Shall Not Be Questioned – Page 1682 – The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State …

Philadelphia Foot Fettish Attacker

This guy is just asking to get shot. When he grabs for the shoes, that’s always a good opportunity to paint the sidewalk with this guy’s brains. This is why more women need to carry, especially in a city with as many warped human beings as Philadelphia.

“I used to walk my dog early in the morning before I went to work, all around the school, now I just stay on Parrish. I take my cell phone, sometimes I talk to someone. It’s scary,” said Fairmount resident, Kathleen Bannon.

Yeah, that cell phone is really going to help. I wish the media and politicians would stop perpetuating this myth that cell phones will protect you.Â Talking to someone on your god damned phone is an invitation to a robber, because it means you aren’t paying attention to what’s going on around you.Â Paying attention will protect you a lot more than any friggin cell phone.Â By the time whoever you’re talking to calls the police, you’re either out your money, and your shoes, a rape victim, or you’re a stain on the sidewalk.Â My guess is this shoe fetish attacker is a seriously dangerous individual, more so than ordinary armed robbers, and need to be stopped before he kills or rapes someone.Â But you won’t hear anyone in Philadelphia suggesting women take self-defense classes and get licensed to carry weapons.Â No, just carry a cell phone.Â If you’re lucky, the police will show up before you become a statistic.

Mosin-Nagant Humor

I ran into this really amusing bit while looking for info about the Mosin-Nagant over at 7.62x54r.net. We’re all familiar with the AR vs. AK fights. Well, the die hard Nagant lovers think they have a leg up in that debate:

Stuff you know if you have an AK	Stuff you know if you have an AR	Stuff you know if you have a Mosin Nagant
It works though you have never cleaned it. Ever.	You have $9 per ounce special non-detergent synthetic Teflon infused oil for cleaning.	It was last cleaned in Berlin in 1945.
You are able to hit the broad side of a barn from inside.	You are able to hit the broad side of a barn from 600 meters.	You can hit the barn from two counties over.
Cheap mags are fun to buy.	Cheap mags melt.	What’s a mag?
Your safety can be heard from 300 meters away.	You can silently flip off the safety with your finger on the trigger.	What’s a safety?
Your rifle comes with a cheap nylon sling.	Your rifle has a 9 point stealth tactical suspension system.	You rifle has dog collars.
Your bayonet makes a good wire cutter.	Your bayonet is actually a pretty good steak knife.	Your bayonet is longer than your leg.
You can put a .30″ hole through 12″ of oak, if you can hit it.	You can put one hole in a paper target at 100 meters with 30 rounds.	You can knock down everyone else’s target with the shock wave of your bullet going downrange.
When out of ammo your rifle will nominally pass as a club.	When out of ammo, your rifle makes a great wiffle bat.	When out of ammo, your rifle makes a supreme war club, pike, boat oar, tent pole, or firewood.
Recoil is manageable, even fun.	What’s recoil?	Recoil is often used to relocated shoulders thrown out by the previous shot.
Your sight adjustment goes to “10”, and you’ve never bothered moving it.	Your sight adjustment is incremented in fractions of minute of angle.	Your sight adjustment goes to 12 miles and you’ve actually tried it.
Your rifle can be used by any two bit nation’s most illiterate conscripts to fight elite forces worldwide.	Your rifle is used by elite forces worldwide to fight two bit nations’ most illiterate conscripts.	Your rifle has fought against itself and won every time.
Your rifle won some revolutions.	Your rifle won the Cold War.	Your rifle won a pole vault event.
You paid $350.	You paid $900.	You paid $59.95.
You buy cheap ammo by the case.	You lovingly reload precision crafted rounds one by one.	You dig your ammo out of a farmer’s field in Ukraine and it works just fine.
You can intimidate your foe with the bayonet mounted.	You foes laugh when you mount your bayonet.	You can bayonet your foe on the other side of the river without leaving the comfort of your hole.
Service life, 50 years.	Service life, 40 years.	Service life, 100 years, and counting.
It’s easier to buy a new rifle when you want to change cartridge sizes.	You can change cartridge sizes with the push of a couple of pins and a new upper.	You believe no real man would dare risk the ridicule of his friends by suggesting there is anything but 7.62x54r.
You can repair your rifle with a big hammer and a swift kick.	You can repair your rifle by taking it to a certified gunsmith, it’s under warranty!	If your rifle breaks, you buy a new one.
You consider it a badge of honor when you get your handguards to burst into flames.	You consider it a badge of honor when you shoot a sub-MOA 5 shot group.	You consider it a badge of honor when you cycle 5 rounds without the aid of a 2×4.
After a long day the range you relax by watching “Red Dawn”.	After a long day at the range you relax by watching “Blackhawk Down”.	After a long day at the range you relax by visiting the chiropractor.
After cleaning your rifle you have a strong urge for a stiff shot of Vodka.	After cleaning your rifle you have a strong urge for hotdogs and apple pie.	After cleaning your rifle you have a strong urge for shishkabob.
You can accessorize you rifle with a new muzzle brake or a nice stock set.	Your rifle’s accessories are eight times more valuable than your rifle.	Your rifle’s accessory is a small tin can with a funny lid, but it’s buried under an apartment building somewhere in Budapest.
Your rifle’s finish is varnish and paint.	Your rifle’s finish is Teflon and high tech polymers.	Your rifle’s finish is low grade shellac, cosmoline and Olga’s toe nails.
Your wife tolerates your autographed framed picture of Mikhail Kalashnikov.	Your wife tolerates your autographed framed picture of Eugene Stoner.	You’re not sure there WERE cameras to photograph Sergei Mosin.
Late at night you sometimes have to fight the urge to hold your rifle over your head and shout “Wolverines!”	Late at night you sometimes have to fight the urge to clear your house, slicing the pie from room to room.	Late at night, you sometimes have to fight the urge to dig a fighting trench in the the yard to sleep in.
There you have it. In the end, it is clear to any open minded inquirer that the Mosin Nagant is the most superior weapon of all time, but the AR and the AK come out as a draw when compared side by side.

Range Report – Refighting World War II

I finally got the Mosin-Nagant out to the range this afternoon. I decided to take the Mauser K98 along with, to compare the two. The indoor range maxes out at 25 yards, which is fine, because to be honest, I’ve never been able to shoot well with notch sights. I much prefer the AR-15s peep sights for some reason. My overall impression, which is probably not a surprise, is that the Mauser is the better weapon.

The Mosin-Nagant bolt, just dry cycling, operates smoothly. As soon as you add ammunition, it takes a fairly heavy wallop to lock the bolt down, which I found to be rather annoying. The Mauser’s bolt action is very smooth, and can be cycled while still maintaining a reasonable shooting position. To cycle the Mosin-Nagant’s bolt, I had to completely break my shooting position in order to get enough leverage to slap the bolt down to lock the breech closed.

The trigger on the Mosin-Nagant I found to be sloppy and unpredictable compared to the Mauser. The Nagant’s trigger has slack before you start to hit the breaking point, same as the Mauser, but there’s a definite bit of resistance on the Mauser trigger before it breaks. The Mosin-Nagant has no crisp break. It just kind of goes at some point when you pull it back, so it’s hard to take up the slack, refine your bead, and then give that little bit extra to fire the shot.

The safety on the Mosin-Nagant hardly qualifies at all, since you basically just lock the firing ping against the receiver. It’s difficult to undo in a hurry, and probably impossible in a panic. The Mauser has the edge here in going from safe to ready to shoot, even though the K98’s safety is also less then ideal. If I were carrying a Mosin-Nagant as a soldier, I think I’d rather leave the chamber empty than fuss with the safety. Even the Kalashnikov safety is an improvement over this.

Accuracy between both weapons is probably comparable in the hands of an expert shooter, which I am not. The best group I managed to do with the Mauser at 25 yards was a group of five about the size of a quarter. With the Mosin-Nagant, the best group of five was the size of a silver dollar. Of course, those were the only group of 5 where I didn’t end up pulling one or two shots outside the group :)

All in total I fired 80 rounds out of the rifles, which is more than enough for me. My shoulder feels like someone beat it a few times with a hammer. I have new respect for my grandfather’s generation, who were shooting these massive high power cartridges all day, and, as fit soldiers, had a bit less padding to dampen the recoil than I do. Plus, the damned rifles are heavy. I can’t imagine slogging one of these around Europe for four years!

As for me, I enjoy the collecting and occasional shooting aspects of these historic rifles, but for fun shooting, I’ll stick with rifles that fire intermediate cartridges. My shoulder will thank me.

Support for Gun Control Down Among College Freshman

Those of us who favor limited government will weep over a poll (PDF) linked to by Kos (not often you’ll see me link to him), which shows support for big government to be widely supported by college freshman.Â It’s probably not too surprising that people who aren’t yet earning paychecks, and are thus not being taxed to pay for government programs, favor more of them than those who are.Â But don’t despair too much folks:

The issue that shows the greatest change from 2005 to 2006 is a decrease in support that â€œthe federal government should do more to control the sale of handguns,â€ down from 78.7 percent in 2005 to 73.8 percent in 2006.

So I guess we must be doing something right, but that number is way way too high.Â We need to keep this number dropping, because our rights have no future if we’re not reaching out to these types of people.Â I think this is an area we EBR types have more of an advantage over the fuddies.Â In my experience, young people get far more excited over a chance to learn about and shoot the same firearms they play with in video games than they are about learning to shoot a deer rifle.

I’ve introduced three college aged folks to shooting, one of which was quite afraid of guns before.Â Know anyone in college who’s never had a chance to shoot?Â See if they have any interest in going to the range.Â You might not make a shooter out of them, but you can at least give them some knowledge and show them a fun time.Â The only way we’re going to keep our rifles is to get more people involved, and make it harder for the anti-gun folks to sell people on their bullshit.

Ooops!

Looks like we were down for a while. The MySQL database for the blog is stored on my MythTV DVR, and last night it looks like my friend shut it off because she couldn’t stand looking at the light the blue LED was producing while she was trying to sleep on my sofa. I have a perfectly good bed up in the guest room! No flashing and solid blue LEDs up there!

But yeah, in my household, you can take the blog down by turning off the TV :)

Slow Blogging Day

It’s a slow blogging day for me.Â Went to bed early last night, so I didn’t get anything queued up for the morning, and today I have to get some work done at work, so little posting until I get home later tonight.Â In the mean time, for those joining us, scroll back for Full Auto Day.

I never realized that blog articles could be queued.Â I hope that’ not revealing a big secret like that episode of The Simpsons where Homer becomes a truck driver and starts revealing the existence of the autodrive system ;)

Full Auto Day – The Hughes Amendment

This will be the concluding post for Full Auto Day. If there’s one thing that I’ve tried to feature in this series, it’s ordinary people having fun shooting machine guns and assault rifles, as happens in various locations around the United States every year. Why does anyone need a machine gun? Because machine guns are really friggin fun! I’ve never seen anyone who wasn’t intrinsically hoplophobic, or recoil shy, shoot a machine gun and not walk away with a big shit eating grin on their face. I’ve shot my friend Jason’s M11 dozens of times, and I still get a big smile on my face every time I send a mag full of 9mm downrange. When I first tried a suppressed H&K MP5 submachine gun, I briefly for a moment considered whether it might be a good idea to sell my car to buy one. Unfortunately, the MP5 wouldn’t be very good at getting me to work, so that idea was quickly abandoned.

So that brings me to the reason that machine gun shooting is becoming increasingly the domain of the privileged few because of the stratospheric prices on registered machine guns.; Congressman William J. Hughes, who, as I nicely added to his Wikipedia Entry, is responsible for banning civilian possession of machine guns not already lawfully registered prior to May 19, 1986, despite there being virtually no history of crime being committed with legally owned machine guns in the United States. Why’d he do it? Because he’s another gun hating asshole from New Jersey (I hope he googles his name and manages to read that too). If you want to see more information, take a look at Dave Hardy’s 1986 Cumberland Law Review article about the FOPA, or Gun Law News’ summary of the FOPA.

Because I’m really wanting to have way more full auto fun than I can currently have, I’m quite eager to be rid of the Hughes Amendment. Unfortunately, the NRA has largely given up on machine guns. As much as I wish they didn’t, the sad truth is current political climate isn’t conductive to accomplishing anything on this ground. Over the next few years we’ll be lucky just to fight off more semi-auto bans. We’re also probably not going to have much luck in the courts in this regard either. So what to do? Well, we have to keep chipping away bit by bit, until we change the political climate to the point where it’s feasible to get rid of it. In the mean time, I think it’s important that we figure out ways to present machine gun ownership and shooting in a positive light to the general public.

But if the Democrats want a fight, we can always do to them what they did to us. If those slippery bastards try to close the “gun show loophole” or other such crap, why not slip a repeal of the Hughes Amendment in right before debate closes, and pass it on a questionable voice vote. It’s a little low, sure, but what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If you can’t defeat a bill, adding a little “f*ck you” amendment is always a nice touch.

Well, I hope everyone liked today’s Full Auto Day. I’ll maybe do special interest features like this in the future. Stay tuned!

Full Auto Day – PPSh41

I don’t really like commies much, but I sure do love the guns they produced.Â The Russians learned very quickly at the hands of both the Finns and the Germans how deadly effective submachines guns could be in combat.Â The Russians needed to develop their own submachine gun pretty quickly, and of a simple enough pattern to be easily manufactured.Â Â Luckily, George Shpagin was able to come up with a design that worked, and worked well.

The PPSh41 is a blowback operated submachine gun that fires from an open bolt.Â Chambered in 7.62x25mm.Â It accepts a 34 round box or 71 round drum magaine, and has a cyclic rate of fire of 900 rounds per minute.Â Earlier models had select fire capability, but later models were full auto only.Â The model here is showing with the drum mag.Â The Soviets discovered drum mags were too cumbersome to use, and not reliable enough under combat conditions, so in 1942 they developed a box magazine.

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=S5v2x2jbKrU[/youtube]

That’s quite a burst.Â I believe there are a fair number of these that are transferrable out there.

Full Auto Day – A Holiday in Cambodia

Can’t find a real AK-47 here to shoot? Â Try Cambodia:

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=0rnFh8UMQIo[/youtube]

You can impress the dudes by already knowing how to handle a Kalashnikov.Â You can even shoot RPGs for the right price. Just don’t be a chode and blow up a cow, ok?

Full Auto Day – Kriss Super V

There hasn’t been a truly innovative 45 caliber submachine gun produced, that can think of, since the Thompson. The folks at Transformational Defense Industries (TDI), have come up with a really novel one, that I just must own, but can’t, thanks to the Hughes Amendment.

That is slick. The idea is so simple, I can’t believe someone didn’t think if it before. But notice how the grip is raised above the barrel more than in a standard submachine gun. This seriously reduces recoil and muzzle climb and makes firing on full auto very controllable.

Here’s a video of it straight from SHOT 2007:

[googlevideo]-6654700044795906272[/googlevideo]

Nice!