Author: Sebastian

Dead Pirates – A Great Easter Treat

Looks like the captain managed to jump overboard again, and the Navy shot the remaining pirates.  Nice shooting.  At least the Big-O had the stones to tell the Navy to do what they had to do.  There will be more piracy though, that much can be certain.  Blackfork thinks it never should have come to this point, and I agree with him.

I wondered, since it’s a bit harder to convince the international community to give up its irrational fear of civilians with guns, whether the Navy could buy a dozen or so old merchant vessels, fill them with Marines, and have them cruise the Gulf of Aden. Kill any pirates who try to attack.  Eventually, the pirates won’t know which vessels are carrying cargo, and which are carrying marines who will kill them.  Get enough countries to do this, I’m going to bet that a lot of these pirates decide life as a fisherman isn’t so bad after all.

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The Endowment Member Gift

NRA finally got my endowment member gift to me a few weeks ago.  We’re cleaning up today and putting everything in its place.  The problem is, where to put the endowment member gift.  You can see my dilemma below:

NRA Endowment Knife

It’s a lovely knife.  It would be nice to put it on display.  But it’s also a weapon, and I don’t particularly relish the idea of performing a Tueller Drill half asleep at three O’Clock in the morning because a home invader has decided to arm himself with my commemorative NRA Endowment knife.  I don’t like to leave functional weapons laying around the house.

I figure I have two choices.  Epoxy the knife to the display rack, so that it can’t be easily removed, or mount it on the wall in the bedroom.  I don’t know if I honestly want a knife mounted in my bedroom.  I liked the civil war bullet set I got for the Life membership.  Unless a burglar brings along an 1861 Sprinfield, there’s not much that can be done with that.

Not that I don’t like the knife, but can you imagine the headline?  So I would suggest to NRA gifts that are a bit more, shall we say, inert.  How about an NRA commemorative deactivated 5 inch naval shell?  I could put that right by the fireplace!

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You Know You’re a Gun Nut …

… when you start thinking about places you could put shooting ranges, and thinking about it in this level of detail:

As you can see there is lots of empty space in this underground garage. And with the aid of my trusty laser range finder I found places where it was 345 yards from wall to wall. It’s not really practice for Boomershoot (minimum range is 375 yards) but it’s close. And it’s would be better than anything else within 20 miles or so.

I was discussing this with some Microsoft friends at lunch the other day and they had a concern about the ceiling height. As the range gets longer the midrange height of the bullet gets larger too. Would people start hitting the ceiling beams? In particular Jim was concerned about using a 45-70 which has a trajectory resembling artillery.

It’s a valid concern. With a 340 yard zero a typical .45-70 cartridge is going to have a midrange height of over 50 inches. My AR-15 shooting it’s favorite ammo is going to have only a 7.1 inch midrange height. And my .300 Win Mag would have only have a midrange height of 6.3 inches.

Go over and see Joe’s dream indoor range.  It certainly looks the part.  We have significant unoccupied space in our building too, and I’ve thought it would make a great air gun range, or even a smallbore range if you could get the right backstop.  We have a good 45 yards inside in the unoccupied part.  Joe is more of a long range shooter than I am, and his preferred targets a bit more, shall we say, reactive.  Thus his dreams are bigger too :)

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ABC 20/20 Hatchet Job

Sensibly Progressive has a great run down of the 20/20 special, which basically informs us that we’re all way too stupid to defend ourselves with a firearm.

UPDATE: More from VSSA:

We’re only ten minutes in to this and it is very clear that the theme of the program is that ordinary citizens are not prepared to use a firearm in self defense. They give several hours of training to three students at a small college then put them in a scenario to see how they react. Predictably, they fail.

And put them in a scenario as a trained shooter, namely a police instructor.  They should have put them up against another untrained person.  This is an excellent timeline from Found: One Troll:

Active shooter breaks in and Jimmy is unable to draw his sidearm from under his concealing sweatshirt. Looks like he needed more practice. Jimmy is shot and “killed” before he can draw. Jimmy did not seek concealment behind his desk. Sawyer trots out the canard that Jimmy could have been disarmed by the active shooter, his own gun used against the other students after he falls. The active shooter is a police officer and firearms instructor, trained and experienced in shooting while moving and recognizing threats. Not a realistic simulation, it seems to me.

Definitely not realistic.  If a highly trained individual goes ape shit, the body count is going to be high, and even trained police officers are going to have difficulty taking him down.  Also, the person playing the role of crazed shooter expected resistance.  A real shooter will not be. But it does bring up an important point: you have to be better than the person you’re going up against, and what I’ve long suggested to get better is training and competition, particularly practical shooting.

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Speeding Up Silhouette Matches

One of the time consuming things in running silhouette matches is having to make the line safe, go down, and reset all the animals.  Resettable targets would be ideal, but not many people make them, and some brands have issues with the animals popping back up on you.

I went down to club this morning to check out some targets we’re considering using for our air rifle and air pistol silhouette matches.  They are made by a guy up in Binghamton, New York.  His company is called Noteworthy Targets, and make these 1/10th scale NRA Air Gun Silhouette targets that reset.  We shot at them all morning with a hard hitting .22 caliber air pistol, a high powered .117 air rifle, and my .177 air pistol.  They worked pretty well.  The demo model brought down for us were air rifle targets, and my .177 couldn’t knock the rifle rams over at the regulation 18 yards, but if we get lighter air pistol ones made, that shouldn’t be a problem.  The great thing is, when they go down, they stay down.  They are also fully adjustable, so you can adjust how heavy you set them.  Today we had them set pretty heavy.  The animals also screw on to the shaft, which is nice in case you need to take them off for repair.

He makes a lot of other steel targets if you want to get into shooting at steel.  It’s a lot of fun, if the range you shoot at allows it.

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Wither YouTube?

This analyst doesn’t seem to think that YouTube’s business model is sustainable:

So what does this mean? It seems safe to assume that YouTube’s traffic will continue to grow, with no clear ceiling in sight. Since the majority of Google’s costs for the service are pure variable costs of bandwidth and storage, and since they’ve already reached the point at which no greater economies of scale remain, the costs of the business will continue to grow on a linear basis. Unfortunately, far more user-generated content than professional content makes its way onto the site, which means that while costs grow linearly, non-monetizable content is growing geometrically as compared against the monetizable content that YouTube really wants and needs to survive. This means less and less of YouTube’s library will be revenue-contributing, while the costs of delivering that library will continue to grow.

What are Google’s options?

Google could take a lesson from its neighbor, Hulu, and focus only on proprietary content with existing consumer loyalty and real monetization prospects. With its massive audience, this is a viable option, and a direction in which YouTube has already taken some baby steps. Axing user-generated content would seem to be anathema given the site’s roots, but it may be the surest way of putting the business into the black.

Alternatively, YouTube could implement a subscription structure for the site, either monetizing certain members-only content, or requiring users to create a paid account in order to contribute content. With so many marketers looking at YouTube as part of their viral strategy, this too could be a viable option.

I’ll be honest, I would pay for YouTube if they went to a subscription model provided the price wasn’t outrageous.  I would pay 40 or 50 dollars for a year’s subscription if it allowed me to embed video on my blog for all to see.  It’s a shame it doesn’t appear that the business model works, becuase YouTube is damned useful.

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Sheriff to Residents: Cowboy Up!

A Sheriff in Mason County in Washington State is encouraging local residents to arm themselves in response to budget cuts in the department.

“I won’t say vigilante days, but we’re back to days when there wasn’t very much law around,” Bob Clark said. “We live in a very remote area and it’s a constant worry.”

Sheldon was quoted in a local newspaper as calling people on Seattle’s Queen Anne and Capitol Hill “wimps.” He has since backed off that statement.

Sounds like my kind of Sheriff.

UPDATE: Ooops… :g/Sheriff/s//County\ Commissioner/g

For those of you not Unix geeks, replace Sheriff with County Commissioner.  That’s what happens when I skim through an article.

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Reality Check for Lefty Bloggers

This is more about the post I ran yesterday about Lefty blogs looking to rake in the dough from the causes they support.  Advertising Age has some commentary about it that I think is spot on:

All that said, realistically speaking, no one believes that political blogs on either side of the aisle are anything more than water-carriers for their favorite parties or candidates. They’re not journalists — and don’t pretend to be. And they do provide a useful service: They keep the grass-roots watered and fertilized. Especially on the left, the big-name bloggers have grown and cultivated communities that, jokes about Lamont aside, can have a multiplier effect and provide buzz — and cash.

This is someone who understands new media, and what role blogs play in political advocacy.  Read the whole thing.  It’s insightful.  This is also an area where the right wing model of organization by think tank is horribly disorganized and behind.  This could have grave consequences for the right moving forward.

Despite the fact that NRA seems to be developing relationships with bloggers along this model, I also worry that they have not been keeping up with the left, when you really look at some of the things they are doing with online organizing.  It’s astounding.  If we don’t grab the best ideas, and use them ourselves, we could be out in the political wilderness for a long time.

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