Seriously Badass!
Chiptunes on CRACK!
BTW Just found the guy has an artist page here. Give him some love!
OK this is a really neat video about turning a birdshot load into what is essentially a frangible bullet.
neat little concept from back in the day that might come in handy in real life. Certainly I can see this as a way to convert trap and field loads into something that would be more effective against people or medium game. Of course I wonder if these things would work in a repeating shotgun, or if the handling by the action might cause the shells to warp significantly.
Will work well in your tactical coach gun!
So Wednesday there was a note in my lunchbox. It read: “I love you!” Only it wasn’t signed by my wife, but by my gay house guest. You all know me, I laughed my ass off, and sent him a text message that said “I love you too, Baby!” 😉
Today I got a different note. With some translation it said “Fuck You!” in Mother nature. The Sammich bread I had used had mold on the one side of the bread I didn’t check when making it.
BOOOOO!
On the up side there’s a BBQ joint not far from here. I’ll grab lunch there.
Found this interesting anti-freedom article through the channels that think such things are a good idea:
One in five people permitted to carry guns in Johnson County since a new shall carry law went into effect in January have criminal records, Johnson County Sheriff Lonny Pulkrabek said Wednesday.
WOAH! That sounds like a REALLY SHITTY LAW! Just imagine, drug dealers, and car jackers, and wife beaters all carrying gun, 100% legally???????
Unless you are aware of how laws work:
One man approved in March was arrested for criminal mischief in 1994, drunken driving in 1998, unauthorized use of a vehicle in 2000, possession of controlled substance in 2002, 2003, 2005 and 2007, possession of a stolen firearm in 2007 and telephone harassment in 2010, Pulkrabek said.
I’m actually reading that sentence differently after the first read. At first I thought this was lists of various convictions on various people’s records who have permits. Now that I read this it appears to be ONE guy. OK first let’s play devils advocate and assume the worst. This unnamed guy is shady and bad news, as well as having bad judgement. That’s the ONLY person of the claimed 250 they mention. “Conspicuous absence” comes to mind. What do the 249 other “criminal records” look like?
**UPDATE**Zercool notes it says “ARRESTED” not “CONVICTED” so this guy may not have done ANY of those things listed above.
Let’s assume that just because they didn’t mention them they didn’t simply make up the numbers. This unnamed fellow has a bunch of convictions, but all are minor. (furthermore they must all be misdemeanors because a felony would disqualify him from both a permit AND owning guns….btw that’s federal, even in the states that don’t require permits a felony conviction means you can’t possess a gun)
What this Sheriff is saying, that if you had a bit too much to drink after a holiday party and thought you could drive home, and got pinched with a DUI, you shouldn’t have rights…even if that was your only charge, and it was 20 years ago. Better yet, you were out drinking and decided to leave your car at the bar and walk 5 miles home. A cop decides he needs to flex his muscles and writes you a chickenshit ticket for “Public Intoxication”. No more rights for you, as far as the Sheriff and the anti-rights cult has decided.
Remember you wild college days? Remember that one night the neighbors called the cops and you got cited with a noise violation? Yep, NO RIGHT!
Remember when you were moving home from college and you got caught in a speed trap, and in all the hustle and bustle you lost the summons and forgot about it. Well you got that “Failure to appear” fixed….but now you can’t have rights.
Do you have loved ones who have minor convictions in their distant record? Do you trust them behind the wheel of a car? Do you trust them to watch your kids? Do you trust them to watch the register in the shop?
Of course you do, we’ve all done silly things, and we’ve all made some bad judgements. Some of us go caught, some didn’t, most of us went on to learn from our mistakes (the ones who didn’t often made BIGGER mistakes and got real convictions).
It isn’t about that. This is about taking away rights. In many towns in “May Issue” Massachusetts you can’t get a carry permit. Just can’t. None of this chickenshit minor conviction nonsense, just nobody is issued one because they chief has the right to say so.
Well not NOBODY, the Chief’s and other officers family and friends can get their permits OK, as the government officials and their family and friends, as well as those who work for the fire department. (When I hear somebody say they have a carry permit from such-and-such a town, I simply ask them “Police, or Firefighter”. I haven’t been wrong yet!)
These are bad laws, and they always lead to corruption and abuse. Furthermore the fear-mongering doesn’t seem to be all that realistic. The dude with all the minor convictions? He can legally drive a car. Buy Gasoline. Watch children in daycares or schools. Drive a public transit vehicle. Drive a heavy truck on the highway….hauling hazardous waste. This guy could be standing behind you in the elevator or in the parking garage. If he’s such a danger why would you let him walk free? If he’s not such a danger, what harm with letting him carry his gun be?
We’ve all heard of California’s ban on open carry. (extra bonus points for using the stock footage of the man who was carrying in Washington state where you can openly carry LOADED guns, unlike California. Also I love how THAT shot gets used, but never the shot of the same man in Camo with a Colt Commander in a Bianchi retention holster pushing his daughter in a pink stroller. Camo, Love Handles, and guns are scary…but pushing a stroller is something HUMANS would do, don’t show that! Also you can’t run from an attacker when you have a child in a stroller, and you can’t “Just give them what they want” if what they want is your young daughter)
Now they’re planning on a long gun registry.
Can you name an open carry problem in California? Hey I’ll make it easy, name a problem from somebody open carrying in the whole country!
How about a crime solved by a gun registry in this country?
Hey, how about the whole world?
Given that these things are non-issues, do you think that’s wise for a state that is totally broke to do?
This is the “Progressive” way. Just watch as they “Progress” right off the cliff!
We all know people can be robbed at knife-point just as well as at the point of a gun. But the Gun is different.
The 47-year-old victim was unconscious and bleeding about 7 a.m. Wednesday in the parking lot of the Fairview Inn….An autopsy determined Taylor died of massive bleeding due to stab wounds to the heart, said Carl Kanefsky of the state Medical Examiner’s Office….When arrested, Dillard admitted stabbing Taylor three or four times with the victim’s paring knife, which was used to cut crack cocaine, and stealing money and drugs from his pockets.
Not a deadly “assault knife” but a simple paring knife, which for those of you who aren’t kitchen savvy, is a really small knife. Just for Irony note that Dillard was also known as “First Degree”, classy!
But guns are always different, because they’re different. Also as drug associates these people knew each other, which is as relevant as “Gun Death” as a metric.
h/t Mike W.
So let’s start with some technical stuff. For the below table I simply jumped onto wikipedia and read the load data there and took a ball-park median for muzzle energy. I also simply went up the line with common carry gun calibers, I missed a few big ones, the idea is more to give a scope not to cover every little chambering:
.32 ACP 130 ft/lbs
.380 ACP 200 ft/lbs
9x19mm 460 ft/lbs
.40 S&W 500 ft/lbs
.45 ACP 550 ft/lbs
.357 Mag 700 Ft/lbs
10mm Auto 750 ft/lbs
.44 Magnum 1200 ft/lbs
Again not scientific collection, but it’ll give you a general idea of the rounds relative strength of the rounds, tho muzzle energy hardly translates to “Stopping Power” which is bullshit anyway. More on that later. One thing you’ll quickly notice is that the difference between most of the adjacent rounds is really just statistical noise. Its about 40 ft/lbs between 9×19 and .40 S&W and 50 between the .40 and the .45. Going further the HUGE caliber war of all time is separated by around 100 ft/lbs! Note that the .32 ACP, which most people agree is far too small for personal defense, and it has more muzzle energy than 100ft/lbs. So the difference between the “puny europellet” and John Browning’s “Death Ray” is less power than most people would claim is worth it.
Also let’s note that the difference between .380 Auto which is debated as a marginal carry cartridge, and .44 Magnum is often very unpleasant for most shooters, and stuffed in guns that can be quite difficult to carry and conceal, is 1,000 ft/lbs.
For further reference I decided to look at a couple of military rifle cartridges. First let’s note that rifles tend to have lighter, narrower, and longer bullets going at VERY fast speeds. This causes vastly different behavior in how the bullet interacts with the target. Still the numbers are the same:
5.56x45mm 1300 ft/lbs
7.62x39mm 2000 ft/lbs
7.62x51mm 2700 ft/lbs
So let’s look again at that 1,000 ft/lb gulf between .380 and .44 Mag, that’s about the average difference between intermediate rifle calibers 5.56×45, and 7.62x39mm, and the full-power rifle cartridge 7.62x51mm, and the “Bear Medicine” .44 Magnum has about the same muzzle energy as the “Poodle Shooter”, “Varmint Cartridge” 5.56x45mm.
Of course the rifle rounds will have better penetration, they will achieve speed enough for hydrostatic shock and the longer bullets are more likely to tumble, but they may also over-penetrate, and therefore may still have energy they don’t transfer to the target.
Handguns are handguns, and rifles are rifles. We don’t carry them because they’re death rays, and the military doesn’t even bother to ISSUE handguns to most soldiers, because the rifle is the place to be. We carry handguns because we can carry a handgun, conceal it if we want to or are required to, AND carry a sack of groceries and be able to still grab your car keys out of your pocket. And while there does appear to be a noticeable energy difference between the smallish .380 Auto, and the massive .44 Magnum, really the calibers you may be considering aren’t really all that different.
OK where does that leave us? Well first I just spend a long time rambling to tell you something you probably already knew: The gun in your hand when you’re in fear for your life beats the gun at home or in your car. Carry your damn gun, you just might need it, and a .25 Subcompact will beat the hell out of hiding under a desk and hope the goblin gets bored before he gets around to shooting you. But am I REALLY advocating you to carry a .25?
Nope! And if you’re serious about self-defense I hope you put a LITTLE more thought into carrying more gun before you go for the micro-gun. Caleb made a controversial post about not needing a pocket nine, he makes some good points, the biggest is a hit with a .380 beats a miss with a 9mm any day of the week and twice on Sunday. 9mm is more powerful than .380, if the guns are similar size and weight it means the gun will be harder to control. But a .45 ACP or a .40 S&W are harder to control than a similar sized 9mm. Did Caleb write a post about how you don’t need a Glock 22 or 23 when we have Glock 17 or 19?
Here’s the thing, actual terminal ballistics is really a lesson in chaos. People will talk about ballistics gel, or even chunks of meat, or even live animals in the field, but people are different, and the stuff inside of people is widely different even short distances apart.
Run your hand down your ribcage, feel how far apart your ribs are. Not imagine a round hitting square on somebody’s rib, vs. square between them. The two round tracks of the same bullet will be quite different, and the difference between the two shots is probably much greater than your average offhand grouping on range.
So not only is terminal ballistics about shot placement, but there’s also some dumb luck in there. That’s why we have the adage “What’s worth shooting once is worth shooting twice”. If it comes down to you shooting another person in self defense, you should probably put a few more rounds into your attacker just in case dumb luck isn’t on your side. Also means that reloads are a REALLY good idea.
Still while somebody might take a single .32 hit and drop dead, and somebody might take a few hits from a .45 and still manage to kill you, and recover from his wounds, the law of averages is saying that the more powerful .45 is more likely to have favorably dumb luck than the .32, or even the 9mm.
So if they make a pocket Nine that’s the same size of a comparable .380, and you have the strength and skill to shoot them both, why not pick the more powerful gun? I carry a Commander 1911 in .45, they make lots of similar sized guns in 9mm and .45, and I can shoot them all, but why not go with the .45?
I also Carry a .38 Revolver, Jay has a similar gun in .357 Magnum. I’ve shot Jay’s Snubbie from Hell several times, and its a handful, but not uncontrollable in my hands. The ONLY reason why I don’t have a gun like his is because I probably bought the 642 AND the 638 in the picture for the price of Jay’s one 360. But if you have the gun and you can SHOOT the gun, why not carrying the more powerful load?
One last point: Confidence. You’re carrying a gun to protect your life, do you want to wonder if the gun is even going to work? I certainly don’t carry a gun until I’ve put several hundred rounds through it without malfunction, if you do the full 2,000 round challenge that’s even better. Why? Because when you need the gun to save your life, you want to know it works. You’re not going to be in a 2,000 round gunfight, but it simply means dumb luck is less likely to find you.
Same goes for your caliber of choice, nobody wishes they carried less gun on a day when they were in a gun fight, and a 9mm JHP may fail to expand when hitting a target, but a .45 ACP won’t contract.
The take away is carry your damn gun, you might need it. And if you’re going to carry your damn gun, carry one that you have real confidence in, and in a caliber that is as powerful as you can proficiently handle.
Be safe out there!
Gotta love what the anti-rights lunatics discuss as “Common Sense”
It should have the support of both parties if they care about keeping terrorists from making another attack on our own soil. The gun lobby should support this bill but doesn’t. There are safeguards built into the bill to keep people who are wrongly denied a gun purchase to challenge. In this case, the negative rhetoric obscures the benefits of the legislation. Even most gun owners favor passing the bill. It would be wise for us to remember the terrorists with guns who paralyzed the city of Mumbai, India for 3 days in 2008, killing 164 people. Passing a law to stop known terrorists from legally buying guns just makes common sense
First let’s look at the Mumbai attacks. We have a group of Pakistani terrorists illegally entering the country of India carrying AK-47 Military rifles in a nation that essentially bans all firearm possession except Police, Military, and the highest cast civilians for hunting and sport only.
The police were poorly armed or prepared for such an attack, and the civilians were unarmed, and many wish they COULD have fought back. First up our national laws don’t effect citizens in other nations, and its of course already illegal to cross into this country with contraband, oddly that doesn’t seem to prevent much at all. Just look at the drug trade, and the chaos on the US/Mexico boarder.
Still furthermore, got to LOVE the antis faith in the “Terror Watch List”. First I’ll add that EVERYBODY on the “Terror Watch List” is NOT a terrorist. If they WERE a terrorist law enforcement and/or the US Government could arrest, or simply kill them under the Geneva Convention. Ideally the “Terror Watch List” is a list of POTENTIAL terrorists. Of course the list sucks as there are lots of people on the list that aren’t terrorists. And actual terrorists who aren’t on the list at all. So what fucking good is it? Answer: NO FUCKING GOOD! But hey, let’s use this useless piece of shit to strip rights away from people. Oh and how hollow does it ring that the anti-rights goons promise ways to view and petition the list ONLY if they give the bullshit list more power. Nice, huh?
Also I’ll note that the last Terrorist attack was VERY similar to the Mumbai attack. The Ft. Hood shooting was a terrorist attack with a firearm. He used an underpowered gun (Its belied that many of the wounded in the attack may have died if he had used a more conventional handgun), but what’s interesting is he had minimal resistance until an armed police officer showed up simply because all the SOLDIERS he was shooting were disarmed by Army regulations. Yep every person he shot was trained in the M16 rifle, some the M9 pistol, and I’m sure several had concealed carry permits…but no guns, and no way to defend themselves.
As you probably know, but you just want to be provacative, Bryan, the Mumbai attacks are an example of what terrorists can do to a major city with guns and explosives. If it can happen there, it could happen here. Why not try to stop something like that before it happens again? Isn’t that why we have scanners at airports and we have to take off our shoes, etc.? We know that terrorists used planes for one attack so we try to stop another like it. We know what happened in Mumbai, we should try to stop another one like it.
Or simply make the whole country more like the grounds of Ft. Hood so a terrorist can either sneak into the nation by land or sea (and note that Politicians who support stronger infringement on the 2nd Amendment are the same people who are opposed to sealing the boarders or cracking down on illegal immigrants) or simply a terrorist who wasn’t on the list can break the law and commit murder against the vast crop of legally disarmed victims. Or hell what’s keeping them from buying guns from drug dealers dealers. I mean if they can get heroin from Central Asia, why can’t they get the military weapons that are “>also produced there?
This is their “Common Sense”, take note, and act accordingly!
Neat list of freedom ranked by state. No surprised New Hampshire, Arizona, and Alaska do VERY well, and California, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts do very poorly. I was surprised at how poorly Montana and Wyoming do, and how well Colorado and Maine rank, given that they have very strong reputations for states that had very free-spirited pasts, but have been overtaken by denizens of Nanny-states looking for cheaper living and better scenery.
Also no surprise that population density seems to strongly correlate how much the government is going to limit your freedom, I mentioned that here, individuals can’t fend for themselves in dense urban areas, and people who live far off the paved roads likely will have a hard time getting help from others so they are practically forced to be self-sufficient.
I was also surprised how Massachusetts ranked in population density. Sure in the Eastern part of the state we’re all pretty much shoulder-to-shoulder, but out west its pretty open….still its a small state with several big cities, and loads of little cities, so that doesn’t surprise me much.
