Category: Shooting

I feel like I’m at the point where I’m doing rule revisions for the club all the time. The new Board members have different ideas. This is good, because stagnation is usually a bad thing. I’m open to debating new ideas. I’ve said previously, keeping thieves away from money should be a top priority for any non-profit, and I think we’re pretty safe in that regards now. I wish NRA could say the same, but they can’t.

So in thinking about rules, it always helps to start with first principles. So what are they? This is what I’ve come up with:

• Rules should be based on safety, not shooting preferences. A lot of club rules enforce the shooting preferences of the ruling cadre. This promotes stagnation, which is the point in many cases.
• Short and simple to understand rules will be better adhered to than lengthy rules that read like tax code.
• When someone does something wrong, and you can throw a list of charges at them, your rules are redundant, and probably overly long and complex.
• Subjectivity can’t be avoided, but should be to the greatest extent possible. However bright line rules will tend to be complex. Simple rules will be open to interpretation. The important thing is everyone agree on a consistent set of interpretations, and that those are communicated.
• Avoid rules that enable rules nazis. My club has a rule about targets needing to be placed six inches from the target frame, which is meant to prevent the target frame from being shot up. But there was once an RSO who carried a ruler, and I’m sure you can imagine what he did with it.
• Rules should not disable the advanced shooter because some people are idiots. A useful exercise is to outline the rules, and then pick which of the “four rules” the club rule maps to. You’ll necessarily have some that are procedural, like what you must do if someone yells “cease fire.” But it’s useful to see how many rules either don’t map at all, or map so far downstream that it would just be better to state the actual safety principle directly.

The main thing to remember is that all this is supposed to be fun! Even with very well done rules, having rules nazis can ruin a good time. Much like thieves will be attracted to the temptation of money, rules nazis are attracted to the prospect of lording over people with rule minutia. So keep minutia to a minimum.

… I’m never going to be able to replenish my .22LR supply at a reasonable price. I am honestly not much of an ammo stockpiler. For calibers I reload, I have enough supply to get me through an ammo shortage. But I was negligent on my .22 supply.

I was down to a half case of .22 when the pandemic started. I should have ordered a few cases then. Never again though. When supplies return to normal, I’m gobbling up a case every month or so until I have a deep enough supply to weather shortages.

BTW, in my experience almost no one believes this is a demand driven shortage. Conspiracy theories abound, as well as accusations of price gouging by the manufacturers. Doesn’t take much to clear shelves, folks, and manufacturers are going to be really reluctant to add capacity when they were in a slump recently because they overbuilt during the last ammo panic.

Sorry, for all of you out there laughing at John Kerry over his AR-16 comment, which you should because he’s proof that you can marry more money than you could ever hope to make, but money can’t buy you functioning brain cells.

But the AR-16 is a thing, and I would totally own one too if I could.

I don’t really feel like commenting on statue toppling. I don’t really favor toppling statues for the most part. Though I’m sort of OK (sort of because in general people who want to erase history are up to no good) with removing (through democratic, rather than mob action) statues that were put up in the racial identity politicking revival of the last century’s teens and twenties. The problem we have in this country is we need to topple statutes. Statute toppling I can get on board with. Statues are history and art. You know who liked destroying statues? The Taliban. Statutes, on the other hand…. if half the tax code disappeared, would anyone really miss it?

OK, so I said this post would be about shooting. I’m looking for opinions on loading for the M1 Garand without a gas plug.

I’ve been looking for a powder that can do .223, .30-06 and .308 reasonably well so I can economize. Normally my go-to would be Varget, but I can never find it. I got a hold of 8# of Ramshot TAC, since it had loading data for all three. But I’m not sold on it. It leaves the .30-06 case empty enough it shakes like a maraca. Cycled the action fine on the starting load, but I need to chrony it. Internet fora suggest “Never use ball powder in an M1! 4895 or go home!” But Internet gun fora are full of bullshit, myth, and legend. My club is honestly no better. I’m sure bending the op-rod is a real thing, but I just don’t know how much of a risk it reasonably is if you’re careful and don’t run hot loads. Anyone have experience with M1 loads that deviate from the norm? Or is that really not a good idea to play with?

This seems to be going viral in the shooting community on social media. So much so that a reader from Colorado on Facebook sent me a message asking if it was my club. Then I noticed Illinois folks I know commenting. It is not my club. We were never this Fuddy at our Fuddy-Fudd Fuddiest, and we’ve gotten rid of a lot of the rules like this. This is a club up in Lycoming County, PA:

The rifle rule won’t even allow for high-power practice, and even bullseye rapid fire is 5 shots in 10 seconds. I suppose you could do your rapid fire string, and wait 50 seconds, and then shoot another one. But this does show this is not a club for actual shooters of shooting sports people are shooting today. Despite the fact that we’ve had our share of dumb rules, my club has always had the advantage of having membership that, for the most part, love the shooting sports. That’s not the case everywhere.

Yes, this club will likely die with the generation promulgating rules like this. The comments I see on social media are correct on that count. But I also think it’s incumbent on younger shooters to do what it takes to save places like this. Once we lose a place to shoot, we will never get it back. The club culture is also something unique that is worth saving. You won’t always succeed. There are clubs that are too far gone. But I found this advice seen on Facebook to be telling.

Fudds. I get it. But complaining will not help. Showing up at membership and board meetings will help. Showing up with a lot of guys helps more. Letter writing helps. Running for office helps. Being professional about it all helps. And if you “walk in the Fudd’s shoes” for a month you may discover the new policy may not be as stupid as you think. Sadly… 99% of rules exist only for the 1% that seems to mess things up for everybody. I would not put up with the new rules either and there may be an intelligent solution around it. Fudd’s do not care about complaining. They hear it all the time. You have to become a force.

That’s absolutely spot on, except for the part about “not be as stupid as you think.” I’d bet it’s about as stupid as you think. But that was clearly written by someone who has been very involved in club life. In most cases, club leadership is not as Fuddy as the caricature you’ve built in your brain suggests. Just in that position, you see a lot of idiocy, and it becomes temping to deal with that idiocy by rules. It’s the same temptation lawmakers face: when the only tool you have is a hammer…

The drive to do something, is huge. It’s not restricted to anti-gun people. There’s plenty of that attitude to go around.

Now that I’m helping run an action steel program, I’m finding that being on the line all day wearing electronic earmuffs in hot weather is awful. I’d like to be able to wear a hat that offers more shade than a ball cap. I’m looking at electronic plugs, but it looks like anything decent is ridiculously expensive. Walker has the Razor line, which would be fine, but they don’t look to be binaural, which is a deal breaker for me.

I know there are mechanical earplugs which are open for conversation normally, but close in response to loud impulse, however I have no idea if they are actually any good. I know people who swear by them. But earplugs aren’t exactly something you want to ask your shooting buddy “Hey, can I try that?”

I’m curious how much these work, and whether they hush conversation too much. The thing I like about electronic muffs is that I can’t tell I’m muffed unless I’m trying to hear someone over a lot of gunfire. I’ll even forget I have them on in winter.

Anyone have any recommendations?

I had the opportunity to attend NRA’s Range Development and Operations Conference in Pittsburgh. If you’ve ever been to NRA’s Law Seminar, it’s a similar format, except a smaller crowd. If you’re a Director or Officer at a gun club, I highly recommend you get your club to send you, or even go yourself if you can swing it. It was an eye opener for me. It’s three days. It can be rough to sit in a conference room for three days and hear presentations if you’re not the classroom type.

Takeaways for me:

• First takeaway is that if you don’t do this for a living, in other words, if you’re not presenting at the conference, you don’t know everything. This conference will just explore the tip of the iceberg of things you don’t know.
• The worst thing you can do as a club is stick your head in the sand and pretend everything is right, and everything is fine. Seek expert advise. NRA will come evaluate your range for free. The results are kept confidential. If you’re really worried, coordinate through your lawyers so any results are privileged. Ranges that stick their head in the sand likely do not have an extended future. When those ranges inevitably go under, we won’t replace them.
• There’s lots of expertise and technology available to help ranges get on the right track. My club send people to the RDOC about 15 years ago, and we had a few Board members who figured it would just be the same. It was not. Range technology is evolving fast. One presentation on the economics of the industry mentioned that while there is definitely a “Trump Slump,” the baseline of shooters is still much higher than it was a decade ago, and there’s investment. Shooting ranges actually do less business when people aren’t buying as many guns.
• At some point, the firearms industry will need to replace lead styphnate and lead azide priming with something non-toxic. That’s proven illusive, but it’ll have to be done. Lead bullets are a far more manageable problem than the lead emitted from primers, which have to be cleaned up and disposed as hazardous waste.
• Does your range have an environmental stewardship plan? If not, you need one. This is becoming standard industry practice. We’ve long been big on recycling in our sport, but a plan will help ensure people know all the best practices. There are people who will help you write one who are experts in this stuff, know environmental engineering, and who are not tree huggers looking to shut you down. NRA’s Range Services and the professionals who work with them are trying to keep ranges open, not help them get shut down.

Now, some things I didn’t like about the conference:

• The classroom format is a bit rough for some people. Not sure there’s so much you can do about this. I found the Vendor room, and networking with the pros, to be just as useful as the conference itself. Maybe more here.
• Get presenters to hold questions off until the end. Letting an audience of people interrupt speakers with (often stupid) questions is a recipe for a presenter having to skip over material at the end or rush through. I wanted to see some of that material! It’s better to be able to cut off questions at the end. We had a few “class clowns” and various other people who liked to hear the sound of their own voice monopolizing or interrupting the speakers.
• Asking people to introduce themselves at the beginning individually is a nice touch, but it does signal to a certain kind of individual that the world gives a shit, and primes them to believe the world wants to hear their wisdom.

And the biggest takeaway for me?

At my club, 200 yards is the max I can reach out to, so the regular old 55 grain FMJ-BT is my bullet of choice. These days what powder I use depends on where I can get some for a very low price or free. Since I’m still going through powder I have scrounged from various sources, I’m not all that familiar with the wide array of choices. I generally have been sticking to Varget, H322, IMR4895 and I just came across a few pounds of Varmint and IMR4198.

I know a couple of guys who occasionally head to a 600-yard range near Atglen to do some long-range silhouette shooting. I haven’t really shot Silhouette in years, because it’s honestly about as much fun as watching paint dry if you’re not getting better. I don’t have the time, patience, or desire to master the sport. Those Silhouette guys helped improve my shooting a lot, but there came a point where it had done everything it was going to do for me without devoting more time to the game than I was willing to give.

But turn it into a precision rifle event with half-scale animals at ridiculous distances? You once again have my attention. That’ll be fun even if I’m missing a lot, and it gives me an excuse to tinker, which never gets old.

However, the most precisionist rifle I have is my AR, which isn’t anything to write home about. I bought it during the height of the ban almost 20 years ago by this point and it’s 100% stock, save the bayonet lug and birdcage flash suppressor I put on after the ban. It has regular old A2 furniture. A few weeks ago I uncased at the club and had some young guy say, “Wow. That’s old school!” It seems like just yesterday it was me saying shit like that to grey haired shooters. I resisted the urge to come back with, “You know, back in my day, we didn’t have any of these free-floatin’ barrels and fancy-dancy ACOGs with illuminated reticles.”

Old school or not, I’m thinking of slapping a halfway decent optic on it, and taking it out to see how I do at that distance with so-so equipment. But no way I’m taking my regular 55 grain load. I’m interested in the capabilities of the Mk. 262 round for reaching out to 600 yards. For those of you who may not be familiar, the Mk.262 is a 5.56x45mm round developed by SOCOM for longer range work. It uses a 77-grain Sierra Match King bullet. It is about as decent a round as you can get and still be able to stuff them into a magazine. I want to work with a practical round and not with loadings that have to be single-loaded into the rifle.

The trouble is, I’m not used to working with bullets that heavy in this chambering, and I’m paranoid about overpressure. A few months ago, I ran into a supply of 75gr HPBT bullets, and I am starting with those. That bullet with 22gr of H322 driving it isn’t yet a compressed load at 2.26″ OAL. Hodgdon says that’ll push out at about 2785ft/sec with 48,100 CUP from a 24″ test barrel. For a 77gr bullet, 21.8grs of H322 pushes 2,721ft/sec a 50,900 CUP. Black Hills seems to get close to 2900ft/sec out of a 20″ Colt AR barrel, so I’m guessing they have to be loading over the SAAMI spec and closer to the NATO spec on chamber pressure, which is about 10,000CUP higher. Anyone have any experience trying to replicate this load to get the same performance as the factory Black Hills load?

With club elections now behind me, a new system to manage prospective members in place and seemingly working, I’ll have some more time now. I’m interested in bringing a Steel Challenge match to my club. The only problem is we don’t allow drawing from holster. Maybe I could get an exception for the match, but I think that’ll be a tough climb. The fact is there are some risks associated with letting any yahoo draw and fire from holster, and I’ve seen enough sloppy gun handling there to be wary of it even myself. But I’m also finding people will rise to the competence that’s expected of them… in other words, as I’ve been running matches, I’m seeing gun handling practices get better.

If I were to run a Steel Challenge-like match, I’d probably need to get people’s gun handling skills up before we could do anything like draw-from-holster. I’m curious what other people might have done in this situation, and how other clubs that allow draw from holster or allow limited draw from holster manage it. If you run a Steel Challenge match, which means it’s an open match, how do you know the shooter showing up actually knows how to do a safe draw? Is there ever any safety check? Pre-qualification? Do you police equipment? I’ve looked at other clubs in the area, and some allow it, but only for qualified people.