Oh, yeah!

 This commercial has purely tickled my funny bone...

Redux, but explained.

 Someone on social media was again talking about how their travels had been taking them to mom'n'pop gun shops in small towns, and he was surprised to find the stock and pricing in most of them to be pretty near normal. He speculated that ammo manufacturers were prioritizing small shops...

It’s not that they’re prioritizing deliveries there, it’s just that they don’t do as much business so they’re the last to sell out. As a matter of fact, those shops are the exact opposite of prioritized; when they do sell out, they’ll be the last to get restocked. Wholesalers and manufacturers prioritize buyers who purchase by the skid, not who buy a case or two a year.

 What happens with those smaller shops that are off the beaten path is that their inventory lasts about until one of their regular customers goes on social media or a gun forum and says "I don't know what all you people in big cities are talking about with this 'ammo panic'. Ain't nobody panicking here in Two Mules, Kansas. We've all got our guns, I guess. Why, I just stopped by my regular LGS, Billy Bob's Tradin' Post, and their stock and prices were all normal."

 

 Three days later, after the locusts have descended, Billy Bob's is sold out.

 Three months later, Billy Bob's....which was run by Billy Bob as a side gig to his regular welding business using his wife as a bookkeeper/office manager, a retiree to basically run the place four days a week, and a college kid as part time counter help...hasn't been able to restock and closes, behind on its mortgage because they had zero reserve capital to weather ninety days of sub-hundred-dollar gross sales.

(SOURCE: I have worked for three or four Billy Bobs and known dozens personally. Like most small businesses...and especially most hobby businesses...your typical brick and mortar gun shop is dramatically undercapitalized.)

L'enfer c'est les autres

 Back when I was maintaining the S.W.A.T. Magazine Facebook page, every time I posted a link to a self-defense incident from Texas, I'd cringe a little inwardly, because the news story would inevitably reference that the matter was being referred to a grand jury.

Common Taters would then erupt in outrage..."A grand jury?!? What kind of communism is this? It was clearly self-defense!"...because people, some of whom were licensed gun owners in the state of Texas, seem stunningly ignorant of the fact that all homicides in Texas go before a grand jury.

The latest example of this phenomenon on social media has been triggered by an AP headline:

Texas grand jury: No action against killer of church shooter

This has led to the usual painstaking attempts at explaining, which are as frustrating as trying to push a rope uphill because the whole internet has a JD from the Law & Order University Richard Anthony Wolf School of Law and doesn't want to hear what it doesn't want to hear.

Hence you get conversations like the following:

"Why was he even charged?!?" 

He wasn't charged. 

"But why was the case even brought before a grand jury!" 

Texas requires all homicides to be brought before a grand jury. 

"But think how much he had to pay to defend himself!" 

Nothing. You aren't represented before a grand jury. 

"Why did it take nine months? It should have taken nine minutes!" 

If you'd take two seconds to type 'Tarrant County grand jury' into Google like I just did, you would see that Tarrant County grand juries, of which two are empaneled at any time, hear 14,000+ cases a year. They meet three days per week. And that's not taking into account disruptions caused by the Time of the 'Rona.

"But...but...!" 

I hate the internet.

And then, after this entire exchange, you get to do it again, because people don't read through threads and instead just charge to the blinking cursor in the comment box at the bottom to upchuck their typo-laden misspelled spleen, usually complaining about something that's been addressed half a dozen times upthread.

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Seasons Turn

 We've been having an unseasonably warm and very dry September here in Hoosieropolis; the sort of weather that would have had Farmer Frank blogging about the drought. At least we were right up until about three hours ago when a cold front blew in from the west, bringing much-needed rain and ensuring that we've already seen the warmest temperatures of the day.

 Looking at the forecast for the next week, it was time to put the top up on the Zed Drei, since I couldn't guarantee temps warm enough to keep the rear window pliable for any length of time in the near future.

 Much like 2018 and the broken collarbone, 2020 has turned into another year without a summer...or at least any semblance of a normal summer.

 Sadly, the long hot dry spell doesn't bode well for a colorful autumn, either. Neighborhood oaks are already shedding leaves without even changing color much.

 Blah. Maybe I'll try to get to the zoo this week.

 Have a picture of a floofy dog from the neighborhood.

Wherein the road to Damascus runs through Venice, CA...

 What happens when the urban outdoorsman encamped in front of your house is a violent felon and the cops can't do anything about him because the city fathers won't let him?

 Amy Alkon found out:

 "An hour and a half after I’d called 911, officers arrived. And it was then—noon, on Thursday, August 20th that I had an upsetting revelation: We citizens can no longer rely on the police to show up. And then the thought hit me: I need to get a gun. 

 You’ve got to love the irony. It’s the Democrats who push for gun control, yet it’s the Democrats in power in my city who are leaving me with no choice but to arm myself."

 You are your own first responder.

...it was the style at the time.

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Putting a @tacticaloutfitters #moralepatch on my @firstspear #strandhoggplatecarrier because it feels appropriate for the times...

A post shared by Tamara Keel (@tamarakeel) on Sep 25, 2020 at 2:52pm PDT

 

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #192...

Coming soon to an issue of Shooting Illustrated near you...

There's a large tree stump by the left-hand berm in the south bay at Marion County Fish & Game that's only partially in the shade of the new awnings. In the mornings, when the light is right, it's like a natural stage for shooting by available light. 

This shot was with the Fujifilm FinePix S2 Pro, which practically qualifies as a vintage camera these days, at least by digital photography standards.

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Armor

"Goddammit, I *just* put my plate carrier back up in the attic last week!" is maybe the most 2020 phrase ever.#civilunrest #2020iscursed

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) September 24, 2020

 

Official Shutterbug

Yeah, yeah, the movie itself is going to be full of political whingeing, but candid portraiture is my favorite kind of photography and Pete Souza is a master of it, so I'll be watching it.

(I'm also enough of a geardo that I want to see the setups he was using during the Reagan years.)

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This gives "ship's cat" a new meaning.

 How I missed this story when it was fresh is a mystery to me.

Actually discussed in a virtual meeting today: how to keep cats from accidentally commanding spacecraft while this work is going on in people's homes on laptops instead of inside a cat-free #NASA building 🤣🐱 #catsofquarantine pic.twitter.com/JDVouGGlYy

— Dr. Amber Straughn (@astraughnomer) April 7, 2020

Greatness and the Profit Motive

 My internet meanderings this morning caused me to run across a vintage Car and Driver piece from the launch event for the Porsche 928, back when it was still intended as the 911 replacement and the Porsche of the future. 

It's a great article with classic writing from David E. Davis and L.J.K. Setright, among others, and includes this quote from Ernst Fuhrman, then-chairman of Porsche:

"It's not surprising that a car that is designed to be good at 230 kph would be good at 100. It would be very surprising if cars designed to be good at 100 kph could be good at 230. Our cars are not as they are because we are better engineers than General Motors. Our cars are as they are because Germany has no speed limits. If I was running General Motors or Ford, my cars would probably seem just as dumb as Estes's or Ford's. I run a small company with very few customers, and it is easy for me to look smart—only my risks are proportionately greater."

 

He warmed to his subject as we wrecked a perfect sea bass and ordered red wine for the cheese. "I design cars for a thousand people or so. I don't have to design cars for everybody. At Daimler­-Benz or General Motors, I would have to listen to this one or that one: 'The car is too small; it is too big; old people won't like it; it must have four doors.' I am in an enviable position. If I don't like it, it won't get built." 

 

"One man can design a car. A small group of men can design a car. But a large group of men will always design gray mice. I promise you that anyone who has owned a Turbo or a 928 for one year will never forget it. On the other hand, a man who has owned a gray mouse—no matter how good it is—will look back twenty years later and say to his wife, 'What was that car we had? It was a very good one, but I can't remember the name.' "

I was reminded of the flip side of that coin, a quote from Carroll Shelby regarding the Porsche 959, which I can't find online, but paraphrased was something like this: "The 959 is an amazing car, but Porsche is losing money on every one they sell. You think the engineering department at GM or Toyota couldn't design a car like that? They could, but they're in business to make money."

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Fakery on the internet? Say it ain't so!

 How good are you at spotting bogus social media profiles, the kind that are just being used to agitate or exploit social divisions? (For some reason these are called "trolls", which doesn't seem entirely accurate, but the term has stuck.)

I got six out of eight right at this link.

I'd have gotten seven, but I managed to outsmart myself. 

"This is such an obvious troll account that it must not actually be a troll and there's some little tell that I'm missing. They just want me to think it's a troll account, so I'm gonna say it's not." 

Spoiler alert: It was a troll.

(h/t to OnHerOwn)

Automotif CLXXXV...

 

There was a time when I actively disliked the lines of the C3, but that's softened over the years. I've warmed up to them rather a lot, but I think it's the body style easiest to ruin with aftermarket bodywork.  This clean, stock model from...well, 1970-'72, somewhere in there...is rather attractive, but sticking spoilers and such on them inevitably winds you up in Corvette Summer territory, and nobody wants to go there. Nobody who's sane and has good taste, anyway.

Part of my mixed feelings might also come from the fact that the C3 straddled two eras. 

The earliest ones were right at the peak of the muscle car era, with an array of ferocious big block options and capable of blistering acceleration, but the tail end of the body style saw such ignominies as a 305 cubic inch motor for California cars, smog motor 350s with sub-200bhp output, and the final model year saw the debut of the baroque Crossfire Injection setup. 

For most of the later '70s, stock Corvettes struggled to break into the 14's in the quarter and turned in 0-60 times in the sevens, but then again, pretty much everything was slow from '75-'85. Those were dark times for horsepower fans.

The Slogans are Replaced, by-the-bye...

 Man, watching the backing and filling on both sides explaining why they're flip-flopping on their positions from four years ago has been hilarious. The august adults elected to our nation's senior deliberative body are trotting out talking points that are little more than long-winded, polysyllabic versions of the ones familiar to parents of toddlers: "She started it!" and "Billy did it first!"

Ted Cruz's convoluted but consistent arguments on This Week showed that he got his money's worth out of that Harvard law degree. 

"If you look at history, if you actually look at what the precedent is, this has happened 29 times. Twenty-nine times there has been a vacancy in a presidential election year. Now, presidents have made nominations all 29 times. That's what presidents do. If there's a vacancy, they make a nomination. 

 What has the Senate done? And there's a big difference in the Senate with whether the Senate is of the same party of the president or a different party of the president. When the Senate has been of the same party of the president, and a vacancy occurs in an election year, of the 29 times, those are 19 of them. Of those 19, the Senate has confirmed those nominees 17 times. So if the parties are the same, the Senate confirms the nominee. 

 

When the parties are different, that's happened ten times. Merrick Garland was one of them. Of those ten, the Senate has confirmed the nominees only twice."

While it doesn't necessarily jibe with his or his party's statements from four years ago, he'd obviously done his homework before going on the show and had his answers prepared and ready.

Hillary on Meet the Press was visibly flailing and out of practice.

"Oh, it's absolutely broken, Chuck. And I was able to watch your previous interviews with Senators Klobuchar and Barrasso. And Senator Barrasso is, you know, doing an epic job trying to defend the indefensible. The system has been broken for quite a while. But clearly, the decision that Mitch McConnell made back in 2016 in the midst of that presidential election but at a much earlier time when Justice Scalia unexpectedly passed away is what should be the standard now. They talk about, "Well, you know, we had other standards before." Well, they made a new precedent. And that new precedent, which they all defended incredibly passionately, is to wait for the next president, whoever that is, to make the nomination. But as you clearly heard, that is not what they are intending. And it's another blow to our institutions. You know, what's happening in our country is incredibly dangerous. Our institutions are being basically undermined by the lust for power..."

And Hillary Clinton is absolutely a Subject Matter Expert on the lust for power. 

Unfortunately, while Chuck Todd absolutely loves politics, he's got zero killer instinct as an interviewer, so he didn't press the issue of the the Dem's 180° with the person most likely to give an entertaining answer.

Statement on President Obama's nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court: pic.twitter.com/GTcLMLyS6I

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) March 16, 2016

The whole situation is so up in the air that anyone making confident predictions about any of it is pretty much guaranteed to be talking out their ass, but I can state one thing for sure: The Democratic Party's senators are right now rueing the day they voted for the "nuclear option". And all Americans should be, too. 

The day that we decided that a straight 51 senator party line vote was all it took to confirm a SCOTUS pick, we ensured that only nominees who appeal to party bases would be picked. 

Compounding the problem, Big Data is doing to electoral politics what Sabermetrics did to baseball. With the "swing voter" turning out to be a myth, the old "Primary to the base, General to the center" is collapsing, and elections are turning into a contest to see who can radicalize and enrage their base more, while discouraging the other side's base from even turning up.

This is just going to crank the divisiveness to eleven, while both sides' leaders are doing their best to discourage their loyalists from trusting the results of the election. Uncool.

Well-played, Mopar. Well-played indeed.

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TRX Easter Egg 🤣🤣🤣 . . #ramtrx #hatersgonnahate #raptorkiller #ramtrucks

A post shared by Midwest Offroad Expeditions (@catchmeoffroad) on Sep 13, 2020 at 9:02am PDT

There's a little Easter egg in the airbox of the Ram 1500 TRX...

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Polititainment

 As I would have expected, the Sunday morning political talking head shows this morning are lit, y'all.

As someone who is somewhat of a Meet the Press partisan, it pains me to say that This Week With George Stephanopoulopoulopoulos consistently has a better panel discussion, what with Rahm Emmanuel and Chris Christie as permanent fixtures sparring with each other.

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Wherein I Realize I'm A Poor

Checking out the prices of current night vision gear, I'm wondering if "WE LEASE THE NIGHT!" might not be a valid business model to pursue.#nightvision

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) September 19, 2020

 A good ballistic helmet and NODs would be sweet, but that's just way too gucci for my income bracket.

Plus, that's only the start of a very expensive rabbit hole that leads to IR illuminators, taller optics mounts, and all kinds of other unforeseen expenses. "It's not the camera body that's the big expense, it's the sum total of all the lenses and accessories."

We're living in a straight-to-video '90s SciFi flick.

*1990*
SCIENTIST. “I can send men 30 years into the future! But—“
GENERAL. *hits button*
*zot*
CHRONONAUT. “Amidst pandemic & unending natural disasters, President Donald Trump, creator of Space Force, brings Middle East peace—“
S. *gunshot*
S. “see? they always come back insane”

— David Hines (@hradzka) September 11, 2020

 

Disappointing, actually...

 Just as a data point, dude running a G48 with Shield Arms 15-round mags in last weekend's Rangemaster Instructor Development class was having constant problems with them. Tom mentioned he hadn't seem them running well in a class yet, to his knowledge. 

 I don't mean to get off on a rant, here, but the 48 runs fine with factory 10-rounders, and Glock also makes a 4" gun that runs like a top with 15-round mags and has been more or less the industry standard for a reason. 

 "But have you tried...?" Hey, if I wanted to maybe have to dick around with a gun to make it run reliably, I'd buy a Kimber. I thought the whole point of a Glock was to pull a soulless piece of combat tupperware out of the box and get to blasting with no more preparation than stuffing rounds in the magazines?

Messing around with sights or trigger shoes is one thing, adding a magwell or a Gadget or a backstrap plug doesn't affect reliability, but magazines? I have yet to run across an aftermarket Glock magazine I'd entirely trust for carry. Maybe Magpul, but only if I absolutely had to, and I'm having a hard time envisioning a scenario where I had to.

 

The most British battle name ever.

 So King Henry VIII of England decided he wanted his kid Eddie, who was, like, six years old at the time, to be promised the hand of little Mary, daughter of the Scottish king, in marriage. (She wasn't even two yet, so it's unlikely she was asked her opinion on the matter; dynastic politics are creepy as dammit.)

Now, if you wanted your son to marry your neighbor's daughter, what would you do? Well, if you were Henry VIII, you'd invade your neighbor's house and try burning it to the ground.

England went to war with Scotland in an attempt to fuse the dynasties in a conflict now called...in as British a manner as possible...the "Rough Wooing".

This conflict culminated in the English shooting up the Scots army at the Battle of Pinkie (I'm not making this up), a crushing English victory...only the Scots had already bundled Mary, now aged five, off to France and betrothed her to the Dauphin, which is what the French called the king's senior manchild. What a dolphin has to do with being a prince is one of those things that only monarchists understand, I guess.

Anyway, with the Scottish princess married off to the French prince of Viennois the odds got flip turned upside down and troopships began disgorging French soldiers and mercenaries from the Holy Roman Empire in Scottish harbors. It was obvious that, despite the shooting having tapered off with England holding a good-sized strip of southern Scotland, the Scots were willing to keep on fighting to the last Frenchman. 

A peace treaty was concluded and, despite England having won on the battlefield, they went home without any territory or Scots princesses to show for their efforts.

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