Flashback

Longtime Friend & Reader Mark S. sent me this missive a week or so ago:

The attached is a photo of a high school classmate’s mother, taken at the Balboa Gun Club in the Panama Canal Zone (sometime in the 40s or 50s, I think). We were wondering if you had any guesses or opinions about the rifle and scope. The items near her right knee are cash bundles of her winnings in a competition.

The rifle was no problem, and I identified it immediately:  a Remington 513 Target Master (513T), made from 1940 until the late 1960s.  (I actually had a chance to shoot one of these beauties when I helped the TSRA instructors get Son&Heir’s Boy Scout troop get their rifle shooting badges.  After they were done, the TSRA guys very kindly let me shoot off the rest of the .22 ammo they’d brought along.  One-hole groups and Big Smiles From Kim followed.)  Here’s a 513T exactly as used at the Boy Scout shoot, with a Lyman peep sight:

(The 512 model had a tube magazine, but was pretty much the same rifle.)

I would shoot this rifle against any modern commercial .22, even an Anschutz or CZ 455.  I might be beaten, but I sure as hell would not disgrace myself.

The scope was also easy, although I couldn’t figure out its magnification.  It’s the venerable Unertl, used mostly by the U.S. Marine Corps until late in the Vietnam War.

I suspect that the actual scope in the rifle club pic has 8x magnification, as it was the most common in civilian use (the USMC used the 10x).  And here’s a pic of the two together:

…and an unscoped Sporter model (essentially the same gun as the 513T, except that the bolt handle isn’t raked back) at Collectors, for just under a grand:

Ask me if I love this old tackdriver…

Constitution 1, California 0

For this round, anyway:

A federal judge in California ruled that a law requiring background checks to purchase ammunition violates the Second Amendment.
Voters approved toughening California firearms laws to include background checks on ammo purchases in 2016, and the restrictions took effect last July. The California Rifle & Pistol Association filed a lawsuit against the state shortly after.

U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez called the law “onerous and convoluted” and “constitutionally defective.”
“The experiment has been tried. The casualties have been counted. California’s new ammunition background check law misfires and the Second Amendment rights of California citizens have been gravely injured,” Benitez, a Bush appointee, wrote in the ruling.

Suggestion to Californian gun owners:  get ’em while you can.  In your state, there are no guarantees against gun-control fuckwittery.

Quarantine Project

Last week I posted how a friend decided, whilst being confined to quarters, to clean his shotguns.  Clearly, he’s not the only one getting twitchy.

From another locked-down Reader comes this project:

Nothing else to do, so I attacked my Thompson Center R55 .22 rifle.  The stock always felt clumsy and clunky to me, so I smoothed out the sharp edges, rounded the corners & cut away near the trigger.  Then finished it with automotive clearcoat.
And I think we can all agree that this was time well spent:
What a beauty.  And I’ve written before how good a rifle the R55 is.
[jealous]
If anyone else out there has been bored out of their tree and taken to fiddling with their guns in this time of cholera Chinkvirus, feel free to share the details, with pics.

Chock Full

It’s hard to see how someone could fit any more annoying shit into a single headline:

And for those who, like me, might be clueless about someone named “Lizzo”, look it up online at your own peril.  Seriously:  have a barf bag ready.

Don’t even get me started  about the neo-globalist “One World” Kumbaya bullshit.

Erf Day Idiocy

You know, if the filthy hippies had stuck to their communes

…or else just given us cool-looking fashions

…then we’d have been fine.  Instead of which, they gave us the pretentiously-named Earth Day, wherein we have to save Mother Gaia RIGHT NOW or else WE’RE ALL GONNA DIIIIIEEEEEEEE!!!!

Of course, as this article suggests, it’s all bullshit.  Every single one of their doom-laden prophecies has failed to occur, none are ever likely to occur, and as with all this crap (see:  Climate Change OMG), it’s basically cover to end Western civilization and the capitalist system.

Feel free to ignore anything that has “Earth Day” in its title (hence my naming this post “ERF Day”), and you will be the happier for it.