Observations
Why safety is important to the gun community as a whole…
When you own a gun, you’re not just buying a device of metal and polymer or wood. You become part of a large community. With that comes a great deal of responsibility. Everything you do or say from that point on reflects and affects this community as a whole.
Therein lies the problem. If a mistake is made, you’re going to be judged by a group of often uninformed individuals with the benefit of hindsight (and often an agenda). I commonly refer to them as “armchair analysts”. The bright side is that it happens with far more than just the firearm community. As a pilot, listening to people talk about airplanes any time there is an accident is enough to make me want to pull out what little hair I have left. I actually heard a news “expert” once say something to the effect of “The pilot didn’t file a flight plan because it was a single engine prop plane.” No, the pilot didn’t file a flight plan because he was flying in VFR conditions and wasn’t legally required to file one in any way, shape or form. It has nothing to do with the kind of plane. Don’t get a military member started on the news coverage of their stuff. You’re going to be there listening to a (very justified) rant for a while. If you’ve listened to the news or happened to accidentally stumble into the putrid quagmire of the comments section of a news site whenever there is a story on guns…well…you have to force yourself to laugh otherwise you’ll either start crying or probably die from an anger induced aneurysm.
Fortunately, it’s actually very easy to avoid becoming the focus of those armchair analysts: don’t make a mistake.
“Oh? Is that all it takes? Thanks, Mr. Noob, that sounds easy! Your insight is inspiring to us all! </sarcasm>”
Yeah, yeah. Easier said than done, right? Actually, no. Believe it or not, this is one of those rare situations in life where it’s easier done than said. You see, there are some rules…
You see that button on my menu that says “Safety Commandments”? It’s the very first button next to “Home”. It is the most important button on my site. If someone visits my site and visits no page beyond that one, I call it a win. Those rules…those commandments…are all you need to avoid an accident. There are only six of them. The first four are the same ones you typically find posted at every gun range and plastered over every NRA training guide. I personally added two more based off of issues I’ve seen pop up on news stories and such.
I can say this without any doubt in my mind: if you follow those rules in their entirety every single time you come near a gun, you will never have a problem. From a statistical standpoint, it falls into the “impossible” category. Again, that’s only if you follow every single one of them at all times with no compromise. If you break or skimp on 1 rule, your chance of having an accident goes up significantly. Break 2 and the chances then doubles. If you’re breaking (or even skimping) on 3 rules or more and it becomes a matter of when you have an accident, not if.
Let me give you an example, by the way, of what I mean by “skimping” on a rule. It’s not so much flat out breaking it, it’s taking a shortcut which, frankly, can be just as bad. Say you’re going through your guns. You pick up your Glock 19, check it for empty then set it down. You then pick up your 1911 and check it for empty. Then you have to go to the bathroom. You come back and pick up your Glock again but you don’t check it for empty. Why? Because you checked it a moment ago and you’re the only one in your house. That’s skimping on a rule. Logically, it should be fine, right? Let me ask you this: have you ever walked into a room but forgotten why you went in there? Have you found your car keys elsewhere in the house even though you could swear you set them down on the table by the door? Your memory is never reliable and should never be treated as such. With that in mind, three scenarios are possible:
- The Glock remains unloaded.
- You loaded the Glock back but forgot because you never load it back until you’re done.
- You never checked it in the first place but you swear you did because you always do.
That means there is a 2 out of 3 chance that gun is going to go “bang” when it should go “click”. Now, ego or pride will convince you that the other two results are impossible. If you have truly never misplaced an item or forgotten to do something, you might have an argument there. Personally, I don’t want to bet my life on a 1 in 3 chance. Those may be great odds in Vegas but not in my house.
During my flight training I was taught that every accident is just the final step in a series of events that started the moment I woke up and that chain could have been stopped at any given moment up until that final step. While there are sometimes exceptions to that in the world of airplanes, I’ve yet to see a situation in firearms where that didn’t hold true. Sometimes you have to set aside ego/pride to do so.
Stan Lee (by way of Ben Parker) said it best: With great power comes great responsibility. Your actions will affect us all just as my actions will affect everyone. It may seem like a waste of time to do something like checking your gun every time you pick it up but the alternative is far worse. We’re in this together so let’s try to help each other out. It’s not as hard as you think.
“Stantheman” by Edward Liu – Stan “The Man” Lee. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
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How Fluid Is Your Plan?
I have to apologize but the best way I can think of to start this article is with a quote from the Tenth Doctor: “People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly….timey-wimey…stuff.”
What he’s basically saying is that reality isn’t always an A + B = C type of flow. The tiniest factors can influence things which makes outcomes rarely predictable. As a result, your life and plans should never follow an A + B = C type of response.
Let me change gears for a moment. This will all come back around, don’t worry. Just bear with me. I have a friend who has decided to become a “prepper”. He’s hoarding food and supplies and is building himself a bunker. He’s got a seed bank and all kinds of water purification devices and more. According to him, he’ll be ready for anything. So my first question to him was “what if you have to leave?” You see, his entire plan was based off of Disaster + Bunker = Safe. I pointed out to him that Mayport was a major target for nuclear attack. If some country decides to push a button, NE Florida would be lit up and the fallout would certainly reach to his place. His bunker wasn’t good for radiation and, although I’m not up to date on the effect of radiation on crops, I don’t know if I would trust eating food grown in conditions that required a radiation suit in order to harvest (if they’d even grow at all). Long story short: in all his planning he never once considered having to leave his fortress.
The same has to go for your defense plans. Is there more than one entrance to your house? What if you’re in your yard? What if they’re already in your house when you get home? What if your go to gun just doesn’t work?
As I said above, reality is wibbly wobbly. There is no possible way to come up with a single plan that can account specifically for every possible factor. The trick…and I’m not saying there is a trick but if there was it would be to try and come up with a master plan that is fluid in its execution. Try to figure out the most likely factors and then make sure it can adapt to unforeseen circumstances.
One of my big heroes, Alton Brown, had a philosophy when it came to kitchen goods: no unitaskers. If it can only be used for 1 single purpose, it had no business being in his kitchen. The only exception was a fire extinguisher, mind you. A similar philosophy would be a good start when it comes to survival supplies as well as defense. For example, shotguns are good for home defense as well as hunting and the same goes for certain semi-auto rifles. Storing all your guns in your bedroom may be convenient but it’s also an “eggs in one basket”. Storing guns all around your house in strategic locations, via small safes, is a tactically better option.
The same can go for concealed carry/personal defense options…kind of. Not so much versatility in the items themselves but in your EDC in general. Carrying a pistol is all well and good but do you really want that to be your only option? What if the threat is bad but in that grey area between “bad situation” and “my life was in danger”? Recent events have shown that things can get muddied very quickly. Carrying something as simple as pepper spray along with your pistol doubles your defense options and can potentially save you legal troubles after the fact.
One of the best things you can do is to test your plans. I’m not saying pay someone to break into your house or set fire to your neighborhood. I mean try to find holes in it. Don’t assume that “so and so will never happen”. Don’t rule out odd options either like “what if they’re dressed head to toe in super advanced bullet proof armor?” If you find a hole in your plan, look to see how things can be adapted to fill that hole.
In the end, it’s survival of the fittest out there. That doesn’t always mean those who can bench press a Volkswagen and run 30 mile marathons. Mental fitness, creativity and the ability to adapt are, by far, the most valuable assets you can have.
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Gun Myths: Gun show reloads are wastes of money.
There’s a lot of bad information on the intertubes. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve seen horribly bad advice being passed off as “expertise”, I wouldn’t need to be working anymore and could do GunNoob.com full time. With that, I’m going to start picking out bits of bad advice I’ve seen around the internet and then go all Mythbusters on it.
The first one was inspired by a strange set of circumstances. I was browsing one of my favorite forums and saw someone just ripping on those gunshow reload ammo packs. You know the ones: $12 for 50 rounds of 9mm FMJ and so on. Even though he stated that he “had never had a problem with them”, he wouldn’t “waste his money on that junk”. About an hour after I closed my browser with a chuckle, I got an email from someone asking about reloads for range practice. Part of me wonders if he was reading the same forum that I was browsing.
Regardless, those “worthless” gunshow reloads have made up about 99% of the countless number of shots I’ve made while running this site (and for a while beforehand as well). Why? Because I can get hundreds of rounds for the cost of a single 50 pack of the brand name stuff. Unlike some bloggers who are sponsored, or run their own stores, or are filthy rich to begin with, I’m just a guy running my own blog out of my pocket. The money I spend on this blog competes with things like mortgages and electric bills and such. I save money where I can and the biggest place to save money is on ammo. Granted, if someone wants to sponsor this blog, or just throw money my way for no reason whatsoever, I won’t turn it down. My first wife got my dignity in the divorce.
Anyway, here’s the thing about those reloads. A lot of people don’t trust them. They don’t have the quality controls that a lot of the big name manufacturers have and that could lead to a higher number of bad rounds. The funny part is, I’ve never personally had any. In fact, I’ve had more bad rounds from those Remington UMC boxes than I have ever had from the gun show reloads. It really comes down to volume. Let’s say that, for whatever reason, both a GSR (gun show reloader. I just made that acronym up.) and the big name brand both have an average bad round rate of about 2%. Now let’s say Big Name, Inc brand churns out 2 million rounds a day while GunShowReloader, LLC puts out maybe 10,000 a day. After crunching the numbers, we see that the reloader would have about 200 bad rounds while the big name brand would have 40,000 bad rounds. In other words, the big name brand would churn out more bad rounds in a day than the total number of rounds the reloader could churn out almost a week.
In fact, in my research, I can’t really find anything substantial. I haven’t seen anyone saying “they blew up my gun”. I’ve seen a few cases with a home reloader blew up their gun, mind you, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. All the stories I’m seeing are “they blew up some guy at the range’s gun” or “I know a guy who knows a guy who gets his hair cut from a guy that lives next door to a guy who’s gun blew up from those”.
Keep in mind, a lot of companies say that using reloads voids the warranty. My question has always been “how would they know?”. You’d have to be one heck of a self-incriminating person in that case. Am I saying be dishonest? Not at all. There’s only a couple of ways your gun can be damaged on account of reloads and both of those couldn’t be explained as a “warranty issue” by any stretch of the imagination. Keep in mind, I’m not advocating underhandedness. The reloads DO void your warranty and you should shoot them with that understanding. What I am saying is that, statistically speaking, it’s not going to be an issue either way.
So by all means, load up your gun with them, go to the range and blast away. They’re great rounds and the hate they get is unwarranted by far.
Myth: Busted Sorry, our staff of law-monkies has informed me that’s copyrighted.
Myth: torched!
What’s what you say? Would I bet my life on the reloads and use them for self defense? Well…uhm.. I would have to say LOOK OVER THERE! SOMETHING VERY DISTRACTING IS HAPPENING! **runs away**
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Getting the Heck out of Dodge: Dealing With and Surviving a Riot.
Ask any expert: society is fragile. It doesn’t take much for it to collapse and when it does, it’s not pretty. Law and order go out the window while bricks and trashcans go through windows. Civility is replaced by rage. Humanity is replaced by something else…something feral. There is no reasoning at this point, there is only survival. When the riots broke out up in Ferguson, I started to wonder what I would do if it happened here. How would I handle it? Where would I go? I’ve been researching for the last few days and I’ve noticed some major trends in advice.
First off, the best bit of advice is to avoid being near a riot before it even starts. Don’t let anyone tell you that a riot just pops up out of nowhere. You’ll never be walking to your car after shopping at the mall when a riot just jumps out of the bushes and says “booga booga I’m a riot!” There are always signs leading up to one even though it may only be a couple hours worth of leadup as opposed to days like in Ferguson. It may be a protest going on and on or a crowd at a sports game getting a bit unruly. If you keep your head on a swivel, like you always should, the signs are there loooong before one actually happens. It’s like building clouds on a summer day. You look at the sky and it goes from blue to cloudy to anvil clouds to darkened skies and eventually the storm is unleashed. Sometimes, even though it gets dark and nasty looking, the rain that follows isn’t as bad as it looked. Sometimes the clouds will disappear before any rain falls. Other times it’s a borderline hurricane with lightning, hail and tornadoes. Learn to watch for those metaphorical clouds. It doesn’t always guarantee a riot but I wouldn’t go swimming if the sky looks that dark that’s for sure.
So let’s say that, for whatever reason, you find yourself with a riot on your hands. There’s a couple different situations you could find yourself in and, though they’re handled essentially the same way, there’s a few slight differences in how they should be handled.
The ideal situation is one where you live safely outside of town and the riot is just between you and your home. In that case, take the long way home. Don’t try to even shortcut near the riot or just give it a slightly wide berth. Circle as far away from it as feasibly possible. Even if it takes 2 or 3 hours to get home, it’s worth the extra miles on your car.
Second worst situation is if you live safely outside of town but you’re in the middle of the riot when it breaks out. This is where things get a bit dicey. Your goal is, first and foremost, survive and stay safe. Secondly, you should try to get out of the middle of things. This can be a lot more difficult than it would seem. In most cases, the police will try to set up a perimeter to contain the violence. Even if you have nothing to do with the riot, you’re probably not going to get through. The police aren’t going to listen to your pleas any more than the rioters will. You’re either going to have to find another way out or weather the storm however you can. The bright side is that the police will be focused on where the heaviest rioting is. Head in the opposite direction and you may find a way out. You may be going quite a long way on foot so I hope you’re wearing comfortable shoes.
The worst situation is if your home is right in the middle of the riots. Here, you don’t have a sanctuary to go to and you’re probably not going to have any way out either. You’re likely going to need to hole up and fortify. The biggest reason this is the worst is because you’re most likely to be completely separated from your family for a long time in this situation, at least more so than in the other scenarios. Your kid may be at school, your husband or wife may be at work. They will be stuck there because there is no safe place waiting for them at home. The school certainly isn’t going to drop your kid off in the middle of the craziness. Make arrangements for a friend or family member who doesn’t live in the middle of things to pick up your kid(s) and take them somewhere safe. If the spouse is at work, make sure they stay there or again, someplace safe. It’s going to eat at you not to have everyone there where you know what’s going on but if they’re someplace safe they need to stay there. That’s more important than being together in this case.
Now, there are some consistent bit of advice across the board that you should follow. The biggest rule of them all is:
Stay Calm – It’s very easy to get freaked out because, frankly, everyone around you is freaking out. No one is going to listen to reason so don’t bother. Just keep your head about you and keep thinking and analyzing your situation and surroundings. If you’re with your family, keep them close and keep them calm as well. Don’t get separated. Lock arms or carry them if you have to.
Don’t Draw Attention to Yourself – Calmly (but briskly) walk to a safe place. Try to blend in as best as you can. No one is looking at you. Look for a less crowded area and make a beeline for it. Rioters tend to group together so get on the edge of that group and get away.
Stay Out of It – Smashing cars and stealing flat screen TV’s make look like fun but don’t give it a try. If you want to stay safe, don’t join in. Even if you sympathize with the rioters, your primary concern should be yourself and your family.
Being Selfish is Being Smart – This one hurts to say but now is not the time to be a hero. If you see someone getting assaulted or what have you, ignore it. I know it would gnaw at my conscience for a long time afterwards if I did that but my family is more important and I can’t protect them if I’m injured or dead. My family is my biggest concern and, even if it means leaving a stranger in trouble, I will do what I have to in order to get to them and protect them. Stepping in to help someone will draw far too much attention to yourself. I feel rotten for even typing this, mind you, but we have to do what we have to do.
Watch Your Feet – Keeping upright and walking is of utmost importance. If you trip and fall amidst the crowd, you will get trampled. If you do fall, go fetal and protect your head with your arms and hope for the best. The ideal situation, believe it or not, is if a bunch of people trip and fall on you. This will cause the crowd to instinctively avoid the pile of people and it could result in some breathing room for you to get back on your feet and moving again.
Backstreet’s Back, Alright – If they’re rioting in the streets, which they always are, they stick to main roads. Places where you’d normally get stuck in traffic is where they’ll be rioting. Now’s the time to see the less visited places of your town/city. The alleyways and back roads will be significantly less crowded so head to those. Knowing the layout of the city, it goes without saying, it vitally important. How well do you know your city? Probably not as well as you should. Why not explore it more this weekend to get a handle on its layout beyond the main roads you always take?
Have Gun Will Travel Should Stay Hidden – If you’re one of the millions of CCW holders in the country, you’ve got a good advantage in most cases. A riot, believe it or not, is not a good place to have your gun out. Remember: you’re not dealing with rational people at this point. In most cases, a criminal will flee at the sight of a firearm. In riots, if there’s enough people around, they’ll charge right for you. Trust me, you don’t have enough bullets. The ideal situation is to get away from the crowd as quickly as possible. Once you’re safely away from the main riots, you may still encounter people taking advantage of the lawlessness. Then and only then should you consider drawing if there is no other choice. A group of 3 or 4 people are more likely to flee than a group of 30 or 40 rioters.
Have a Rally Point – If you’re all separated before the riot starts or, worst case scenario you’re separated in the middle of it, have a point to meet at. It could be your home which might be safely outside the violence, a relative’s house or even a landmark or park that you know is in a safe area. It’s best to have a main one and a couple of alternatives. Make sure you all know how to get to them before everything goes to crap because the middle of a riot is not the best time to be looking at a map.
In riots, much like in life, the cool and rational minds prevail. Stay alert and stay alive. Those with a plan have a natural advantage. Have a plan and stick to it.
Image Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
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Ligyrophobia
Fear is an incredible emotion. Fear of failure can motivate someone to success just as easily as it can prevent someone from ever trying. It can freeze even the bravest in their tracks. It has also been the root cause from some of the greatest atrocities in human history.
Everyone has a fear of something. Some people don’t like snakes or spiders, for example. In most cases, fear can be reduced by education. If someone doesn’t like snakes, exposure to snakes and learning about them can often times get rid of that fear. Given enough time, they will see that a snake is just an animal like anything else and all they want to do is eat, sleep and survive. There is nothing inherently evil about them or their nature. The same goes for most other creatures we’re afraid of.
Except clowns. Clowns are always evil. No exceptions.
There is a certain point, however, where a fear is so extreme that it is referred to as “irrational”. There is no amount of education or reasoning that will truly get rid of that irrational fear. People will recoil is absolute and unfathomable terror at the sight of their tormentor. Something as simple as a roach or a dirty counter top, which is completely mundane to most of us, is the stuff of nightmares to someone with an irrational fear.
The technical term for those fears is, of course, a phobia.
The term phobia is thrown around a lot these days and it’s often used in the same vein as “literally” or “OCD”. How often have you heard someone say something like “When I saw Susan there I literally died”? Not to jump on the bandwagon but using the term literally when you mean figuratively makes me want to literally beat my head on a desk until I’m stupid enough not to care anymore.
But I digress.
If you don’t like spiders, you don’t like spiders. If the sight of a single spider puts you into such a hysteria that you would rather burn your house down than confront the spider even if it’s to spray it with bug spray, that’s a phobia. The distinction is important.
To someone who doesn’t have a true phobia, the fear makes no sense. They look at it as “just a spider” or “just a little dirt”. There is no way for a person to understand that crippling horror and, on the other side, there is no way for the person with the phobia to truly explain why they’re so scared of the subject.
All of that was to clarify where I’m coming from when I say this: I have a phobia and, taking that phobia into account, I am a complete and utter moron for taking up this particular hobby.
I am terrified of loud noises. The louder they are, the worse I am. Some noises, can even put me into full on panic attacks. The technical term is “ligyrophobia” and in my **cough** years on this planet, I’ve learned to cope with it and to hide it as best as I can. I’m also convinced that the stress from it has shortened my life a bit. At the very least, it’s definitely made some things quite difficult.
Theme park rides, for example, are hit or miss for me. I rather enjoy theme parks and many of the rides but every now and then I find myself on a ride that has me regretting my whole trip. A perfect example is a ride I went on a few years ago at Disney’s Animal Kingdom. The ride was called “Dinosaur!”. It was hell. I won’t waste time going into detail as this is already a bit longer than I wanted it to be before getting to my ultimate point but still, the noises on that ride had me shaken up for the rest of the day and it took a long time for me to calm down. I noticed that my heart rate sped up a bit as I was typing about it, if that’s any indicator.
So the fact that I enjoy shooting is a bit of a mystery.
Aside from the situation where I needed a gun, I kept up the hobby out of the thought that it would help me to get over my fear of the noise. In a way, it has and it hasn’t. In the past, whenever I would arrive at a gun range, the first couple of shots I heard would put me into a near panic attack. I can’t describe to you how horrific the sound is to me. The muscles on the back of my neck tighten up, my legs become shaky and my heart rate goes through the roof. After a few years of shooting, my heart rate still climbs but my panic has subsided. I don’t have the uncontrollable urge to run away when I go to a range.
My hands still shake like crazy with a pistol and I have the damnedest time keeping a tight group. In many ways, it’s disappointing as hell because I don’t shoot my pistol as well as I’d like to. It’s still a more than acceptable level, in the grand scheme of things, mind you. The way I see it, with all the stress I go through to shoot in a “calm” practice environment has, in some ways, helped prepare me for a time when my life depends on it. When you think about it, I kind of know how to shoot with adrenaline and fight or flight response in full swing. For someone who’s never dealt with a phobia, they’re probably thinking “yeah right, a bit of noise doesn’t prepare you for defense”. For me, it’s not just a bit of noise: It’s the audio equivalent of a knife to the throat. I don’t think anyone is ever truly prepared for a defensive scenario, but I think knowing how I react in a fight or flight helps in some way.
I’ve also found that rifles and shotguns are far more manageable for me. The human mind is a strange thing and most of how it works makes no sense at all. In this case, I’m guessing there’s something about the recoil and the sound profile of them that doesn’t bother me as much. I still hate the noise and I still have to do a lot of deep breathing to calm myself down before I start to shoot. My hands don’t shake, however. I can hold the rifle or shotgun still long enough to get an accurate shot.
So what does all this ultimately lead to? It’s very important to know where your weakness is. Once you know that, you can either work to strengthen it or work around it. I’m not going to fool myself: pistols will probably always be difficult for me. I will continue to work on them but, in finding out that I’m better with rifles and shotguns, that allows me to focus on what I’m better at and improve those skills rather than push a rock up a hill. In the meantime, don’t hold your breath to see me competing in any 3-Gun competitions.
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Your Gun is Bad and You Should Feel Bad
When something makes me angry, I tend to joke about it. Making jokes about things is kind of a coping mechanism for me. It’s a way of dealing with my anger. I guess the mentality is that if I can make a joke about it then it’s not worth getting angry over. That doesn’t work to make me less angry, mind you, but the attempt is there and I should get credit for that at least. I often make jokes about a certain mentality I see in the gun blog world that just irks me to no end. Continue reading
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The Remington R51: The Web’s Current Punching Bag
So apparently the Remington R51 will cause your car to stop working, set your house on fire, give you Ebola and eat your pets…at least that's the impression I get in reading pretty much every review of it. I haven't fired it myself but I did get to play with it at SHOT show and, like the rest of the gun world, I wasn't impressed. This is why I always tell people that, be it cars, gun or what have you, it's not a good idea to buy the very first model year. This is a brand new gun..sort of…and it's sure to have some kinks. Admittedly, there are some problems with this gun that should never have made it past internal testing.
That leads me to wonder how it actually got to market. It's been amusing, to say the least, reading some of the conspiracy theories surrounding its release. Some are saying that Freedom Group is trying to devalue Remington in order to sell it easier. Others think that accountants have taken over and don't know or care about firearm quality and are just looking at bottom lines. Personally, I have my own theory.
Regardless, the blogger dogpile on the R51 is almost absurd at this point. Granted, I don't think it's a great gun either but there's a different between being honest and being harsh just for the sake of being harsh. The video above, while not flattering, was a good and honest review of the gun. Other bloggers have been nowhere near as…reserved…for lack of a better term.
In this day and age, I don't like to see any business fail or put out a bad product. I hope Remington can eventually fix the problems with the gun but I also fear it won't matter. Gun peeps are notoriously unforgiving and usually quite unwilling to give a second chance. Heck, there are people who won't buy Glocks to this day because a few of the originals had some issues with the polymer frame. Remington is going to have one heck of an uphill battle moving forward.
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How To Poop Like A Samurai?
Over at The Art of Manliness, they’ve posted an article that got me thinking. He spoke of a samurai master that never stopped training. As they put it in the article: “everything he did, he did with great purpose. As he was a sword master, he continued in his study of the sword. When it rained, the master would go outside, crouch in the rain shadow under the house’s eaves, and cut rain drops dripping from the roof line as they fell. He never stopped studying what he did. Bushido taught zanshin as preparedness for battle, which could come at any time. Even, say, when one was on the toilet.” Continue reading
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Year of the Rifle: Picking My First Real Rifle!
Since I’ve declared 2014 the year of the rifle, it goes without saying that if I’m going to learn rifle shooting, I’m going to need a rifle. While I love my Mosin and my .22LR, they’re not exactly the kind of rifle I want to be learning on. Maybe the .22LR a bit for technique and such, but the Mosin…not so much.
So I’m going to look at this the same way that I would if I were going to buy any other item, not just a firearm. I have a rule that, with very few exceptions, if I’m going to spend more than $100 on something I must spend a great deal of time researching it (1 to 2 days per $100). Essentially, what you’re going to read is me just writing down my thoughts as I shop. This is exactly how my brain goes through purchasing decisions….minus a few swear words. Continue reading
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A Different Kind of Shot…
So I hurt myself at the range this morning. There’s so many injuries that we go out of our way to prevent. We religiously follow those gun safety commandments and I don’t know any shooters personally that can’t recite them at a moment’s notice. At the range, we focus so much on those gun safety rules that we can easily forget that there are many ways to hurt yourself that have nothing to do with guns.
Such is the nature of my injury. Continue reading
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