Winning

I ran across this article this morning. It has three interesting points about the changing face of gun ownership in the US. It seems 2/3 of us have our guns for self defense these days, which is something of s shift from the historical reason of hunting. 38% of us keep a loaded firearm easily accessible while we're at home. Well over half of gun owners only own a pistol.

As Michael Bane has pointed out many times, these are hallmarks of Gun Culture 2.0. New gun owners are motivated by self defense needs rather than the traditional reasons for gun ownership that Gun Culture 1.0 felt. They see the crime on their streets and in their neighborhoods. They understand that the police usually respond after the deed is done. They have internalized the message "You are your own first responder."

Another important aspect of this is that we as freedom loving individuals are winning. More people are "getting it" than there have been in decades. While Moms Demand Bloomberg's Money may be making a lot of noise, they're not making a lot of headway, and that's a Good Thing.

I like Winning. Winning feels good, and it lets me know that it's going to be a lot easier to teach my putative grand kids how to shoot when that time comes.

What is it with these Canadian

(As found on Gab.)

Snipers. 11,319 feet for the record. Plus an unknown number on lives saved by his work.

The GOP says its going to get strapped; the left loses its collectivist mind

I should have seen it coming--really I should. When I posted this morning about GOP Congressman Thomas Massie introducing a bill calling for concealed carry permit reciprocity in the District of Columbia and I said "I hope the Democrats shit themselves. Literally." I honestly didn't think that they'd do it in such a public manner or quite so quickly.

I didn't count on the power of Twitter and the Twits that inhabit it.

It seems that New York Rep. Chris Collins was interviewed today and he espoused some distinctly Second Amendment views. Ditto for Georgia Rep. Barry Loudermilk. I don't doubt that others aren't thinking along the same lines but simply weren't interviewed.

Predictably, the left is coming unglued. OMG, it's gonna be Saturday Night in Dodge City! I mean, just read the tweats from the twerps in the above referenced article. They know it! It's settled science!

Except it isn't. In every state since Florida passed their concealed carry statute, we've been told that the blood was going to run in the streets, that gun fights would be breaking out over parking spaces and so on and so forth. There's only one problem. The blood has stubbornly refused to flow. Ever. Anywhere. Any time. Period.

To make it worse, concealed carry permittees are, in study after study, the most law-abiding group in whatever jurisdiction is researched. Adding insult to injury, we accidentally kill fewer people every year than doctors.

So here they are, in all their pants-shitting hysterical glory: The American Left, once again pronouncing The Received Truth as only they know it.

Will no one rid us of these troublesome progressives?

DC reciprocity?

After the recent shooting at a GOP practice for a charity baseball game, some folks I know were predicting moves by Congress--on both sides of the aisle--to enact further gun control laws. To paraphrase one, "You just can't go around shooting politicians with impunity, especially the ones in power."

Now that's true, and it's a good thing that we can't. Despite the fact that some portion of our elected politicians aren't worth the space they take up, having folks shooting them out of hand just because they don't care for them is a good way to get a civil war started. Heaven knows we're doing a good enough job slow-walking ourselves into that already, we don't need to add rampant political assassination into that stew.

In this country we already have decades of practical experience that shows gun control doesn't work when it comes to lowering the rate of violent crime. The District of Columbia is one of the prime examples of that simple fact. The tighter they squeezed, the worse things got.

So this morning I got a very pleasant surprise when, trolling through the inbox, I see this headline in The Shooting Wire:  D.C. Personal Protection Reciprocity Act Introduced. Yes, you are reading that correctly. Congressman Thomas Massie has introduced H.R 2909, which would force the district to recognize valid concealed carry permit from any state. Even better, my Congressman is a co-sponsor.

I hope the Democrats shit themselves. Literally. They're ginning this up; it's time for us to put an end to it. It was only a matter of time before they graduated from their sticks, stones and bottles of piss to guns. In Arlington, a massacre was averted by two things--Good Guys with guns and the good fortune they happened to be on scene. Allowing the great mass of legal concealed carriers to carry in more places will help make sure those two things can happen the next time. Because all the blah, blah, blah in the media right now, there will be a next time.

They aren't going to paper over that civil war so easily.

Zeroing your AR-15

It's a deceptively simple subject. If you've ever been in the service of Uncle Sugar, he says 25 meters and you're done--or at least he used to, back in the dark ages of the 1980s. God know what he says now. My research says it's a lot more complicated these days, since we now have a number of different types of ammo (M885, MK262 (I think that's it; it's a 77 grain round), M193 and so on) that have to be taken into account. The first video gives you a lot of background on the subject, including the ballistics, so you can understand what is going on with the round and not just doing "Monkey see, monkey do".

 

The second video gets into the interesting question of "Well gee, I've zeroed for 25/50/100 yards, and suddenly I need to shoot a target at 5 yards."

 

 As you can see on the second video, if you're playing one of the 3 gun games, it really doesn't matter much what your zero is. You're going to get good enough accuracy that if you're aiming at the center of the A Zone on your target, you're going to hit it if you're doing your part no matter what your distance is.

Your issue is going to be that pin point accuracy you need if Marty the Meth Head has come barging into your home looking for money and has taken your wife/son/daughter hostage and is using them as a shield. Depending on how close you are, the difference between point of aim and point of impact could be 3+ inches. Depending on how much of Marty you can see, that may be the difference between hitting Marty and hitting Mom, or not hitting Marty and letting him have Mom. Neither seem to be good options.

So what can you do? There is the option of "maximum point blank range", an idea that's making the rounds. It isn't a new idea and it's a good, functional idea, but you may find it a little lacking in the accuracy department in the scenario described above. I certainly do. We can, as Aaron Cowan does (or in one case, fails to do) in the second video, use hold over to make the shot. If you've practiced enough, that can work, usually. Of course, if it doesn't, putting a target paster on Mom won't help much. You may be zero at a shorter distance, like 5 yards, but many AR sights don't have the ability to deal with that much parallax.

I'll grant that we're looking at a pretty far-fetched scenario for most of us. The odds that we'll have to pull off this shot are probably right up there with winning the lottery.

It will be some time yet, but I'm going to have to experiment with this. I've gotten my Form 1s back from ATF, and I'm going to be building a couple of specialized ARs for home defense. While these guns may well go shoot some sort of gun games, their primary purpose in life is the defense of the castle. The longest shots I anticipate with them is 100 yards, and the shortest is across the room.

It's a hell of a thing that we have to consider taking such measures.

Brevard County (FL) Sheriff Wayne Ivey Gets It

I wish I could embed this video, but it's on Facebook, so yeah. (Thanks to True Blue Sam for the lesson in how to embed videos from Facebook. I never knew you could do that.) Still, you should go watch it, if for nothing else to see what an elected official who actually understands the situation and who trusts the citizens who put him in office looks like.

For the record, he's warning folks that in the light of the ever increasing terrorist threat, they need to get their carry gun on. Oh, and by the way, if you need help with that, his department teaches a course, free of charge.

Hell, I'd consider moving just to be able to vote for the guy.

Just in case you've been wondering

I have to admit that all this Alt-this and Alt-that have had me a tad confused. Just what is the Alt-Right anyway, and what, all of a sudden, is Alt-Light? Do I dare wonder about the Antifa after the farce of Evergreen State? Well, I finally decided to put the Googles to work and I found these two articles, which seem to come from authorities in the field, so to speak.

What the Alt-Right Is
The 21 Theses of Alt-Christianity

And I managed to do this without linking to the Daily Stormer. Trust me, you don't want to go there. I'm not. Well, not again, anyway. Couldn't manage one for Alt-Light without linking an Antifa site, and I'm not going there, either. Sort of like the Daily Stormer for the other side of the street.

It's starting to feel uncomfortably like the late 60s/early70s these days. I'm just waiting on the bombings and airliner hijackings to start.

Bullet-proofing

(Via SurvivalBlog)

How about a product you can mix on site and apply to your walls to make them bullet proof? If that sounds like something you might be interested in, check out BallistiCrete. Apply it thick enough (2") and it will stop rounds up to 7.62 x 51. This could be some handy stuff.

June 6, 1944

Once again, we remember the men of Operation Overlord. Here you see one of the iconic photos of that day, taken by Robert Capa, of the first wave of troops storming ashore onto the hell of Omaha Beach.

And once again, I am in awe of these men, and grateful that they were then when the world needed them.