Archive for the 'Guns' Category

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.

News from Tega Cay:

Quintin Huseman said he was running near Lookout Park and Shoreline Parkway in Tega Cay on Saturday morning with his two dogs, Gracie and Lilly, when they were attacked by a coyote.

Lilly’s bite wasn’t too bad and Gracie scared the coyote away.

“It happened really quick. The coyote snuck up on her,” Huseman said. “By the time I turned, it was already coming towards me, and all I could think is, it was rabid.”

Huseman said he called police to report the incident.

“The concern I have is the two dogs are 90 pounds each, the coyote is probably three-quarters of the size of one of the dogs,” Huseman said.

I’ve never found it to be an issue at all to carry a gun with me when walking my dog.  I do it all the time.  Running is a different story from what I understand.  I don’t run so I don’t know from first-hand experience.

But runners ought to find a way to carry a gun when running.  There is equipment you can use.  Get it.  Develop a discipline of wearing and practicing with it.

It may save your life or the lives of your beasts.  Oh, and by the way, it was probably not a Coyote.  It was probably a Coywolf with mixed DNA.

TFB: This guy is saying he has built a rifle that is pulling .4 MOA at 600 yards, or in other words, he is repeatedly pulling 2.4″ spreads with the .224 Valkyrie at 600 yards.  I know that the cartridge already has a reputation for being long range and accurate, but I don’t know if I believe this.

Ammoland: Big bore air rifles now legal for deer hunting in Arkansas.  From what I understand, the muzzle velocity is around 800 FPS for these types of rifles.  I don’t know if I believe this ensures an ethical kill.  I think I’d stick to a higher muzzle velocity.  Or in other words, a real firearm.

Proliferation of rifles a danger to residents and officers:

The chief said the initial investigation by the department’s Criminal Investigations Division shows Davis was shot multiple times in the back with a high-powered rifle. They were able to find the suspected shooting scene on Pettus Street, where multiple rifle casings were recovered.

Collier said they also found several 9 mm rounds near the scene. A 9 mm semi-automatic pistol was located beneath the victim’s body. The only suspect information is that two black males wearing dark clothing were seen running from the scene north on Pettus Street.

“At this point, we believe there was an exchange of gunfire,” Collier said. “However, it appears the victim fired his pistol at the suspects as he was fleeing.”

… the proliferation of rifles in Selma by criminals as the weapon of choice is both a community problem and an officer safety problem.”

So let me get this straight.  The proliferation of rifles is the problem, not the criminal?  And the victim was shot multiple times in the back with a “high powered rifle,” but still managed to get off several 9mm rounds at his attackers?

I don’t know if I believe this account.

Bloomberg Editors:

When law-enforcement agents seek information on guns found at crime scenes, they call the firearms tracing center of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Agents at the tracing center, in West Virginia, then try to establish a chain of custody based on the gun’s serial number, manufacturer, distributor and retailer.

The agents pursue this task in the most inefficient, wasteful and time-consuming manner imaginable, manually searching records — about 800 million of them — because federal law purportedly prevents the center from organizing them into a searchable digital database.

This absurd prohibition needs to be lifted.

Well, in order to prevent this kind of inefficiency, I suggest dismantling the agency altogether as it serves no constitutional purpose and has no legitimacy.

If this isn’t acceptable, then I would suggest an alternative.  Every employee must be required to walk or ride a horse to work every day, and home again, and the time left in his work day can be spent fulfilling requests from law enforcement.  No, on second thought, no horses.  Walking will reduce the probability I have to fund their medical care with my tax dollars.