Fun Turns to Tragedy!!!

The Skinny

I am a gun enthusiast trapped in the People's Republic of Maryland. My political affiliation is Independent, as the Ruling parties are both full of crap, and long ago stopped representing the common man. If the Libertarians weren't such freaks I would probably be one. I am a member of the Nation of Riflemen and damn proud of it. I once took an oath that I would support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. As far as I know I never broke that oath, and will continue to follow it. I am not Politically Correct and will NEVER be Politically Correct. If you need to know more, feel free, Ask.

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I rarely quote whole texts from peoples blogs, in this instance I thought it was worthy of the full monty so to speak.

Diyala Province

The peace can be won here, but the steep road ahead is only for the strong.

Sounds a bit like something that Sherif Joe would show…

This entry is from the webblog of Michael Yon.  Michael is a reporter that has been on the ground and out with the troops.  I spent a bit of time reading his blog last night and I do find him a refreshing break from the typical MSM reports that come out of Iraq. 

I will definitely be adding a link to Michael Yon’s blog as it is definitely worth the read.  Michael’s blog is just more conformation from people on the front line in Iraq on just what is really happening.  If you have the time spend a bit of it reading Michael’s Blog, you will not have wasted a single second of your time.

The hardest part of gaining any new idea is sweeping out the false idea occupying that niche.
-Robert A. Heinlein

Political tags - such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth - are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.
-Robert A. Heinlein

The militia of these free commonwealths,
entitled and accustomed to their arms,
when compared with any possible army,
must be tremendous and irresistible.
Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves?
Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms
each man against his own bosom.
Congress have no power to disarm the militia.
Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier,
are the birth-right of an American ...
the unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands
of either the federal or state governments,
but, where I trust in God it will ever remain,
in the hands of the people.
-Tench Coxe

But the are going to have to use their hands. 

Sad state of affairs that the public school system has come to lately where we suspend two girls for ten days for cutting a cake with a butter knife.

It seems the knife was already in the school and the girls borrowed it to cut their cake.

Welcome to the nanny state.  How much longer do we put up with silly crap for the sake of being politically correct.

My favorite part of the story was “you ought to be glad we didn’t have you arrested”.  For what possession of a butter knife?  We should send the whole lot of them to England, as they would fit in well over there in the U.K.  (sorry Mr. Freemarket)

Hat tip to Ravenwood’s world yet again…  Must make him a link soon…

Here is a quote attributed to another dirt bag terrorist…

“The shedding of Muslim blood ... is allowed in order to avoid the greater evil of disrupting jihad.“

It makes you wonder how long the people of Iraq will let the terrorists live among them.  The terrorists seem to be targeting the average Iraqi with much greater frequency in the past month.  How long before the Iraqi people start taking care of the terrorists themselves, as most of the people there are still armed? 

Its not like the terrorists live in a vacuum, eventually once you have shat where you eat too often the others that live there get a bit fed up with your antics.  Once they are good and fed up, someone will put a bullet where it counts.  It has happened a few times in Iraq already.  How long before it happens on a larger scale is the big question.  How long to the good stand by and let the wicked continue on their path?

It also makes me wonder just what kind of religion condones violence against its own practitioners.  Islam the religion of peace.  Surely you jest…

Been having a discussion with observer about an article that came out of academia (you can find the article over at Geek’s place along with his take on it).  I initiated the discussion with observer because he if the only person from the academic world that I know online.  I asked his opinion, but it touched on a topic that was a sore spot.  In his post he called me one of his “conservative” readers.

This made me do a little more consideration on my political thoughts and orientation.  I have found myself

running from both parties as neither one is really representative of how I feel.  I am going to post a wholesale portion of text from a local (at least to me) blogger who has titled his site Ravenwood’s Universe

My Political Views:

I share with our Founding Fathers, the belief that the powers of government should be limited.  Specifically, the government should only be empowered when it can take advantage of economies of scale.  This means that it should only do things that it can do better than local governments could do separately.  National Defense is one such example.  It worries me that people all too often look to the federal government to solve all our problems; even when many of these problems clearly could best be handled at the local level. 

That sums up my political views rather nicely.  “free will, and personal responsibility” and Live and let Live are really the focal points for me.  Here we are only a dozen or so generations from the time of the founding of our country and we have forgotten (if not abandoned) what the people of our country fought so hard to bring about. 

So here are a few quotes to try and bring about remembrance.

I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.
-James Madison

Do not separate text from historical background. If you do, you will have perverted and subverted the Constitution, which can only end in a distorted, bastardized form of illegitimate government.
-James Madison

If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.
-James Madison

It is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.
-James Madison

And finally here are two parting shots.

It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.
-James Madison

The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty.
-James Madison

I may give out a few more quotes tomorrow as well as delv further into my own political views as my discussion with Observer has piqued my interests in that direction.

I Submitted an article that I wrote for the Savage Shooters web site.  The website is a great resource for owners of Savage rifles. 

I spent a few days writing this and submitted it to the site administrator for consideration for publication on the site.  Well low and behold they did publish the article for this month.  I was pretty pleased with the article on the web site.  They were able to keep a lot of the formatting that I had done in the PDF that I sent them.  Unfortunately what I sent them for review was my first draft and as you can imagine it contained a few mistakes.  My wife who majored in english is my usual editor (she also fixes my various typos on this site), did not get the chance to review my article before I sent a copy for preview to the site.

I had sent it to them for some feedback and for a review to see if they wanted me to elaborate further on any of the subjects that I touched upon in the initial draft.  They posted the article as I sent it to them,  I have attempted to get them to fix the issues but to this date they have not done so…

You can find the article here Long Range Rifle Build.  I like the article overall but there are typos that I would like them to fix… 

If you shoot savage rifles the savage shooters website is an excellent reference site.  The people on the site are always helpful and friendly.

Here is my article in PDF with the final edits.

“What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms.“

—Thomas Jefferson

and probably never will…

After spending time with some of our armed forces best and brightest at boomershoot you tend to get a different opinion of just what is really going on in Afghanistan and Iraq.  The soldiers tell decidedly different story than you see in the Main Stream Media.  It seems from their stories that the MSM has nothing positive to say about the good things that are happening over in Iraq and even better the MSM almost never leaves their cushy hotel in the green zone.  Except for the embedded reporters, which we never hear from unless an american has shot a terrorist that was playing dead.

The actions of the MSM media recently have been without Honor, Integrity, or Patriotism.  They wonder why their readership is falling rapidly.  People no longer tolerate

journalism.  Journalists have a duty to present the facts, not how they feel about the facts, but the facts.  I have spent a lot of time since my return mulling over just what I wanted to write about the LA Times article full of deceit, lies, and misrepresentation. In their recent article about the Italian security agent that was killed when the car he was riding in was shot at and disabled because of a high speed approach to a security checkpoint.  It is sad that the agent was killed, even sadder that agents who had been in country decided to disregard the well known and established checkpoint procedures just because they were excited.  You can read a detailed report on the changes and omissions from the Reuters article that the LA times used as a base for their story.

You can read a very detailed and well documented summary at Patterico.com

It all boils down to this.  The MSM wants the world to be influenced by them and have great ratings.  To bad.  The MSM has for far too long been lying to the American public (and the world for that matter if you take into consideration the BBC).  For the first time in the history of man, there is no real way to control the flow of information.  For some reason the MSM has failed to figure that fact out.  As long as they continue to try to twist the facts to support their flawed suppositions they will continue to loose viewer / readership to alternative forms of media which report the facts.  I used to be a news junkie and usually watched CNN headline news fairly regularly.  Now I hardly ever watch the news and when I do they never seem to get the story right.  And finally the MSM is just plain anti-American, and more people are figuring that out.

Wow…  Now that was a fun 3 days of shooting.  I went through 450 of my 500 handloads, I probably shot 400 of them and other people probably went through 50.  The Black Hills Match was not needed as my handloads shot very well out through the 700 yard mark. 

The Clinic started on friday morning with an overview by Gene Econ who was our principal instructor. Gene also brought four assistant instructors to the precision rifle class, three of who were soldiers.  All of the soldiers had served in either Afghanistan or Iraq, two had been wounded in action.  Meeting and talking to soldiers that have been over in sandy land shows you just how much the Main Stream Media is lying, but this is about boomershoot not the MSM, I have a post for them later.  Gene also brought another civilian with him who was also an excellent instructor. 

I had a few goals in mind for the shooting class.  The big goal for me was learning to dope the wind (the term “read the wind” is for the uninitiated), and we had a bit of wind out there.  The wind got to about fourteen MPH max the whole three days.  The other big goal for the shooting class was learning how to see bullet trace in the spotting scope.

The first day of shooting went quite well, I learned a lot about long range shooting.  I was usually able to get the bullet on target in 5 shots or less on the first day.  The wind gave me a fit the whole time the first day.  Ben was my spotter and we spent the day rotating from spotting to shooting.  I was a bit frustrated at the end of the day due entirely to the shifty wind at the boomershoot site.  We went out to eat with a large number of the crew and fun was had by all.  I wussed out and wend to bed early, believe it or not 8 hours of shooting is quite tiring.  You spend a lot of time concentrating on either watching for bullet trace from your shooter or trying to hit the targets with every shot.  At the end of the day we each got 3 boomers to put at the 380 yard line and shoot.  Unfortunately the mix for them was off and only 2 were detonated, I got solid hits on all of mine but none went off.  I am sure that this gave Joe a very sleepless night trying to figure out what went wrong.

Day two went much better.  I was able to get a pretty good handle on the wind most of the time.  I started getting my shots on the steel targets in 2 shots most of the time instead of the 5 it had been taking me.  The wind was still a pain most of the time but I was getting better with doping.  I used the target knobs on the scope for the making the large windage adjustments to get onto the targets, so if I had to hold off the target it was just by a little bit.  By the end of the day I as pretty comfortable with the wind and scope adjustments to compensate for the wind.  Joe put out boomers early for us to try and detonate as fridays boomers were recalcitrant, the early afternoon boomers were also a bit on the uncooperative side.  Needless to say Joe went back to work and by the end of the day he gave us a second set of boomers to shoot at.  These boomers went boom…  I had two booms on my smaller 4 inch targets but the larger 6 inch target was a no go.  It seemed to me that the thicker smaller targets would detonate easier, but the thin larger targets would just get shot through with no detonation (at least from my .308).

Having a 2 day class is probably a good decision.  On day two of the class you get a chance to use more of the shooting skills that you learned on day one, it definitely helped build confidence and made the boomershoot event a snap.  Shooting the steel targets was a great way to get feedback at ranges where seeing the shot on paper is quite difficult.

Day three (the actual event).  We started out the event with a few demos (I have a video done but have not yet posted it) which were very cool and fun to watch.  After the demos were over the event started in earnest.  The 380 yard line was awash with smoke from exploding boomers (including two of my own).  After I popped two boomers at the 380 yard line I moved up the hill to the 700 yard line.  I had definite hits at the 700 yard mark but no explosions on the targets.  I only saw one explosion at the 700 yard mark and it was from a .50 cal round, so this years mix at the long distance needed a very fast round to do the trick, by the time my round got to 700 yards it was traveling at 1652 fps and it seems that was just not enough to detonate a distant boomer.

I did not want to spend much more time shooting closer boomers because there were plenty of people out there who did not have equipment that was capable of an easy hit on a 4 inch boomer at 380 yards.  I gave a few of the boomers in the 400-600 yard range a few shots, solid hits did not give me a detonation so I moved up to the steel gong at 635 yards and made lots of hits on the gong in lots of varying wind conditions.  So I was very happy with my improved wind doping at varying distances.

I was fairly impressed with the large turnout at Joe’s event.  With right around 100 shooters and probably another 50 spectators it was a well attended event when you consider that the event is held in a fairly remote location.  The Media was also out in force over the three days and I even got interviewed (don’t worry Joe I did not step in it) and the reporter noted that I was from Maryland. 

I am pretty sure that my rifle was one of the most photographed rifles at the event.  I got lots of comments on the paint (all good by the way) and had more than a few people want to look through the NightForce scope.  I also had one of the soldiers shoot it quite a bit, as his injury is most likely going to make him start shooting left handed.  He was quite pleased with the accuracy of the Savage rifle, especially when he found out that there was no gun smith work done to the rifle.

All and all it was a very well run event.  Being a well run event contributed quite a bit to the enjoyment of the event.  I had a great time and will definitely be coming back next year for both the clinic and the boomershoot.  My only suggestions to Joe would be to make the prone berm about 3 or 4 feet wider as it is a bear spotting while standing on the slope (sliding down the hill while shooting prone is not much fun either), and add a few more steel gongs for the main event just in case things are not detonating reliably past 400 yards as shooting the steel is fun and you get instant feedback when you get a hit.

I will have a post up about the people that I met a bit later, as well as the video.