the new 1911 because it’s a really neat gun which ought to be very accurate and a joy to shoot. It has a hand-fitted barrel, and that’s a big plus for 1911 accuracy.

Yes, I will have several hundred rounds of defensive ammo for it. Because you never know.

I truly, truly hope I can get the AR15 sighted in tomorrow, and I may actually get to bring Naomi home. Things will be great if the cows will just stop licking my table.