Sunday Catch-Ups

After a few days in Santa Fe catching my breath, I'm gearing up for the long run to the SHOT Show. For an ep of SHOOTING GALLERY, I'm looking forward to doing some filming with Mike Hughes, CEO of NextLevel Training and it's great S.I.R.T. laser training pistol and rifle. My friend Paul Markel of Student of the Gun and I were joking on the phone a couple of weeks ago that if it wasn't for the S.I.R.T. pistol there are weeks when we wouldn't have any training at all. Both of us keep a S.I.R.T. pistol on our desks and the walls of my office have different-sized IDPA targets and pictures of plates thumb-tacked up.

The SG crew is also building a nice arbalest, a siege crossbow, for our episode on What To Do Until the Ammo Returns. It's about quarter-scale, so I need a quarter-scale castle to assault. Or a quarter-scale troll...

On the road I carried the usual assortment of armament — an LCP in my pocket, my Perfected LC9 (thanks Galloway Precision) in a SafePacker (with extra mags) and the DoubleStar C3 AR in a Comp-Tac Trojan Horse rifle case. BTW, the Trojan Horse case works exactly as billed, a great AR carry system that raises no eyebrows.

Couple of articles that are well worth reading. The first is from Afterburner's Bill Whittle, one of the most thoughtful commentators on politics, survival and just plain clear thinking. It's called Bamboo Spears, and it's from his personal blog, now called The Common-Sense Resistance:

Not long ago, the man who made my career possible – Glenn Reynolds, aka The Blogfather, aka Instapundit, wrote a simple, throw-away sentence that went through my forehead like a diamond bullet. It fundamentally changed the way I see things, and like a diamond bullet through the forehead – it hurt. 

Glenn was talking about the pummeling the GOP was taking in the polls during and after the latest “government shutdown,” which was in fact caused by President Obama but which was reported in the press – universally – as being the fault of the Republicans. He wrote: 

The GOP has to deal with the problem posed by a hostile media. It’s like trying to mount an invasion when the enemy has air superiority.

Read the whole thing, please! I've been saying for a couple of years or so that the loss of the free media in the United States is a disaster of as-of-yet unplumbed proportions. Consider the staggering scandals of the Obama administration — Obamacare, Benghazi, the IRS, the NSA, overtly snooping on the media, Fast and Furious...and no doubt I'm missing some. A Republican President could not have survived even one of those scandals! Not one, much less 6 in the span of 2 years.

The Democratic/statist administration survives and even thrives because the once much-vaunted "free press" provides cover and cover-ups, "false flag" explanations and an unquestioning recitation of administration talking points — much the same way Pravda used to dutifully report the crop and manufacturing projections from the old Soviet commissars, even though they were blatant fantasy. The formerly free press now defines its job as protecting the Progressive agenda, period. Air cover, if you will. Again, read Mr. Whittle's post and take it to heart.

On a much lighter note, my old friend Massad Ayoob has an exceptional column over at Backwood Homes that really helps cut through a lot of the current thinking about firearms why we sometimes get beyond "logic" in our firearms acquisitions:

Logic? Certainly, it can't be denied. Indeed, it has to be integral to any decision making process. Sentiment, as opposed to generic emotion? Well, one thing we all have to remember is that if our collective experience with the given thing wasn't good or positive, we probably wouldn't have developed a sentimental attachment to it in the first place.  

If you think about it, this is one of the many ways in which the world of the gun is an allegory to the rest of the world we live in.  

Sentiment and logic can co-exist comfortably. That co-existence, after we've given it some thought, can be natural and efficient...and pleasing, an element which carries an intangible value which only the individual can weigh and value.

Nicely done, Brother Mas!

Time to face another week! My Ruger SR-762 should be in this week, in time for me to show it off in Phoenix next Tuesday at the SHOOTING GALLERY Live Audience filmings at Ben Avery. Looking forward to seeing lots of people there!