Tag: Guns and such

My favorite toy

Hyperbole — Or Is It?

Politics, The Gun Thing

So having taken back the U.S. House, the Socialists are starting to feel their oats:

WASHINGTON — A Democratic congressman has proposed outlawing “military-style semiautomatic assault weapons” and forcing existing owners to sell their weapons or face prosecution, a major departure from prior gun control proposals that typically exempt existing firearms.
In a USA Today op-ed entitled “Ban assault weapons, buy them back, go after resisters,” Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., argued Thursday that prior proposals to ban assault weapons “would leave millions of assault weapons in our communities for decades to come.”
Swalwell proposes that the government should offer up to $1,000 for every weapon covered by a new ban, estimating that it would take $15 billion to buy back roughly 15 million weapons — and “criminally prosecute any who choose to defy [the buyback] by keeping their weapons.”

And when he got some blowback, the little turd went full Stalin:

It is a recurring fantasy of socialists that they can disarm Americans without too much difficulty.  Of course, we know that’s not true, and if the FedGov were ever to try it, the cost would be prohibitive (in so many ways).  And for the record, let’s forget all about nukes.  That’s just a wet dream on the part of socialists like Swalwell;  they want to wish the problem away with a wave of a magic wand — it’s a recurring fantasy of theirs for just about every issue — and “nukes” is just a shorthand.

Where this socialist scumbag and his ilk are dangerous is this bullshit talk of “common ground”.  Let me make this clear:  between gun owners and gun confiscators, there is no common ground.  It’s the same with the “commonsense gun control legislation” that they bat around:  there’s no such thing.  Every single piece of legislation suggested by gun controllers has one, and only one goal in mind:  the eventual disarming of the American people.  They can protest all they want, but we know the truth of the matter, which is that all gun control legislation is incremental, because they know that sweeping gun control (confiscation and disarmament) just ain’t gonna happen, dreams of the Swalwell types notwithstanding.

It is quite possible that gun confiscation might have some small success — e.g. in Swalwell’s own district (see below), where the incidence of legal gun ownership is probably quite low and the Democrat Socialist-majority voting population might even support the idea of giving up whatever guns they have.  (And I know what you’re thinking:  nuking the 15th district, and especially with the concomitant fallout, would actually solve quite a few problems, but let’s not go there.)

Also, Swalwell might have at his behest the loathsome assholes of the California State Police, who were so notably efficient in disarming households in New Orleans during the Hurricane Katrina floods.  So yeah:  it’s quite feasible that confiscation could work there.

In North Texas, not so much.  In the first place, the would-be confiscators would have to overcome Texas political sentiment about guns — good luck with that — and according to our last county sheriff, the confiscating force would first have to go through his deputies to get to our guns.  And I’m sure that north Texas isn’t alone in this attitude, not just in Texas but all over the U.S.

We don’t have to worry about gun confiscation, the wet dreams of pissants like Swalwell notwithstanding.  What we have to worry about is, as I said above, all the “reasonable” gun control legislation such as, for example, legislation that would limit the type of gun you can own, or equally bad, limits on things like the amount or types of ammunition you can own, or whether you have to register with government as a “gun owner” before being able to buy it.  (Don’t laugh;  that’s the situation that faces  Californian gun owners right now.)

Did I already mention that today is National Ammo Day?

Let me offer a little additional advice:  if you don’t already own a semi-automatic rifle (and we all know what I mean by that), you might want to improve your gun collection by buying an AK-47, AR-15/20 type, SAR-58 or HK-91 (to name but some options) — and buy it today (along with a “sufficiency” of ammo for the rifle, of course).  Send me an email if you want some more details.

Gratuitous Gun Pic: CZ 75B (9mm and .40 S&W)

Gratuitous Gun Pics, The Gun Thing

Despite my aversion to double-action 9mm pistols, I’ve always had a soft spot for the CZ 75:


Made by the fine Ceska Zbrojovka Company in the Czech Republic, the CZ 75 is probably one of the most respected DA pistols ever made.  Reliable to a ridiculous degree, I think it was prevented from beating out the Browning High Power as the world’s most popular 9mm pistol only because Czechoslovakia had the misfortune to be once part of the Evil Empire, and as such it was difficult to export the guns to the Running Dogs of the Capitalist West.  To add to the irony, the CZ 75’s action is based on that of the High Power, so the design is as sound as a bell.

CZ is such a damn good company in so many respects, they put most American gun companies to shame.  For starters, their marketing is excellent—there are as many variants of the CZ 75 as you could wish for.  Their advertising is likewise great (check out their website for an example of how a gun company should advertise their product line, with great pictures and feature-rich product data).

And they are accurate.  It should be remembered that I am, in all honesty, no better than a “competent” shooter with a handgun, but I can shoot the CZ 75B well enough to impress even serious shooters.  Oh, and one more thing:  take a CZ 75B out of your gun bag at the range, and nobody will ever look down on your choice.

Here’s the best part, however.  For what you get, the CZ pistols are great value for the money.  You can get a new CZ 75B for less than $650.  For that price, you may have to spend another $90 on a trigger job — like all DA pistols, the pull is not always to the individual’s liking — but then again, it may suit you fine.

As I always say:  IF I were in the market for a 9mm pistol, and IF I didn’t prefer single-action (e.g. Browning P35 High Power) over double action, I’d already have a CZ 75B.  And all that said, I’m still tempted.  Maybe a stainless model?  I don’t have one of those…

Thinking Small

The Gun Thing

Saw this SOTI (somewhere on the Internet):

Nice sentiment, but not ambitious enough.  Consider these options:

Or, if we’re going to “own them all”, let’s look at some other cartridge options, grouped together for the sake of convenience:

You see, I don’t want anyone to be constrained in their thinking… think big, people.  Own them all.

And remember National Ammo Day on November 19th.

Gentle Reminder

The Gun Thing

Just in case anyone has forgotten (and shame on you if you did), this coming Monday November 19th will be National Ammo Day — which, given the upcoming transfer of Congressional power to the Socialist Party, makes Ammo Day’s rationale all the more meaningful.

For those who’ve been living on the Planet Manhattan and didn’t get the word, the principle is simple:

Buy one hundred (100) rounds of ammunition or more on November 19th.  Corollary:  if you eschew factory ammo and roll your own, then buy sufficient powder, primers, casings and bullets to create more ammo — the quantity is up to you — OR buy a brick (500 rounds) or more of .22LR.

That’s it.

The goal of Ammo Day is quite simple:  to put a billion additional rounds of ammunition into civilian ownership on a single day.

Make your plans accordingly.

Gratuitous Gun Pic: Colt Combat Commander (.45 ACP)

Gratuitous Gun Pics, The Gun Thing

Here’s the gun with which I learned to shoot the .45 ACP cartridge:  the Colt Combat Commander Model 70:

Now I’ve said a lot of bad things about Colt (the company) before, but I have to tell you, my Commander was an absolute joy to shoot, and I never had to do anything to improve it.  What’s more, it loaded, fired and ejected every possible type of .45 ACP I ever put into it, and within the confines of the shorter 4” barrel, it was as accurate as I could shoot it — which, I have to tell you, wasn’t saying much.  In those days, I had no patience, and every handgun shooting session seemed to involve shooting a box of ammo as quickly as possible, then heading off to the rifle range lanes to do the serious stuff, i.e. trying to get five rounds of .308 through a single hole with my Israeli Mauser.

It seemed pointless to me to spend a lot of time at the range trying to coax tiny groups out of a 4” barrel, when most self-defense situations involve distances of less than seven yards and shooting fewer than five rounds — when pin-point accuracy is largely irrelevant, really, as long as all the holes are in a sideplate-sized hole in the center of the target.

But to return to the old days:  after shooting off my first thousand rounds of .45 ACP, I could handle the Commander in my sleep, and saw no reason to spend more time than I needed “to keep my eye in”.  Ah, the silliness of youth…

To a certain degree, I still have some of that cavalier attitude towards large-caliber handgun shooting, and most especially with a carry gun.  Now, though, that’s confined to my backup S&W 637;  the 1911, however, always gets a thorough workout.

And here’s the scoop:  the smaller 1911 frames like the Combat Commander are a perfect compromise between stopping-power and concealability — for a man.  I think that women need something which either tames recoil better (i.e. a larger-frame pistol) or else should shoot a cartridge which has less recoil to start off with.  Or both.  Like this shiny Combat Commander in 9mm:

And yes, I know there are women who compete in IPSC and all that jive, using full-frame 1911s to shoot .45 ACP.  (David also killed Goliath — but that’s not the way to bet.)  The stainless Commander fits every bill for the ladies, I think.

As for me:  would I use a Commander for my carry piece nowadays?  In a heartbeat.

Fixing The Civil Service

Military, The Gun Thing

The title isn’t what you think.

The “civil service” is the nickname British Army soldiers gave to the hapless SA-80 bullpup rifle — it doesn’t work and you can’t fire it — during Gulf War One.  So bad was the thing that a booming black market for captured Iraqi AK-47s was created because so many of the SA-80s were “lost” during that campaign.

However, after many failed attempts to fix the poxy rifle, it appears that the Brits have finally got the thing right (other than the fact that they had to get the Germans to do the job for them, of course:  that whirring sound you hear is of British WWI and WWII field marshals spinning in their graves).

Apparently the SA (now called the SA-80A3) really has been fixed this time, and the Brits plan on fielding it for at least a half-dozen more years.  Of course, it still shoots the silly poodleshooter 5.56mm NATO (.223 Rem) cartridge, which the U.S. Army will soon be phasing out because it’s ineffective in any scenario outside an urban one [links to about 5,000 earlier Kim Rants on the topic omitted for reasons of brevity].

Which means the Brits will have to play catch-up, again.