2011 – Page 104 – Shall Not Be Questioned

An Interesting End to a Weekend at the Range

Sebastian should be about an hour away from home by now. Unfortunately, he’s still probably about four hours away. Why? Because of a 16 mile back up on I-81 northbound in Southwest Virginia.

Why was traffic backed up for 16 miles? Because a sheriff’s deputy got in his official vehicle, stalked his ex-wife to a gas station, pulled his rifle out and shot her multiple times in front of a child in her car & bystanders nearby. Then he got back in his out-of-county sheriff’s vehicle, evaded state police for a while, then pulled over and shot a state trooper in the leg before getting about a mile down the road and engaging in another shoot-out with two additional state troopers.

Unfortunately, Sebastian didn’t see the traffic until he was just past an exit. Then he spent over an hour trapped while trying to get 5 more miles to the next exit. In an attempt to use AT&T’s cell network, I routed him around the roads where the state police were dropping the rest of 81’s traffic, but it added another hour and a half to his time.

The good news is that the state trooper who was shot is doing fine. The sheriff’s deputy has “life threatening” wounds.

NRA Reaches 1 Million Facebook Fans

Earlier today, the NRA crossed the 1 million fan milestone on their Facebook page. Meanwhile, the Brady Campaign recently crossed the 14,000 fan mark. Just sayin’.

Lucky Gunner Shoot – Videos

The hotel WiFi here is pretty slow, so video is difficult. I am happy to be able to present my shit eating grin moment of the day. Unless tomorrow is remarkably more awesome, this is probably my treat for the weekend, and the reason it was worth it to get down here. These gentlemen you see in confederate uniforms here quite clearly take great pride and joy in their hobby, and it shows. I am very happy they let this Yankee fire part of their Reb artillery battery. This video does not really do the sound these cannon make justice. You can be on the far side of the range and feel it pound against your chest when it fires. It’ll set off car alarms.

In this video you can see them explain to me how to fire the cannon, and what sequence they will go through. You can see them load the live ammunition, aim the cannon, insert the fuse, and eventually I walk into the shot and fire the sucker. As Tam pointed out, it’s a lot different than what you see the park, where they are just firing blank. The cannons in this battery recoil quite a bit when fired with live ammo.

Lucky Gunner Shoot – Day One Photos

Here’s a gallery of some of the photos I managed to take at the Lucky Gunner event. I have annotated them the best I can, but there are some things I don’t recognize or perhaps some things I have gotten wrong. If you can identify a piece, please let me know. I am not an expert on artillery, particularly, nor tanks and especially not half-tracks. Feel free to error check on anything I mentioned or name in the pictures.

World War II era BMW motorcycle with sidecar. Mounted is an MG38 machine gun.

What a cannon ball exit wound looks like on a fridge.

Exit wounds on a defunct dryer at Bullet Fest 2011

Police Officer of Knoxville, TN in Knox County Sheriff's UH-1

UH-1 "Huey" of the Knox County Sheriff's Department

Lucky Gunner Shoot – Day One

After arriving into the Knoxville area around 1AM last night,Â and not being totally sure of what kind of event Lucky Gunner had in store for us, I arrived to the event this morning not knowing quite what to expect. Turns out Lucky Gunner got us into an invitational machine gun shoot event known as Bullet Fest, and I think it worked quite well. I quite enjoyed myself for the first day, getting to shoot a wide variety of machine guns. As far as entertainment events, there were World War II and Civil War re-enactors present, and some of them brought fun toys like a half track all decked out in machine guns, and two World War II era tanks shooting live ammunition. You can tell this type of event is basically an excuse for rich guys to bring out their favorite toys. The organizer was getting frustrated with one of the tanks turned loose on the range, and wanted to get him out of there, but he was having a good old time. I guess if you own a tank, there’s not much opportunity to drive around a ranges smashing cars and shooting live ammunition, so you get as much in as you can. The Knox County Sheriff’s department also brought their UH-1 “Huey” helicopter and landed it in a parking spot for the amusement of spectators. That was pretty neat too, though I’m probably not the only one who is disappointing they didn’t rake downrange with machine gun fire from the helo. Turns out they only use the Huey for search and rescue.

Anyway, back to the important stuff, machine guns. What did I shoot?

M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle, or BAR. Anyone who’s a World War II history buff knows of this weapon. I had figured being a 30-06 full auto, it would be murderous to shoot, but given the gun’s weight, the recoil is quite manageable. I have a lot of respect for the guys that slugged these things around Europe. At 22 pounds, I’d hate to be that guy.
M1919 Browning Machine Gun, .30 caliber. This is a water cooled model, and runs about 40 grand if you want one for yourself. Before I shot it, a round cooked off in the chamber indicating the water reservoir was empty. I had heard you can piss in the water reservoir in a pinch, but happily, a jug was handy. I was supposed to limit myself on ammo, but got a bit carried away. They had to tap me on the shoulder to get me to stop. I feel bad about that. But damn, it was a lot of fun.
MP40 9mm submachine gun, predecessor to the MP5, of World War II vintage on the German side. I would have believed this gun was firing blanks. It’s highly controllable with very little recoil or muzzle climb.
M3 submachine gun, .45ACP. Much like its German counterpart, highly controllable and tame. A joy to shoot.
M14 battle rifle, 7.62x51mm NATO. This is a gun that should never be used except on semi-auto. Full auto fire is brutal and essentially spray and pray. An AK-47 is considerably more controllable.
HK91 battle rifle. More controllable than the M14, but still pretty brutal on full auto.
AK-47, the real thing. More controllable than I would have thought. The cyclic rate is slow enough the muzzle has time to come back down under its own weight. You don’t have to fight it as much as I would have thought.
M16A1. You would think from firing an AR that the M16 would be relatively tame. It’s quite controllable, but it definitely pushes back a bit more than you would think.

Tomorrow Kriss is going to let us demo some of their new toys. They have representatives that have flown all the way from Switzerland. I didn’t even know they were a Swiss company, but it looks like they are. The Kriss is Swiss technology.

I thank Lucky Gunner for generously supplying us with ammunition and putting all this together. It’s not every day when beautiful women come up, hand you a menu of ammunition that’s available, and bring you whatever you want to the firing line.

Brian Aitken Interview

I’ve been meaning to listen to this for a couple of days, but just got around to putting it on as background to working on random projects. Brian Aitken did an interview with Sam Adams Alliance to talk about his arrest, and this portion gives the basic story with a focus on why he turned down several plea bargains.

Take a minute to listen: Brian Aitken Interview

A Reminder on Different Priorities

The poll that remains up for this week’s NRA-ILA poll of activists is a stark reminder that not all of our fellow gun owners have the same priorities:

More than a quarter of the respondents don’t even have a concealed carry license. And only 3% believe that their names have been published. Considering that most papers who publish those databases do so for the entire state, the number is likely much, much higher than 3%. Even though I never saw it, I know my information was published by the Roanoke paper in Virginia.

Keep in mind, this is a poll not only of people who are members of NRA, but care enough to sign up for the ILA weekly grassroots alerts. And not just that subset, but people who care enough to actually click through and take the poll. So, on one hand, it’s not a perfectly representative sample. On the other hand, it does show that even among those who are passionate about the issue, our interests vary – and we shouldn’t throw those with other ideas under the bus if we can still bring them along in the broader fight for our rights.

Off to the Lucky Gunner Shoot

I’m on my way to head down to Knoxville for the Lucky Gunner Memorial Day shooty shindig. Unfortunately, because the drive takes 10 hours, I won’t be able to make it to any of the Friday pre-events.

I’m taking two ARs, my Glock 19, and Kel-Tec P-3AT. I’ll have to stop before entering the People’s Republic of Maryland since it is the only state along the way where my carry permit is not valid. We’re really going to have to fix that at some point.

Technology Transitions Gun-Related Purchases

It’s not a shocker to anyone who regularly reads blogs, but I thought a few of these questions & answers with the CEO of Cabela’s were interesting on the shift of how they sell over the last 5 decades:

Q. Cabela’s started as a catalog company and then added retail stores and online shopping. What’s the future mix?
A: The common thread that runs through our 50 years is an absolutely maniacal approach to customer service. Being the best at customer service has simply taken us where the customer wanted us to go. … So where our (sales) channels go in the future, our customers tell us and we will follow them there. We listen.”

Q. What are you hearing now?
A: Email, as you and I know it, has become less and less relevant to the generation in high school and college, and maybe just out of college. For that generation, it’s all about social media and texting. … Plugging into that stream will be the next thing. We track it. We’re on Facebook. We have more than 600,000 Facebook fans. We’re involved with Twitter.

Q. How important is the printed catalog in 2011?
A: The catalog is becoming less of a shopping vehicle and more of a prompt to get all of us to go to the Internet. There’s less density there about product specifications. It’s more informational. How to use something. It’s all designed to pique your interest and get you to come to the Internet, where you can see the full array of everything we have to offer.

The interview also addresses some questions about why Cabela’s is opting for smaller stores and other business-type issues. It’s an interesting little peek at the company, even if not the most detailed.

Several years ago, I started to notice that I only viewed catalogs in order to get an idea of what to look for on a website. I don’t read or view those two things in the same way, so it was sometimes helpful to find things I might not otherwise have considered. But now we just toss the catalogs completely. I’m pretty sure the only catalog I’ve thought about in the last year was for Godiva, but that was simply because I was part of a nearly year-long focus group.

Jealous

I wish I were an EVC for districts like NUGUN‘s region. One of his state legislators just posted pictures of himself sighting in his rifle. Seriously, jealous. He also posts range photos on his campaign page.

*sigh*

I guess I just have more work to do.