A Feel-Good Story for the Rest of Us

It is perhaps emblematic of the wretched state of the world that the feel good story of the week was a deadly Egyptian cobra escaping from the Bronx Zoo. This cobra's venom, it has been noted, will kill a full-grown elephant in 3 hours or a liberal in...well, really, snakes won't bite liberals because even cobras have a gag reflex.

I for one hope the poor bastard makes it...that he slices his way through the seething rat population of NYC...breaks into the sumptuous offices of Michael "What Snow?" Bloomberg, ostensibly the city's mayor when Donald Trump is busy or in the bathroom, and goes all Bruce Willis on the Mayor with a bit o'the ole ultra-violence unless Hizzoner ponies up first class passage to whatever festering North African cesspool the cobra wants to visit first, plus a metric ton of white mice to sweeten the deal. Who knows? Maybe the cobra will end up the new President for Life in Egypt or Chief Something or Other in Libya after we finish bombing it back into the Stone Age (which, c'mon, could be realistically accomplished with a string of cheap Chinese firecrackers and harsh language). Or maybe the cobra, bereft of iodine, will contract radiation poisoning, grow to the size of a skyscraper and savage Damascus, Syria, as the first Middle Eastern Godzilla. Or, heck, maybe it'll check into the Ritz of London, become a Gadsden Flag-like symbol to the rioting hordes of Harry Potter wannabes who are really really upset that they may have to pay for their own mocha lattes and get invited to the Royal Nuptials after all as a representative of "the little people."

Godspeed, little brother!

Sorry...too much time at the airport. I did manage to get to a cowboy match with the Sand Creek Raiders out east of Denver before I was packed and delivered to DIA, and the match went great. Cold, but great. Today I was shooting a set of SASS Ruger Vaqueros in .357 tuned by Ken Griner of Griner Gunworks (http://www.grinergunworks.com/).

Man, that is one heck of a set of pistols, maybe one of the best sets of Vaqueros I've ever shot! From my standpoint the guns were set up perfectly...fast to run and 100% reliable. There are 2 keys with cowboy revolvers -- at least for me. The first is that the mainspring needs to be light enough to be cocked quickly, but heavy enough to pop even CCI primers. The second thing is that the 2 guns need to be as close as possible to identical. The Griner Vaqueros are perfect on both counts.

He also bead blasted the top of the frame and barrel for a nice flat nonreflective finish, a big deal when you're shooting fast in bright sun.

Ken's work is first class, his prices are reasonable and he doesn't have a five year wait to get work done. Check him out for sure.

My friend Stuart Barber, "Tame Bill" in his cowboy incarnation, called me today to tell me he'd stumbled into a relatively cheap Browning BSS SxS 12 gauge...sigh...so many guns...so little time. As I mentioned last week, BSSes are sort of the uber-SxS shotgun, but it's getting harder and harder to find one a sane person wouldn't mind carving up for a cowboy or self-defense SxS. The things are tanks.

Hey, whatever happened to Quadaffi's all-girl bodyguard corp?