Cemetery has pictures of his weekend shooty activities. There’s a top hat, a couple of fireballs, and a whole lotta smoke.
Category: Guns
Kids and Automatic Weapons
Kevin Baker has some video that will really make our opponents wet themselves, including a kid firing a German MP40. The MP40 is a highly tame submachine gun. Appropriate for letting the kids try.
Anti-Gun Activists on Parade
About 200 people marched on the NRA meeting in April, and I went to talk to a few of them about what inspired them to participate in a protest, what they believed was happening inside the convention, how they felt about concealed carry at such an event, and how they view the Second Amendment.
First, I want to thank reader Adam Z. for taking the pictures. Oh, and for bringing a buddy new to the issue along to Pittsburgh for their first NRA meeting. They both decided to go check the protest out with me, and this video would be missing several of the shots of signs & people if it had not been for Adam. Second, I apologize for the shaky images. Again, forgetting the tripod was not one of my better moments. But, for much of the video, it would not have mattered since I was conducting most of the interview while we were actually marching. During said march, I was dodging construction signs, potholes, and cars.
Lucky Gunner Shoot – Day 2 – Range Master
On Sunday, the folks over at Lucky Gunner treated us to a shortened version, or demo version of you will, of a pistol course from Range Master. Based on what I experienced, I think they have a sound program, and I would recommend it. Their staff are experienced law enforcement officers, and law enforcement and civilian trainers. You can see some of the people we met here. Tom Givens told us that he’s had 53 of his students go on to get into gunfights, and all of them won them. He did unfortunately say he’s had two of his students murdered, but both had forgotten the first rule of gunfighting, which is to bring a gun.
The day started with some basic classroom instruction, focusing largely on the mindset of carrying a firearm, safe firearm handling, and most of the basic stuff you’d expect to have covered. Then we went to the range session, which started with some basic exercises. Despite what our opponents often think, in that training is this magical thing that turns one from a bumbling fool into a competent gun handler, it is not. The purpose of training is to provide the building blocks of competent gun handling that can be practiced, over and over again, until it becomes second nature. Range Master teaches with this is mind, working from the holster to firing the gun in multiple steps and are combined over the course to show the student how to, on his or her’s own, drill those good habits into their brain through repetition and practice.
After drilling on the basics of the draw and presentation of the firearm, we worked up to firing, first one shot, then two, three, along with magazine changes through all the firing drills. One thing I learned was that I carry spare magazines backwards. In truth, and I’ll probably get kicked out of the tacticool club for admitting this, but I almost never carry a reload (unless you count a New York reload). I also learned a pretty good tip for one handed shooting, which was to allow the gun to cant a bit to the side if it helped you get a firmer grip on the pistol. This did seem to improve my one handed shooting, particularly with my left hand.
After lunch we did drills on improving shooting cadence, going from one shot per second, to two shots per second, and up to four shots per second. There are tips for being able to shoot fast accurately, which we didn’t get into very much, but that could be because we were not taking a full Range Master course. After working on cadence, that’s when the target dummies came out. Follow this link to see the web site of DVC Targets, who makes them. These are excellent training tools. They were fully dressed, and set to drop if hit with a clean shot to the vital area by a 9mm (which is what most were shooting, including me). This is the first time I’d ever shot at something that looks like a live person. The drill was to fire two shots into the chest area down zero zone on an IDPA target, at about 5 yards, then engage the dummy at about 10 yards. Two hits down zero at five yards I wasn’t going to sweat, but I was a little apprehensive about how my eye would find center of mass on something human shaped wearing clothing, but I found center of mass just fine and dropped the dummy.
If you’d like to take a class with Range Master, they are in the Memphis area, but do instruction offsite as well. You can find their schedule here. I think they did a pretty good job with us, and were very patient under the time-compressed circumstances. All training helps, and is beneficial, no matter what you think you know and no matter how basic the course. You will learn something new, or pick up a new technique that could end up working for you. I was glad to spend Sunday with Range Master, and thank them for introducing us to them, and to Lucky Gunner for arranging it.
I don’t need no teenage queen …
… all I want is my M14:
Thanks to Les Jones for taking the video, and he has many more, including some of the women who are a lot cuter than I am. I’m not kidding when I say it’s brutal. Probably the most uncomfortable full auto I shot. Even the BAR was a walk in the park by comparison. You’ll notice my flinch when I drop the hammer on an empty chamber.
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.
Lucky Gunner Shoot – Day One
After arriving into the Knoxville area around 1AM last night, 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.
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.