Boomsticks: Gratuitous Gun Pr0n No. 28

3" S&W Model 629-1, circa 1987, with a CRKT Ryan Seven folder.

The Mag-Na-Porting on this flamethrowing snubnosed .44 Magnum definitely helps make it easier to shoot. I wish it was a little newer, as this is a pre-"Endurance Package" gun, so hot loads with bullets heavier than 240 grains can cause the cylinder to rotate backwards under recoil. Not that I'd make a hobby out of firing such Elmer Keith Memorial Rhino-Rollers, mind you. Loaded with hot .44 Special, such as Buffalo Bore's 255gr Keith SWC @ 1000fps, it's almost downright pleasant.

The bright sparks of Bee County, Texas...

...are asking their citizens to fuel their automobiles with sunbeams and happy thoughts. They say they will boycott Exxon Mobil until gas is $1.30/gal. I say, why stop there? Why not continue the boycott until The Evil Petrogiant buys everyone in the county a gold house and a rocket car?

Morons.

Woo Hoo! I'm not a pistolsmith, but I play one on the Int3rw3b!

Using the handy-dandy detail strip instructions found at M1911.org, plus recollecting my walk-throughs from Bob and Shannon at work, I have successfully replaced the trigger in my Delta Elite with a spare STI unit I had lying around and it all went back together and everything works all normal and stuff and I still have all my fingers and no leftover gun parts! W00t!.

This may not sound like much to some of y'all more mechanically talented types, but little things like this compare to an assault on the North Face of The Eiger for ten-thumbed l'il ol' me.

Woo hoo! W00t! Wheee! :)

(This is about the only kind of pistol I've ever owned with which I'd attempt this; everything seems so simple inside, and there are no itty-bitty springs for me to send flying. :-o )

Oh, look! An idjit!

My post of yesterday was responded to by one "Dean Berry", of Dean Berry Ministries. I think his response deserves special attention...

Dear Dean,

You wrote:

The Second Amendment means nothing outside of hunting.

Dean, you have got to be a special kind of ignorant to respond to a post containing a picture of enough military longarms (many with bayonets attached) to equip an infantry platoon with some babble about the 2nd Amendment and "hunting".

Our forefathers gave us that right to fend off a military takeover in the U.S. - by
either the left or the right.

I'm with you on that one, Dean. The Second Amendment hasn't got anything to do with duck hunting or protecting one's self from muggers. (Although those are both happy side effects of it.)

Apparently, since most gun owners are far right they didn't see fit to fight the far right takeover so here we are. On the verge of martial law.

You'll imitate your German counterparts of 70 years ago. You'll allow them to take away any weapon that gives you parity with the military. You know you barely made a peep when the Brady Bill took away your assault rifles, which is what you'll need to effectively combat troops.

Well, first of all, I wouldn't describe me as "far right", unless by "far right" you mean "anarchist". Second of all, nobody's taken any guns away from me, so I don't have a clue what you're talking about. You also seem to be a little confused about the Brady Law, which mandated background checks, and which had nothing to do with the now-defunct Assault Weapons Ban of 1994. (Read a paper since September of '04? Can I interest you in a folding-stock Kalashnikov? We have them on sale at work...)

What a bunch of cowards, and what a sore disgrace you are to our forefathers who gave their blood for the likes of you.

I'd rebut this one, but I'm short on time because I have to get to doing The Lord's Work; selling evil black semiautomatic rifles to the public. (We also got in another machine gun. Anybody interested in an HK33?) Whatchoo doing on that front today, Dean, other than clogging up my inbox with your unfocussed ravings? Go play in traffic.

Sincerely,

The VFTP Management Team

PS: I think you should know that you give religious loonies a bad name.



Heh.

Well, that was cleansing.

Anyhow, I've used up so much time typing that I don't have time to suit up and take the bike. Guess I'll have to drop the top on the Beemer. Sucks to be me. :)

Boomsticks: I don't have a mantel...

...to hang a mantelpiece gun over, but I do have a large, disused storage closet.


A friend calls it "the museum". What doesn't show well in the photo is that there's a thumbtack in the map corresponding to the country of origin for each of those rifles.

Milsurp collecting: It's a disease.

Blog Stuff: Some Meme-ishness...

From Ride Fast & Shoot Straight, the bike list meme:

1981 Kawasaki GPz550. The bike I taught myself to ride on.
1985 Honda VF700F Interceptor. Colored my bike expectations for years; I rode the wheels off this one.
1983 Honda VF750C Magna. Still not sure why I bought a power cruiser. Fun, though.
1981 Kawasaki GPz550. Another one. What fun these paleosportbikes are.
1995 Suzuki RF600R. My everyday traffic tool for years in the Atlanta grind.
2000 Suzuki TL1000S. A ton of fun with room enough to slip the leash. A headache on tight roads.
1998(?) Kawasaki EX250 Ninja. Happyhappyfunbike. You can't have more fun with your clothes on.
1984 Honda VF1000F. Lardassio. (But big, noisy fun in the absence of any curves.)
1990 Kawasaki ZR550 Zephyr. Imagine a time machine ride to 1989, an '81 GPz550, and a bushell basket full of cash...
(Next Up: A 1990 Honda CB-1...)


From The Countertop Chronicles, two memes:

First Concert:

Six Flags Over Georgia, 1985, John Parr opening for Blue Oyster Cult. How very Eighties is that?

Last Concert:

Knoxville Civic Coliseum, 8/22/06, (EDIT: Whoops! 8/22/02...) The BB King Blues Festival, w/ The Fabulous Thunderbirds, George Thorogood, and (of course) BB King. (No, my memory for dates isn't that good; the ticket stub is still lying on my desk next to my computer almost four years later. I'm a packrat.)


They're memes, folks; take 'em and run with 'em as you will. :)

Politics: Well, they're half right.

A bipartisan Senate inquiry has determined that the bloated, incompetent, and only vaguely Constitutional Federal Emergency Management Agency should, after its abysmal performances last Autumn, be dismantled...

...and replaced with a brand-spanking-new bloated, incompetent, and only vaguely Constitutional agency; one with the much less acronymically mellifluous handle of "National Preparedness and Response Authority".

What difference do they think changing the name on the sign out front of the building is going to make? Anybody want to lay odds that the Federales look for people with strong Emergency Management backgrounds from FEMA to staff the "new" agency? How much is it going to cost me to pony up for mailing these clowns new business cards?

I'm with James Madison on this one:

I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article in the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents..... With respect to the words general welfare, I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators.

It makes one look like a savage to say so, but if your house burns down, blows over, or floats away, it's not the job of the federal government to fix it for you. Charity is one thing, but federal tax dollars coerced at 1040-point from a single working mother of two in Dubuque (and then filtered through a morbidly obese federal agency) to rebuild your bungalow in Destin is not charity, okay? It's extortion.

The Senate panel was half right: FEMA needs to go. But it needs to stay gone, not come back in drag.

Today in history:

Benito Mussolini got his just desserts.

A sign the good guys are winning...

Metro Pulse, Knoxville's local "alternative" weekly paper, which is not known for its conservative leanings, put out their Best Of Knoxville 2006 issue just now.

They included the staff pick for "Best Place To Show Your War Face", which is, of course, Coal Creek Armory. Are we hip, trendy, and cool, or what? (Did I mention that we have, like, cool skulls and stuff on our new tee shirts?)

If you’ve never held a sweet, smoking handgun after shooting the hell out of a target from 25 yards, then you haven’t truly lived. While we here at the alternative newsweekly don’t advocate shooting guns in the wild, at least not without a permit or within earshot, a few of us have been known to take out a bit of aggression in the safe confines of the Coal Creek Armory.

Automatics For The People: Yeah, baby! :)

Boomsticks: The Weekly Check on the Bias...

...is up over at Alphecca. Jeff skewers the little Mussolinis meeting in NYC, and points out the bloopers in a monumentally dumb Minnesota editorial. Go read.

NKVD, Stasi, Gestapo, Campbell County Sheriff's Dept.

Five armed men with badges come to a house, handcuff the occupant, beat the living crap out of him, hook his testicles up to a battery charger, dunk his head in a fish tank and the bathtub, put a gun to his head and threaten to shoot him, all the while demanding him to sign what amounts to a confession.

The USSR? Nazi Germany? No, the United States of America. Read the transcript and tell me it doesn't turn your stomach.

Officer Franklin (reading aloud to a man with electrodes on his genitalia): "Then shut the fuck up then. 'This written permission is being given to me knowingly and voluntarily to the aforementioned officer of my own free will, without any threats, coercion, or any...'"

...sense of irony, apparently.

At least they got sent to the pokey. Some of them for as little as 54 months. If there is any cosmic fairness, they will be put in the general population, and then perhaps real justice will be served.

Folks, there is almost no more heinous crime that can be committed than to abuse the public trust in such a fashion. When a guard dog gets bite-happy, you need to put it down. These men (and I use the term loosely) have smeared dung on the badge of every good lawman in the US. This is where the War On (some) Drugs has gotten us: Jackbooted thugs with a combat mindset torturing a man for information, with badges on their belts and warrants in their pockets, under the color of law.

(From No Quarters, via Say Uncle.)

Blog Stuff: I lurve my car CD changer...

Now playing at the Beemer Ampitheater:

Disc 1: U2, Achtung Baby
Disc 2: No Doubt, Tragic Kingdom
Disc 3: Faith No More, Angel Dust
Disc 4: Concrete Blonde, Bloodletting
Disc 5: Alanis Morissette, Jagged Little Pill
Disc 6: Nouvelle Vague, Nouvelle Vague

A little darker than usual overall, but still with something for most any mood. Angel Dust is great for getting amped up on the drive to work, and Bloodletting is near perfect for top-down cruising on a foggy, wet night, just after it's stopped raining...

Blog Stuff: A Get Well card.

Sunday afternoon we spent a fair amount of time wondering as to the whereabouts of Michael Silence. I mean, he'd seemed pretty enthusiastic about the whole thing...

Darn it. :(

Get well soon!

That's gotta suck...

There's a thread here at The Firing Line from a guy in New York who is fraught with worry over how to subliminally let someone else know that they have set off his NRA-dar, and that he, too, is a closeted firearms owner.

Has it gotten that bad in some parts of the country? Sitting there, worried about how to covertly let someone know that you, too, enjoy a frickin' Constitutionally protected natural right? Are there really places where it is more socially acceptable to say "Hey, I noticed you're wearing a tee shirt that says 'I bugger farm animals' and I just want to let you know that I, too, enjoy farm animal buggering," than it is to say "Hey, where do you go hunting?"

What kind of Bizzarro America have I stumbled into?

(By the way, if you notice my "Coal Creek Armory: Automatics For The People" bumper sticker, you may take that as a sign that it's safe to chat me up about shootin' irons. Not that that's too big of a problem here in Tennessee. Yet.)

Et voila...

"Senatrix".

Lawdog makes history fun. (Of course, the fact that medieval goings-on in the Eternal City made the seamiest soap opera ever televised look like a Doctor Seuss book by comparison always helps make that a fun and attention-getting period to study.)

Blog Stuff: Those with greener thumbs than I...

Ben at Tomato7 needs help identifying this flower.

Unfortunately, having a brown thumb, I was forced to explain to him that in my world: "If you don't mow it, can't eat it, and can't stand in its shade, it's a Hygrangeum."

"Hygrangeum" is my all-purpose catchall name for plants that I have no clue as to the proper name for. Seeing as I can't tell a nasturtium from a night-blooming cereus, those plants are legion. When tourist folks here in the springtime South ask me "Oh, those are pretty! What are they?", unless they're dogwoods, I answer "Hygrangeums." (Much like the days when I used to wear a stopped watch and answer anyone enquiring as to the time with "Quarter to four," any answer delivered in a confident, self-assured tone of voice seems to make them happy.)

I wonder how many New Yorkers are right now gushing to their kinfolk back home "We drove through the Smoky Mountains and all the blooming hygrangeums were so pretty!"?

Boomsticks: Gratuitous Gun Pr0n No. 27

Browning BDM 9mm pistol. The round thing on the slide is the "Dual Mode" switch, which can be rotated between "Pistol" and "Revolver" modes. In the former, the gun operates like a conventional DA/SA auto, while in the latter the gun automatically decocks itself after each shot, but can be manually thumb-cocked for a single action shot, just like shooting a DA revolver. Early teething problems, unconventional controls, and (mostly) bad timing killed this slim Browning 9mm in the marketplace. The knife is a ceramic-bladed Boker Delta.

Blog Stuff: Random notes from a day off.

Friday started off grim: Peeing down rain, and stuff to take care of at work before I could go enjoy my day off. I helped Marko pick out a No.1 Mk.III from our selection (he got a 1933 BSA), and took care of some dull scut work around the shop.

I escaped, and dragged my book to lunch. Having just scored a 1916 Enfield myself, I was re-reading the section of Keegan's The Face Of Battle dealing with the battle of the Somme over a delicious filet with a double side of asparagus spears at the Chop House, but kept getting distracted by the power lunch going on at the table across from me. A man and a woman were having a business lunch, acompanied by a conversation spoken (loudly, on his part) solely in managerial buzzwordese. If I heard the word "proactive" one more time before the check came, I'd have probably lost it. When CCA is a globe-spanning empire, and I've sweated my way up to Junior Vice President of Ashtray Placement or whatever, please, shoot me if I start talking like that.

I swung by Leaf & Ale on the way home to expand my beer horizons, and can add Avery India Pale Ale to Bridgeport IPA on the generally approved list. I still prefer The Shipyard Fuggles IPA to either, though; I may have a new reference beer, there. (The reference beer is your baseline to which you compare other beers, as in "Well, this is almost as good as..." or "Hey! This is even better than...")

I got home to find that Amazon had dropped off my order: Boston T. Party's novel Molon Labe!, and the album Nouvelle Vague (thanks, Phlegmmy!) The sun came out long enough to let me enjoy a pretty sunset with a book in one hand, a smoke in the other, and a beer on the little cafe table on my porch, but then Mother Nature welshed, and ended my day off like she started it, by dumping a skyful of water on my noggin.

Overheard At Work...

Tam: "Look, Bob! A carpenter bee. Know how you can tell it's a carpenter bee?"

Bob: "How?"

Tam: "Because its little toolbelt is hanging down and you can see the crack of its ass."

Bob: "How do you know it's not a plumber bee?"

Tam: "Hadn't thought of that..."

Boomsticks: Xavier wants to see your ugly guns.

The life of a CCW pistol is not an easy one. Most guns lead lives of idle luxury. Despite manufacturer's ad campaigns showing specops guys rolling about in the mud, your average rifle or pistol lives in a climate-controlled safe and is transported to and from the range in a carefully padded case. The "Hostile Environment" finish on 90% of civilian-owned HK USP's is rarely exposed to any environment more hostile than the trunk of a car.

Not so for carry pistols. They get bumped, banged, sweated on, covered with clothing fuzz and other detritus, and worn shiny from repeated holsterings and unholsterings. If the owner is conscientous, they also get the wheels shot off them in an attempt to maintain proficiency. As a result, they rarely look like the shiny guns in magazine review photo spreads.

Xavier, recalling a thread from one of the online gun boards, asked to see those beat-up workhorses. Here's mine:



I don't carry the Pro every day, because I have a couple of other 1911's set up more or less identically, but it's definitely my "heavy rotation" totin' iron, seeing the inside of a holster three or four days a week for the last four years. Considering the wear and tear it's had on it, I think the Black T finish is holding up pretty well, but I'll probably have it re-coated at some point in the next year or so.