Archive for the 'Firearms' Category

The Outdoor Wire:

Ethologist Dr.Valerius Geist in British Columbia is the former program director of Environmental Sciences at U. Calgary, and he is known world-wide for his studies and writings about large game animals. Val recently sent me an e-mail about something that hunters should be aware of.

What prompted Val’s e-mail is that he had just received a newspaper article from Germany http://wolfeducationinternational.com/wolfe-am-hochstand-auf-der-lauer-wolfe-at-the-high-stand-in-wait/ reporting that German researchers, analyzing photographs of traps, animal feces, tracks, and other traces, found 60 wolf packs are now living across the country,13 more packs than a year ago. Overall, there are now between 150-160 adult wolves in Germany.

In Val’s research on wolves and their relationship with people, which I described in an earlier article, http://www.theoutdoorwire.com/features/230658 he found that in countries where most people don’t hunt with guns or own them – Siberia, India, Kazakhstan, etc.– wolves are more likely to attack people. Whereas in North America, where firearms ownership is greater, when people fire shots toward wolves, typically they keep their distance.

The German article, however, reports something different.

German hunters are reporting that when they’re out in the woods, and they shoot a red deer, fallow deer, roe deer or wild boar, wolves immediately show up. It’s common knowledge that predators like wolves, coyotes, and bears will feed on the remains of game animals. However, in Germany the wolves don’t seem to want to wait until the downed animals have been dressed, they aggressively approach the carcass and the hunters.

[ … ]

According to Val, “This is the first report I have ever heard about wolves being drawn to hunter’s gunshots. However, that bears can and do attack hunters is definitely known in North America.” A number of those we contacted agree.

These are some of the responses.

Jim Low, a retired Alaskan game warden, says, “A gunshot on Kodiak Island attracts bears.  Many deer hunters have killed deer on Kodiak Island only to have a Kodiak brown bear show up and want to dine on venison.”

Joe Hosmer, former Pres. of the SCI Foundation, agrees. Joe says: “I have seen this black tail hunting on Kodiak Island. When a deer is shot the bears come running!  The hunter needs to give up the deer and move on,” unless you also have a bear license.

And then there’s this.

Hunters approaching a kill or a blood-trail with their single tracking dog are in danger of losing their dog to a wolf pack. In 2016 in Wisconsin, wolves killed 41 hunting dogs. https://www.wpr.org/record-number-hunting-dogs-killed-wolves-2016

Be careful out there.  A good dog will give his or her life for you.  And I’ll give mine for my dog.  After all, a man can’t live forever, and it matters how he dies.

Around these parts, a Coywolf doesn’t howl.  When I’ve been out with my dog at times, I just see their eyes.  They don’t announce their presence.  That’s why I carry a gun with me wherever I go.  I intend to make sure neither of us has to give our lives for the other.  I think General Patton had something or other to say about that.

Gaston Gazette:

Public access to an outdoor pistol range near Rankin Lake Park has officially been shot down after a five-year run.

Gastonia leaders say low interest in the amenity, combined with the cost of staffing the facility, led to the decision at the city’s Firearms and Tactical Training Center. Cutting off public use of the pistol range will maximize the use of all the amenities there, including a neighboring rifle range, said City Councilman David Humphries.

Humphries chairs a public safety committee that reviewed recent trends at the range before making the recommendation to do away with public pistol range access. City Council members voted unanimously in favor of that decision this month.

The facility at 1000 Tulip Drive features a public skeet and trap range, as well as a pistol and rifle range that are heavily used by law enforcement officers for training purposes. In 2013, the city opened things up and began allowing residents to fire handguns on the range from 8 a.m. to noon, and rifles from 1 to 5 p.m. Saturdays. The fee for 30 minutes of handgun time was $5 for Gastonia residents and $10 for non-residents. Rifle rates were the same, though on an hourly basis.

The public access to the pistol and rifle ranges has never been advertised on the city’s website, relying mostly on word of mouth for people to know about it.

Minimal public use of the pistol range prompted the city to cut back the hours of operation there beginning in 2017. Humphries said at the time that maintaining time for public use of the range had taken away opportunities for law enforcement officers to train on the grounds. And Gastonia Police Chief Robert Helton said keeping track of handgun users requires more oversight, because it’s easier for a careless person to inadvertently point a loaded handgun in an unsafe direction.

After the cutback, the pistol range was generally only open to the public for four hours a month – generally on the first Saturday of each month. Humphries and Councilman Jim Gallagher said at least two city staff members had to man the pistol range during those times, and few people ever showed up.

“I think the average was one to two (people) per session,” said Humphries. “With rifle shooters, a lot more of them show up at different times of the year.”

The change will enhance the more popular public use of the rifle range, he said. Because of the 90-degree configuration of the training center, the rifle and pistol ranges cannot safely be used at the same time.

Maybe if the ranges were open more often than they are – both of them – and maybe if the folks who run them weren’t jerks, both would be more popular and well used.

Here’s the thing, officer.  I’ve shot at so many ranges I’ve lost count and couldn’t name them all.  At every one of them, folks managed to shoot pistols without pointing them in an unsafe direction, whether we had ROs with us or not.  Some of the safest shooting I’ve ever done is when shooters were self-policing.  I don’t buy your argument.

As for your rifle range, the folks who run it are obnoxious.  I won’t go back there again.  And I’ll have to say that South Carolina has North Carolina beat by ten miles on this front.  South Carolina has free ranges associated with the DNR.  North Carolina doesn’t.

Shooting Illustrated:

To see how illustrative a small sampling might be, I decided to fire 100 rounds of the same ammo, out of the same rifle, during identical shooting and atmospheric conditions. My thinking was 100 carefully fired and recorded shots should provide a more practical picture of performance. The results changed the way I look at performance testing results, and might explain some of the misses we sometimes experience.

[ … ]

If we accept this 100-shot accuracy test as being representative, it’s clear simply firing and chronographing a couple three- or five-shot groups is not illustrative of how any rifle/load combination will perform over time. If you want to know what you can really expect from your rifle, every time you pull the trigger on a certain load, you need to evaluate more than one box of ammo.

In this article he deals only with those pseudo-random variables like velocity due to differences in loading, bullet weight, etc.  While it is well beyond the scope of this post, there are also things like stochastic vibration propagation along grain boundaries and crystalline structures of the gun barrel, which gets very complicated.  That subject cannot be given justice here.

When you fire a 3-shot group and claim that the gun shoots “__” MOA, or a 5-shot group and that the gun is capable of “__” MOA, that’s only marginally useful.  That data doesn’t meet the Central Limit Theorem (CLT) for convergence and presence of  at least three moments (a mean, fractional standard deviation of < 5% and a Variance of the Variance that is acceptable to an analyst).

But 3-shot and 5-shot groups is all you’ll ever see from a gun manufacturer.  Just realize that this is essentially meaningless and much more is needed to yield a standard distribution with proper variance.

Readers know that I not only open carry (sometimes) because I hate the feel of concealed carry and find it highly uncomfortable, but also because I believe we need to normalize this behavior.  As I’ve said before, I believe that opposition to open carry is about shaming gun owners.  I’ve also observed that “there is no prima facie reason that open carry cannot be legitimately for the reason of making a statement or for education purposes.”  I believe in open carry “For the peace, good and dignity of the country and the welfare of its people.”

If you do not choose to open carry for whatever reason, I’m okay with that.  I’m also okay with a gun carrier not feeling comfortable with doing something in an attempt to normalize acceptance.  I’m okay with these things as long as concealed carriers are okay with my choices and don’t criticize me for mine.  I do not open carry all of the time, but when I do, I expect acceptance from the gun community.  No, I demand acceptance from the gun community.

This all stipulates that open carriers don’t act like a jerk.  I was with an open carrier tonight waiting in a fast food line (I ended up getting a chicken salad), and he acted like a prick.  He was resting his hand on his firearm much of the time.  You’re as much of a goober if you touch your weapon as a cop is.  Get your damn hand off your gun.

He was dressed poorly and sloppily.  He then proceeded to act like a prick to the lady behind the counter about something, said hey to no one and offered no greetings, and as he sat with his family after he got his food, he blurted out obnoxious comments to his children wanting to know where they were going and what they were doing in a manner that everyone could hear him.  His poor daughter was simply going to the drink fountain.

If you openly carry, you are an ambassador for our cause.  Don’t be an ass.  Please.  Just stay home.  Dress appropriately, be nice, be respectful, observe proper rules (don’t play with your gun), and don’t leave retention straps hanging down from your holster.  Work on your holster to make it look like a gentleman is carrying a gun.

Do more than just look like a gentleman.  Become a gentleman.  Or stay home.

Outdoor Life has an interesting article up on their tests of new hunting and long range rifles of 2018.  As I’ve come to expect for new chassis long range rifles now, they are all rather pricey.  But one thing that jumped out at me was the Savage M10 Stealth.

It’s an accurate rifle (0.5 MOA) and shoots 6mm Creedmoor, which is what most long range precision shooters are using now.  So if you want an accurate rifle out of the box for competition shooting without the process of building, this might be a good choice.

Via correspondent Fred Tippens.

Uh oh.  Queue up The Alaskan on this .357 Magnum focus.  I’m sure he’ll consider that too small.  I’m neither advocating nor denying what the author says.  I’m dropping it out there for your take.  In the mean time, that’s one mean, bad looking critter, yes?

Joel clearly prefers the Leupold, so for instance when someone else pays the bill (e.g., military) the choice is clear.

For me, not so much.  The Leupold Mark 5 costs $2500, while the Athlon Argos costs $400.  They’ll both shoot well out to 600 – 800 yards.  Yes, the picture must be clearer to Joel, but for an additional $2100, it had better be.

The question is what do you want to do with a scope?  Do you want to be a competition precision rifle shooter, or a hunter and shooter who can do it well to 600 yards and moderately beyond?  At some point a man must begin to think about cost unless he is wealthy.

But contrary to what Joel said, who was addressing those folks who think you can put a $400 scope on a $5000 precision rifle, I don’t know anyone who thinks that.  If you can afford a $5000 rifle, you can afford a $2500 scope.  I can afford neither.

Wired:

25-year-old radical libertarian Cody Wilson stood on a remote central Texas gun range and pulled the trigger on the world’s first fully 3-D-printed gun. When, to his relief, his plastic invention fired a .380-caliber bullet into a berm of dirt without jamming or exploding in his hands, he drove back to Austin and uploaded the blueprints for the pistol to his website, Defcad.com.

He’d launched the site months earlier along with an anarchist video manifesto, declaring that gun control would never be the same in an era when anyone can download and print their own firearm with a few clicks. In the days after that first test-firing, his gun was downloaded more than 100,000 times. Wilson made the decision to go all in on the project, dropping out of law school at the University of Texas, as if to confirm his belief that technology supersedes law.

The law caught up. Less than a week later, Wilson received a letter from the US State Department demanding that he take down his printable-gun blueprints or face prosecution for violating federal export controls. Under an obscure set of US regulations known as the International Trade in Arms Regulations (ITAR), Wilson was accused of exporting weapons without a license, just as if he’d shipped his plastic gun to Mexico rather than put a digital version of it on the internet. He took Defcad.com offline, but his lawyer warned him that he still potentially faced millions of dollars in fines and years in prison simply for having made the file available to overseas downloaders for a few days. “I thought my life was over,” Wilson says.

Instead, Wilson has spent the last years on an unlikely project for an anarchist: Not simply defying or skirting the law but taking it to court and changing it. In doing so, he has now not only defeated a legal threat to his own highly controversial gunsmithing project. He may have also unlocked a new era of digital DIY gunmaking that further undermines gun control across the United States and the world—another step toward Wilson’s imagined future where anyone can make a deadly weapon at home with no government oversight.

Two months ago, the Department of Justice quietly offered Wilson a settlement to end a lawsuit he and a group of co-plaintiffs have pursued since 2015 against the United States government. Wilson and his team of lawyers focused their legal argument on a free speech claim: They pointed out that by forbidding Wilson from posting his 3-D-printable data, the State Department was not only violating his right to bear arms but his right to freely share information. By blurring the line between a gun and a digital file, Wilson had also successfully blurred the lines between the Second Amendment and the First.

“If code is speech, the constitutional contradictions are evident,” Wilson explained to WIRED when he first launched the lawsuit in 2015. “So what if this code is a gun?”

The Department of Justice’s surprising settlement, confirmed in court documents earlier this month, essentially surrenders to that argument. It promises to change the export control rules surrounding any firearm below .50 caliber—with a few exceptions like fully automatic weapons and rare gun designs that use caseless ammunition—and move their regulation to the Commerce Department, which won’t try to police technical data about the guns posted on the public internet. In the meantime, it gives Wilson a unique license to publish data about those weapons anywhere he chooses.

You can’t stop the signal, man.  The controllers can’t win.  It’s impossible.  It’s as impossible as FedGov winning a counterinsurgency campaign.

The DoJ decided to make peace.  Here’s a suggestion to the rest of the controllers: make peace.  You won’t like it very much if you don’t.

Global News:

A Bella Coola man is recovering in Vancouver General Hospital after he was attacked by a sow — or female — grizzly bear.

Jordan Carbery said he spotted some movement outside his home sometime after 5 a.m on Tuesday. He went outside to investigate and saw some cubs in a cherry tree.

One of the cubs fell out of the tree, which was near the entrance of his home. That caught the attention of the mama bear.

“I looked over to see a sow grizzly bear looking right at me and heading straight for me,” he said.

He tried to run back to the house.

“Suddenly I was just run over,” he said. “It felt like two football players tackling me.”

Carbery found himself on the ground and “next thing I realize is that the bear had my head in its mouth and was picking me up.”

“My scalp tore and it dropped me,” he said.

The bear grabbed him again, he said, and let him go.

He tried to fend off the bear by kicking at it. “I kicked her in the face three times at least,” Carbery recalled, “and then I tried to hit her in the face in the snout. She was like a prize boxer. She was so fast.”

Carbery managed to create enough separation between him and the sow to make his way into the house.

Since he was in an area with no cellphone coverage, he had to drive himself to hospital.

As he ran out his to his car, the bear charged at him again.

Good Lord.

Sir.  I don’t mean to pile on when you’re in such pain, but why did you leave home without a gun?  The first time, and the second time?

Why, oh why?

Financial survival, that is.  But for a company, is there any other?

Whatever.  I don’t do H&K myself.  Too pricey, not good enough.  I suspect they’re much like Colt was years ago, where they had relied way too much on military contracts and listened to the gun-buying public way too little.  Colt relied on the contract for M16s / M4s, and by that time had fired all of their wheel gun mechanics.  They completely missed the resurgence in interest in revolvers.

If you want to see any current evidence for the drop in quality control at H&K, watch Tim’s most recent video of his “new” HK USC .45 Carbine.  Pitiful.  Just pitiful.  Broken front sight, magazines that don’t work, FTF.  Just pitiful.