The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
The Replacement Kimber.
While I wait for the Eclipse to come back, I can console myself with the new Ultra CDP II:
Damn, ain’t that pretty? Look at the figure in the grip panel! The other one is just as beautiful.
Now I have a complete set: Government, Commander, and Officer’s size!
Or at least I will when Kimber sends the Eclipse back, repaired.
This is just too cool. Many thanks to Kimber and to Murphy’s Guns and Gunsmithing, my favorite Tucson gun shop.
I just got back from seeing The Bourne Ultimatum – overall, not a bad flick (though being a gun nut the sound effects and continuity errors grated a bit.) But the previews – ah, the previews.
First up, a trailer for The Kingdom, a film about, well:
A team of U.S. government agents is sent to investigate the bombing of an American facility in the Middle East.
While I’m not certain, I’m pretty sure this is about Saudi Arabia. Apparently the FBI is sent in to investigate this act of terrorism, and – for some strange reason – the local government interferes! On top of that, our intrepid G-Men are attacked by terrorists themselves! Looks action-packed. Written by Matthew Michael Carnahan, directed by Peter Berg. Good cast as well.
Next up, Rendition. This film stars Reese Witherspoon as the wife of an Arab-American who is grabbed at the airport by the CIA and receives extraordinary rendition – i.e.: he’s whisked off to a foreign country where he can be tortured into confessing interrogated properly. Of course a still-wet-behind-the-ears local agent is sent to “monitor” the “interrogation” and is disturbed by what he witnesses. Meanwhile back at home the distraught wife fights to find out what happened to her husband. Written by Kelly Sane, directed by Gavin Hood.
But wait! We’re not done! Third up on this list is Lions for Lambs, starring no less than Glenn Close Meryl Streep, Tom Cruise, and Robert Redford, who also directs! There’s not much online about this that I’ve been able to find, but Redford apparently plays a psychologist who can’t seem to understand why young men might actually want to join the military! Tom Cruise plays an opportunistic Senator who spouts lines like “Do you want to win the War on Terror™ or don’t you?!?!” Streep apparently plays the heroic newspaper reporter who is drawn like a moth to the flame of the Senator, but I’m sure is only interested in reporting the Truth™. Amazingly, this film is also written by Matthew Michael Carnahan. Mr. Carnahan’s had a busy year, since IMDB shows that this and The Kingdom are his first two screen credits ever.
Remember when Hollywood made movies like Sands of Iwo Jima and Strategic Air Command? That was propaganda, too – but at least it was in favor of our side coming out victorious.
Arnold Toynbee wrote, “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.” He also noted, “Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.” Finally, “I do not believe that civilizations have to die because civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills.”
I’m amazed by the seemingly increasing will towards civil suicide exhibited by so many of my fellow countrymen. I don’t like a lot of what I see happening either, but I don’t outright deny the dangers we actually face for the ones that might be. Perhaps we’ve reached some critical mass past which we cannot stop an inevitable slide into self-destruction. I don’t know. But Hollywood isn’t helping stop that slide, that I do know.
Quite a while back I excerpted a quote from Purple Avenger that I liked. My post was entitled The Engineer’s Perspective. Here’s the quote:
My best friend is a lawyer, bright, gifted, … PhD in law; bored with his job, he decided to study engineering. After his first quarter, he came to me and said that the two “C”s he’d achieved in Engineering Calculus 101 and Engineering Physics 101 were the first two non-A grades he’d ever gotten in college, and that he had had to study harder for them than for any other dozen classes he’d had. “I now understand”, he said, “why engineers and their like are so hard to examine, whether on the stand or in a deposition. When they say a thing is possible, they KNOW it is possible, and when they say a thing is not possible, they KNOW it is not. Most people don’t understand know in that way; what they know is what we can persuade them to believe. You engineers live in the same world as the rest of us, but you understand that world in a way we never will.”
I don’t think that you have to love math to be an engineer, but you are going to have to learn it. That means that you’re going to have to do the homework, correctly. Mistakes and “close enough” are the ways to build bridges that fail.
htom | 09.26.05 – 2:10 am
This week, a bridge failed. It was not, particularly, an engineering failure. The bridge had stood for some 30 years. It was a management failure.
Let me explain.
Back in March, 2005 I linked for the first time to Dr. Sanity, the blog of Dr. Pat Santy who was a flight surgeon for NASA for the Challenger mission. In that piece I reflected on the effect that the Challenger disaster had on me – at the time, a recent college graduate looking for a job:
I remember listening to the launch of the Challenger early in the morning here in Tucson, and thinking – as the station broke for a commercial – “At least this one didn’t blow up on the pad.”
Morbid, I know, but I’m also an engineer. I wasn’t then – I was still going to college at the time (Ed. note: I actually graduated in December of 2005) – but that’s been my orientation for most of my life. I knew that each manned launch was a roll of the dice, a spin of the cylinder in a big game of Russian Roulette, and that NASA had become just another government bureaucracy. (And I also knew just how close we had come to losing three men in Apollo 13 because a series of small, innocuous errors had cascaded into a catastrophic failure in a system that was almost neurotic in its quest for safety.)
It was just a matter of time.
Still, I was shocked when they came back from commercial to announce that Challenger had been destroyed in a launch accident just minutes after liftoff. I knew that all seven of the astronauts were dead. I knew that the “teacher in space” wasn’t going to get there, and that a classroom of students had to be devastated by that realization. Many, many classrooms, but one in particular.
I watched the footage of the liftoff, now splayed in endless grisly loops on every network – all of which had previously declined to show the launch live and interrupt really important stuff like “Good Morning America.” I watched as the flame bloomed out from a Solid Rocket Booster joint, impinging on the huge external fuel tank, and said, “That’s what killed them. What the hell caused that failure?” I watched the Satan’s horns of the SRB exhaust tracks as they trailed up and away from the epicenter of the blast. And then I watched it all again.
Over and over.
Later I discovered that the engineers at Morton Thiokol had tried to get the launch scrubbed, knowing the problems that cold weather caused in the O-ring joint seals of the SRBs, but they had been told to “take off their engineer hats and put on their manager hats” in order to make a launch decision. The launch had been delayed too many times, and President Reagan would be making his State of the Union address that night, with a call to Crista McAuliffe – Teacher in Space.
I decided right then that I didn’t ever want to be a goddamned manager.
Judging from what’s being reported, engineers knew for some time that this bridge, like one in eight around the country, had “structural deficiencies” due to fatigue, corrosion, sub-standard assembly practices, and so forth. This means that there are a lot of bridges (and, one assumes, other infrastructure) out there that aren’t up to their design capacities any more.
How bad was the 35W bridge? Apparently pretty bad, but not so bad that some engineer somewhere was willing to risk his job over it. I’m sure that more than one structural engineer was told to “put on his politician’s hat” and make a decision based on economics and politics rather than safety.
Bridges fail. But it’s more often than not due to non-engineering causes.
UPDATE: (Hat tip to Shooting the Messenger) ‘Go after the designer,’ says Minneapolis bridge checker. Apparently this weasel wants to avoid the fact that this bridge lasted forty years before it collapsed, and that it was his job to determine if it was still safe, not the designer. The designer did his job. Mr. Kurt Furhman, bridge inspector, probably kept being asked to put on his “politician’s hat” – and did so.
But Then You Kiss Her Sister…
This never happens to me. I mean never.
In the continuing saga of the new (to me) Kimber, I neglected to mention that when I picked it up last Monday the salesman told me that they were giving away a new Ultra CDP this Saturday (today). Anybody who came in the store on Saturday would have one entry for the pistol, but anybody who bought a Kimber during the week would get an additional five entries. I filled out the tickets, but I knew it was just an exercise.
They just called me.
I won.
One of these:
Here’s Kimber’s stats on the Ultra CDP:
Caliber: .45 ACP
Features:
* Entirely built in the Custom Shop for enhanced concealed carry.
* Carry melt treatment rounds and blends edges to avoid snagging on clothing or holsters.
* Blackened aluminum frame with 30 lines-per-inch checkering contrasts with the premium aluminum trigger, stainless steel slide and satin ambidextrous thumb safety.
* Hand-checkered, double-diamond rosewood grips and low profile Tritium night sights finish these elegant carry pistols.Specifications: Height (inches) 90° to barrel: 4.75
Weight (ounces) with empty magazine: 25
Length (inches): 6.8
Magazine capacity: 7
Ambidextrous thumb safety
Carry melt (frame & slide)
Recoil spring (pounds): 18
Frame: Material: Aluminum
Finish: Matte black anodized
Width (inches): 1.28
Frontstrap checkering (30 LPI)
Checkering under trigger guard (30 LPI)
Slide: Material: Stainless steel
Finish: Satin stainless steel
Barrel: Steel match grade
Length (inches): 3
Twist rate (left hand): 16
Ramped Sights: Meprolight Tritium 3-dot night, fixed
Radius (inches): 4.8
Grips: Rosewood double diamond
Trigger: Premium aluminum match grade
Factory setting (approx. pounds): 4-5
My wife comes home occasionally from the casinos with a few hundred dollars, but I pretty much never win anything.
Not today!
Now I don’t mind waiting for the Eclipse to come back from the factory.
Oh – it’s got an internal extractor. I asked.
No Matter How Beautiful She is…
…someone somewhere is tired of her crap.
Now I know why that Kimber Eclipse Pro II was for sale at such a discount below new.
Remember when I wrote:
It’s used, apparently very gently (which I hope does not mean “returned because it doesn’t work”) and in excellent condition.
and continued:
Yes, it’s got the firing pin safety. Yes, it’s got an external extractor. No, John Moses Browning is not spinning in his grave over the sacrilege.
If you listen closely, you may hear a faint whirring sound.
It doesn’t work. Using both commercial Federal hardball and my own handloads, Kimber factory, Chip McCormick, and Wilson Combat magazines, I couldn’t put eight rounds through the pistol without at least two failures to extract. It would pull the case about halfway out of the chamber before the extractor slipped off the rim, and that’s all she wrote.
Today, a Kimber factory representative was at the gun shop where I bought this pistol, so I headed directly from the range to the shop and had him check it out. He stripped, cleaned, and inspected the slide, extractor, and firing pin, and even checked the extractor tension. He advised me to try it again, but if it failed he recommended that I return it to Kimber for correction. I went directly to the closest indoor range.
No improvement.
It doesn’t matter how pretty it is if you can’t rely on it. It’s going back to Kimber just as soon as I can ship it out. NOW I miss my old job. Shipping via FedEx or UPS was simple. Now I have to go to the main UPS office to ship it. What a PITA.
Tagged Again!.
I’ve been tagged again with a “thinking blogger award,”
…this time from Joe Huffman. Coincidentally, both Joe and JimmyB, the previous nominator, were attendees at the first Gunblogger’s Rendezvous last October. I’m not suggesting there’s any kind of conspiracy or collusion, but if I get another nomination out of that group…
Actually, I’m really pretty honored. It’s nice to know that some of the stuff I write actually does make people think, especially since that’s largely why I do it.
Thanks much, Joe. See you again at this year’s Rendezvous.
Cheap Shot (No Pun Intended).
(Via Rodger)
Vegansexuals are people who do not eat any meat or animal products, and who choose not to be sexually intimate with non-vegan partners whose bodies, they say, are made up of dead animals.
—
Christchurch vegan Nichola Kriek has been married to her vegan husband, Hans, for nine years.
She would not describe herself as vegansexual, but said it would definitely be a preference.
She could understand people not wanting to get too close to non-vegan or non-vegetarians.
“When you are vegan or vegetarian, you are very aware that when people eat a meaty diet, they are kind of a graveyard for animals,” she said.
Here are Nichola and Hans:
This begs one question: Being vegan, does she swallow?
Overtime.
You know all that overtime I worked during the last few weeks? Here’s what I did with some of it:
I picked it up yesterday. It’s used, apparently very gently (which I hope does not mean “returned because it doesn’t work”) and in excellent condition. Yes, it’s got the firing pin safety. Yes, it’s got an external extractor. No, John Moses Browning is not spinning in his grave over the sacrilege. It’s a beautiful piece. Here’s Kimber’s (much better) photography and description:
Eclipse pistols have such a striking appearance that it is easy for features and performance to take a back seat. All business right down to the core, Eclipse frames and slides are machined from solid stainless steel. Frontstraps have 30 lines-per-inch checkering for a positive grip. A match grade Premium Aluminum Trigger from the Custom Shop is tuned to release at 4-5 pounds. Breech faces are polished to ensure flawless feeding. Barrels and chambers are carefully machined to match grade dimensions.
The Eclipse finish brings out the classic lines of a 1911 better than any other process. The slide and frame are finished in a tough matte black oxide then all flat surfaces are brush polished, leaving recessed and curved surfaces dark and contrasting. Laminated gray/black wood grips checkered in the traditional double diamond pattern and matte black small parts round out the package.
The Eclipse Pro II™ and Eclipse Pro Target II™ have 4-inch match grade bushingless bull barrels fitted directly to the slide.
Being used, I obviously didn’t pay full list for it, but it was still pretty pricey. They’re right about one thing, it’s damned pretty. Hopefully this weekend I’ll get a chance to take it to the range and run a few hundred rounds through it.
I’ve decided to make this a category of its own, since I’ve done several posts on the topic before; one very recently. Every time there is a breakdown in civil order or a heinous crime is committed a few people wake up to the fact that they are responsible for their own protection. Some of them decide that purchasing a firearm is a good idea, and often only then do they learn the state of gun laws in their particular jurisdiction.
Earlier this week a pair of…
Words escape me. “Goblins” is too trite. “Inhuman excrement” is the closest I can come. A pair of soulless inhuman turds broke into the home of a family in Connecticut, raped and murdered the mother, raped both the 17 and 11 year-old daughters repeatedly, beat the father brutally with a baseball bat, and set the girl’s bedrooms on fire with them tied to their beds to cover their escape. The mother was strangled. The daughters died of smoke inhalation. The father was rescued by responding officers before he, too, could succumb. Thankfully, the vicious bastards did not succeed in escaping. Unsurprisingly, these slime had long rap sheets and were both out on parole, having served only part of longer sentences.
The reaction of the community is unsurprising. Shock, fear, and the sudden realization that yes, it can happen here – and that the police generally come in to take a report after the fact. They don’t prevent things like this from happening.
I don’t know how I missed the story before today, but on the evening news I was somewhat surprised to see that at least two networks saw fit to mention that gun sales in the area had spiked. A little Googling brought me a story from the Hartford Courant: After Killings, Fear Drives Alarm Sales. That’s not all they drove:
While home security systems may be in demand, it appears that much less interest has been shown in guns as security-related purchases.
But wait!
“The middle-class and upper-class Simpsons aren’t looking to shoot anybody,” said Roger Picerno, proprietor of Guns and Safes Unlimited in Milford.
Most people are more likely to install locks and alarms, he said.
But Scott Hoffman of Hoffman’s Gun Center in Newington said his Berlin Turnpike store has received “seven or eight times” the normal number of inquiries about gun permitting, gun safety classes and weaponry, including more than a dozen calls on Thursday, he said. Sales are up, he said, but he would not provide any data.
“Much less interest”? Based on what? This is not what the network news reported.
An unusually high proportion of this week’s calls came from women, Hoffman said.
“On an ongoing basis, I get people coming in who have been robbed, raped, mugged, whatever,” said Hoffman. “And they come into the store days later wanting something to protect themselves.”
Here’s the kicker:
Many leave with pepper spray instead of firearms after learning that legally acquiring a weapon typically takes weeks or months. Obtaining a pistol permit – required for handguns – typically takes 90 days or longer, gun dealers said. Some shotguns can be obtained in about two weeks.
So, gun sales didn’t spike – because of permitting, restrictions and waiting periods? I wonder what sales are going to look like in 14-90 days.
Remember my post from July 4? I excerpted a bit from a post at Seraphic Secret, an exchange between the author and a young woman who was the victim of a stalker:
“I can’t believe I’m here. I’ve been against guns and violence my whole life.”
“Did Ned threaten you, physically, I mean?”
“Said I belong to him and no one else. That’s about it. But I know what he means.”
“What did the police say?”
“The last cop, as he was leaving, whispered for me to get a gun.”I tell her that owning a gun isn’t sufficient. She has to take safety classes, self-defense classes. She has to know what she’s doing. I grab NRA brochures from the counter, make her promise that she’ll sign up as soon as she gets her gun in ten days.
“Ten days?” she cries.
“First you have to take a test, here in the store, a written test. They’ll give you a booklet to study from. Then you get a certificate making you eligible to buy a weapon in California. After you purchase the gun there’s a ten-day waiting period until you take possession.”
“But why?”
“Background check. To make sure you’re not a felon, a psychopath, an illegal immigrant, a terrorist, a drug addict; it’s the law.”
Apparently in Connecticut, it’s ninety days for a handgun, and two weeks for a long gun.
Because a lot of people up there have been “against guns and violence” their whole lives, and the “middle and upper-class Simpsons aren’t looking to shoot anyone.” Or at least they weren’t.
Still, the gun shop owner gives excellent advice, and the paper reported it:
Hoffman, who wore a pistol in his belt during an interview Thursday and said he keeps pistols and a shotgun at home, said guns don’t guarantee safety.
“You could have 100 guns in your house strategically placed and not be able to save yourself,” he said.
Absolutely correct. Even carrying one on your hip is no guarantee that you can successfully defend yourself.
But it gives you a chance. I mentioned earlier that I’ve ordered a copy of Armed America: Portraits of Gun Owners in Their Homes. Each portrait is accompanied by a statement from the subject(s). This one seems most apropos:
“…one time out of a 101 where having a gun would have meant saving your own child – you would sell your soul, or trade everything you have to do that.”
For at least the chance…
Looking for a New Pistol?.
Interested in contributing to a good cause? Check out this raffle:
LTW (http://www.louderthanwords.us), short for Actions Speak Louder Than Words, is a consortium of custom shops from around the country who specialize in the 1911 pistol. We collaborate 2-3 times a year on a custom gun, raffle it off, and donate the proceeds to a selected charity. We are proud to announce that our first project for 2007 will be for the benefit of AmericanSnipers.org!
And what are they raffling off for $10 a ticket? Well, here’s just the pistol, a very customized Springfield 1911:
The enhancements include, in order of progression through the LTW shops:
Legacy Custom Products has expertly fitted the BarSto barrel and optimized the slide to frame relationship. He has also done one of his signature magwell treatments wherein a special mainspring housing of his own manufacture is utilized, enabling him to open the magwell out towards the rear without creating a knife-edge from the magazine chute’s rear wall. This magwell treatment does not add any parts, weight, or bulk to the pistol but seriously augments the user’s ability to get a fresh magazine in place, fast.
Rogers Precision: Chuck’s reputation and abilities for building hard-core working guns that look great is being taken full advantage of here. His “Golfball” treatment of the frontstrap and on the mainspring housing on the back, are likely the ideal gripping pattern for a true, in-the-fray pistol. This pattern gives a very positive grip when a firing grasp is exerted, and yet doesn’t “lock in” the user to the point that he can’t shift the pistol slightly if need be. Moreover, the pattern is “open” and does not tend to fill with dirt and debris–one might even say it is self cleaning. Chuck has also machined sand cuts into the frame/slide sliding interfaces, allowing the pistol to run longer in sandy or muddy conditions. Sand cuts are nothing new in the world of small arms, some of the most-issued military weapons in the world have them, the FAL rifle and Sterling submachinegun to name a few. Chuck has also added a recessed lanyard point to the butt– one that does not protrude but is there and ready whenever needed.
Don Williams brings to bear his considerable talents in fine-tuning the internals of this pistol for maximum safety, reliability, and precision. Hammer, sear, disconnect, mag release, trigger (triggers, actually; one long and one short)….. none will escape his expert attention. In addition, Don is fitting two spare extractors with and to a super-tough EGW oversized firing pin stop.
Ned Christiansen will be fitting the sights, which will start out as Yost-Bonitz Professional Grade sights. The YoBo PG rear sight is made with a front face that is vertical, providing a surface with which the user can perform one-handed manipulations such as chambering a round, by hooking the sight on something. Ned will modify these in “Shield Driver” fashion, where the front face of the rear sight is made even deeper, and is serrated, creating a hard-to-miss surface for racking the slide, on, say, the side of a ballistic shield. Ned will also fit and TIG weld in place the plunger tube, match the slide rear surface to the frame and texture it along with all three extractors, and ensure that the VZ grips are a great match to the pistol’s final lines. Ned will also be fitting the pistol with a light rail.
The shop of Yost-Bonitz Custom will be responsible for etching the LTW and AmericanSnipers.org logos. They will also fit the (Wilson Combat) safeties (one ambidextrous and one single-sided), and do a precise dehorning of the pistol. Yost-Bonitz is the nerve center of LTW and is also handling some of the administrative duties related to the raffle, and YoBo’s Steve Bailey’s itchy shutter-button finger will be putting this pistol and its accoutrements on film.
Final finish for the pistol is still TBD but a few different hard-knocks-proof options are being considered.
My chances are probably better than they are of winning the Powerball so I could afford to have something similar built. The drawing will be at the February, 2008 SHOT show. Winner need not be present to win.