score: citizen 1, robot revenuer 1.

I'm not a fan of the revenuers. That includes the red-light cameras at certain local intersections, which are not there for public safety, but for revenue generation.

However, I believe that you have to pick your battles, and that this particular battle turned out to be a really dumb one to fight.

On the minus side:

--Mr. Clark is charged with a felony, which will mean the permanent loss of his voting and Second Amendment rights. (No more guns, ever, and therefore no legal way to defend yourself or your family for the rest of your life.)

--The incident is likely to cost him a fair amount of money. There's the legal costs, the restitution he'll be ordered to pay (the shot-up camera), the $500-plus hunting rifle that's now KPD property, and the loss of income that'll result from Mr. Clark having to go to jail and/or losing his job as a result. There's also the reluctance of employers to hire folks with felony records, which may severely curb Mr. Clark's income potential for the rest of his life.

On the plus side:

One robot camera out of commission for a few days. The article notes that a replacement will be installed within a day or two.

Sometimes,a principled stand involves the risk of arrest and felony conviction. There are scenarios where I would gladly chance those. Seeing a red light camera out of commission for three days is not one of them.

Oh, and all the political/philosophical aspects aside: as a gun owner who considers himself responsible, I have to be appalled at the non-existent safety-mindedness of Mr. Clark. This is not about "Nerf World" and "safety Nazis", but about the judgment of someone who would shoot four .30-06 rounds through a thin metal box at an intersection which is ringed by businesses, residential properties, and a busy Interstate. Can you be 100% sure of your backstop in that kind of location?

on naming weapons.

JPG over at Expert Witness has a good piece up on the habit of some folks to name their weapons, and why he doesn't.

I've never given a name to any of my guns, because I've never given a name to any of my hammers or screwdrivers. They're tools, plain and simple. They may be more interesting, more important, and more fun than most of my other tools, but they're still mechanical devices designed for a specific purpose. It bothers me just a little when people name their guns, because it completely plays into the hoplophobe's mindset of the gun as a device with some sort of imbued and independent spirit.

For some reason, I don't mind the naming thing with swords. A sword is both more personal and more unique than a firearm. When the sword reigned supreme as the ultimate personal weapon, no two of them were ever alike, so I guess you could say that a sword has more unique attributes than the firearm. Mass-produced handguns, however customized, don't really strike me as having much of a unique character, however attached their owners may be to them.

In the end, however, even the most unique sword is merely a tool as well, just an inert piece of metal. It's the spirit, skill, and intent of the user that turns a gun or a sword into a weapon. To speak with Robert Heinlein, "there are no dangerous weapons, only dangerous men."

(Edit: Naming a gun "Vera", however, is totally cool and awesome.)

intangibles.

When I put my little "Five Airplanes" thingie together, I started thinking about what really made my particular choices stand out among all the other excellent aircraft I could have picked. Then I came to the conclusion that the same thing that makes these particular human-made tools remarkable is also the thing that makes any great human-made object remarkable, and that's intangibles.

Every once in a while, an engineer or artist manages to create something that is far more than merely the sum of its parts, something that performs far better than the addition of its specifications on a sheet of paper may suggest. Aviation is full of such creations, for example. There's no specific list of features that made the Douglas DC-3 the legend it is, but rather the way those features add up to something above and beyond sterile numbers about performance, cargo capacity, or range. A well-designed piece of machinery has much in common with a good musical symphony—you can dissect them into numbers and notes, but when you hear the thrumming of a DC-3s Cyclone or Twin Wasp engines, or the opening motif of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, you realize that you're witness to something significant.

Almost every one of us has favorites among our selection of tools, and most of the time, we can't precisely put our finger on the exact reason why we prefer our favorites over any other tool for a particular job. The more vital the task, the more attached we are to the tool in question, and there are few issues more vital and personal than self-defense. Therefore, people tend to get very attached to their choice of sidearm, for example, and that's the main factor behind the endless "brand war" discussions we see on the discussion boards dedicated to guns and self-defense.

A person's preference in personal sidearms is unassailable. You cannot convince a man of the inferiority of his pistol by dragging out sterile data if he's been carrying that pistol through thick and thin, war and peace, calm and danger, for the last ten or twenty or thirty years. Their reason for picking that particular gun might be insufficient for you, and your personal preference may beat theirs on paper when it comes to empirical factors like capacity, weight, or loading speed, but you cannot overcome intangibles with mere numbers.

Take my personal preference as an example. I've often talked about the virtues of my carry gun, the Smith & Wesson K-frame with a three-inch barrel. In a toe-to-toe battle of statistics, any Glock fan could beat me soundly with sheer numbers. A Glock 19, for example, is lighter, holds two and a half times more ammunition, and is much faster to reload than my S&W Model 13. On paper, the Glock 19 is the superior self-defense weapon, beating the Model 13 in nearly every category. So why do I carry the Smith instead of a Glock 19?

Why, intangibles, of course.

The M13 has a heft to it that's lacking in the Glock. It has just the right amount of weight—heavy enough to absorb recoil and make follow-up shots easy, and light enough to not be a burden on the belt. Yeah, the Glock is lighter, but the Smith is light enough, striking just the right balance between shooting and carrying comfort. It doesn't need to weigh twelve ounces, because it's not a pocket gun. (On a side note, if you can tell the difference between a 25-ounce gun and a 30-ounce gun on your belt, you need a better belt and holster, not a lighter gun.) Now, how do you quantify the "proper" weight for a gun? The simple answer is that you can't, because "proper" in this case depends on the purpose of the gun, and the opinion of the person who has to carry it. To me, a three-inch K-frame on the belt is just right, but to someone else, a fifteen-ounce J-frame in the front pocket is just right. Can you argue who's correct, armed with just a spec sheet with numbers on it? Of course you can't.

The M13 has other intangibles that make it superior to the Glock in my mind. It's more reliable—not hugely so, since the Glock is a very reliable design as well—but enough to make me trust it just a smidge more. It's more adaptable to my hand, and balances better because it's less top-heavy. It's easier to verify as loaded—all I have to do is to glance at the back of the cylinder. It's a self-contained system—there are no magazines to lug around, and no need to spend another $200 on a sufficient stash of them. It lets me keep all my brass, every last piece, and I don't have to bend down and spend fifteen minutes picking up empties every time I go to the range. It's less ammunition-sensitive—I don't have to spend any time trying to find a load that feeds well, and I can load and unload it a hundred times a day without having to worry about bullet setback and marred brass or bullets. It holds less rounds than the Glock, but I'm a better shot with it because it makes me place those fewer rounds more judiciously—with the Glock, I always have the thought of "I got plenty more" in the back of my head, and it's easier to get sloppy with shot placement. It's more monolithic in construction—you can't put it out of battery by pushing the muzzle into an assailant, and it makes a better impact weapon in a pinch.

All of these factors put together add up to something that I don't get with any other carry gun, and that's something you can't really express with cold, hard data. The M13 on my belt gives me the warm-and-fuzzies in a way the Glock doesn't, and you will not be able to talk me out of one in exchange for the other by talking about capacity, weight, reloading speed, or anything else to which you can attach numbers.

The next time you read a discussion about Glock vs. 1911, pistol vs. revolver, Ford vs. Chevy, Piper vs. Cessna, New England vs. Dixie, or any other attempt to quantify intangibles and determine that "A is better than B", look at it as if they're trying to establish whether Beethoven's Fifth or Mozart's Symphony No.40 are the better compositions. Could there be a bigger waste of time?

guilty gun pleasures.

Here's my guilty gun pleasure: a ratty old Hi-Standard Double Nine.

It's a nine-shot .22 double action revolver, styled to look like a single-action sixgun. The frame is alloy, and the cylinder swings out for loading and unloading. This particular model was acquired as a bonus on a trade a few years back. (Note the faux pearl factory stocks, which drive up the Blue Book price a whole ten dollars.)

It's not the prettiest gun in the world. The double-action feature is kind of pointless, since the pull weight is well north of twenty pounds, and probably closer to thirty. Fortunately, the grip and hammer shape are well-suited for single-action shooting. Despite its homeliness and lack of dollar value, it's actually a ton of fun to shoot in that fashion. It sits in the hand and points just like most single-action revolvers. It's a dandy plinker with regular .22LR ammo, and it'll also shoot .22 Shorts and CBs. With the primer-only Colibris, it even turns into a respectable indoor gallery gun.

Book value of this thing is around a hundred bucks, but the fun I've had out of it adds up to many times that value. I suspect it'll end up in Quinn's or Lyra's possession in the future...it's not like the recoil of the .22LR is likely to wear that ugly little thing out any time soon.

out with the old, in with the new.

In the most recent issue of S.W.A.T. magazine, Clint Smith reviews Aimpoint's latest offerings in the combat optics sector. He muses that "in a world of changing technology, one area that has seen quantum leaps forward over the last few decades is visual acquisition systems for weapons."

He's absolutely right, of course. Twenty years ago, electronic sights were new-fangled gizmos with some utility, but the old pros preferred (and preached the use of) iron sights for serious applications.

These days, everyone who's anyone in the business of professional violence has some sort of advanced combat optic on their rifle, and iron sights are mostly relegated to backup or emergency use. It's still important to be able to use iron sight, of course, but the latest generation of optical sights has made the rifleman far more effective. As the saying goes, if you can't see it, you can't hit it, and a rifleman these days has many excellent optics from which to choose, tools that make him or her drastically more efficient by several orders of magnitude. An infantry squad with iron sight-equipped rifle would be at a distinct disadvantage against a squad equipped with ACOGs, ELCANs, Aimpoints, or Leupold CQ/Ts on their rifles.

I thought about the article for a while, and then realized that this technological trend extends to other applications as well. Small, inexpensive electronics are now attainable to the regular guy on the street that make any super-expensive industrial-grade stuff from twenty-five years ago look completely ancient by comparison.

Take civil aviation as another example.



This is the cockpit of a Beech Baron 58 equipped with analog "steam" gauges. You have your avionics on the left side, your engine gauges in the center, and the radio/AP stack to the right. It's fairly easy to keep an eye on things once you're used to the layout. With steam gauges, the Baron feels and flies like a nice light twin.



This is the cockpit of the same plane equipped with the Garmin G1000 "glass cockpit" integrated EFIS. All the information of the steam gauges in the previous cockpit shot is consolidated on two 12-inch flat panel TFT displays, with an integrated communications panel between them. The left panel serves as the PFD (primary flight display), and the right panel serves as a MFD (multi-function display). On the left screen, the pilot can view all the information related to aircraft attitude, speed, heading, and vertical speed, without having to scan multiple steam gauges. On the right screen, the pilot has access to all engine- and fuel-related information, along with a moving map. With the G1000 avionics suite, the Baron feels and flies like a miniaturized airliner.

Aircraft equipped with the G1000 system also retain some steam gauges as backup (and primary) instrumentation in the event of a system failure. The whole thing is designed for redundancy--if one display fails, the other automatically switches to PFD mode, and the system is designed to run off a secondary power source in case the aircraft's alternator and primary battery go "kablooie".

Once you're used to flying with a glass cockpit, it's hard to go back to steam gauges. The difference in situational awareness and functionality is quite substantial. With the G1000 and its competing products, civil light aircraft now have flight information and navigation systems that were reserved to modern airliners just a few years ago, and unavailable at any price just two decades ago.

Of course, in both the shooting and flying communities, there are always the grumpy holdouts that pooh-pooh the newfangled gizmos. There are lots of rifle shooters that use (and preach the use of) iron sights as the only "true rifleman's sight", and there are doubtlessly many pilots that eschew the new glass cockpits in favor of the tried-and-true steam gauges. ("If it was good enough for Lindbergh, it's good enough for me!")

Alas, time and technology march on, and the newfangled technology of today is going to be the mainstream of tomorrow, even in fields that have more than their share of traditionalists.

i still have all my fingers.

Well, it looks like I managed to get those .38 Special rounds reloaded properly.

Thorsten is visiting from the old Fatherland, and we went to burn some powder tonight. I ran a hundred rounds of my home-brewed loads through the trusty Model 13, and all of them went "bang" with the same noise and recoil. Thorsten shot a five-round cloverleaf of overlapping holes at seven yards with the M13 in single action, so I guess the load is accurate enough.

Thorsten rented a Glock 21, and I tried my hand with it as well, but my Glock groups were twice as large as the ones out of the S&W. That revolver is a thing of beauty...it goes bang six times without fail, you open the cylinder, dump your six empties right back into the box, and load up again. No busting thumbs, no chasing brass, no slides locking back with rounds left in the magazine (the repeated weird Glock malfunction of the night, with both shooters), and no failures to feed or extract. Make mine a sixgun...

the right to kill and eat deer.

The spirit and intent of the Second Amendment protects AR-15s and HK91s before Marlin .30-30s and bolt-cranked aught-sixes. The ability to go and shoot deer and such is just a fringe benefit of the ability to be a counterbalance to an armed government.

Next time some Fudd mouths off about how "you don't need an assault rifle to hunt", remind them of the fact that they're just hanging on the coat tails of the rest of us. If the Supremes ever uphold Miller in all its implications, it would mean that the government can ban deer guns, but not military weaponry.

men who don't understand "no", and the women who die to them.

"A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity."

--Robert A. Heinlein

You know, I read stuff like this all the time. In fact, it seems that nary a day goes by when there's not at least one news item about a female being injured or killed by a male who has a hard time parsing the meaning of the word "no", or the phrase "not interested".

I have no respect at all for men who visit violence on women. Part of that may stem from an upbringing in a house where the title of Dad's Punching Bag was frequently passed back and forth between my mother and myself. (Dad didn't like the bookishness and "girly ways" of his oldest son, you see.) I've never had an ounce of tolerance or understanding for bullies, and that even extends to people who order around the hired help. Watching how your date treats the waiter can be an enlightening insight into his or her character--they'll put on a mask for you on the first few dates, but they'll tend to let their true personality peek out when talking to the guy who brings them their food.

With the sheer amount of horror stories in the news that involve women losing their lives at the hands of psychotic ex-boyfriends or -husbands, it's mind-boggling to see that the most ardent defenders of women's rights can usually be counted on to also ardently oppose the use of guns for self-defense. The whole problem with female victimization by males is the fact that males are usually physically stronger--they can bring more force to bear. The tool that is best suited to remove that force disparity is the firearm, but that tool is decried as a phallic symbol of violence.

Use your keys to scratch the guy, they'll tell you. (Your round-edged safety key for your Prius is certain to inflict disabling pain on the guy who's hopped up on adrenaline and testosterone.)

Use mace or pepper spray, they'll suggest. (Just make sure that you don't spray it into the wind, that you manage to point the usually unergonomic container in the right direction in all that excitement, and that your ex-beau isn't one of the numerous people who are impervious to that stuff when under the influence of adrenaline or alcohol.)

Scream for help or blow a whistle, they say. (And hope there's another strong male nearby who can use force on your behalf--if your attacker doesn't crank it up a notch to stop that inconvenient ruckus, that is.)

Oh, and then there's the magical Scroll of Protection, the Restraining Order.

Restraining orders are pieces of paper. They have no magical properties, and they're not bullet-proof. A restraining order always requires a gun to back it up. The only difference between a restraining order taken out by a gun-toting woman and one taken out by a pacifist, "non-violent" woman is whether the gun is already at the scene of the assault, or whether it needs to be carried there in the holster of a cop. That difference, however, may very well determine who gets carried off in the body bag when all is said and done.

If the feminist movement was truly about empowerment, they'd put legal concealed carry at the very top of their priority list for political action. There's nothing that empowers a person like allowing them possession of the tools to negate all differences in strength and size.

Not all men are violent and psychotic sons-of-bitches who have a hard time taking rejection. Hell, not even the majority of men fall into that category. There are, however, enough of them out there that my daughter will be taught from an early age to walk softly and carry a big stick.

She'll know that she always has the right to say "no", and "not interested", and she'll always have the means to back up that right if she happens to come across some knuckle-dragging simian who thinks that any woman he dates automatically becomes his property.

We all have the right to self-ownership, male or female. There's an astonishing number of females who have a special someone in their lives who has never learned that lesson, and who continues to be an uninvited presence.

Don't buy the bull about non-violence and the moral superiority of it. When the chips are down, it'll be your body in a bag, and you'll be just another news item. Never initiate force, but never shy away from it if someone else visits it upon you. By all means, take out a restraining order. But do yourself a favor and empower yourself. Buy a gun, learn how to use it, and take control of your fate--and if your persistent admirer decides to walk right through that restraining order and make sure that "if I can't have her, nobody else will," then shoot the bastard dead.

christmas in august.

The FedEx truck just showed up and dropped off a large box from Dillon. It contains a whole bunch of stuff, including a Square Deal B, an accessory kit, and a copy of the Lyman Reloading Handbook.

(Thanks, Mark! I think I'll follow your advice and read that manual cover to cover before I even slice open the box with the reloading press in it.)

The FedEx guy mistakenly dropped the box off on the neighbor's porch, and the poor thing kind of duck-walked it over to our door. It has a bit of weight to it, you see.

Now all I need is some powder and a big box of lead semi-wadcutters, and I'll finally be recycling all the brass that's been taking up space in the coat closet for the last year or two. I'll report on the experience in detail at a later date.

a fool’s errand.

In a recent post, Tam heaped some scorn on one Mrs. Robyn Ringler, a gun control activist and writer who blogs on gun violence. Tam rightly points out that it makes no sense to single out gun violence over, say, knife or fist violence—it's not any more deplorable when a man shoots his estranged wife than if he bludgeons her to death, or runs her over with his SUV.

There are many people like Mrs. Ringler. They mostly mean well, but their particular crusade against guns is a fool's errand. They single out the tool, and not the action. In Mrs. Ringler perfect world, nobody would have guns (except maybe the cops she'd call if someone were to break into her house), and where there are no guns, there's no gun violence.

There are some major problems with that line of thinking. First of all, people like Mrs. Ringler don't (or can't) understand that you cannot stuff the genie back into the bottle. Technology cannot be un-invented. There are over a hundred million functioning firearms in private hands in this country alone, and even if you banned the sale and manufacture of new guns tomorrow, those guns are out there. All you would accomplish is to do for gun what we did for drugs with the destructive War on Drugs: you'd create a vast black market for guns that enjoys government price control. Drugs have been illegal for a long time, and billions of dollars have been spent fighting their manufacture and distribution, and yet they are available on just about every street corner in America. Now consider that firearms are much more durable and longer-lived than manufactured pharmaceuticals (and therefore much better suited to be passed from user to user), and you'd have to suffer from a very pervasive kind of self-delusion to think that banning guns will get rid of them.

Then there's human ingenuity. When you make an item illegal, you encourage a cottage industry for it. When I was a teenager, one of the kids in my neighborhood had the ability to make guns out of damn near anything. He had an IQ of about 80, but he was skilled with tools, and he was able to make fairly sophisticated revolvers and shotguns. Now, this kid had a pretty modest workbench set up in the basement, and he was able to make functioning firearms—think about what the average American hobbyist could crank out with the tools commonly found in a suburban garage. Any dolt can mix blackpowder—the recipe has been Public Domain since the Chinese made their first rockets in the Middle Ages. See what I mean about not being able to un-invent technology? You can't erase the knowledge of metallurgy and chemistry from the minds of people, so even if you managed to wave a magic wand and make all the guns disappear, there'd be new ones in private hands within weeks.

The next problem for Mrs. Ringler, and perhaps the more complicated one, is the innate human desire for self-preservation. You see, humans naturally gravitate towards personal weapons, because they have always been a necessary tool for survival. Drop a man into an unfamiliar wilderness, and the first thing he will do is to gather something suitable for use as a weapon—a few whacks with a sharp-edged rock will turn a stick into a spear. We want to survive, and when you drop someone into a forest full of hungry and feral things, their brain circumvents all the ideology and politics, and goes straight past the bullshit to the survival basics. I have no doubt that even Mrs. Ringler's brain will work in that fashion if and when the chips are down—if she ever heard an intruder rummaging through her house, I'd bet dollars to donuts that she'd have at least a kitchen knife or some sort of improvised impact weapon in one hand while she dialed 911 with the other hand. Your instincts don't care about your stance on gun control or weapons in general—they will tell you to grab the baseball bat or the putter by the closet, and get ready to apply it to the skull of whatever wild animal comes through your bedroom door. You can suppress that instinct, of course, but it takes a rare kind of ideological fervor. (Even the "bear guy" Timothy Treadwell, who once stated that he'd consider it an honor to be eaten by a bear, told his girlfriend to hit the bear with a pan when he did, in fact, get eaten by it.) People want weapons--it's in our nature, an instinct honed by many thousands of years of evolution, clawing our way to the top of the food chain with no advantage but our large brains and our opposable thumbs. Trying to counter the urge for self-preservation is as futile as trying to counter the urge for sexual reproduction--any policy that counteracts those instincts is doomed to failure from the beginning.

Lastly, there's the problem of force parity. Before the advent of the firearm, the efficiency of a weapon was determined by the muscle power of the user. The sword, the bow, the knife, and the mace all required physical strength to wield them, and the stronger person was always at an advantage against the weaker one. It's more than a bit ironic that an intelligent and otherwise informed woman like Mrs. Ringler would want to remove the one thing from society that has given teeth to the weak (and yes, women in general are physically weaker than men.) Any 90-pound college student or octogenarian grandmother can pull the trigger on a gun and have complete force parity with a 220-pound rapist or home invader. Take the guns away from them, and we return to a society where women have to rely on men to protect them from other men.

(Interestingly enough, gun opponents like Mrs. Ringler do just that—they outsource their personal safety. When you call 911, you summon a man with a gun to use force on your behalf. The fact that you don't personally own the weapon in question doesn't make you morally superior—on the contrary, it makes you a hypocrite of the first order. You absolve yourself from having to use force by shifting that responsibility to another person, and then you congratulate yourself on your civilized attitude.)

So, why do these people spend so much time and energy tilting at windmills? I don't commit the logical fallacy of assuming that all gun control proponents are uneducated. On the contrary, many (if not most) are well-schooled. Gun control is one of the pet causes of the liberal-leaning crowd, and there are many academics and college graduates among those ranks. Could it be that the Left is just as likely as the Right to ignore evidence if it contradicts deeply held emotions?

Gun control is a fool's errand, Mrs. Ringler. It doesn't disarm the bad guys, only those who are already inclined to obey the law. I've often heard that gun owners are paranoid because they feel the need to own weapons for protections. Well, who's more paranoid: the person who owns a gun, or the person who wants to disarm everyone?

feel-good public policy #2,283,388.

The Omaha Housing Authority has decided to make public housing citywide a gun-free zone. Under a new policy effective in October, all public housing residents may not possess guns in their dwellings, even if they own them legally.

Omaha Housing Authority spokesmuppet Stan Timm says that the rules are "one more tool in trying to be ahead of and prevent crime."

Good going, Stan. For all practical purposes, you just painted "CRIMINALS, COME AS YOU ARE" on the door of each residence under your authority, in twelve-inch tall day-glo orange letters.

Just another reason why I'd rather sleep in a cardboard box among rabid weasels than accept a public handout: if you take the King's shilling, you have to sing the King's song.

on “gun buybacks.”

Once or twice a year in almost every major city, the police and city government will stage a cute little show called a "gun buyback". Earnest politicians and eager law enforcement brass congregate in front of a bunch of cameras, and pat themselves on the back for sponsoring an event that'll improve public safety, "get guns off the street", and make the violent crime rate plummet.

That, of course, is a bunch of fluffy crap.

Make no mistake—gun buybacks exist for one reason only: to give an opportunity for camera time to mayors and Chiefs of Police of crime-ridden cities, so that those folks may step in front of the cameras and assure their constituents that their elected officials are, in fact, the cat's meow.

Those "buybacks" are never effective. It's the same dog-and-pony show in almost every major city in the country, and it always has the same results. The cops staff a table for a day and offer taxpayer-funded gift certificates or vouchers to the public for each gun turned in, "no questions asked." They always net the same sorry collection of rusty top-break antiques, nickel-plated pot metal pistols, ancient shotguns, and the occasional beat-up .22-caliber rimfire plinker. (During a recent buyback in Boston, the catch of the day was a wood-stocked Ruger 10/22, which the organizers proudly presented as a "very dangerous Ruger 22 assault rifle".)

The problems with those "buybacks" are many. First of all, they're ingeniously mislabeled, as you cannot buy back anything you didn't own in the first place. The implication here, of course, is that all guns originate from (and belong to) the authorities, and that the "buyback" merely returns those weapons to their place of origin. It's a prime example of how language can be manipulated to mold attitudes—repeat the term often enough, and the desired mindset will spread among the target audience.

Then there's the problem of economy. Those buybacks offer a good chunk of taxpayer money for any gun turned in, usually regardless of condition. People use those buybacks to grab a quick c-note or two from the tax pot for their rusty and inoperable sock drawer junk, and we—the taxpayers—are forced to purchase those things at ten times their actual and practical value. The catch of the day then ends up in a smelter or under a saw blade, and the taxpayers get exactly zip for their cash outlay.

That brings us to the problem of effectiveness—some people (usually the organizers) claim that those turned-in junkers are "taken off the streets", implying that this will somehow have an impact on the crime rate. That, of course, is unmitigated bullshit. Criminals and gangbangers who need their guns for their line of work will not turn in their guns for sneaker coupons or Wal-Mart gift certificates. The people who do show up at those "buybacks" are a loose congregation of scrap metal profiteers and scared old grandmas who want to get rid of Papaw's old pistol that's been rusting away in a sock at the bottom of the drawer for the last forty years.

Lastly, there's the problem of Unintended Consequences. Since those "buybacks" offer cash or loot for any turned-in gun, "no questions asked", they are a fabulous opportunity for the occasional real criminal to get rid of a crime gun. The gun will invariably be destroyed, the crook gets a Target gift certificate for his troubles, and the taxpayers have to fund this sanctioned destruction of evidence.

No, those "gun buybacks" don't do anything to prevent crime or increase public safety. Next time you read about one in your newspaper, take it for what it is: a taxpayer-funded Public Relations stunt that's supposed to help make the mayor and his Chief of Police look like they're "doing something about the crime problem."

notes from a weekend.

We spent the weekend in Georgia at Robin's sister's place. Her sister has three kids ages thirteen to nine, and they are...rambunctious. Within a few hours of our arrival at my sister-in-law's house, her kids had taught Quinn how to say "oh, shit" when he drops something, and demonstrated for him how to burp the alphabet from A to Z. (That's an impressive skill, I have to admit--my brother can swallow air and burp on command, but I've never acquired the ability.)

On the way to their house in Buford, we had to brave the Atlanta periphery at rush hour. While we were in walking-pace traffic, I saw something that I've never seen before in my life: the thermometer displaying outside air temperature showed 117 degrees. (That's 45 degrees celsius, for you Euro-types.) The air conditioning in the van was blowing at maximum, with the air flow selector set to recirculate the inside air, and it was bearable, but I could tell that the vehicle was just about at the upper limit of its thermal operating envelope. We passed several cars that had quit on their drivers, and the thought of breaking down in 117-degree heat with two small children in the car made me wince.

Our usual communal weekend World Of Warcraft gaming has slowed down a bit. Robin goes to work extra hours every other Saturday or so, and on her off weekends we usually have too much other stuff to do. Occasionally, we manage an hour or two of questing after the kids are in bed, but life kind of takes precedence over quests and instance runs right now. I've read of people who neglect or even starve their offspring because of World of Warcraft addiction, but those people have severely faulty wiring in their cranial fuseboxes. If I ever choose playing computer games over taking care of my kids, I hope that someone beats me to death with my own keyboard.

Finally, a question to my readers who are a.) parents, and b.) gun owners: how do you keep your home defense or carry weapons secure from toddler access, yet reasonably fast to bring into action without having to rely on dexterity (that may not be there when something goes crash at three in the morning), spend half a grand on mind-reading hi-tech gun safes, remember number combinations, or have a key on your person at all times?

I have my own method right now, but it's probably imperfect. The carry gun is stored well out of his sight and reach, and unloaded, with a full speedloader next to it. It takes about three seconds to bring it into action, and charging a wheelgun from a speedloader is beyond the knowledge or dexterity of any toddler, but his skill at getting into things is growing daily, and I want to find a more permanent and secure solution.

(Yeah, I know that an unloaded gun is no good to me if someone knocks down my door, but there's a much higher likelihood of my kid shooting himself with a loaded gun than there is of me not having the time to perform that well-practiced three-second loading procedure.)

some random hoplography.

Smith & Wesson Model 1066, chambered in 10mm Auto. All-steel construction, accurate, easy to control, and perfectly reliable even with budget lead flatnose 10mm ammunition.

S&W autochuckers don't have the cachet of a SIG or H&K, being the pistol line Most Likely To Be Overlooked At The Gunstore, but this big 1066 was every bit as reliable as any of the fancy Euroguns I've owned. With some decent full-house factory loads, that gun is a mean device.

Oh yeah, and 10mm Auto is an awesome caliber. If you can handle the somewhat zesty recoil from un-neutered loads, this caliber is the answer to the light-and-fast vs. heavy-and-slow debate, being one of the few handgun calibers in existence that does heavy-and-fast. Trajectory is flat, accuracy is great, and the caliber is probably the most flexible autoloader round out there. You can load it down to .40S&W levels for less recoil, or load it up to full rock-em-sock-em loads, tossing a 200-grain bullet at 1,200 feet per second, or a 165-grainer at over 1,400.

If 10mm Auto factory ammo wasn't so hideously expensive (and thus hard on the wallet for regular practice), I'd probably still carry that Model 1066. (On those rare flatgun days, that is. Most days, I'm quite content with that decidedly more old-fashioned revolver thingy.)

on word processors, the weather, and guns.

At the risk of sounding like a shill for Alphasmart, I have to once again sing the praises of the little Neo.

I've had this thing for a little over a month now. I've written roughly 20,000 words on it, five or ten or thirty minutes at a time. The battery meter just dropped to 99% a few days ago. At this rate, the three AA batteries in this thing will run out of juice at some point early next year.

There's not a thing I don't like about the Neo. It's very well designed, and it does its one job better than anything else. No boot time--hit the "On" key, and two seconds later, you're ready to type away. No power issues--forget having to lug around a power adapter, or secure a seat next to a power outlet at your local Sip-N-Type. No big-ass laptop bag or thrown-out backs--the Neo weighs two pounds, which is half the weight of the skinniest sub-notebook out there.

Yes, it really is the best thing since sliced bread, and yes, you do need to toss out your laptop and get yourself one of these if you do any kind of heavy-duty writing. It lets you untether yourself from your desk, and you won't believe how many productive five-minute writing sessions you can squeeze into a day if you don't have to first grab your eight-pound laptop, wait for it to boot up, and hope that the battery is topped off.

It's the hottest stretch of the year. Here in the Tennessee river valley, that means heat and humidity so oppressive that it feels like you're walking into an industrial-sized bakery oven every time you leave the house. At this time of the year, I don't mind being stuck in the house with the kids, and any excursion is basically a quick transition from air-conditioned house into air-conditioned van to go to the air-conditioned store. Weeks like this one remind me of a line from that mediocre movie with Matthew Perry and Salma Hayek, where his parents spend time with her parents at some lake in Arizona for Cinco de Mayo...the Mexican part of the family has a great time in the sun, but the Anglos just sit there and sweat, until the white dad shouts at the Mexican dad, "The white people are melting!"

In Germany, residential air conditioning is virtually unknown, and considered a wasteful use of electricity. When I left the place in 1996, they had just started putting AC units into new vehicles as standard equipment, but I didn't walk into my first air-conditioned dwelling until I came over to the United States. We may use far more energy with our central and window AC units, but if its between me sitting in subtropical Tennessee heat sweating out a gallon an hour, and Gaia taking it in the pants, then set the thermostat to 68 degrees, baby. They make more kilowatts at the nuclear power plant every day.

Concealment is tricky in this kind of climate, of course, but I've had very good success with a close-fitting pancake holster under an untucked t-shirt. I never really understood the desire for those little subcompact guns made out of styrofoam--the smaller you make 'em, the harder they are to shoot well. If I can hide a steel K-frame revolver under an untucked t-shirt without even having to use an IWB holster, then why would I get one of those little compromise guns?

That's not to say that pocket guns like the Jetfire and P32 aren't neat. They are, and I've owned my share of both. I used them for backup, though, and not as a primary choice of sidearm. For that job, I want something made of steel, something that'll accommodate all the fingers on my shooting hand. There'll be enough factors spoiling my accuracy in a gunfight; trying to win a life-or-death shootout with a gun the size of a credit card is something I don't want to add to the menu.

for the recoil freaks.

Here's something I found in a Swiss gun magazine a few years back. It's a revolver called the "Pfeifer Zeliska", and it's made by an Austrian gunsmith who is probably all kinds of nuts.

For the ultimate in hand-held stopping power, this puppy is chambered in .600 Nitro Express. That's the genuine elephant cartridge used for Very Large Things That Can Kill You Dead. They mention the chronographed ballistics out of this thing, and I had to do a conversion from joule and meters/sec. to foot-pounds of energy and feet per second.

It launches a 900-grain bullet at 1,515fps, for a muzzle energy of 4,586fpe.

.600NE has roughly twice as much oomph from a rifle barrel, but even the reduced muzzle energy out of that monster wheelgun is still well above anything else offered by anyone else. It's half again as powerful as the .500S&W, and recoil is probably, erm, excessive.

Is there a need for a revolver with that kind of ka-boom? Not really. (There's also no practical purpose for it, unless you figure out that time machine thing and start going on hunting trips to the Jurassic period.) However, I'd buy one for two reasons alone: first, it's a neat piece of engineering, and second, it would make the gun control crowd piss their pants in terror.

Alright, make that three reasons: it makes one heck of a loud BOOM, and making things go BOOM is one of the primal joys in life.

another arrival in valhalla.

Jim Cirillo, former NYPD stakeout unit officer, shooter, and instructor, died last night in a traffic accident.

In his service with NYPD, he survived--make that won--over 250 armed encounters with bad guys. He was known to sling a mean wheelgun, and he was one of the gun gurus I truly respected.

Add another name to the list of people I'll never get to meet.

thoreau says: ditch your iphone.

Okay, so Thoreau was a tree-hugging hippie, but he had some salient points. His views on taxation and civil disobedience are laudable, for example, and the older I get, the more I find myself agreeing with his ideas on simplification.

Five years ago, I would have been in line to get my paws on an iPhone. I used to be a gadget hound of the first order--when the original iMac came out, I did stand in line, money in hand, to purchase one of the first ones for sale at the CompUSA in Nashua. I used to be a proponent of what my friend Mark calls "the all-singing, all-dancing multimedia device", coveting and buying gizmos that shoehorned the maximum amount of capabilities into as small a package as possible. The first Windows CE handhelds? I had a bunch of them, despite the fact that the software sucked, and their batteries lasted a tenth of the runtime offered by Palm's devices. Hell, I would have bought an iPhone simply for the fact that it says "Apple" on it, and because it's shiny and glossy.

Fast forward to today, and I'm not very tempted to get a combined phone/music player/web-browsing-and-email device. (And no, it's not just because the piggy bank for toy money is chronically empty these days.) Sure, it looks gorgeous, and I have no doubt that it does all those things in a beautiful and simple fashion, but it doesn't fit my recent trend towards simplification.

My carry guns are one example of this trend. I didn't wake up one day and decide to pare my carry guns down to just S&W K-frames--it just sort of evolved that way. When I made the K-frame my regular carry piece, it was the simplicity of operation and complete reliability that was the initial factor, but after a while I found that I also really enjoyed not having to carry extra magazines. (Speed strips are far easier to carry around--just stuff a pair into your front pocket and be on your way.) Then I appreciated being able to keep all my brass, and after a while I realized that I shot the K-frame better than anything else. I actually ended up carrying the same gun all the time, instead of switching to the Carry Gun of the Month every few weeks, and as a result my skill and comfort level with the old S&W improved quite a bit.

So I ended up getting a duplicate for my carry gun, which is identical in every respect except the length of the cylinder chambers. (My Model 13 is a .357 Magnum, and my Model 10 is a .38 Special.) Both guns are set up identically, with the same grips, loaded with the same rounds (.38 Special +P LSWCHP), and they ride in the same holsters. You can't tell them apart without reading the roll marks on the barrels. Now I have a backup gun for the one I carry, and if the M13 ever breaks or gets taken after a self-defense shooting, all I have to do is get its twin and stick it into the empty holster. I don't have to worry about finding leather, keeping magazines loaded, futzing around with "feed-friendly" carry loads, or getting used to a different manual of arms. Simple is good: you can see the loaded status of both guns just by glancing at the cylinder, both operate in exactly the same fashion, and there's no extraneous fiddle-faddle. Even the sights are just grooves in the topstraps and no-snag low front sights on thick barrels. Recoil is next to nothing even with the +P carry loads, and both guns put those 158-grainers exactly where you point them.

Well, since the simplicity concept works well in that particular area (self-defense weaponry), I started thinking that it might work well in other areas as well. The idea is to pare down the required hardware for a task to the most simple form that still allows full functionality.

I use laptops for writing, and up until recently I usually bought the most powerful machine I could afford every few years. Then I realized that I really only use my portables for writing, and that I didn't need the extra capabilities afforded by a new laptop. I started to regress my writing machines to earlier technology, just to see how far I could downgrade before getting less productive, and to my surprise I found out that writing on an old machine actually enhances my productivity because it offers fewer distractions than state-of-the-art hardware. A ten-year-old Powerbook will still run Word as well as a brand new MacBook, and it won't beckon with World of Warcraft. Then I took that equation to its logical conclusion, and bought one of these, which only lets you do writing...700 hours of it on one battery charge. No email, no Internet, no games, nothing but empty storage space to fill with letters, words, and sentences.

That Thoreau fellow...he may have been a patchouli-scented tree hugger, but that "simplify" thing seems to work pretty well. We seem to be in the middle of the ADHD Age, and our tools and toys reflect that. Buck the trend and try to shed the fluff for a little while, and it might just amaze you how much you can get done when your technology serves you instead of distracting you. I'm a complete and utter capitalist, so I get a twitch whenever somebody starts ranting about "unchecked consumerism", but maybe we don't need the latest and greatest all the time, and the term "obsolete" is used far too liberally.

gun trivia.

The old-fashioned .38 Special round, chambered in those antique revolver thingies, was introduced in 1902.

The thoroughly modern 9mm Luger round, chambered in high-capacity semi-automatic pistols and full-auto subguns, was introduced in 1902.

some more gunography.

So I had a lengthy post all typed up, complete with pictures and careful annotations...and then Blogger mangled it into a cryptography exercise.

Here's a more abbreviated version, then.

My digital camera dates back to the Pleistocene. It's one of the old Sony Mavicas with the built-in floppy drive. (One-point-two megapixels! Who-hoo!) Despite its ancient technology status, it does take pretty decent pictures when you get the light just right.

Here are a few snapshots of guns I've owned over the years. Most of them are in the "Never Should Have Gotten Rid Of That One" category. Some day, I'll have enough play money in the bank to be cured of my guntradeitis, but such is the curse of the guy with limited funds....you have to get rid of some of the old if you want something new.

Anyway, here goes:

Beretta 950BS "Jetfire" Inox

SIG P225

SIG P232

Colt Defender

Smith & Wesson 1066, 10mm Auto

Heckler & Koch P7M8

And finally, a sampler mix of slugs in a sidesaddle on a Benelli Nova.