Month: September 2008

Interesting Observation

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Earlier this week my wife said, “I’m off Saturday. We need to go to the range. It’s been too long since I’ve shot that .38.” We have a S&W Model 60 2″ .38 Special that we keep in a quick-access safe (along with a 4″ Ruger GP-100). The .38 is “hers,” though she can shoot either in a pinch.

As I’ve noted here previously, my wife is not a “gunnie,” but she’s a decent shot, and I can hand her my Ruger MkII Target, a brick of 500 .22LR, and set up our swinging target stand, and she’ll happily blast away all day.

So we got up bright and early this morning, loaded up the truck with the .38, the .357, the MkII and the Single-Six, my Kimber Classic and M1 Carbine, the swinger stand and the rest of the paraphernalia, and we headed out to the Tucson Rifle Club – a 45 minute drive. The TRC is a nice facility, with a 500 meter rifle silhouette range, two 100-yard “public” rifle/pistol ranges, a 100-yard .22 rifle range, a 100-yard range dedicated to law-enforcement (members can use it when law-enforcement isn’t), a 200 yard handgun silhouette range, an action shooting range with three bays for cowboy and IDPA/IPSC shooters, and a 1,000 yard range with shooting positions also at 200, 300, and 600 yards. There is some interference. For example, if there is a match on the 1,000 yard range at anything over 200 yards, then the action bays are closed since they can be observed from the shooting positions on the 1,000 yard range.

Today, everything was busy. There was a match on the 500 meter range, the two 100 yard public ranges don’t really suit themselves to close-range pistol shooting aside from the fact that they were nearly full, the .22 range and the police range were occupied by a Hunter Safety class, the pistol silhouette range was running a Cowboy Lever Gun silhouette match (pistol caliber lever guns), and there was a 600 yard match going on.

The place was hopping.

So I asked my wife if she was game to go to the Elsy Pearson public range in Casa Grande, which is quite a hike North of town, and she said “Fine!” (No, the actual, heartfelt “Fine!” Not the “Whatever the hell you want” “Fine!” which doesn’t really mean “Whatever the hell you want.”) On the way back towards town I had an idea. There is a 100 yard range operated by the County in Tucson Mountain Park, and it was not far off the track. I have never shot there, but I’ve driven up to it to check it out before. I thought we’d give that a shot (so to speak.)

It was packed. And it wasn’t packed with deer hunters sighting in for the fall hunt, either. More on this in a bit.

So, we decided to go ahead with the original fallback plan, stopped and got some breakfast, continued home so I could pick up my home-made target stand (the Casa Grande range is unattended and has no target frames or targets. Bring your own, and take ’em home when you’re finished with ’em.) Then we hit the road again.

It’s about an hour from my house to the range, mostly on I-10 and a short stint on I-8. Unfortunately the I-8 exit was closed due to an accident, so I had to take the long way around to get to the range. It wasn’t packed, but it was pretty busy. Recently the City of Casa Grande got some grant money from the department of Game and Fish and have done a very nice job in expanding and improving the range. There are now four bays; a 100 yard, a 250 yard, and two 25 yard bays, all with concrete shooting benches under sunshades. The 25-yard bays have three shooting positions each, and the 100 yard has six or eight, I believe. We took one of the 25 yard pistol bays for ourselves, but the main 250 yard bay (some 20 shooting positions, I think) was damned near full. Again, not filled with Bambi hunters. One thing I noticed at TRC, the Tucson Mountain Park and again at Casa Grande, it appeared that at least half the shooters were there for purely recreational purposes, and at least 10% of the guns on the firing line were EBRs (you know, the guns that Barack If it Looks Like a Machine Gun it Must Be a Machine Gun Obama believes are fully automatic and not used by “sportsmen and hunters,” but which are, in fact semi-automatic and of a “kind in common use at (this) time.”

Moreover, at least 10% of the shooters on the line were of the female persuasion as well. And some were shooting those EBRs.

Overall, it was a very enjoyable morning, even though I put some 240 miles on my truck. I got to spend several hours with my favorite person in the world in the pursuit (and capture!) of my (second!) favorite recreational activity. 😉 Can’t beat that even with a big stick.

Quote of the Day

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Quote of the Day

Stolen in its entirety, a comment from LawDog’s 9/11 post:

Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity.

It isn’t that the MSM gets together and CONSPIRES to avoid images of 9/11/2001, or the bestial behavior of radical muslims around the world. It’s that they cannot grasp it. It doesn’t fit anywhere in their world; a world where Socialism works and they – the anointed – are divinely chosen by Providence to guide those who are less enlightened (that’s us).

They reacted the same way to the news from the killing fields. To the revelation that Stalin was a monster whose body count dwarfed Hitler’s. They cannot deal with the information that so contradicts their world-view, so they blank it out of their minds and unconsciously try to blank it out of the world.

They lack the intelligence to handle world as complicated as the real one – hence the way they fall for Marxism, a belief totally unsuited to the complex modern world – and they lack the moral strength to face the consequences of their past behavior. The mass graves. The misery. Acknowledging these would break them, which is why the become so hysterical when confronted.

They are pathetic intellectual dwarfs and moral lightweights. The proper response to them is not anger but impatient contempt. Certainly they must not be allowed to run the country. – “c. s. p. schofield”

If You’re the Praying Type. . .

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If You’re the Praying Type . . .

. . . and even if (like me) you’re not, please point your thoughts towards those about to receive the full fury of Hurricane Ike. Fellow blogger Jim of Smoke on the Water and I traded emails yesterday. Jim recently moved off his 30′ sloop New Dawn into one of the stilt-mounted houses common in Galveston. He has sent his significant other off to safety, but decided to ride out the storm in Galveston. He wasn’t clear on whether he was staying in the house, or just someplace nearby.

The storm surge is predicted to top 22′.

I doubt his house stilts are quite that tall.

Good luck, brother. I’ll be waiting to hear from you.

Hey, FEC? BITE ME.

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Hey, FEC? BITE ME.

If this blog post represents a “contribution” to McCain’s campaign under the McCain-Feingold incumbent protection, er campaign finance reform act, then take me to court!

This individually produced viral ad is making the rounds of the blogosphere. I am more than happy to host it and help pass it along. I’ve seen it several places, but it was up at LawDog’s and someone offered to send the Flash video to anyone who wanted it.

I wanted it:

http://img.photobucket.com/player.swf?file=http://vidmg.photobucket.com/albums/v99/smallestminority/Dear_Mr_Obama.flv
I dislike John McCain as a candidate for President of the United States, but I have made my position quite clear vis-à-vis his Democrat opposition. When the choice is castration versus wedgie, I vote wedgie.

Quote of the Day

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Quote of the Day

The basic and crucial political issue of our age is: capitalism versus socialism, or freedom versus statism. For decades, this issue has been silenced, suppressed, evaded, and hidden under the foggy, undefined rubber-terms of “conservatism” and “liberalism” which had lost their original meaning and could be stretched to mean all things to all men.

The goal of the “liberals” — as it emerges from the record of the past decades — was to smuggle this country into welfare statism by means of single, concrete, specific measures, enlarging the power of the government a step at a time, never permitting these steps to be summed up into principles, never permitting their direction to be identified or the basic issue to be named. Thus statism was to come, not by vote or by violence, but by slow rot—by a long process of evasion and epistemological corruption, leading to a fait accompli. (The goal of the “conservatives” was only to retard that process.)
– Ayn Rand, ” ‘Extremism,’ or The Art of Smearing,” Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

Quote of the Day

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Quote of the Day

Time is passing. Yet, for the United States of America, there will be no forgetting September the 11th. We will remember every rescuer who died in honor. We will remember every family that lives in grief. We will remember the fire and ash, the last phone calls, the funerals of the children. – President George W. Bush, November 11, 2001

Quote of the Day

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Quote of the Day

A socialist advocates socialism because he is fully convinced that the supreme dictator of the socialist commonwealth will be reasonable from his — the individual socialist’s — point of view, that he will aim at those ends of which he — the individual socialist — fully approves, and that he will try to attain those ends by choosing means which he — the individual socialist — would also choose. Every socialist calls only that system a genuinely socialist system in which these conditions are completely fulfilled; all other brands claiming the name of socialism are counterfeit systems entirely different from true socialism. – Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics

(Found at Billy Beck’s.)

Thus, in one paragraph Von Mises explains why “true socialism” has apparently never been tried.

Also On the Topic of Elites

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Also On the Topic of Elites

Another very good piece, also from Rational Passion – McCain Will Win – I Will Abstain. An excerpt:

For (Bill) Maher and (Sam) Harris, the Democrats fight for the little guy, peace, justice, and all good things. And if you don’t vote for them, you’re an idiot. And a narcissistic idiot for not realizing how stupid you are! You are to defer to the wisdom of your betters–people like Maher, Harris, Obama, and other left-liberals–and shut up! Why? Because you’re stupid, fool!

If this is how you view the little guy–as a bitter, narcissistic, idiot who clings to religion, guns, and xenophobia to give him comfort and security in a world without the blessings of “progressive” Democrats in charge–how can you be said to be his representative? Note that I have nothing against elitism. I have a problem with a certain kind of elitism. I have a problem with an elitist who claims to support the little guy out of one side of his mouth while sneering at his stupid Wal-Mart-shopping-gun-toting-Bible-believing ways out of the other.

Being a left-liberal elitist is not a function of one’s economic class or educational attainment per se. Being a left-liberal elitist means believing that helping the little guy is the purpose of politics and simultaneously believing that the little guy would abandon the things that he says he values if only he had a few more dollars in his pocket and a better job, thanks to left-liberal government programs. Some people, shockingly, don’t like being told that their values–right, wrong, or in-between–are symptoms of economic deprivation! Might they be? Sure. But people don’t like being told that, and if you’re going to insult them, don’t expect them to vote for you.

READ THE WHOLE THING. This includes YOU Margaret Soltan.

And here’s the Quote of the Day, from that same piece:

No, it won’t be racism that does Barack Obama in, if he does in fact lose. For every racist white who won’t vote for Obama because he’s a black man, there’s probably a guilty white liberal desperate to vote for a black person to prove how non-racist he is. I think the racial issue is a wash–it may help Obama, and it may hurt him, but on balance, it won’t be the deciding issue. I think the deeper reason for Obama’s probable defeat is something he said in his convention speech. Obama told us why John McCain won’t embrace the brilliant Obama plan of hope and change. Obama said “It’s not because John McCain doesn’t care. It’s because John McCain doesn’t get it.” That, really, is all left-liberals have. To those of us who don’t “get it,” they can offer no reason to support their candidate or their worldview. The bulk of the press, Hollywood, academia, and our cultural institutions generally–they “get it.” They “get it” so well that the need to argue for and explain their views is a skill they’ve lost. And there are a whole bunch of us who don’t “get it” and resent being told that we don’t “get it” by people who use sneers and smears to make their case instead of arguments.

I think I need to add Rational Passion to my daily reads.