Gun Nuttery Moves to New Level

The other day an idea came to me: an ammunition “savings account.” The idea was that I would put a large amount of ammunition aside and then either leave it alone or rotate it out as I shot. I have concerns that anti-Christians will make ammunition much harder to get in the future, before coming to confiscate it entirely, so it seems to make sense to be ready.

I have been working on my stockpile. I made a large number of .45 ACP rounds for target shooting, and I also made hundreds of .45 ACP hollowpoints. I have 9mm and .38 Super components on the way. Before the end of the year, I should be sitting on a pretty decent cache or “arsenal” as the TV news people like to call anything beyond half a box of CCI Mini-mags.

I’m learning a lot about making ammunition, and it has affected the way I see handguns.

When I made my defensive rounds in .45 ACP, I found that they had tiny velocity spreads. One round would be 906 fps, another would be 910, and so on. When you buy factory ammo, you can expect a spread of around 50 fps.

I don’t know if it’s true, but common sense suggests that consistent velocity contributes to accuracy. After all, bullets travel in arcs, not lines, and the shapes of the arcs are partly determined by velocity.

Today I shot a few defensive rounds as well as some target rounds. The defensive rounds were made with new Starline brass, and the target junk was made with brass I found on the ground at gun ranges. Before I shot the defensive rounds, I weighed every one in order to make sure I didn’t overload any. They were amazingly consistent. Almost all were exactly 320.0 grains. From past experience I knew that random brass gave varying cartridge weights.

I shot a lot better with the new brass. It made me wonder if the interior volumes of sister cases were likely to be nearly identical. Volume affects pressure, and pressure affects velocity.

Two notions came to mind. First, I should stop using whatever brass and powder I had lying around, look for accurate load data, and buy the right stuff. Second, I should break down and get a nicer gun. I didn’t want to shell out for a Les Baer or a Wilson Combat, but I knew there were guns that were more carefully made than my SW1911 yet not prohibitively expensive.

I decided to try Vihtavuori N320 powder. Supposedly, it gives excellent accuracy, doesn’t flash much, and doesn’t stain brass. It ought to be the best powder on earth, because it costs over 50% more than other powders. I also decided to invest in semiwadcutter .45 bullets. They make nicer holes in targets. Today my round-nosed bullets tore a big strip out of a target. I don’t want to keep dealing with that. Also, semiwadcutters are supposed to be reasonably good for defense and hunting.

As for the gun, I took a long look at the Colt Gold Cup Trophy. People speak highly of it. I decided against it, though. I wanted a second .45. The Gold Cup Trophy is available in .45 ACP and .38 Super. I may want to get one in .38 Super some day, and I don’t want two Gold Cup Trophys.

I started reading about the Smith & Wesson Performance Center SW1911. It’s similar to mine, but they fit the barrel more carefully, and there are some other little touches. It’s supposed to be a $3000 gun for less than half the price.

I was thinking about it when I went to check my mail. I wondered: was it really a good idea to get another gun, or was it just my flesh talking? I decided to ask God if he was in favor of it, and I felt a wave of something go through me. “YES.” It was a little unnerving. It bordered on pain.

That settled it. I ordered the gun. If I’m wrong, the worst thing that can happen is that I have a new pistol.

I have a lot of brass and bullets on the way. Should I also buy factory ammo? I don’t think so. For one thing, I trust my own ammo more. For another, I can make exactly what I want. Finally, while paying for top components is not cheap, it’s way cheaper than buying really excellent factory ammo.

Besides, you learn very little from shooting the factory stuff.

I think factory ammo is perfect for the AK and the shotguns, and I can’t make my own rimfire ammo, but other than that, I believe reloading is the way to go.

I may go completely nuts and get some real shooting glasses. I’ve never had any. I get the cheap yellow safety glasses.

I should pick up some holsters. I need one for my full-size Glock, and it would be good to have some 1911 holsters. I don’t carry a 1911, but for all I know, someone close to me may need to borrow one in the future.

I may get a couple of Miami Classic II holsters. I already have one for my small 10mm. They’re about as unobtrusive as a holster can get. They don’t get in the way when you sit down or do most types of labor.

It will be nice knowing I have a 1911 which is sufficiently snazzy to make it easier to separate my own bad technique from problems caused by a gun that takes a little extra effort to control.

Expect target photos and a great deal of bloviation.

Anti-Christians Really are Deluded

I always say we’re moving into the last stages of the age of the Gentiles and that persecution and delusion are ramping up sharply. Today I received a great piece of evidence.

For a long time, Republicans and Democrats have been fighting about covid. Democrats say, very wrongly, that it’s a major threat. Republicans tend to compare it to a severe flu season, and that characterization has been proven right. Democrats support draconian measures which don’t appear to work well, and Republicans express concern that if we stay at home forever, there will be economic devastation. Republicans say Democrat officials want economic trouble so they can use it to depict Donald Trump as a terrible leader during an election year.

I just read that Democrat bigwigs are highly disturbed…DISTURBED…by a Democrat economist’s belief that we are going to receive great news about Trump’s economy in spite of covid.

The optimist’s name is Jason Furman. He’s a Harvard professor who served Obama as an economist. In a video conference in April, he told a group of leaders from both sides this: “We are about to see the best economic data we’ve seen in the history of this country.”

Here’s a terrible quotation from the article:

Furman’s counterintuitive pitch has caused some Democrats, especially Obama alumni, around Washington to panic. “This is my big worry,” said a former Obama White House official who is still close to the former president. Asked about the level of concern among top party officials, he said, “It’s high — high, high, high, high.”

Here’s another one:

The former Obama White House official said, “Even today when we are at over 20 million unemployed Trump gets high marks on the economy, so I can’t imagine what it looks like when things go in the other direction. I don’t think this is a challenge for the Biden campaign. This is the challenge for the Biden campaign. If they can’t figure this out they should all just go home.”

Republicans have been proven right. Democrat politicians want us to be poor so Biden can win. They’re beginning to admit it to journalists.

This is not a small thing. Poverty is very bad. Do I even have to say that? Poverty ruins lives. It costs lives, too. But it truly is what the Democrat establishment wants for us.

What greater delusion could there be? What better evidence do we need before we admit that supernatural delusion is sweeping the country? No one could be this crazy and evil without help from spirits.

Biden is demented, and he’s going to be dead in a few years. It’s obvious to anyone who knows anything about dementia. In what appears to be the most cynical presidential strategy in history, the Democrats are working to engineer an election in which a demented yet widely palatable candidate wins the Oval Office and control of the nuclear football. They are fully aware that if he is elected, he will have to be removed from office, and they’re fine with it. They know the Vice President will be the true leader.

Liberals were never very rational, but this is a new level of insanity.

There is no way to avoid delusion if you aren’t filled with the Holy Spirit and you don’t pray in tongues every day. Sanity doesn’t come from the mind. It comes from the spirit. Evil spirits speak idiocy to us around the clock. You have to have a greater spirit that tells you the truth.

What’s more amazing? That Democrats want us to be poor, or that they’re willing to admit it? How could either of these things be true if they were in their right minds? They think their attitudes are right. No one could be that blind without supernatural help.

Here’s another interesting thing: articles are coming out, admitting covid has hit Democrats much worse than Republicans. If you remove the Northeast from the statistics, American figures don’t look all that bad. If you remove a few liberal cities, they look even better. It’s as though God sent the disease to American leftists.

We disagree on covid policies, not just because Democrats are more afraid of death, and not just because Democrats want to see Trump lose. We disagree because we have different realities. The world looks very different to Christians and anti-Christians.

I have never seen a covid patient. I don’t own a medical mask. I have lacked for nothing, unless you count having to wait longer than usual for a haircut. I have been able to go wherever I want in my area of the state, at any time of day. Apart from a personal tragedy which happened to take place during the epidemic, I’ve had a wonderful, restful time. I don’t think I’m unusual.

The other day I watched Mark Hemans issue a prophecy, and he compared the epidemic to a time of rest. Something about God making people slow down so they could come to him. It has been that way for me. I’ve felt as though I were wrapped in an invisible blanket, held apart from the terror and selfishness. Idle, even by my standards.

I have a cousin near liberal Chicago. She has been a prisoner in her home. She can’t get into Walmart. She can’t buy meat. My cousin near liberal Atlanta can’t get meat. I sent him a photo of my local grocery’s well-stocked meat area, and he said his Publix hadn’t looked like that for months.

It’s no wonder Christians and anti-Christians disagree. We live in different worlds on the same planet.

I keep getting the feeling that something is over. I have the inexplicable feeling that it doesn’t matter what I do now, because something is coming to an end. If your city condemned a house you lived in so an off-ramp could be built, you wouldn’t fix the lawn and hire someone to paint the walls.

When Jesus showed his disciples where to cast their nets, and they filled their boats with fish, they walked off and left the fish to rot. They had found something better to do. I can’t help thinking of that.

Sometimes I think the feeling means I’m going to die for some unknown reason, so I can be removed from this world. Sometimes I think it means the rapture is close.

Maybe the feeling doesn’t mean anything.

People are at each other’s throats down here. On Earth, I mean. It’s getting worse. It will be nice to leave it behind. It’s always great to be extracted from a situation in which people who are basically boneheads are clawing at each other and cannot be helped.

I like the expression “bonehead” because it’s not about intelligence. It’s about unwillingness to listen.

It’s about pride.

I think I’m going to cut down on the use of the words “Democrat,” “liberal,” and “leftist.” I really like “anti-Christian.” It’s much more accurate, and it covers nominally Christian nuts who are conservative yet still controlled by Satan. In the South, there are anti-charismatic, anti-Semitic sects that fit that description.

“Anti-Christian” also connects these people to the Antichrist, whom they already serve.

The sad thing is that writing about the delusion of anti-Christians won’t change anything. Even if a lot of people read my blog, it wouldn’t help people who are against God. They can’t be reached by reason. If what I write serves a purpose, it’s probably to reinforce people who already believe.

Persuasion is fine, but it only works on people the Holy Spirit has prepared. We don’t come to Christ because of logic and argument. We do it because the Holy Spirit reveals Christ to us.

I really hope Biden loses. It was bad enough when we elected an ineffective junior senator who had only worked 143 days. How will God treat us if we knowingly turn our country over to someone who is clearly senile?

Democrats want us to be poor, and now we have proof. How will God react if we elect someone we know wants us to have poverty?

We will probably get what we asked for.

Wyatt Earp or Barney Fife?

While sitting waiting for the rain to end, I’ve been reading about Massad Ayoob, the firearms writer. I have to say that my awe is decreasing by the minute.

If you have anything to do with gun people, you know that Ayoob is nearly worshiped. Saying you disagree with anything Ayoob says is like pouring honey on yourself and jumping onto an anthill naked. You will make a lot of people who don’t really know that much about anything very angry. He has his own Beyhive.

He wrote some books about self-defense. I have at least one of them, somewhere. When I read it, I thought the author was a bad dude who had been in lots of gunfights and stakeouts. He certainly made himself sound like that kind of person. He isn’t, however. Nothing close to it.

Today I read a piece by a guy who has serious issues with Ayoob’s integrity. His name is Shawn Dodson. He says he admired Ayoob, but his opinion changed when he found evidence that Ayoob was dishonest. He and Ayoob had a squabble, and he went through a bunch of things Ayoob had said and posted evidence suggesting Ayoob was not exactly truthful.

Here’s a link: LINK.

Example: Ayoob said he testified in a case involving the FBI when he actually appeared in an administrative hearing before the case went to court. He calls the case Christine Hansen et. al., v. Federal Bureau of Investigation, but on the Internet, it’s actually Hansen v. Webster (1986). The Webster in question was the director of the FBI.

Ayoob said, “I testified. The court listened,” clearly claiming a judge heard what he said. Now, to be fair, Ayoob is a layman. He appears as an expert witness from time to time, but he couldn’t begin to look after or understand a court case. Maybe he really thought an administrative hearing was a court case. I doubt it, though. It was an EEOC hearing. I used to deal with the EEOC’s examiners, and their offices are not located in courthouses. Not in Miami, anyway. I don’t see how anyone could think an EEOC hearing was a court case.

The Miami EEOC office was full of amply proportioned, slow-moving ladies who padded around in house shoes. It was more like their home than an office. There was a sleepy atmosphere to the place. It was conducive to napping. My dad told me to expect this when I visited, and it turned out he was absolutely right. The examiners expected attorneys to spoon-feed them and do all the work. I don’t recall witnessing any hearings. That would have gone far beyond the degree of involvement I was familiar with.

When you want to sue your employer, you have to complain to the EEOC first. Then the EEOC does nothing, and you’re allowed to sue. That means you go across town, to the federal courthouse.

The EEOC is a big joke, to be quite honest.

It appears that an agent named Hansen sued the FBI for sexual discrimination. Somewhere in the mix, she complained about the guns women had to use. Ayoob says it was a class action, so I guess other women were involved.

Here is some of what Ayoob wrote about the case:

I testified. The court listened. The court found in favor of the women, and the Bureau was ordered to “revise and update its obsolete and sexist firearms training.”

The big problem with this statement, apart from the fact that he didn’t really testify in court, is that according to an FBI bigwig, there was no court ruling. How could Ayoob have imagined one? I don’t think he could have. He must have lied. That’s my best guess. The bigwig, [full-time] Special Agent Urey W. Patrick, said the suit was settled and that the FBI made no substantial changes to its firearms policies.

A settlement is not a court ruling. It means you and your adversary make a private agreement and go home. A court doesn’t issue orders after a settlement. There is no way a judge would have said, “This case is settled, but Massad Ayoob, whose testimony I have not read, says your policies are wrong, so I order you to change them.”

The ever-reliable Internet says the DOJ, not the court, changed the FBI’s procedures in 1981, long before the case ended. If the court listened, why did the DOJ make the changes? According to a scholarly paper, the finding that changes needed to be made was made by the DOJ itself.

Special Agent Patrick also said Ayoob was “demolished” as a witness and that he was forced to read a passage from one of his own writings, contradicting something he had just asserted very forcefully.

Ayoob also said this:

When I testified against the FBI in 1980 for the women in the class action suit of Christine Hansen, et. al. V. Federal Bureau of Investigation, I was told it would be the kiss of death to my career. So be it. The women were right and the Bureau was wrong, and I couldn’t have looked my then three-year-old first-born daughter in the face had I not gone there and spoke the truth.

This is not how it works. Ayoob is a career expert witness, or as my evidence professor Mickey Graham used to say, “Witness Having Other Reasonable Explanation.” Ayoob has testified for defendants. In all likelihood, he has never testified on behalf of law enforcement. They have their own experts, who have been to college, on salary.

I’m assuming he’s telling the truth when he says he has done this kind of work. It’s hard to know what to believe now.

If he did work as an expert, it means he worked against cops and prosecutors. It should not have surprised or bothered anyone to see him testify to help a person suing a big law enforcement organization. It was what he did for a living. The FBI case was not an outlier for him. And you can’t ruin your career by testifying as an expert witness. No one cares. No one is even likely to find out unless you, gee…I don’t know…write about it in a book or magazine.

No one told Ayoob testifying would be the kiss of death for his career. Not unless it was his wife or maybe a bartender. No one who knows anything about court cases would say something that crazy.

One notes that it did not kill his career, and that he wrote about it while trying to advance his career. Why would you publicize something you expected to ruin your reputation and force you to give up your livelihood?

I’m not saying it’s virtue-signaling, but it certainly resembles it.

Ayoob also got into it with a doctor (not a gun writer or part time cop like Ayoob) who is held in extremely high regard among forensic experts. The doctor’s name is Martin Fackler, and he founded and ran the Armed Forces’ Wound Ballistic Laboratory. Ayoob tried to argue with him about the JFK shooting, saying the head wound was not consistent with the type of gun and ammunition used by Lee Harvey Oswald. The arrogance is amazing.

Ayoob is not a doctor, lawyer, paralegal, nurse, or, unless he is uncharacteristically hiding a credential, a college graduate. Assuming you’re not an expert, he knows about what you and I do when it comes to autopsies. He still argued in print with one of the world’s leading authorities. Dr. Fackler explained why Ayoob was wrong, and Ayoob continued arguing.

Whom would you believe? Stephen Hawking or the lady who typed his papers?

Ayoob cited another expert named John K. Lattimer, and Lattimer was so disturbed he published a response contradicting Ayoob.

Here are Ayoob’s credentials as well as I can determine them. He was a part-time cop in a tiny Mayberry-like New Hampshire town with a crime rate about 1/6 as high as the American average. He has not been in shootouts. He has not taken down lots of scary criminals. He was never in the military, although he was of draft age during the Vietnam War. As far as I can tell, he only has a high school education. He is not a mechanical engineer, hence he cannot comment as an expert on firearms design or construction. He is not a ballistics expert, because those people are scientists, and scientists go to college. He is just a guy who read a lot about guns and crime and hustled his way into a career as an authority.

He left the Grantham, New Hampshire PD as a captain. Question: how hard is it to become a captain in a town containing about as many people as a Broadway theater? I have relatives in a town in Kentucky that size. If someone there started calling himself a captain, they would still be making fun of him 10 years after his funeral.

I remember a funny story. They tore down the Powell County courthouse and built a new one. The county judge, who was a low-level official who basically handled traffic tickets, had it named after himself: “The Billy Joe Martin Government Center.” You can imagine how long the letters stayed up.

I often disagree with things experts say, but I’m not crazy enough to do it when we’re both talking about something about which I very clearly know comparatively little. Yes, I disagree with the people who pushed the theory that covid would be a devastating plague, but they themselves admitted great uncertainty, and besides, I generally turned out to be right. I wouldn’t argue with them about the physical properties of the virus or the body’s mechanisms for responding to it. I can’t even guess about those things. But Ayoob held himself out as competent to discount the opinions of two renowned experts, regarding well-settled science, in the creation of which they were both instrumental.

He once said this:

“Those of us who have seen violent death up close, who have seen what high-powered bullets can do to living human tissue, have a horror of inflicting that nightmarish, never forgotten damage on a fellow human being.

Obvious question: if you haven’t been in violent confrontations involving high-powered bullets, and you’re not a pathologist or any type of medical professional, how did you ever manage to see violent death up close? My guess is that he was in the car with a full-time cop who went to the scene of a suicide. Or maybe his celebrity status got him into some autopsies. I have been invited to autopsies. Lawyers get invitations like that. Had I gone, I would not write about my experiences the way he did.

Is it just me, or does the quotation suggest that he has been out in the street blasting away at criminals? If I wrote something like that, I would be sure to point out the circumstances so I would not deceive anyone.

The more I read, the less I respect this guy. I think he knows a great deal about self-defense and shooting techniques, just as anyone would after spending decades reading about these things and practicing shooting on safe gun ranges far from criminals. I think his opinions on bullet performance are utterly worthless when there are so many real authorities to go to. His legal opinions are about as valuable as those of a person who drives an ice cream truck.

Given the things Dodson exposed, I can’t believe stories Ayoob tells about himself without corroboration. When he talks about preparing cases with lawyers, we don’t get to hear what the lawyers recall. Maybe they paid little attention to him. Maybe he got fired a lot. Maybe a number of lawyers talked to him on the phone and decided not to hire him, and then he went on to say he “got together with attorneys” on this or that case.

Here’s how the expert witness business works. You have a client, and you think it would help him if an expert testified to the likelihood of various facts. It might be nice if a doctor said your client would never walk again. It might be good if an accountant said the defendant’s actions cost your client 40 million dollars. There is a pool of expert witnesses out there, and they advertise their services. You pick one you know will see things your way, and you turn him loose with the evidence. If ethics matter to you, you don’t tell him what to conclude, but I’m sure many lawyers cross that line.

You can see why my evidence professor called them W.H.O.R.E.S. I’m not saying they’re all dishonest, but many are, and conveniently, they’re dishonest in ways that don’t quite amount to perjury. If there are honest ones, they’re still not breaking their backs to bring out the truth. They’re trying to generate conclusions that will help the parties whose cases they’re involved in.

Go to a trial involving experts, and what will you see? One side’s experts will say A, B, and C are true, and the other side’s experts will “prove” there is no way any of those things could be true. If experts are really experts, and if they’re honest, how can that happen?

The fact that Ayoob worked in this field doesn’t mean he was right about anything or that the parties he worked to help were right. He may have been hired to help the guilty many times, and that’s okay, because that’s something our legal system permits. He never had a client, unless you include the lawyers who paid him. A layman can’t have a client.

The more I think about it, the more surprised I am I didn’t have a change of opinion sooner.

I think much more highly of Jim Cirillo, the New York cop who shot at least 11 people. His conclusions about self-defense are based on brutal experience. His own, not just other people’s. He worked full-time, and not in New Hampshire.

He was obsessed with inventing better bullets, because he knew what it was like to fire an ineffective shot and then try to make up for it while the criminal fired back. The more I think about Cirillo’s writings, the more I think lethal ammunition is important. It makes sense. If you’re really lucky, you’ll hit an assailant once during a confrontation, and if that shot doesn’t do the job, you will be in deep trouble. The odds of a single shot stopping a criminal are not good under the best of circumstances, so you need to do what you can to improve them.

It’s all very interesting. When you listen to fervent self-promoters, you always have to think about the inherent conflict of interest and how it may drive them to give you bad information.

Pro Tip: Wear Shoes

It’s a beautiful overcast day, and I feel like blogging, so I think I’ll tell on myself. Here goes.

I have a burglar alarm. It’s annoying sometimes. This weekend it annoyed me by beeping over and over.

I had a half-hour power outage. The burglar alarm has a UPS-type battery for backup power. When the battery is low, the system beeps. It appears that the outage drained the battery and the system was not able to charge it enough to make the beeping stop. The battery is from March of 2017, so it’s a little bit past the halfway point of its expected lifespan.

The control panel is not a good product. It’s not intuitive. For example, before you enter the security code to turn things on and off, you have to enter a “1.” This should be printed on the panel in big letters in case a friend has to turn the alarm off while you’re away. It has tiny instructions printed on it, and they don’t tell you very much. It has directions for turning off the annoying beep, which it spins as a “chime.” These directions do not work when the power goes out. When you turn off the CHIME, the battery beep does not stop. Because when your battery goes bad, or the system simply isn’t man enough to charge a good battery, you need to be reminded every 90 seconds, forever. Especially when you’re trying to sleep.

I can’t get burglar alarm batteries where I live. I have to order such things, or I suppose I could pay the alarm company $150 to install a $20 product. I ordered a battery with a larger capacity than the old one, and then I thought about killing the beeps.

I did not call the alarm company. I figured it was impossible to kill the beeps using the panel. After all, the CHIME shutoff did nothing.

I decided to try two things. First, I got out an old computer UPS I wasn’t using, and I plugged it in, hoping it would charge its own battery to the point where I could substitute it for the alarm battery. After a few hours, it charged up, but when I installed it, the beeps continued.

My next genius move was to open up the alarm panel and look for the buzzer, which really is a buzzer, not a chime. I think. It certainly looks like what electronics people call a buzzer. My plan was to take my soldering iron, remove the buzzer, and reinstall it when the battery arrived. Or not. You don’t really need a buzzer on your burglar alarm panel. It has a text display, and it also communicates through my phone. I guess the buzzer is nice if you enjoy hearing the CHIME go off over and over as doors are opened and closed. I don’t have much use for that feature.

I plugged my soldering iron in and turned it on. There is no furniture near the panel, so I left the iron on the floor. I wasn’t going to step on it. Who would step on a hot soldering iron, knowing it’s turned on?

While I was doing all this, I decided to call the alarm company. They might conceivably be of use. I talked to some lady who said she would refer me to their technical people and have them call me.

While I was talking to her, I felt a terrible pain in my right little toe. I was standing on the soldering iron.

It’s not that easy to have a calm conversation on the phone when you’ve just stood on a soldering iron, but I found that it could be done. What really bothered me was the smell of burning flesh which filled the area after I moved my foot. Apparently I left a significant amount of myself on the soldering iron.

It was very late, and I figured I would hear from these people the next day, so I heated the buzzer’s lugs and started pulling. One slid out of the PCB just fine, and then the buzzer fell apart. Now I had a permanently deleted buzzer.

Immediately, the phone rang. It was the tech guy. I told him my problem, and he said, “Press the star key.”

Mmmf.

I put the panel back together and went to bed. Before turning out the lights, I hit Ebay and ordered a package of buzzers for $3.65. The pain went away after about half an hour, thank goodness. Falling asleep was not a problem. Too bad it happened pretty close to 2 a.m.

I don’t know if pressing the star key actually works, but I suppose I should have called and tried before mutilating my alarm panel.

For all I know, the panel has been straining to beep all night with its larynx ripped out. I sort of hope so. I like the picture of an annoying adversary screaming at me silently, features contorted with desperation, while I sleep in peace.

Later this week, my buzzers and battery will arrive, and maybe this will be the end of my problems.

Why didn’t I just look up my panel’s manual? You’re so smart. You think you know everything, don’t you? Get ready for some humble pie.

My panel has no manufacturer’s markings on it, inside or out. Seriously. It has a logo sort of a thing consisting of symbols. It’s sort of like the thing Prince used as his name for a while. You can’t search for it on Google.

Today, by sheer luck, I found out what type of panel it is, and I downloaded a manual. Guess what? There are no instructions for turning off the battery beep. Totally serious. What kind of sick mind writes a manual like that?

I can see him now. Some nerd with 42 pens in his shirt pocket, sneering that if people don’t feel like buying spare batteries, they don’t deserve to sleep.

I should have had a spare battery on hand. Actually, I did, if you count the UPS. Not sure the UPS battery is up to the task, though. Can’t tell without a buzzer. BWAH HA HA HA HA.

Should I get a spare battery now? Don’t know. The new battery should last at least three years. Will I still be here?

I’m thinking I should hook the battery up to a car charger the next time this happens. I think the internal charger in the alarm box is junk. It works off a tiny wall wart. I’ll bet I would have to put up with a solid day of beeping even if I had a good battery, because it would take that long to recharge.

I also think I should put a UPS on the wall wart. If the system never knows there’s a power outage, it won’t be aware it has an excuse to bother me. I’m not sure why the internal battery doesn’t provide complete backup. Maybe it’s deliberate. Maybe the company wants me to know the power is out, even if the alarm is working. I don’t see how that helps me, though.

If I add a UPS, the system won’t know there’s an outage for a considerable length of time, and that will give the power company time to fix things before the system finds out. Most outages are short. They wouldn’t challenge a UPS. As for long outages, the UPS will run down, and then I’m no worse off than I was with a depleted internal battery. It will just take a little longer to get there.

Maybe I should get a motorcycle gel battery to replace the internal battery. It seems stupid to protect your house with an expensive system when you’re going to back it up with a $20 Chinese lead-acid battery that won’t keep a PC running for 20 minutes.

I guess a gel battery would need a different charger. Okay, maybe I should get a lead-acid motorcycle battery. Still better than what I have.

In other news, I got another useful revelation.

One of the tough things about serving God is getting humility right. Even when you credit God with the good things that happen in your life, you can do it in a way that draws admiration to you. I’ve noticed that preachers who heal people get a lot of thanks and admiration, and they don’t do a great job of deflecting it.

You can say, “God did this for you,” but that doesn’t capture the truth of what happened. You can’t help but sound a little condescending.

God showed me this: don’t just say, “God did this.” Say, “My master did this.” Call God “my master” whenever possible. Don’t say “the master.” It’s not personal enough. The feel isn’t the same.

I got ahold of this, and I started telling God he was my master. Try it. It feels wonderful. It makes our relationship seem like what it actually is. I feel tension drain out of me when I say it. It’s as if burdens are sliding off of me.

God has to receive proper credit in order for his power to flow through us. It can’t just be words and thoughts. It has to be in our hearts. Using the proper language can change your heart and open you up so he can flow.

You have to try it in order to understand how helpful it is.

God’s glory is a problem if it starts to stick to you. When you’re close to him, it’s easy to end up in a situation where you are overly exalted. It appears that this is what happened to Satan. You need to be able to reflect the glory and prevent it from harming you.

The Bible makes it clear that God does his most impressive work when others are standing aside. When you’re striving, the credit for what you do is yours. God won’t take credit for it or get heavily involved. When he gets the glory, he does the work.

I can’t say enough about it. Give it a try and see how it works out.

Beautiful, Beautiful Data

I got to try out a new product today: the Competition Electronics Prochrono DLX chronograph. It connects to phones via Bluetooth and creates files of shooting data.

My old chronograph is a Master Chrony F-1, and I probably got it in 2009. Even back then, it was not advanced for its time. Smartphones and PC’s existed, and the F-1 had no real means of connecting to them. It didn’t do much of anything.

When I use the F-1, I have to stop after every shot, put my gun down, and write down the velocity. A lot of the time, the F-1 fails to take a reading. That’s annoying when you only have 5 test rounds.

The people who make the F-1 solicit email orders on their website, but they don’t seem to respond to them. They have no electronic shopping cart, and that’s unbelievable. They sell parts, but getting them is a hassle.

The F-1 has light diffusers cobbled together from three pieces of plastic. It has diffuser supports that telescope into each other so you can separate them and put them in the Chrony’s small box. The Prochrono has one-piece diffusers and one-piece support rods.

I’m making .45 rounds out of the pile of free bullets I got from Hornady when I bought my press. It has been hard to get good information for loading the cartridges. I want a velocity of between 850 and 900 fps, and I want to use Unique or Accurate No.7 powder. I already have both, and I have more Unique than I need. Maybe. Do you ever have more powder than you need?

I found an article from the Handloader Ammunition Reloading Journal, listing a bunch of loads. The author went up to 6.8 grains of Unique with an OAL of 1.205″, which is a lot shorter than Hornady’s recommendation. At 6.8, he got 949 fps. I figured I would try 6.5 to be safe.

I set the Prochrono up in the pasture and fired away. I had the phone app running. It allowed me to set up a special list for the load I had created. I was able to enter the type of bullet, the case, primer, charge weight, OAL, and whatever else I wanted.

When I started firing, I heard a lady telling me how fast the rounds were flying. The app was announcing the velocities! That was wonderful. I didn’t have to stop to write things down or check the screen.

When I was done, I had the following info:

45 ACP XTP 230 6.5 Unique Digital Link
Test rounds for defensive purposes. Goal 875 fps.
Temperature: 93° F
Pressure: 30 in Hg
Bullet Weight: 230.0
Power Factor Average: 218
Power Factor Low: 218
Power Factor High: 219
Number of Shots: 5
Minimum: 948
Maximum: 956
Spread: 8
Average: 951
Standard Deviation: 3
Custom Attributes
OAL 1.205
Brass Starline new
Powder Unique 6.5
Primer WLP
Bullet Hornady XTP
# Velocity Ft/lbs Power Factor Date
5 952 462.82 218 5/23/20 5:07 PM
4 948 458.93 218 5/23/20 5:07 PM
3 951 461.84 218 5/23/20 5:07 PM
2 950 460.87 218 5/23/20 5:06 PM
1 956 466.71 219 5/23/20 5:06 PM

To me, that’s incredible. Writing that up myself would take forever. I was able to email it to myself as a PDF.

The velocities were way higher than I expected, and the cases bulged. I found three of them, and they had creases running across them where the chamber restrained them. Not what I wanted.

I don’t know why my rounds were so much faster than the ones in the magazine.

The rounds were pleasant to shoot, and the gun didn’t seem to mind at all. It’s too bad I can’t use this load.

The velocities were incredibly consistent. I am guessing this has something to do with the way I’ve been cleaning my powder measure. I’m using an RCBS beam scale which is very accurate. Today I set it up using test weights, so not only are my charges consistent, they should be very close to the number I want.

People say charge weight doesn’t affect accuracy much. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I know my .45 handloads have always been more accurate than factory ammo. Is it the Unique, or is it charge consistency? Can’t say, but there is no conceivable reason to want your charges to be inconsistent, so I’m glad mine are not.

I moved to 6.2 grains and started over.

45 ACP XTP 230 6.2 Unique Digital Link
Test rounds for defensive purposes. Goal 875 fps.
Temperature: N/A
Pressure: N/A
Bullet Weight: 230.0
Power Factor Average: 207
Power Factor Low: 202
Power Factor High: 209
Number of Shots: 5
Minimum: 882
Maximum: 910
Spread: 28
Average: 902
Standard Deviation: 10
Custom Attributes
OAL 1.205
Brass Starline new
Powder Unique 6.2
Primer WLP
Bullet Hornady XTP
# Velocity Ft/lbs Power Factor Date
5 882 397.26 202 5/23/20 6:18 PM
4 905 418.25 208 5/23/20 6:17 PM
3 910 422.88 209 5/23/20 6:17 PM
2 906 419.17 208 5/23/20 6:17 PM
1 908 421.02 208 5/23/20 6:17 PM

Again, wonderful consistency. The 882 figure is the least consistent, and it’s right in line with the accuracy of factory ammunition. Maybe that charge was a little short.

I should have bought this chronograph a long time ago. Comparing it to the Chrony is like comparing a Commodore 64 to a modern PC.

I don’t know what’s going on with the Chrony people. Maybe it’s a family business, suddenly overtaken by modern companies with Asian connections. Maybe they did their best. In any case, they haven’t caught up. Someone on a forum recently said they weren’t answering the phone.

I have to decide whether to stay at 6.2 grains or drop a tenth. If I take a tenth off, I won’t be able to make ammunition until tomorrow, because I don’t want to test more rounds tonight. If not, I can get started making cartridges right now.

Very nice. I think I’m finally marginally competent at making pistol ammo.

My Own Strength Doesn’t Cut it

The fallout from my recent dream has been wonderful so far.

I dreamed the wife of a preacher who had committed suicide threw herself on me and gave me a passionate kiss. It may not sound like a dream that came from God, but it appears that it was.

One of the things I took away from it was a new revelation of the importance of faithfulness to God. Your relationship with God, although not sexual, should be hot, passionate, and exclusive, and you should be appalled by the thought of cheating on him.

You can cheat on God by committing sin or just by conforming to the secular world. You can cheat on him by failing to spend time with him. Many Christians practice idolatry through things like yoga, astrology, the martial arts, traditional Chinese medicine, and so on. Idolatry is the most blatant form of adultery there is.

Anyone who wants to see how Christianity resembles marriage and how straying from God is like having sex with strangers should read Ezekiel 23 in plain English. It’s startling. Here is a link.

I have always hated adultery. It can be hard for a single person to understand how a married person can cheat on his or her spouse, especially if that person is attractive and devoted and has a good personality. I do understand the temptation to cheat on vile people, but I know it isn’t acceptable.

I have never liked the hundred-mile rule. Women may not be familiar with it. It goes like this: “If I’m at least a hundred miles from my wife, I’m single.” I guess this could also be called the convention rule.

If you’re married to someone, you don’t just behave when that person can see you. It’s not okay to commit adultery that person doesn’t know about. Marriage should be characterized by deep trust. Once someone cheats, that trust is damaged very badly.

I don’t understand women who marry men who are unlikely to be faithful. Jada Pinkett Smith comes to mind. She has a famous “open” marriage. Some people seem to admire her for holding onto Will Smith in spite of what he does, but the truth, in all likelihood, is that she simply has no choice other than divorce, and like Camille Cosby, she doesn’t want to relinquish the status he brings. She was a minor celebrity before she married him, and if they divorced, she would fall to a much lower rung on the social ladder.

All this being said, I had a physical relationship with a married woman once. I feel very bad about it. She was in the process of getting a divorce, but it wasn’t final. I told myself that made her single, which was not true. We were in love, and we had plans. I thought we would marry. I used these things to justify what I did. Of course, a physical relationship outside of marriage is never acceptable, so even if her divorce had been final, I would merely have been committing fornication, not adultery. It would not have made our behavior righteous.

But for the divorce proceedings, I would never have touched her. I convinced myself I was still against adultery.

Anyway, regardless of what I did in a time of disgraceful self-deceit, I have always hated cheating.

The passion of the kiss in the dream made me think about the nature of our desire for God. We should be like women who are helplessly drawn to their husbands. The circle of trust around God and us should never be broken. When we are tempted, we should be just as upset as married people who are approached by sluts and players.

We need to start saying “slut” again. There are a lot of women out there who need to have cold water thrown in their faces so they can see what they’re doing to themselves. We shouldn’t let active strippers or other prostitutes work in church ministries. We shouldn’t let career single moms sing onstage. The Bible uses words like “harlot” and “whore” over and over. Pulling punches can hurt people.

It’s too bad there is no similarly powerful word for describing sexually immoral men.

Before I had the dream, I knew my relationship with God was like a marriage, and I knew I was supposed to be faithful, but the knowledge didn’t run deep enough. The dream put it in my heart, and that has been very helpful.

Now when I’m tempted, I think of the way I would feel if I were married and a sleazy woman came onto me. I would be angry because she was threatening one of the pillars of my life. I wouldn’t be nice about it. I would be very blunt with her, and I would let her know I was going to tell my wife everything.

I may have committed adultery in the past, but I certainly don’t want to do it now. I don’t want to be that kind of person.

I am much better at resisting temptation, and I feel that God is more willing to do the things I ask than he was a couple of days ago. That would make sense. Leaders are generally less willing to support followers who are hypocritical or who dishonor them habitually.

It seems like I’m seeing his hand in my life more often. I truly hope so, because when your testimony dries up, you’re in trouble.

Christians whose testimony is weak should be quiet and listen, instead of founding denominations, running churches, and making up doctrine.

Another Win for Mr. Popularity

If I recall correctly, I started my first Facebook account in 2009. Actually, it may have been my second account. I have dim memories of checking Facebook out during my blogging heyday, which would have been several years earlier. I recall wondering why anyone would want Facebook. People “poked” each other and sent each other beer icons. It seemed utterly stupid. That sounds doesn’t sound like the Facebook of 2009. Anyway, my first really active account probably began a little over a decade ago.

I was an armorbearer for Rich Wilkerson at Miami’s Trinity Church, and I had a lot of church friends. I noticed that a lot of the people I knew had been drinking the Social Justice Kool-Aid. They hated Republican politicians, and they put up emotional posts espousing leftist causes. It was very disturbing, because they were very clearly out of touch with the body of Christ.

They were out of touch with their pastor, who was a conservative. He kept his politics quiet.

I got frustrated with Facebook because it showed me that most of the people I knew were hypocrites. They went to church to feel good, but they remained unchanged. You couldn’t tell them anything. When I shared things that would not be controversial at all among Christians who knew the Holy Spirit, I got a lot of static in return.

A few years later, I belonged to New Dawn Ministries. I didn’t know the pastor was an active pedophile. I posted things that would have gotten a lot of likes from knowledgeable Christians, but I got more static, and a lot of it came from the pastors. The pastor’s wife was especially strident and rude. She was a huge believer in the prosperity gospel, and she believed she and her husband were to be treated like royalty. We were expected to submit to them like servants.

I eventually became very open in my opposition to the church, calling it a cult and denouncing the pastors for telling my friends not to talk to me.

During this time, I used a fake Facebook name, as any intelligent person would. Facebook had a rule I didn’t know about. No fake names. Someone turned me in, and my account vanished instantly. The pedophile pastor put up a post about it. His theory was that God had smitten me. He said, “God don’t like ugly.”

I didn’t bother resurrecting that account. I started a new one and continued doing what I was doing. But one day God told me to get off social media. I was only too happy to do that. I called it “the little rapture.” It was very pleasant.

I still avoid Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. A Russian hacker took over my old Instagram account after I deactivated it, so it still exists.

I had found that social media interaction led to a lot of nonproductive stomach-churning argument with people who thought they knew a great deal yet were very ignorant. I wondered if I was supposed to continue. Was what I was doing a ministry? I can’t say, but if it was, it didn’t work very well. The return was not worth the aggravation.

Today I got a reminder of why I quit. I put something on the web a while back, and even though social media sites were not involved, someone who was offended linked to what I had published, and the flying monkeys attacked. It wasn’t a big deal, but it reminded me how vile the Internet is. I was accused of characteristics I don’t have. One person found out I was a Christian and said I was delusional.

A crowd of venomous, deluded people doesn’t like me. This is nothing new, and I know why it happens.

The voice of Internet haters is the voice of the Beast. He speaks through crowds. He has always spoken through crowds.

A crowd tried to rape the cherubs in Sodom, outside Lot’s house. The crowd was against Noah; God killed all of them and only spared 8 human beings. A crowd delighted in tormenting Samson. A crowd listened to Dathan and Korah and opposed Moses. A crowd got Aaron to make a golden calf. A crowd murmured against Moses, Caleb, and Joshua and died in the desert because of it.

A crowd defied God and insisted he give them a king when he wanted to give them prophets and priests.

Elijah was against the majority. In his time, there were only 7,000 men in Israel who didn’t worship Baal. A crowd of kids insulted Elisha, and God sent two bears to maul them. Crowds abused and killed the prophets. A crowd arrested Jesus. A crowd forced Pontius Pilate to kill him, even though Pilate was determined to let him go. A crowed jeered at him while he was dying on the cross.

Solomon literally married a crowd. He had hundreds of wives, and he listened to them instead of God. He worshiped their false gods and died in disgrace. Solomon was a failure. People forget that.

Under Ahasuerus, crowds rose up to murder Jews. Some believe this was a shadow of the Nazi persecution.

Crowds and peer pressure are evil. The Bible is against peer pressure and the voice of the crowd. The Bible says we are to be the head and not the tail. The head leads; it doesn’t follow. When a herd travels, one animal in front turns its head a certain way and walks in that direction, and the other animals follow as though they were its tail.

I have never been good at picking up on the consensus of the herd, and I have always hated peer pressure. Many times, I have tried to give in to it in order to be accepted, but it never worked. You have to be a certain kind of person in order to pull it off.

If you don’t fit in with the herd, be happy, because it may mean you were created to be a child of God.

Jesus said his sheep would hear his voice. There is always symmetry in the supernatural. Maybe there’s another voice you’re not hearing.

The Biblical figures who pleased God were generally outsiders. John the Baptist is a great example. His father was a temple priest, but John was not given a priesthood. He lived in a time when the Romans, not the Jews, chose priests. It was all political, which is another way of saying the Beast made the choices. Moses was cut out of his Egyptian family and social circle. Noah built a huge ship in the middle of the desert, which was certainly not in accord with the beliefs of his neighbors. Lot didn’t fit in with his neighbors. Elijah was rejected by his king and queen and had to go live in the wilderness. Jewish legend says Enoch lived by himself and rarely appeared before other people. Jesus had no home and no title.

The other day I was thinking about myself, and I wondered why I had never had any ambition to speak of. I think most men are driven to succeed by the fear that they will be perceived negatively if they don’t. I would like to be admired and receive approval, but the desires aren’t strong enough to get me out of bed every day at 5 so I can be the best or richest lawyer on earth.

I don’t care for awards. Competitions are inherently corrupt, and if you win a prize, what does it prove? It shows that a bunch of people whose opinions you probably don’t respect felt like acknowledging you for their own selfish reasons. If I think you don’t have the capacity to form an opinion worthy of respect, how can I expect to derive pleasure from your trophy?

Cash prizes…now those are okay, regardless of whether they come from people I respect. I can use money to buy more tools.

Trophies are not very valuable. When you die, they stay here on earth, filling up with dead flies. They’re usually made of plastic, so it’s not like you can melt them down and keep the metal.

Oscars are made of bronze, which is a cheap metal. The gold exterior is plating. Olympic gold medals are currently made of 92.5% silver, which is okay, but have you checked silver’s price lately? Even including the tiny amount of gold on the outside, a gold medal won’t get you far in a barter economy. It may well be that Nobel medals, made of gold alloy, are the only major prizes that have intrinsic value.

The Greeks, whose culture was completely Satanic, loved prizes. They loved honoring athletes, which is very fitting, because athletes have short careers. Satan loves giving people things that rot quickly, in order to deprive them of eternal riches. Greek athletes got all excited over winning crowns made of leaves. Wonder how long it took those to wilt.

I’m sure Michael Jordan has a huge number of prizes. That’s great, but how would he look on the court today? He would have a tough time with talented high school kids. He might do fine for a short time, but forget playing competitively for a whole game. He has prizes for things he can no longer do. If you serve God, you receive prizes in heaven, and they last forever.

Maybe I would feel different if I had won a lot of prizes or if I had received a lot of approval from human beings. Public approval is like a bribe. It clouds your judgment.

I’ve always had the feeling that lack of ambition was a good thing. I think that’s an unconventional belief.

While I was at Trinity Church, I got a prize. They called it the Abishai prize. The idea came from the infected doctrine of Denny Duron, a football coach masquerading as a pastor. His daughter married Richie Wilkerson, who went on to be the proud pastor of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian.

The idea is that Abishai was a nobody. In Duron’s brand of Christianity, Abishai had no talents and received no honor, but he was special because he was happy to continue working without recognition or reward.

In the Bible, Abishai was an honored military man of high rank, so one wonders where Duron got his ideas.

Duron wrote a filthy pamphlet called The Abishai Anointing, and the basic thrust was that some Christians are very special and you’re not. You should be happy to live in the shadow of people like Denny Duron and carry their laundry and so on, because it’s a big honor to be ignored.

Trinity used people and rewarded sycophants and rich people, so the leaders knew there were people who were not happy about being ignored. I suppose this is why they came up with the Abishai award. It was for selfless leaders who didn’t mind being treated like pack animals.

I didn’t completely understand what was going on back then, and I was slightly honored to receive the award, even though I knew they treated me badly. I got my two minutes onstage, and I was expected to be happy about it and find comfort in it during my remaining years of peonage.

One day I popped the prize, which was a cheap certificate, out of the very cheap frame and put a photo in it. I burned Duron’s ridiculous booklet, and I probably burned the certificate. It’s always unpleasant to learn that you’ve been suckered, even partially.

I hadn’t wanted a prize to begin with, but if you’re going to give me one, don’t bend over backwards to make it an insult.

I criticized Duron and his nonsense publicly after that, which could not have done much to enhance my popularity.

It’s a good example of the sort of earthly rewards I’ve received from preachers and churches.

If they really wanted to honor me, they could have made some effort to clean the area where I worked in the kitchen, instead of leaving it to me and my friends to clean piles of mouse manure out of drawers and treat them with bleach. They could have stopped piling junk on the surfaces where I made pizza that netted them $12 per pie. They could have backed me up when they told me to get the kitchen in shape, instead of siding with a hotheaded underpastor who responded to my efforts by standing up for dangerous filth and telling me I was the problem.

The whole church was like a clown act. It was as if little kids had broken into a building and set up a church. The best way to get in trouble was to try to teach people how to behave responsibly. They hated that.

The mouse manure is back. That’s my guess. It’s very dangerous, and feeding people from a kitchen full of excrement is despicable, but Trinity doesn’t care about reality. They only care about image and money.

Today I got a call from my aunt. I rarely hear from her. She wants to decorate my parents’ grave for Memorial Day, at her expense. That’s nice of her.

She never got to hear my dad’s conversion testimony. She was not at his funeral. She had an appointment for someone to come and measure for blinds.

Her son and daughter-in-law were present, and they heard the testimony. I guess they didn’t tell anyone. That’s surprising, because it was quite a testimony, and I didn’t just deliver it so people could be amused at the viewing. I hoped it would help them.

I told her about his conversion today on the phone. I don’t expect anything to come of it, but you never know.

It’s considerate of her to decorate the grave, but I’m not very excited about cemeteries and mortal remains. My mom and dad aren’t in a hole in Kentucky. Everything here on earth will be destroyed, so putting a lot of effort into caring for a grave is not that appealing to me. After my aunt goes, I plan to do nothing whatsoever to maintain the grave. I don’t have any desire to visit it or to see Eastern Kentucky again. It’s a disappointing place.

A tombstone is a lot like a trophy. It honors a person without actually helping them, and a nice tombstone doesn’t make you a success. There are plenty of people in hell who have beautiful graves.

Maybe I should make burial arrangements for myself, but do I really care? At the moment, I have no will. I was working on one, but my friend Travis died, and he’s one of the people I wanted to bless. Now I can’t do anything for him. I suppose I could help other people.

If the money is wasted, which will almost certainly happen if I die intestate, I won’t care. I’m not going to be sitting in heaven watching unimportant things happen on earth.

I don’t care what happens to my body. I won’t be here to see, and if I were, I still wouldn’t care. I’ll be finished with it, forever. I don’t care what happens to things I scrape off a plate after dinner. What’s the difference?

I’ll be glad to get rid of this thing. I miss not being farsighted. I’m not thrilled about sagging and deteriorating. I don’t like the feeling of greatly diminished potential. There are so many things I can’t look forward to now.

People teach that our dead bodies will be raised and transformed. I don’t think that means you have to protect your dead body. I’m sure that if Jesus can resurrect people who died in explosions, he can fix whatever happens to my carcass.

When I let people and things go, I really let them go. I’m grateful for that, because I’ve seen what happens when people hold on too long.

It’s not that I don’t care. It’s that I don’t care about people and things I know I can’t change.

The crowd is getting very ugly. How much time do we have left? Even human promoters pull acts offstage when crowds get sufficiently hostile. How long should we stay here while unbelievers hurl garbage at us?

It’s good to be reminded of my outsider status. Not that it wasn’t already clear.

Sorry, Rocket

They say no good deed goes unpunished, and while this expression is not quite Biblical, it is often proven true.

Last night, I walked into my bedroom, which has sliding glass doors. I looked out through the glass, and what did I see? A miserable, stinking raccoon in MY yard.

I guess it was 25 feet away. It must have seen me through the glass, but it didn’t seem disturbed. Maybe raccoons are too stupid to understand windows.

It was on the small side, and a weaker person might have described it as cute.

I looked at the bolt-action rifle in .204 Ruger lying on my bed (I have a good explanation), and I had the obvious thoughts. I could slip on some earmuffs, open the door a bit, turn on the scope (I have a good explanation), wait for it to boot, and send the coon to coon heaven. Alternatively, I could sneak around the side of the house.

I was tired. I didn’t know what to do with a dead coon. I felt funny about killing a little one. I waved my hand a few times, the coon realized I was not furniture, and he ran off.

This morning I got up and saw that he had disturbed some blackberry briars in pots. One of them is not looking too good now. This is how I am repaid for my mercy.

My new policy: death to all coons regardless of age, size, or how much they remind me of Disney films.

I had a pet coon for about a week when I was a kid. I had to feed it with a bottle. The person who sold it to me told me to rub its belly with a warm cloth to aid digestion. My mother took it to a vet while I was at school, for the usual raccoon checkup, and he told her to get rid of it ASAP. Coons can carry rabies without showing symptoms, and they get mean when they grow up.

That was the end of my coon-keeping days. By the time school let out, the coon had been returned for a refund.

He was very cute. He had little black hands that were cool to the touch and looked like expensive gloves. He waddled when he was full of milk. His distant relations here on the farm are cute, too, but they still have to die.

I haven’t thought much about disposing of coons, possums, armadillos, and coyotes. You can toss a squirrel a good distance from your house and forget about it, but bigger animals stink, and friends show up for the funeral and free meal. I went online and asked around, and the consensus seems to be that tossing is still the way to go. Just increase the distance. Because carcasses attract other varmints, they can lead to more kills and fewer varmint problems.

My grandmother ate coons. She fixed one for my dad and my grandfather, and my dad said that by the time he finished chewing a bite, it was as big as a lampshade. Apparently it just expanded without falling apart. He was not a fan.

She also ate possums and groundhogs. I’m trying to think of an animal she would not eat.

I don’t really see myself eating coons. Also, my understanding is that the pelts are no good this far south. I could see preserving a coon tail for the amusement value.

I’m going to come up with a coon game plan. I think I’ll just use my carry gun if I see one far from the house. If I see one in the yard, I’ll go for the .17 HMR. If I decide to set up a blind and shoot them, I’ll use the .204 Ruger and the computerized night scope with the built-in video camera. At the very least, I’ll keep the tail to freak out visitors, and if I’m feeling really ambitious, I’ll try to cook part of the beast.

There. Plan made.

I could use the 16-gauge with #6 shot or the Saiga-12 with law enforcement loads, but I really like rifled projectiles.

I just got a new stainless barrel for my carry 10mm. Midway USA had a sale. I could not resist. I paid $79, which is a steal. It should be better for shooting lead, and it provides better case support for hot rounds. The tradeoff is that it may be pickier about ammunition. Glock chambers are loose and relatively short, so cases feed easily. Not sure if I should use the new barrel when I carry. I want the gun to feed. That’s for sure. But all my defensive ammunition is test-chambered. I think. It ought to run.

I felt bad about shooting a youngster, but then when it ran off, I felt bad about not looking after my property. Coons are bad news, just like rats. I should have blasted it.

I’m too sweet for my own good. That’s my problem.

I apologize to all red-blooded American males who don’t wear Capri pants or skinny jeans. I have let all of you down.

Misplaced Passion

Last night brought an interesting dream.

I was at a social event in someone’s house. A young woman came up to me and started asking why a certain young man’s family had allowed him to have firearms after he had been found holding a shotgun to his head. I started saying such decisions should depend on his attitude toward guns, because most gun enthusiasts aren’t thinking about violence when they interact with their collections. But I stopped short, because I realized what I was saying was not applicable in a case in which someone had already shown a desire to kill himself.

In any case, his family wasn’t the problem.

The young woman who was talking to me turned into the young man’s wife, and she pushed me back against a wall and kissed me on the mouth very suddenly, with intensity. I realized she was on fire with love for me. I was shocked. Her features seemed swollen as though her love had inflamed her flesh.

Her husband was dead. She was not being unfaithful. Just bold. Like Ruth.

In real life, the man from the dream is alive and has not threatened to kill himself, and I assume his wife and son are just fine. I have never had any designs on the wife, before or after they married. I barely know her. There could never be any type of romance between us. The very thought is beyond absurd. In the dream, she did not represent herself. She didn’t really look like herself.

Her husband is a music leader and former youth pastor. He’s now part of a church which doesn’t promote the Holy Spirit, so whatever his many virtues are, he is probably not in a position to provide her with the knowledge she needs to move ahead with God. Like Travis, he loves performing in front of crowds, and he loves teaching kids. He’s white, but he was very caught up in black culture when I knew him. Maybe he still is. When you get caught up in black culture, you can end up with the same spiritual problems black people have. By seeking approval from black people, you can end up following instead of leading.

I feel like I’m writing about Travis.

After I woke up, I thought about the dream, and I asked God if it meant anything.

The heat and depth of her love had startled me. I thought of the phrase from the Song of Solomon: “I am sick with love.”

Here is the relevant passage, taken from the Complete Jewish Bible:

Like an apple tree among the other trees in the forest
is my darling among the other men.
I love to sit in his shadow;
his fruit is sweet to my taste.
He brings me to the banquet hall;
his banner over me is love.
Sustain me with raisins, refresh me with apples,
for I am sick with love.
[I wish] his left arm [were] under my head,
and his right arm around me.

It made me think about the way husbands and wives are supposed to feel about each other, as well as the way every person should feel about God.

A couple should be completely unified. The Bible says a man and woman are one flesh. They should have deep intimacy and trust. They shouldn’t wonder about each other’s behavior and intentions when they’re apart. Each should put the other above every other person on earth. Their love for each other should be hot and compelling, not lukewarm.

Our relationships with God should also be intense. God should be number one, even above a person’s spouse. We and God should love each other with burning intensity.

As I thought about this, I got a revelation about my unfaithfulness. I’m serious about God, but I wander off and say and do things I should not do. I see now that this is very much like adultery. I have a partner who is always faithful and trustworthy, and he loves me with limitless heat, without reservation. I don’t live up to my end of the bargain.

It’s disturbing to see things this way. I hate adultery and unfaithfulness. I see adultery as something small-minded, trashy people do, like putting used gum on the undersides of restaurant tables or urinating in swimming pools. Adulterers don’t really love their spouses, and they think their sins against them only matter if they’re revealed.

I already knew oneness with God was like marriage, and I knew God compared unfaithfulness to him with adultery and whoring, but it hit home with more strength this morning.

The fact that a firearm suicide was part of the dream made me think about my friend Travis, who died following an accidental shooting.

Travis was not suicidal, but there were self-destructive elements in his life. He never gave up secular music. He never gave up his long list of maladjusted, ungodly, fake friends. He also stayed in Miami even though he knew it was poisoning him.

Travis was a wonderful person, but as someone who loved him pointed out to me, one reason he held onto things that hurt him was that he wanted the admiration of people he knew. Had he left Miami, he would have had to start over somewhere else as a nobody. Many people in South Florida admired him, and he did not want to give that up.

He was not completely honest with himself, and I know he was somewhat different around me than he was with other people. One mistake he made was trying to remain part of the black social justice culture, which is founded on a false victimhood complex. In private, he said this mindset was wrong, but he still used a photo of Colin Kaepernick for a Facebook avatar. I’m not saying the police don’t brutalize people from time to time. It’s the victimhood mindset I’m against.

People who wallow in victimhood are manipulators, and they don’t examine their own contribution to their problems. They don’t grow. They rot.

We all know what happened to Lot’s wife. Our commitment to God has to have depth. We can’t hold onto things from which he wants to free us.

I’m not condemning Travis. I’m just stating facts that matter.

So what does the dream mean? Maybe I’m supposed to take over for Travis. Maybe there is someone he ministered to, and I am going to have to fill his shoes. If so, based on what happened in the dream, that person is extremely thirsty for help.

Maybe it’s more than one person.

I have to hold onto this revelation. I can’t continue mistreating God. It’s vile and unthinkable, but I have done it over and over. If I wouldn’t cheat in an earthly relationship, why would I cheat on God, who allowed himself to be tortured to death for me?

I’m already doing things Travis used to do. There were a couple of young ladies he thought of as marriage prospects, and I ended up texting them a lot. One of them called me unexpectedly the other day, and we had a long conversation. She is disgusted by the people he knew. She lives near Miami, but she has no intention of going to the funeral. Both of us feel that it will be a disgraceful display of false love, from people who did little or nothing for him while he was alive.

She needs someone who isn’t totally useless to tell her things that will help her stay close to God after a major disruption. Travis is actually the third person she’s lost this year, so she really needs something to balance things out.

I thought I wouldn’t hear much from her after Travis died, but I was wrong about that.

While I was typing this, another mutual friend called. He was weighing the pros and cons of going to the funeral. He used to live in Miami, and he hates it. He is disgusted with Trinity Church and Travis’s phony friends. When his son was a baby, he got a big burn on his face in Trinity’s nursery, and the leadership shut him and his wife out when they went to the pastors. Seemed to me they were lawyering up instead of doing the right thing.

My friend isn’t going to the funeral. He made up his mind. He and his family will be here soon for a visit, though.

Rules and doctrine have taken the love out of Christianity. We put these things up like a lattice, and Jesus has to look through it to see us. Now that I think about it, the Song of Solomon agrees: “My darling is like a gazelle or young stag. There he is, standing outside our wall, looking in through the windows, peering in through the lattice.”

We’re supposed to know God personally and have extremely intense feelings for him.

It would be nice if we could go to churches and hear these things. Instead we have to wait for dreams.

Democrats Killed the Small Gas Engine

Today’s amazing news: sonic cleaners work.

I have three chainsaws, two gas blowers, and a gas weed eater. Thirty years ago, these were great things to have. Now owning them is torture because Democrats force us to use inferior gas tainted with ethanol. It turns out ethanol is a great fuel for political campaigns, but it ruins small engines, and it’s not great for large ones, either.

Here is what Husqvarna says about using ethanol gas: “It is recommended that you replace gas in your fuel tank every 2-3 weeks to avoid alcohol and water related engine issues.”

I have 6 small engines. I never know when I’m going to need to use one. Nonetheless, if I use gas station fuel, I’m expected to maintain a strict schedule of replacing fuel in every tank, and “replacing” doesn’t just mean you can pour it out. You have to run every engine dry, and then you have to run them dry with ethanol-free fuel.

Obviously, I am not going to turn my life upside-down so I can nanny a bunch of yard tools. I buy ethanol-free gas, I add the best ethanol-fighting additive I can buy, and I buy new carburetors when I have problems.

A stock carburetor for a typical chainsaw runs somewhere in the neighborhood of $100. They’re made in China. They’re not very good. Even if ethanol doesn’t plug them up, the diaphragms rot. It’s not like you’re doing yourself a big favor by buying OEM.

The same carburetor, made in the same country and sold by a different company, will generally cost you under $15, along with a new fuel filter, a spark plug, and some other useful junk, such as gaskets. My belief is that any time you buy a small engine, you should buy a Chinese carb off Ebay just so you’ll be ready for the inevitable. Some carbs are a pain to replace, but many pop in and out in 10 minutes, with no tools except for a screwdriver.

I am a huge fan of Chinese Ebay carbs, but I know have an even better weapon: the sonic cleaner. I saw a Youtube video about using them on carbs, and I saw my destiny unfold before me. I needed a sonic cleaner anyway. A sonic cleaner, like a welder or a mill, is a superpower tool. It lifts you to new levels most men will never reach.

My pole saw pooped out a few weeks back, due to ethanol. I can’t recall whether the carb is Chinese. I have a dead-carb collection. Maybe one of them came from the pole saw. Anyhow, by the time it died, I had a 15-liter sonic cleaner. I filled it with hot water, partially disassembled the carb, sealed it in a jelly jar full of gas, and gave it the business. Today I reinstalled it. No problems.

Of course, in order to check it, I had to put fuel in it, so once I confirmed that it ran, I had to empty the fuel, run it dry, and so on. Even non-ethanol fuel should be removed from a carb before you put a tool away.

I didn’t have total confidence in the effect of running the saw dry, because, believe it or not, you can run one dry and still have problems later. My solution was to run some Sea Foam through it. Sea Foam is an engine treatment made from mineral oil and secret ingredients. It’s supposed to be great for engines. I am hoping it can’t congeal like gas.

I wanted to use my weed eater today. It refused to start even though it has never seen ethanol. Today’s gas supposedly contains things that can plug an engine even without ethanol’s help.

I popped the carb off, stuck it in the sonic cleaner, and gave it 25 minutes at 53° Celsius. I picked 53 arbitrarily. Then I gave it another 25 minutes. I’m about to reinstall it.

I’m planning to get some of the Gucci premixed gas they sell at Home Depot. It’s supposed to be better than ethanol-free. My plan is to run engines dry, add a little Gucci gas, and run them dry again. It’s a giant pain, but it’s not as bad as taking saws apart and working on the carbs. I don’t know if it will work.

It seems like there is something special about the climate here. Small engine carbs just don’t like it. People from other areas tell me they use gas station gas and never have problems. I can’t explain what’s happening, but I’m not imagining my problems.

I may get some Gucci gas tonight. You can’t use it all the time, because it costs $20 per gallon. That’s over six times the cost of ethanol-free.

Replacing carburetors is actually cheaper than using this stuff.

You can use sonic cleaners for jewelry and a whole bunch of other things. A big one will run you around $150, but having a superpower is worth it.

Maybe the weed eater will run tonight, and if so, maybe I’ll be able to use it to clear the beautyberry bushes out of the shooting lane in my pasture. I sure hope so, because otherwise I’ll have to attach the bush hog to the tractor, and attaching the driveshaft will probably be a one-hour job all by itself. Having a quick hitch on your tractor is great, but if your driveshafts are torture devices, it doesn’t help much.

Get yourself a sonic cleaner. Feel the power.

Asphalt Looks Better Every Day

Winter was very disappointing. Where I live, the daily highs should be below 80 from November through March, and there should be a lot of days below 70. This year, we got plenty of roasting-hot days in the 90-degree neighborhood. When that happens, you feel cheated, because while summer can trespass on winter and ruin it, there is no possibility we will have cold days in the summer to make up for it.

Now that temperatures are high and we’re getting occasional rain, the grass has started growing. The lawnmower and I are resuming our romance.

Today the mower would not start. I got a click, and that was it. I put a charger on the battery and went to brush the pool.

When I finished brushing the pool, I tried the mower again. It ran. I mowed most of the yard, and then I got off the mower to move a branch. My mower has a seat switch on it that turns the engine off when I get off, but I bypassed it because it’s unbearable. Because the engine was still running when I got off to grab the branch, I disengaged the PTO so the blades would stop spinning.

When I got back on the mower, the PTO would not reengage. I could still ride the mower, but I couldn’t cut anything.

I guess this is what happens when you mow as rarely as I have been mowing.

I almost shut the mower down to look it over, but it occurred to me that it might not start, and I was at least 100 yards from the area where I park it. I drove it back to its spot and shut it down. Of course, it would not start again. I got idiot lights but no starter, no PTO, and no headlights.

I did what I always do. I checked Internet forums. I found a wide array of problems and solutions.

I found out oxidation could cause the mower to act this way. My battery cables had some kind of hard oxide inside the terminals. I had to remove it with a Dumore grinder and carbide burr. I lost my battery brush, which would have done the job in 10 seconds, so this is what I had to resort to.

I let the mower charge while I had lunch, and when I tried the key again, it worked.

I can never decide whether this mower is junk or not. It’s impossible to work on, and it seems much more complicated than it needs to be. It’s full of engineering errors. On the other hand, I believe it’s 28 years old, and it should run for another 20. The John Deere 430 is hard to kill. It’s way too easy to shut down, but it’s hard to kill.

I was unhappy about the failure to start, because I had a special task in mind for today. I wanted to go to the pasture and cut a bunch of weeds that were in an area where I wanted to shoot.

I shoot into a berm made from sand taken from a pond. On one side of the berm, there are no trees within 100 yards. On the other side, there is a nice wooded area, which is exactly where I want to be when I shoot on hot days. Between the wooded area and the berm, there are blackberry and beautyberry bushes. Today I attacked the beautyberries while trying to spare as many blackberry briars as I could. Blackberries are useful. Beautyberries are pathetic. People eat them, but I think they’re trying to prove something. They don’t taste good.

I found that the beautyberry bushes were not easy to remove with a mower. They fold over so low the blades don’t make good contact. But with persistence, I improved my view of the berm a great deal. I suppose I’ll have to attach the bush hog to the tractor and do it right. Either that or I’ll have to use the brush blade on my gas weed eater.

How much do you want to bet the weed eater starts after several months of idleness? Ethanol gas makes it very difficult to keep machinery running here. Even treated ethanol-free gas lets me down a lot.

When I get my shooting lane cleared, I’ll move my targets. I’ll be shooting from east to west instead of the other way around. Right now, I shoot toward a highway. It’s totally safe, but I would feel better shooting toward the big lot full of trees to the west of my land.

My pasture is dish-shaped, so even without the berm, from either direction, I am shooting toward the ground. That’s a nice feature.

I don’t know how people driving on the road would feel if they knew a guy was shooting a 10mm pistol in their general direction, but then they do 70 with cars coming toward them in the left lane at the same speed, and they don’t freak out about that.

Maybe I should have a policy of restricting shooting to experienced shooters. I will never fire a round over the berm, but women and kids do amazing things with firearms.

I feel as though my enthusiasm for life is returning, 9 days after my personal tragedy. I let a lot of things go while Travis was in the hospital, and my motivation was even worse after he died. I seem to be getting more done now.

As I have written before, I believe joy, as used in the Bible, means something other than ordinary happiness. I believe it’s connected with results and expectations. For example, the Bible says, “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.” That describes a type of happiness which is related to relief. The word “rejoice” comes from “joy,” and it’s always connected to an event. Something hoped for happens, or something dreadful ends, and people rejoice.

The Bible says, “The joy of the Lord is our strength.” That’s literally true. If you have joy, you expect good things to happen. It gives you motivation to keep going and get things done.

Depression is the absence of joy. It’s discouragement. This is why depressed people kill themselves. They don’t expect things to change for the better.

I had been expecting to rejoice when Travis left the hospital. Instead, joy was taken from me, and I didn’t have the strength to do all the things I should have done.

It may seem strange to get this upset by the death of a friend. I may not have written enough about Travis to give people an understanding of how close we were. I would feel bad if any of my friends died, but Travis was like a family member.

This morning I asked God for joy. It appears it worked. I got the pool in order and mowed the yard, and had the lawn tractor behaved, I would have gotten more done.

I’m coming back to life, and I guess most of the world feels the same way. COVID-19 is going away. Leftists are unhappy about it, because they think the disease will put Biden in the White House, but it’s happening. People are going to work. We can’t play hooky forever.

Leftists say there will be a huge second wave. If that’s true, where is it? Right now, the epidemic is disappearing in places that reopened, and areas that are locked down continue to have problems. Reopened areas are not getting second waves, but locked-down areas seem to be prolonging the first one.

If there’s going to be a second wave, why hasn’t China had one?

Right now, the main reason the numbers look as bad as they do is the local epidemic in Brazil. I don’t know if they got the bug later than the rest of us or what, but their figures are very bad. The numbers keep rising. The other major nations are doing great.

I am determined to keep cutting back on looking at the news, but I still see things. I saw that leftists were going after Trump for using hydroxychloroquine, the quinine substitute some countries use to treat covid. They’re furious at him for taking it. They keep citing studies which suggest it doesn’t work. They don’t seem interested in the opinions of competent doctors who think it does.

Why do they care what he takes? What possible reason could they have for objecting? These are the same people who think we should all be able to get marijuana prescriptions for anxiety. Not just marijuana, but cigarette marijuana which damages lungs and gives off secondhand smoke. They think drugs should be legalized. All except one, I guess.

They excoriated Trump for not wearing a mask. They wanted him to wear something they thought would protect him, even though they certainly did not want him to be protected. Now he’s doing something to protect himself, and they’re angry about that.

One of the great things about Trump is that he knows it makes no difference at all what he says or does. When he goes against the left, they pour vitriol over him. When he does what they want, the response is the same. The result: he pays no attention. He actually needles them to make it worse. Needling people is a vice, but it shows how little their raving bothers him. I think he enjoys it.

Trump gets annoyed in the short term, but you can tell he forgets all about it 15 minutes later. I guess that’s why his blood pressure is good.

Leftists are all over the web saying Trump lied when he said the White House physician gave him the drug. The physician had to write a note, correcting them. He took responsibility and endorsed the use of hydrochloroquinine in Trump’s case. I wonder what they’re saying now. They’re probably calling him a quack.

Maybe they’re saying the note is forged.

Watching Trump reminds me of my own experiences. God knew before I was born that I belonged to him. Whatever my faults were, I was not cut out to be a child of darkness. No matter how much I tried to fit into the body of Satan, I couldn’t do it. I was always rejected, trolled, and mistreated. I have often wondered why people constantly popped up to attack me. I didn’t always know my status as a child of God was the reason.

What Trump goes through is very similar. There is absolutely no way to make the people who hate him happy. They will never make peace, admit fault, or forgive.

Sooner or later, you have to quit worrying about being liked. Jesus never worried about it. He said incredibly harsh things to people. He was extremely rude. I don’t think Christians should make rudeness a goal, but we ought to be truthful. We should lead instead of following.

I just read a book by Anthony Bourdain, the chef who died by his own hand in France two years ago. Bourdain was a lover of the pleasures of the flesh.

He was a wonderful writer. His book is very entertaining.

As I read, the thing that struck me about Bourdain was that he was the perfect child of darkness. He was a complete follower. He accepted every vice you can think of. He devoured the corrupt ethos of the people around him like a starving dog on a bowl of chicken livers. I don’t think he ever had an original thought, and maybe that’s why he was not a great chef. Running a kitchen well is only part of being a great chef. You also have to be creative. Bourdain was not. He admitted he was a very ordinary chef.

His description of culinary professionals is revolting. According to him, big-city kitchens are full of sexual deviants, criminals, drug addicts, alcoholics, men who molest other men on the job, thieves, and liars. They are astonishingly nasty to each other. They hurl filthy insults at each other all day. They brutalize each other physically. They enjoy abusing and breaking each other.

Bourdain wrote about this atmosphere with tremendous enthusiasm. He couldn’t get enough of it. He savored it and wallowed in it. When he was a newcomer, he saw how vile older cooking professionals were, and instead of choosing another job, he was filled with drive to become like them. It’s as though they were father figures and he was trying to live up to their debased standard in order to prove something to himself.

He was like a kid who went to a “scared straight” program and thought, “THESE ARE MY PEOPLE!”, and did his best to go to prison.

He was a man of the earth. No doubt about it. He was programmed to go to hell. He was made for it. Hell fits him like a bespoke suit. He was Jewish, which means he was descended from Abraham, but he preferred the other side.

When I say hell fits him, I don’t mean he’s not likable. He is. But he lived like a joyous pig rolling in week-old garbage. I don’t think anything could have changed his attitude. Depravity and misery brought him pleasure. He could never have turned to God, because righteousness appalled him.

There are two families on earth, and only two, and every person belongs to one of them.

When people die, they go exactly where they belong. There is no injustice to it. God may not have created hell for people, but plenty of people fit in beautifully there.

As the decline of the world accelerates, we’re going to see huge numbers of people ganging up on God, Christians, Jews, and Israel. They will be more and more direct and bold in their attacks on God himself. We’re going to marvel at them, and many of us will feel that we have to do something. We’ll think something must be wrong because so many people are competing to get into hell. Nothing will be wrong. We’ll be seeing people who belong in hell, establishing their credentials.

I don’t mean we shouldn’t love them or hurt for them. I’m just saying we’ll be seeing something that makes perfect sense.

We’ll be seeing the Bourdain mindset, sweeping over multitudes.

That was quite a digression, but I won’t delete it.

I feel as if COVID-19 were a sorting mechanism, like a cream separator. It’s doing a great deal to divide people into pro-God and anti-God factions. I don’t think the world will be the same afterward. Some people think masks and social distancing will be the big changes. I don’t think so. I think covid is pushing many, many people into the arms of the Beast. It’s teaching them to cling to the government nipple, trust the state without reserve, and jettison their rights as though they were dirty diapers. It seems like far fewer people are being driven in the opposite direction.

I suspect the main changes will be in people’s attitudes toward governments, rights, God, and those who believe in God.

If we’re really getting close to the end, we should expect all the signs Jesus spoke of. We already have one very strong sign. He said it would be as the days of Lot and the days of Noah. Perversion and wickedness abounded in those days. Genesis said a homosexual rape mob in Sodom tried to violate two angels.

Luke 21 contains the description Jesus gave of the end times. It looks like a lot of the things that have to come to pass haven’t transpired yet. It looks like the rapture can’t come this week or this year, but next year can’t be ruled out.

Enough of that. I’m glad I’m feeling more like getting things done.

Deposits May be Illegal Soon

Yesterday I finished making about 500 .45 cartridges. I say “about” because the actual number is 498. I believe I have finally run out of brass.

I decided to do something about the monumental pile of 9mm brass which is occupying space in my home. I ordered 500 semiwadcutter bullets. I read that semiwadcutters are pretty versatile. They make nice holes in targets, and they are better for self-defense and hunting than round nose bullets.

The semiwadcutter is based on the wadcutter bullet, which should be no surprise. A wadcutter is a cylindrical bullet. The flat face cuts nice round holes in targets, making the holes easier to see. Wadcutters don’t always feed well in semiauto guns because they’re short and flat on the ends. A semiwadcutter has a cone on the front, and the cone has a flat face on it. The longer bullet helps with feeding.

The cost for my ammunition will not be far from what I would pay for factory rounds, but my ammunition should be more accurate. Since it’s for practice, that matters to me.

I started using a Powder Cop on my press. This is a device which sits in a press station. There is a rod in the middle of it, and when a cartridge is raised to the top of the press, the rod hits the powder charge, which lifts it up. If the charge is correct, the rod rises to the right level. If not, it doesn’t. There is a white ring near the top of the rod, and you can set it so it’s level with the top of the Powder Cop when the charge is correct.

The most important thing a Powder Cop does is to alert you when you put a double charge in a shell. A double charge can make a gun blow up. A Powder Cop will also tell you when you have a low charge. That’s not as big a deal, but it’s still important. A weak charge can cause a bullet to stick inside a barrel. If you fire another round without clearing the barrel, your barrel may explode. A bright person will not shoot a weak round without stopping to examine his gun, but not everyone is careful.

Do I like the Powder Cop? No. Not for pistol rounds with short cases. My press is mounted low, so I can’t help seeing into the casings as they go by. It’s very obvious when there is a problem with a charge. I’m used to looking into the casings, so it’s hard to remember to look at the Powder Cop.

Does this mean the Powder Cop is a bad invention? No. Most people mount their presses high, which seems like a mistake. They can’t see into casings. Also, there are types of ammunition that have deep casings, and you can’t expect to see the charges clearly.

Here is what I think. A smart person would rig up a couple of electrical contacts on the Powder Cop. If the rod rose too high, the Powder Cop would close a circuit and sound an alarm or turn a light on. It would not be easy to rig it up for low charges, because the rod goes below the low-charge line every time a round is lowered, but oversized charges are the big problem, and an electrical alarm would tell you about them.

If I put an alarm on the Powder Cop, I won’t have to stare at it consistently.

I suddenly have a good deal of ammunition. I don’t say “a lot.” My notions of how much ammunition a person should have are changing.

I used to feel rich if I had two boxes of ammo for a given caliber. Now I’ve been through two ammunition panics: the Obama panic and the covid panic. I have seen how fast the supply can dry up. Once Democrats take over, it will dry up permanently. When you buy ammunition now, you shouldn’t ask yourself how much you’ll need this weekend. You should ask yourself whether you can accept doing without this or that caliber for the rest of your life. If not, start buying.

It’s not hoarding. True hoarding is something selfish people do, to the detriment of others, during a crisis. If you start stockpiling ammunition now, while the shortage is easing, you won’t hurt anyone else.

You should probably have 10,000 rounds of every caliber you consider important and expect to shoot frequently. That’s for old people. If you’re 25, maybe 40,000. You can’t just think about rounds you’ll carry or use for hunting. You’re going to need to practice, and you will want to be able to give ammunition away sometimes. People you care about are not going to prepare. And you will want to leave something to your family.

You probably can’t afford that much ammunition. You could spend $40,000 on one rifle. You should think about your future and decide what your best choices are.

You can get 10,000 rounds of AK ammunition for about $2,000. That’s not a lot of money at all, for a very important future-proofing purchase. The ammunition is very useful. It’s fantastic for self-defense, and you can even shoot deer with it. The AK-47 is like a .30-30.

A lot of people prefer the AR-15. I don’t know if it will be as useful. I’m not a deer hunter, but I’ve read that the AR-15 is marginal for anything bigger than a coyote. There must be something to it, because some states won’t let you shoot deer with one.

Here’s what I think: with 7.62x39mm, you have no doubt. With .223, not so much.

I am sitting on a nice pile of .22 LR. I think it’s something everyone should have. It’s very cheap, you can hunt anything up to a wild pig with it, it’s great for target practice, and you can even use it for self-defense if you have to. I think I should seal up my .22 LR boxes and leave them alone. I can buy new boxes for shooting and leave the stockpile on the shelf.

Maybe it’s best to think of your ammunition reserves as your ammunition IRA.

The upshot of all this contemplation: I still need to make and buy ammunition. I should also spend a couple of hundred bucks on bullet molds so I can cast bullets.

Preparation may not help once they pass laws against ammunition possession, but you do what you can.

I have no interest in holing up in my house and shooting at law enforcement agents or murderous leftist “zombies,” but I want to continue shooting and hunting, and I would like to have some capacity for defending myself and others.

Yesterday while I was reloading, I listened to the Bible. I heard the account of Jesus’ betrayal. It’s funny how you can hear the Bible over and over and still find new things in it. Here’s what I heard: when the worthless snakes from the temple showed up to arrest Jesus, they asked him who he was, he identified himself, and they all fell to the ground. How about that? He knocked them off their feet with supernatural authority. He showed them they were at his mercy.

He proved he was God, and they got up and arrested him anyway. He humiliated them and made it clear that they were on the wrong side, but they refused to take the opportunity to repent. They condemned themselves.

Peole like to say Jesus was captured, but that’s a damnable lie. He surrendered willingly, and he could have freed himself whenever he wanted.

It seems very clear to me that God wants American Christians to own guns, but I think it’s very unlikely that he endorses the idea of having last-ditch shootouts with our enemies. I suspect he wants us to show that when we are taken and imprisoned and killed, it’s by our consent.

Some conservatives and Christians actually seem to look forward to killing their enemies. That can’t be a holy mindset.

I suppose people are getting tired of reading about the death of my friend Travis. They can always start their own blogs. Today I learned he will have a funeral on May 30. There is no information about the location. It was announced on Facebook. I don’t have an account, and I am not starting a new one.

I hope they’re not doing it at Miami’s Trinity Church or The COOL Church, which is a depressing Trinity branch headed by Travis’s friend Terrance. Seeing Trinity’s leaders posturing at his funeral would be like watching vultures and maggots defile a dead soldier. Terrance cared about Travis, but don’t ask me to vouch for the rest.

I’m not planning to attend. I was very involved with Travis when he was alive. I don’t need to show up now and only pretend I cared. Let the dead bury the dead, as someone once said. Whatever I was supposed to do for Travis is done or not done. There is no changing it now.

Travis won’t look down and count the people at the funeral. He will not even know it took place. He has already moved on to something much, much better. He is not sitting beside Jesus feeling bad because I don’t want to go to his funeral.

Certain people may say nasty things about me if I’m not there, but they do that already, and anyway, they are permanently out of my life. I’ve gotten along fine without their love for 8 years.

I did without it while I was a member of the church.

Trinity’s leaders are a mess, but many of the people are even worse. The best people left. Here’s an example of the kind of thing I might have to deal with. I put up a Youtube video and talked about Travis’s life and death, and someone put this comment up: “WE DON’T EXPECT YOU TO UNDERSTAND IF YOU’RE NOT BLACK SO WHAT’S YOUR POINT!”

There is no possibility that person watched the video.

It’s not someone who was close to Travis. I know all their names.

I really lost a lot when I lost my prayer partner. I am asking God for a replacement. They don’t grow on trees. It’s as if Teller died and Penn had to find someone who could do what he did.

Now that I have the reloading process working well, I may stop posting about firearms so much. I may move to electronics for a while. I have not decided.

They Knew Things were Bad when he Knitted Little Colt Sweaters for his Parrots

Today’s exciting challenge: forming a plan for 9mm target ammunition. I’m still not done with .45 ACP, but I will be soon.

I have a couple of 9mm Glocks, and they’re pleasant to shoot. They’re very accurate, and they don’t beat me up. I also have a lot of 9mm brass and maybe 200 Laser Cast bullets. I feel like I need to get rid of the bullets.

I can’t recall making 9mm ammunition, but I have a nearly-empty box of bullets, so it must have happened. I don’t have a recipe. Today I started looking around for one. I don’t want super-hot +P loads for target use. Seems like there is no point. I do want a little recoil, because it makes no sense to practice with ammunition which is way easier to shoot than the real thing. Sure, I shoot .22 pistols, so maybe I’m a hypocrite, but it seems to me that when you shoot a big bore gun, you ought to teach yourself to handle recoil.

I keep wanting to look at new powders. Unfortunately, whenever I look for new recipes, I keep coming back to what I already have: Unique and Accurate No.7. It seems like they do everything. No.7 is really hard to get away from. It’s great for .38 Super, 10mm, and 9mm.

I would like to stop using Unique in calibers other than .45 ACP because it’s dirty. I need to shoot up the vast supply I have on hand, but I don’t want to get crud on every pistol I own, so I figure it’s best to sacrifice .45 ACP.

But wait! I just read something online. An article says Unique isn’t actually dirty. What?

The article says Unique used to be nasty, to the point where unburned grains interfered with the way guns worked. At around the turn of the century, Alliant (the manufacturer) introduced a new, cleaner formula.

If this is true, why does my 1911 always have black residue on it?

Is it possible the residue actually comes from somewhere else?

The lead bullets I shoot come covered with greasy wax. Is it possible this stuff turns into a mist, gets contaminated with soot and then sticks to the gun?

I suppose that is not the explanation. I shoot the same brand of bullets from my stainless .38 Super, and it’s very clean. Unique must be dirty.

Makes me wonder what it was like before they cleaned it up.

Is it really a good idea to make 9mm target ammunition? I should try to find out. Let’s see. I have free brass, so that saves me about 15 cents per round. That means I save $7.50 per box. But I can buy target ammo with brass cases for $9.00, or 18 cents per round. I have 4 boxes I bought for $7.85 plus tax, so it was even cheaper.

Bullets are nearly 7 cents each, or $3.50 per box. Primers run, call it 4 cents, so $2.00 per box. Powder is around 1.5 cents, or 75 cents per box. So $6.25 per box for homegrown 9mm, or $13.75 if I use new brass.

Depending on the breaks, I save between two and four dollars per box compared to factory ammunition. Not a huge savings.

On the other hand, I get very accurate ammunition, I know exactly what’s in it and what it will do, and I get the fun, knowledge, and skill. The knowledge and skill could be important some day. They could make it very hard for us to get ammunition in the future.

I don’t know why homegrown shoots better than factory, but it’s true. Maybe not all the time. Some factory stuff is super-accurate. It’s true for pistol ammunition, at least for me.

I can do better on price if I get a few bullet molds. Lead will always be cheap or free. A good mold runs something like $40, which is far from free, but by the time you’ve made 1000 rounds, you’ve saved around twice the price of the mold, which makes me wonder why I’m not doing it already.

Lead ammo is not useless, even if it’s inferior to jacketed. You can hunt with it. Squirrels and rabbits can’t tell it’s lead. It may not be optimal for self-defense, but it’s still very good. It worked just fine during the Civil War. It still incapacitates a lot of bad people today.

If I were a prepper, I guess I’d stock up on jacketed ammo in a few calibers, but I think it would also be smart to stock up on reloading stuff. Powder and primers are not things you can reasonably expect to make at home.

If things ever got really bad, hunting would become very important, and the hunting laws would be ignored. People would shoot game, and they would also look for ways to eat things like coons, coyotes, and crows. You can eat just about anything made of meat. There are bobcat recipes out there. I guess a feral cat would work just as well, as would a feral dog. They’re pretty abundant.

Mmm. Thoughts of a tasty dystopian future. Cat a l’orange. One more thing that would draw us closer to China.

Crows are supposedly delicious. Soylent Crow.

I don’t think I’ll have problems in the future with ammunition data. In the past, I didn’t do much in the way of taking notes, so I floundered when I started making ammo again. Now I’m acting like the scientist I allegedly am. I write something every time I make ammo, and I include anything that could be relevant. That’s how science works. If you’re really serious, you don’t just record the reagent and the amount and the temperature and so on. You record the type of wood the lab bench is made from.

Don’t laugh. An important discovery in nuclear physics involved something that happened when an experiment was performed on a wooden bench.

I haven’t written down what I was wearing or what kind of bulbs were in the overhead lights, but I record very minor things, such as an incident where debris clogged up my primer-seating punch.

I guess my reloading notes could be used by our future hipster/millennial rulers when they round us up to try us for whatever offenses they can make up. “He made 3000 bullety things, and it also says he ate red meat. EeEeeWWwwWWWwwwWWW!”

What else is happening? I think a lot about love these days. A week or so ago, I was putting Marv back in his cage, and he got very emotional and started nuzzling me with his head. He did not want to go. It made me think about what this world was supposed to be. It was created to be a place where love was like a persistent fog no one could escape.

How often do preachers talk about that? We have completely lost sight of it, but love is the single most important thing in the universe. The physical world and the human race were created so God could have a huge family tied together by love. That’s the only reason. You can cite other purposes, but they all stem from his intention to create a family. Remove love, and they all disintegrate.

We’re very busy attending to responsibilities. We have to work. We have to get the necessities of life. We educate ourselves. We deal with our problems and our human enemies. We also spend a lot of time doing frivolous things to make ourselves happy and reward ourselves for the other things we do. We don’t have a lot of time to lie back on our recliners and think about loving other people. We don’t share affection all that much, with other people or with God.

It’s perverse, if you consider the reason why we’re here. It’s as though God put us here to be farmers, but instead of growing things, we spent all our time polishing our tractors and decorating our barns.

I wonder if the church can change. We focus on rules. We expend a lot of effort trying to do things to impress God. We spend a lot of time criticizing unbelievers without presenting them with solutions. When they look at us, they often see anger and stress, not love.

Some of us are leftist Social Justice Warriors, which is incredible. How could anyone be that wrong?

Satan is great at misdirection. He gets us to prioritize the wrong things.

My friend Travis died a week ago today, and it has been rough, but something good came of it. I got together with a group of people so we could pray and try to help him, and we have been communicating a lot. Now we’re closer than we were. Love has been served. I think the effect will persist.

No Mas!

Today and yesterday I worked on reloading .45 ACP target rounds. At them moment, I have about 250 ready to shoot. It’s a nice feeling.

I had a very weird issue with my seating die yesterday. I was having problems seating Wolf primers in old brass with primer pockets that had not been cleaned. Wolf large pistol primers are supposedly a little bigger than other brands. If this is true, it explains why I’m having seating issues.

I’m using Wolf primers because I have a lot of them. Several thousand. I bought them during the Obama panic. I was lucky to get them. My understanding is that Wolf primers are as good as anyone’s, but they have a reputation for being hard to seat and hard to fire. Some primers require a stronger firing pin whack than others. I had some problems with them the other day while shooting 10mm rounds from a Glock, so I decided to quit using them in defensive ammunition. I don’t want to wonder whether a round will go off when a burglar or a particularly surly squirrel is the target.

I’m using Wolf primers for target rounds because I don’t really care whether every single one goes off. I’m shooting them from a 1911, and it seems to like them just fine. No problems. Is this because the 1911 strikes harder? Were my earlier problems caused not by the primer but by pocket lint slowing the movement of my Glock’s firing pin? I can’t say.

Someone has suggested that tight primers sit high in their pockets and that this can cause them to be hard to fire. If that’s the case, maybe the Glock problems were caused by the tight new brass I was using. Maybe the primers were a couple of thousandths away from being completely seated. I can only guess.

I have shot a lot of Wolf ammunition, and it has always been perfectly reliable, even in Glocks. I don’t have much experience with Wolf primers in 10mm Glocks, though.

I’m thinking about my next project. I want to make defensive ammo for the .45. When I got my press, Hornady gave me 1000 free .45 ACP 230-grain XTP hollowpoints. These are not the greatest hollowpoints on earth. It sort of looks like Winchester Rangers hold that title. But they were free, and I fully intend to use them. I will probably use them up on targets, but still, I want to give them respectable defensive velocities.

I looked loads up, and I found that “fast” for this caliber is 900 fps. Whew. That’s even faster than a BB gun. Impressive.

I spent a long time researching loads. I found some info on using a powder called Power Pistol. You can get over 900 fps with it. I looked up other powders and recipes. Toward the end, I really thought I needed Power Pistol. Then I saw a load for…wait for it…Accurate No.7. I can’t seem to get away from this powder. It seems to do everything. I already use it for .38 Super and 10mm.

I have a lot of No.7, so I’ll give it a try. I still need new brass, however, and I think I’ll still get some Power Pistol. You can’t learn much if you don’t try new things.

I read some new information about using handloads for self-defense. As I have noted earlier, there is a big prejudice against using homegrown ammunition. I have taken a dim view of some of the claims, and I don’t feel bad about that, because experience has shown me that gun experts are often fakes or partial fakes, and they often promote nonsense. Yesterday, however, I saw something that seemed to make sense at first. Massad Ayoob, who is not a total idiot, cited a case in which ammunition caused a defendant some trouble. I hadn’t realized such cases existed.

Up front I’ll say that Ayoob is a non-lawyer and therefore limited in the scope of what he can say with any authority. He gives lawyers advice, and he acts as an expert witness, but he sometimes says things that reveal that he doesn’t fully understand how the legal system works. A lot of people are so awed by him that they think everything he says comes from the throne of heaven, but laymen are not lawyers. Ayoob can’t read, or read about, a case and fully understand it. That’s not a dig. It’s reality.

He doesn’t hesitate to write as though he were an attorney, and that is unfortunate, because other laymen can’t perceive his errors and are likely to believe him.

He wrote a long post on a forum, and one of the lawyers who helped him was a civil, not criminal, attorney. This guy was rude to me a number of years back, and I looked him up. It appeared that he was an insurance attorney. Here’s what my dad always said about insurance lawyers: insurers don’t hire the best or the worst. They hire the mediocre. It’s the best balance between cost and results. Look at it this way: if insurance companies had paid the rates my dad and I charged, it wouldn’t have been all that much better than settling. They need okay attorneys with low rates.

I was unfavorably impressed by the things this man wrote, and apart from that, if it’s true that he’s a civil attorney, Ayoob should have consulted with someone else.

My grandfather got rich taking on insurance attorneys, and he is far from alone. What can I say?

The other attorney doesn’t use his real name, and I have not been able to find any reference to his qualifications. For all I know, he could be handling uncontested divorces out of a trailer for $75 each. If he had impressive credentials, I think he would let everyone know. He may not even be a lawyer.

It’s funny, but for all the popularity of gun forums, you rarely see real, serious, qualified criminal attorneys speak up. In fact, I can’t recall seeing it happen even once.

What we have are a part-time New Hampshire cop from a sleepy town, a guy who appears to be the sort of person who shows up when you sue Safeway because you slipped on a banana peel, and a mystery man who does not hold himself out to be a prosecutor, defense attorney, or judge. Ayoob, in spite of his lack of experience with serious crime, is a huge figure in the 2A community. Why isn’t he choosing better collaborators?

I like his work, and it would be neat to take one of his courses (assuming he hasn’t read this), but like Harry Callahan said, a man’s got to know his limitations.

People also worshiped Jeff Cooper, but he seriously believed FMJ was the way to go, and that’s about like putting bias ply tires on a Ferrari.

I’ll describe a case Ayoob mentions. A man named Bias was married to a woman who was mentally ill. One day she was shot in the back of the head in their home. Descriptions of the case vary materially, which is a nice way of saying some are totally wrong. Bias claimed she threatened to kill herself with the gun and that she fired while he tried to disarm her. The prosecution claimed the gunshot residue evidence showed that Bias shot her from a distance. Apparently, there was no GSR on her, and if she had been holding the gun, and if she had been using typical ammunition, there should have been some.

Gunshot residue is the dirty stuff that comes out of a gun barrel along with the bullet. It flies a few feet and no more. If you shoot someone, the cops will test your skin and clothing for GSR.

Bias did not know what kind of charge was in the cartridge that killed his wife. He claimed only light loads were in the gun, but he didn’t know which of several he had made had killed her. The prosecutors supposedly used a similar, but heavier, factory load to show that a lot of GSR would have hit Mrs. Bias had she shot herself. The defense team determined that the types of loads Bias made had to be fired from a much shorter distance in order to leave GSR on the body.

Here, I must digress. To find out about the GSR, the defense must have hired “experts.” My evidence teacher, the irrepressible Mickey Graham, who awed students because he had supposedly represented the Beatles (actually just John Lennon, I think), used the following acronym to describe legal experts: W.H.O.R.E. “Witness Having Other Reasonable Explanation.”

The fact that a defense expert said something means nearly nothing. I would hope a prosecution expert would be marginally more reliable due to ethical and other reasons, but I wouldn’t put money on it.

Ayoob claims it would have been easier to get convincing information regarding GSR had Bias used factory loads. The defense could have bought ammunition and had it tested.

There are some big problems with using this case as proof that handloads cause people problems in court.

First, it’s a very, very rare case. That, all by itself, is the biggest issue. It’s huge. Ayoob has only managed to produce a few cases in which, in his mind, handloads caused problems, and there are thousands of defensive shootings in the United States every year. If cases where handloads cause issues are that rare, it must be true that handloaded ammunition causes very few legal problems for shooters.

Have you ever, in your entire life, seen a news story about someone who was in trouble for using handloads? If these cases existed, the press would bury us in them, the same way they scream that 1,000 rounds of .223 are an ARSENAL.

Second, it really does look like Mr. Bias murdered his wife. How do you shoot yourself behind the ear without getting a lot of residue on your hand, your arm, and your body? The defense said the residue wouldn’t be heavy if the shot were fired from over 24″, but her hand and arm were certainly closer than that, and how can a woman who is struggling hold a gun’s MUZZLE (not butt) over 24″ away from her head shoot herself behind the ear?

Under the defense’s own theory, the gun’s muzzle had to be at least 24″ away. How?

Side note: who commits suicide by holding a gun two feet away? Has that ever happened in the history of the world?

I just checked, and it is conceivable that if I really tried, I could aim a gun at the back of my head while holding the gun so its muzzle was a little over 20″ away, and that’s the best I can do. Maybe Mrs. Bias was a basketball player. Ayoob says the autopsy determined that she had a reach of 30″. Clearly, that was not the maximum distance from the muzzle to her head. Try and hold a gun with the muzzle 30″ from your ear. Good luck.

When people work on a case together, they tend to buy into their arguments. They start to believe in the parties they work with. It’s normal. Many just say they believe, but that’s a discussion for another time.

When gun enthusiasts talk about people who got “railroaded” by the system, they rarely give serious consideration to the possibility that the prosecutors are right. I don’t know much about the case (largely the fault of people who do a poor job of presenting it on the web), but the little I do know doesn’t make Mr. Bias sound innocent.

I saw an article in which an lawyer claimed it would be hard to get personal reloading records admitted because they were hearsay. That’s not at all certain, but actual ammunition is not hearsay, so excluding it would not be easy, and a judge who excluded it would surely fear reversal on appeal. Excluding admissible exculpatory evidence is something judges know will lead to professional embarrassment.

Third, Bias was acquitted of murder. He eventually got convicted of manslaughter. I will propose that if you have a bad marriage, and your wife gets shot in the head, and if your story is that she held the gun two feet from her head and then shot herself behind the ear, you are likely to be arrested no matter where you got the ammunition. If your defense theory is that a woman of normal height held a gun’s muzzle over two feet from her head and shot herself behind the ear, and if there is no GSR on her at all, you can expect skepticism, to put it mildly.

It looks like there was good, solid evidence against Bias, and he used handloads, and he still got acquitted once and got a hung jury the second time. I don’t know whether better GSR evidence would have helped him in the final trial or not, but he had a lot of baggage without it.

Fourth: factory ammunition probably would have made Bias look worse, because the GSR evidence against Bias would have looked much more solid. “Here are the test results, and we are certain he used this ammunition.” It appears that it could not have helped him, because the defense’s own theory said there would have been GSR at under 24″, and it is implausible that a woman could shoot herself from a distance of more than 20″.

Fifth, Ayoob has a dog in this fight. He promotes the theory that handloads will get you thrown in to prison, and when he writes about it, his language (“lightweight net ninjas”) shows he is emotionally invested in proving himself right. We all know how that works on the Internet. In a post in which he presents his cases, he makes it clear that he researched them AFTER people disagreed with him, and that suggests he didn’t really have the ability to back his arguments up before he was challenged. People called him out, and he did research to prove them wrong, and he came up with very little. What does that tell you?

Should you really call people “lightweights” when you never did police work in a city or served in combat and you have no law degree? He’s clearly a gun expert and a serious student of self-defense, but he’s not Jim Cirillo, Chris Kyle, Audie Murphy, or Vincent Bugliosi.

One of his cases is about someone who was criticized by a prosecutor for using handloads. Ayoob admits he was acquitted, and he presents no evidence that handloads were relevant to his being charged or tried.

Of another case, he writes, “The evidence was messed up in a number of ways in this case, and I do not believe the reloaded ammo (which the prosecution did not recognize to be such until during the trial) was the key problem, but it definitely was part of a problem in reconstructing the case. We were able to do that without GSR evidence, and Mr. Barnes won an acquittal.”

So in a very unusual case, factory ammunition would have been helpful, but it turned out to be unnecessary.

Of a third case, he says a cop shot an assailant at close range and used GSR evidence to show that he was telling the truth when he said the assailant was about 18″ away. I have to ask: what type of handload would have left so little GSR at 18″ that the distance would have seemed so great it made self-defense seem implausible? I’m not a forensic scientist but it sounds like there had to be a lot of GSR no matter what.

Three cases, of which only one has any impact at all. That’s it. To listen to the people who swallow the handload=conviction theory, you would think prisons were full of innocent people done in by Hornady and Dillon.

I don’t know why I’m writing this in the context of this post. I’m not planning to make hundreds of .45 ACP rounds for self-defense. I just don’t like the way people swallow legends and rumors.

Looking this stuff over, here is what I could conclude: there is a tiny, tiny chance that using handloaded ammunition will cause you to be arrested when you would otherwise be left alone, and there is an even tinier chance that it will result in you being tried, and the chance that you will go on to be convicted is tinier still. There is a pretty substantial chance that using lame ammunition will get you killed. It has happened to many, many people. Not just three.

I have zero interest in armed confrontations or being a white knight. The older I get, the more I understand how important it is to AVOID defending yourself with deadly force. I really don’t see myself using a gun to shoot anyone, but if I did, I would want every round to count. I would want the first shot to incapacitate, and I would feel horror every time a round landed without stopping my attacker. In real life self-defense situations, every failure to incapacitate raises your chance of being hurt, and the increase is great, not small.

Imagine a guy is charging you with an axe, which is something that actually happens. You manage to get your gun out and shoot him in the chest…and he keeps coming. Imagine how that feels. What if he has a gun? Imagine knowing your failure is likely to bring bullets your way in the next quarter of a second. This is why good ammunition is important, along with shot placement.

It sounds like there is a microscopic chance that you could avoid a legal problem by using factory ammunition, so why not get the most effective type you can? Because the legend choir will tell you a prosecutor will get you convicted for not using bad, run-of-the-mill cartridges. With the legend choir, you can’t win by using handloads, and you can’t win by using the best factory ammunition you can buy. You have to use whatever junk the cops use. That’s their standard line. Of course, the poor performance of LEO-endorsed ammunition is the whole reason the 10mm was originally adopted by the FBI. They chose it after the Miami shootout, in which FBI calibers failed to incapacitate quickly enough. The fact that a law enforcement agent uses something doesn’t mean it works.

Anyway, I am going to order some brass and get this stuff put together. After that, I may never have to buy .45 ACP again, unless I want something that works better than Hornady XTP’s, which are mediocre.

God is not my Problem

I woke up today and started praising God immediately. It flowed through me like a river’s seasonal flood. It must have lasted over an hour. I did not want to stop.

My friend Travis has been dead for 6 days, but I was praising God with my whole heart. It only occurred to me this morning to think that what happened to Travis might also have been intended to turn me against God.

No success there. I question myself, and I hate evil spirits, but God has never failed or been anything but generous and loving. In the past, I sometimes got angry with God. To my shame, I insulted him once. I can’t forget that. It hurts to remember it. Now I have the grace to side with God. Questioning him makes no sense. I have been here on earth a few short years, and I am small. I don’t know very much, and I am not that smart. I can’t correct the creator of the universe.

Is there a better gift than confidence in God? Without it, you are lost. And “gift” is the right word. You can’t manufacture it, and you are not expected to. Like any good thing inside you, it has to be provided by God, and it’s a manifestation of his presence.

While Travis was in the hospital, I woke up several times and saw spirits in my bedroom. Were they attacking me because I supported Travis?

I was not afraid of them. I hate evil spirits, and I know they do terrible things, but what I feel for them is hate and contempt, not fear.

As far as I can tell, they don’t get anywhere with me. I certainly have moments when they influence me, but as the Bible says, though I stumble, I shall not be utterly cast down. I don’t think they are able to do anything beyond harassment and distraction. The Bible says a thousand shall fall at my side and ten thousand at my right hand, but it shall not come near me; only with my eyes shall I behold and see the reward of the wicked. It’s a promise of protection, and it’s also a promise that God will protect my vision. He says I will see this with my eyes.

Travis invested in people. He had a great number of music students. He ran a drum line, which is a percussion band. The band was made up of ghetto kids. He tried to influence them for the better. He knew many of them were being raised more like wild animals than sheep and more like weeds than crops.

He also had a teaching job at Miami’s African-American Cultural Arts Center.

He experienced a great deal of frustration in his work with kids. Sometimes their parents wouldn’t bring their kids to lessons. The kids themselves let him down a lot. He kept working on people he should have dropped.

He used to hold car washes at the Cultural Arts Center, and the kids did the work. I remember taking my truck once. A few minutes after I left, multiple shots were fired right across the street, and a man was hit. That incident is a small picture of what it was like for Travis to try to help black kids.

He got a return on his investment. It was not all wasted. There are a bunch of kids and young adults in Miami who, thanks to Travis, understand that the way they and their families have lived is not right. They can’t lose that.

What about my investment? Losing Travis was somewhat like losing a son. I feel like I tried to buy something, and the transaction didn’t go through. My check bounced. I felt that a tremendous portion of my legacy had been wiped out.

Things could certainly be better, but because I told Travis things, he was better off when he died than he would have been without me. He repeated what I said to a lot of other people, and they are also better off. Nobody who taught Travis good things should feel completely cut off.

What will happen now? Will God give me anyone to replace Travis? I suppose he will. He has to be angry about what happened. I assume he will turn it around and make the spirits behind it wish they had never thought of bothering me or Travis Quinn.

It will take more than this to cut me off from God. To attack my faith is to attack God himself, because God is my faith. If I generated my own faith by trying hard to believe, I would be wide open to attack. Most Christians generate their own faith because they aren’t baptized with the Holy Spirit and they don’t pray in tongues. I don’t have to do that.

No one is supposed to do it.