Category: Guns

Things Learned Reloading

Sorry for the light posting today. Too much having to earn a living going on this week, and tonight is my weekly silhouette match. I thought, though, I’d give an update on some things I’ve learned with respect to reloading:

  1. You do yourself no favors with a cheap digital scale. They don’t hold zero well enough, and tend to measure underweight if you trickle powder into one. Stick with a quality beam balance or spend the money for a decent digital scale.
  2. Case tumblers can really shine your brass up nice, to the point they look better once fired than new cases look. At first I thought a high sheen on the brass was merely aesthetic, but it actually makes your brass remarkably easy to spot and recover.
  3. Powder dispensers don’t seem to measure all that consistently if you’re thinking about loading up to the maximum recommended powder load. I’ve had best results setting the dispenser to throw a bit under and then trickling up to weight.
  4. A powder trickle is well worth the money.
  5. My Alpha Chrony is very finicky on a low light range, and often can’t see small bullets like .223 and even 6.8 SPC sometimes. It never seems to have trouble seeing .30-06.

The main thing I’ll be looking to improve is my reloading speed. It can take me a few evenings to reload as much ammo as I can shoot in an hour at the range. Nonetheless, it’s a very fun winter time distraction, much the same way brewing beer is, except reloading isn’t quite as detrimental to health, well, except for the lead exposure risk.

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The Bush Sell Out

Via War on Guns a quite good editorial taking The Administration to task for its brief:

Which raises the question:  What the heck was the Bush Administration thinking?  For decades, a critical component of the Republican coalition has been working class gun owners who are bothered by the Democrats’ embrace of gun control.  Republicans actually seem to have won that battle, with Democrats backing off of gun control legislation in the recent Congress.  Why after enduring so much hostile press would the Bush Administration sell out the NRA at this critical juncture?  And why make the reversal in a difficult election year, when the support of gun control opponents will be so critical to Republican fortunes?

What’s it have to lose selling anyone out at this point?  Bush is about as lame duck as they come, and I’ve never gotten the impression he’s all that concerned about his party’s fortunes.  The Bush family are wealthy New Englanders with no real connection to the gun culture.  As the article points out:

The less generous answer lies in the reality of the Bush Administration.  Contrary to the caricatures painted by liberals, there are precious few issues that the Administration has not sold the Right out on.  No Child Left Behind, the prescription drug benefit, monstrous budget deficits, McCain-Feingold, Patient’s Bill of Rights . . . all of these issues cross the gamut of modern politics, and all of them are issues where the Bush Administration’s Rovian plotting has placed it at loggerheads with standard conservatism.  Even on judges, where the Administration usually wins plaudits, conservatives forget Harriet Miers, and forget that two of Bush’s first ten Court of Appeals appointments were Clinton appointees.  Is it really that hard to believe that the Administration would lurch to the left on the issue of guns?

No, not hard to believe, but we still get to be pissed.

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Airport Security Gaffes

Ahab has another story of a gun owner who forgets he’s carrying and gets through security, then proceeds to “do the right thing” and tell the TSA about it.

If you get past security at an airport with a gun, leave the secured zone immediately and count your blessings.  There is no get out of jail free card for doing “the right thing.”  The right thing for you is not to confess to the authorities about the crime you just committed.

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Thanks from Paul Helmke

Looks like Paul Helmke doesn’t have any problems with the Bush Administration DOJ filing. Helmke knows a gift horse when he sees it, and isn’t going to look this one in the mouth. The Brady Campaign has everything to gain and nothing to lose by fawning over this brief. They won’t mention that six years ago they were furious about DOJ adopting the individual rights view, which is identical to the one they are now applauding.

When your back is against a wall, you have nothing to lose. Bush has offered Brady two things with his brief. The first is a way out of their nightmare. An individual rights ruling that means nothing is something Brady can work with. Remanding back to District Court will likely preserve most of the DC ban, despite what the DOJ may actually think about it.  It’s not likely to cause state laws to be threatened in the circuit courts.   Incorporation will be far less likely.

Furthermore, Paul Helmke is aware that gun owners are furious with Bush over the brief, and that this situation puts NRA in a real pickle for 2008. With the gun vote furious at Bush, and with McCain or Romney the likely nominee at this point, NRA is in a very poor position heading into this election. That’s the icing on the cake for the Brady Campaign. Paul Helmke isn’t stupid folks, and what you’re witnessing here is a brilliant political move on the part of the Brady Campaign, compliments of the backstabber in the Oval Office.

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Coverage of VCDL Rally in Richmond

Sailorcurt went, and has some pictures.  This commentary I think is pretty telling:

 One final observation. The VCDL estimates that there were about 400 gun rights supporters lobbying in the General Assembly building and about 200 that attended the “lie in.” I would assume that a good 80 to 90 percent were armed.

All of those guns around amongst all of those people who disagree on the issues so fundamentally (and, in the case of the anti-gunners, so rudely and with barely concealed anger), and NOT ONE PERSON was shot. NOT ONE FIREARM was brandished. The Anti-gunners were perfectly safe even when outnumbered by armed individuals by a factor of two or three to one.

Curious counterpoint to their argument that “guns kill people” now isn’t it?

Yep

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From Our Side in New Jersey

Scott Bach talks about some of the recent changes in New Jersey that Bryan Miller and CeaseFire New Jersey are suggesting target only criminals:

So what’s the problem, you ask? The problem is that the Garden State’s gun laws are a tangled web of hypertechnical, complex, and frequently incomprehensible regulations that often have the effect of ensnaring otherwise law-abiding citizens and turning them into inadvertent criminals.

New Jersey regulates firearms by banning everything first, and then carving out extremely narrow, limited, and stingy exemptions. Fall outside those exemptions, and you’re considered a criminal, no matter how upstanding a citizen you may otherwise be.

Read the whole thing.  This is what the anti-gun folks want to bring to the rest of the country.  These are what they consider “reasonable” and necessary gun control laws.  Yet Bryan Miller has the audacity to claim:

Why do I care? Not because of any disdain or dislike for hunting or sport shooting. Although I do neither, I don’t oppose either. Hunting is a traditional American pursuit dating back to the first settlers, and I see no reason to seek its demise, as long as it is pursued lawfully and meets the demands of the community in which it occurs. I feel similarly about sport shooting.

Furthermore, hunters and sportsmen are generally not responsible for the unacceptably high rate of gun violence we face in this country, so I have little interest, frankly, in their guns.

If Bryan is sincere in this, would he be willing to agree to re-engineer New Jersey’s gun laws so that they won’t so easily entrap honest sports shooters?   You can bet the answer is no.  Bryan cheers Joyce funded studies that show declining gun ownership.  If gun ownership is on the decline in New Jersey, which I would bet it is, it’s driven largely by the laws which make owning a firearm for lawful purposes a hazardous legal undertaking.  It’s hard to get into the shooting sports in New Jersey without talking to a lawyer, and that’s just fine by the gun control groups there.

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