Fili-busted!

There's a really excellent piece by Glenn Reynolds on InstaPundit about the upcoming filibuster-busting:

Of course, what Bush really ought to do is nominate a quirky libertarian judge like Alex Kozinski, thus confusing the Democrats and completely undermining their "the Theocrats are coming!"TM campaign. Unfortunately, Kozinski -- though to my mind perhaps the best Court of Appeals judge of an age to be eligible for the Supreme Court -- is almost certainly too politically incorrect (read: libertarian) to fly with the Republican powers-that-be, a fact that gives the Democrats' sloganeering some shreds of credibility.

Which means that if the Democrats were smart, instead of just grimly obstructionist, they'd be out there floating names of judges like Kozinski as examples of candidates that they wouldn't filibuster (Eugene Volokh would be a good one, too!). This would put Bush in a tough spot, as he'd have to explain why his candidates were better than Kozinski or Volokh, which would be hard, as there aren't many candidates better than Kozinski or Volokh, or give more credit to the whole "Theocrats" thing.

Luckily for Bush, the Democrats aren't that smart.

Lots of us are carrying the torch for Judge Alex!

Pop Quiz!

Check out this AP article on women and the shooting sports, which is pretty good, then take our quiz. There are two interesting statistics in this article you'll need to pay close attention to. Here's statistic #1:

While 13 million people nationwide hunted in 2001 -- the most recent year for which data is available -- females accounted for only 9 percent of the total, or 1.2 million, according to a report by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Nationally, about 12 percent of all males hunt, while only about 1 percent of women do.

Okey-dokey. Now here's statistical tidbit #2:

The National Shooting Sports Foundation, the firearm industry's trade association, says about 24 percent -- or 4.7 million -- of the nation's 19.8 million target shooters in 2003 were female, according to American Sports Data.

HMMMMMM...13 million hunters; almost 20 million sport shooters. So here's the pop quiz...do we as an industry:

1) Put all our money, programs and energies into hunter recruitment and retention programs and see if we can slow the inevitable.
2) Try to DOUBLE the number of sport shooters while Republicans rule the roost to make us (and the Second Amendment) virtually untouchable in future years.

If you answered #1, CONGRATULATIONS! You're perfectly suited to step up and lead in the firearms industry! That's right — you get a secretary, a natty title, a couple of assisants and all the grant money you can burn through. If you answered #2, you pathetic loser! Go back to golf!

Here's the second part of our quiz. We all agree that an increased number of women in the overall shooting sports is a good thing, because the more women who are involved in the overall shooting sports, the harder it is for our enemies to "sell" women on their lies.

Given that substantially more women participate in the shooting sports than hunting; that the barriers to entry into the shooting sports are much lower than the barriers for entry into hunting, and that opportunities for the shooting sports are available in virtually every urban and rural area of the United States, while opportunities for hunting are much harder to source, where do you think we should place all our money, energies and efforts in recruiting women?

1) Hunting
2) Shooting sports

If you answered #1, you not only get to keep your executive position, but you get a raise — and lots more of that yummy grant money! If you answered #2, what's wrong with you? Forget golf! You're banished to bowling! You can't see the forest for the blaze orange trees! It's simple math-um-matics...let's say it cost, oh, $100 to recruit a woman to attend and participate in a shooting sport event, and it cost $1000 to recruit a woman to the hunting fields. It's easy to see that the $1000 is better spent recruiting one woman to try hunting rather than 10 women to try trap and skeet.

Understand?

Still Whipped, But Hanging On!

Okay...one more day of filming left. Spent most of today with Ritch Rand, author of THE COWBOY HAT BOOK and an altogether cool guy. If you're looking for any one of about a billion cowboy hats, Ritch is your man. Also, if you want the lowdown on the complete history of cowboy hats to trump the next boring liberal cocktail party conversation you find yourself in the middle of, ditto.

In truth, I'm relatively out of touch — certainly one of the appeals of cowboy action shooting in general. I'm not even up on the Michael Jackson trial...shudder!

I'll catch up next week, if there's anything worth catching up on.

Whipped Puppy!

Sorry to be out of touch, but we've had a couple of long long LONG shooting days...good, but long. Today was hysterical — we spent the day with Riders In The Sky, who pretty much kept us in stitches. Crank up the TIVO...this is an episode of COWBOYS you're not going to want to miss, if for no other reason that laughter is good for the soul.

The new End of Trail venue in New Mexico is just heartbreakingly beautiful...maybe they'll let me move in.

In gun news, I scammed myself onto the list for one of the first 25 of the "new" 1897 Winchester shotguns coming in from China. These are honestly top-of-the-line guns, as good (or maybe better) than the ones that rolled off the Winchester lines in 1900. Cap from Coyote Cap Gunsmithing did the consulting on the Chinese product, and he was relentless. There's something fundamentally strange — or exhilarating — about the whole idea of multiple factories in China competing over which one can make the best 19th Century American shotgun. The combination of competition and guns is the equivalent of uploading a virus into the alien mothership...sooner or later we know where this leads!

Grab That Hammer!

Okay, here's how you can make your hand feel like my hand, which spent far too much of the day shooting 420-grain, 1400-feet-per-second loads from a .500 Linebaugh revolver:

• Place your strong hand flat on a table.
• Grasp a hammer in your weak hand.
• Repeatedly smash the hammer into the web of your strong hand.
• Groan in pain.

It was fun, but DAMN, that sucker recoils! Of course, the "dueling tree" contest between me and Barry Wardlaw of Accurate Engineering (he built Jay Leno's V-twin Panhead ) using 3-inch .45 Colt custom Rugers stoked with 320-grain screamers didn't help. Thankfully, it got too dark to shoot anymore, but Barry says we can start again tomorrow morning.

Larry Crow is a brilliant gunsmith, but he's got way too much ammunition and way too many cool guns lying around!

I gotta go put a Ben-Gay patch on the web of my hand...nite nite.

Bravo For Florida!

With their revision of their self-defense law.

Of course, we're waiting with baited breath for the impendiing "Wild West gunfights in the street," the antigunners' usual bleet whenever gun laws are liberalized. Of course, even the Wild West didn't have gunfights in the street, but that's anotehr story.

BTW, am on a crappy creeping-slow long-distance dial-up connection at my hotel in Ding Dong, MO, soi I'm going to keep this short this AM. Then I've got to go ride Harleys with the guys from EASY RIDER Magazine and shoot high-powered weapons and blow up fruit with Larry Crow from Competitive Gunworks. PLEASE...no pleas for mercy from the United Fruit Liberation Front!!!

Nice Story in Florida Today!

Man, I wish we could clone this story for every news outlet in America! Here's a good example of what happens when a reporter approaches a story with an open mind:

You see them every day, shopping or dining with children, stopped at traffic lights next to you or walking alone at night through store parking lots.

Chances are, a woman you saw today was carrying a gun.

Congrats to reporter Lee Nessel Daszuta (lndaszuta@flatoday.net) on a fine job. Also, some kind words for brother Andy Standford of Options for Personal Security for doing a fine job of dealing with the media the right way! BTW, it's worth reading Andy's long article on gunfighting as a martial art. I have occasionally had my problems with Andy, but credit where credit is due!

Proof Positive That It's All Gone to Hell...

This from Editor and Publisher, through Drudge:

When reporter Craig McCool and photographer Mairin Chapman of The Kalamazoo (Mich.) Gazette went to a local party to research a series on drinking among young adults, they saw nothing wrong with partaking of the libations themselves.

But editors did. The result: The two were dismissed, and the paper ran an editor's note this weekend explaining the incident.

"Their conduct is unacceptable and violates the standards that we uphold every day as journalists," Editor Rebecca Pierce said in the note, published Saturday. "We don't condone it and we can't ignore it."

Where — WHERE, I ask you — is the next Hunter Thompson going to come from if newspapers fire reporters for drinking beer? I mean, newsguy-wise, it's okay to make up your stories, manufacture quotes, print antigun press releases as news, be inaccessible and aloof from your community, outright lie...but have a couple of beers, and YOU'RE HISTORY!

I always knew mainstream journalism was going to hell in handbasket...

Please Pass Me a Second Dessert...

You'll notice I haven't made much of the CDC report that being slightly overweight isn't nearly the lethal killer it's been made out to be:

The new analysis found that obesity — being extremely overweight — is indisputably lethal. But like several recent smaller studies, it found that people who are modestly overweight actually have a lower risk of death than those of normal weight.

The only reason I bring it up now is I remembered that I was once chosen as the "second most fit fat guy in America" by Men's Health Magazine. The issue I was featured in pictured me pitching a kayak (sadly, with me aboard it) over a three-story waterfall, proving I suppose that yuo can be both overweight and stupid at the same time.

I suppose this is some sort of sick validation on my part...

Going to Kansas City...

...Kansas City here I come, to spend a little time with Larry Crow at Competitive Edge Gunworks blasting away with some of his big boomers. Then it's on to End of Trail in Alba-Qwirky to spend some time with Riders In The Sky. Yippie-kay-ye, y'all.

In the meantime, I always like it when the other side sticks their proverbial foot into their proverbial mouths (or up their proverbial butts, and the case may be). This week's Bullet Points from the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) reports that two major newspapers, the LA Times and the Oregonian, had to eat crow after printing Brady Center "talking points" as fact on their editorial pages. Similar to a couple of years ago wthen the NTY ansd CBS had to retract "talking points" from the Violence Policy Center.

This comes in the wake of a weekend story in the Gray Lady (snore, nod, the New York Times) that the expiration of the AWB resulted in...nothing:

Despite dire predictions that the streets would be awash in military-style guns, the expiration of the decade-long assault weapons ban last September has not set off a sustained surge in the weapons' sales, gun makers and sellers say. It also has not caused any noticeable increase in gun crime in the past seven months, according to several metropolitan police departments.

Of course the Times story does its best to fret and worry about the fact that nothing happened. I loved the display given to that idiot Dianne Feinstein's push for a new AWB. Considering that the first AWB is credited with credited with the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress, which the Demo are still reeling from, what do you suppose is the likelihood of this Congress passing similar legislation? That's right! They'll get to it right after they vote to lower their own salaries!

I Pledge Allegiance...

First, this Denver story from the Washington Times via Michelle Malkin:

Altered Pledge of Allegiance stuns students

DENVER -- The students in Vincent Pulciani's seventh-grade class were reciting the Pledge of Allegiance this week when they heard the voice over the intercom say something they'd never heard before, at least not during the Pledge.

Instead of "one nation, under God," the voice said, "one nation, under your belief system."

The bewildered students at Everitt Middle School in Wheat Ridge never even got to "indivisible," according to Vincent's mother, Christina Pulciani-Johnson.

Then, this important renovation of the Pledge, from ViewFromTheFoothills blog:

"I pledge [allegiance] some occasional recognition
to the [Flag] symbols of oppression
of the [United States] diverse indigenous peoples of [America] the landmass referred to by oppressive European conquistadors as "America"
and to the [Republic] totalitarian theocracy for which it stands,
[one nation,] a Balkanized patchwork of cultures,
[under God,] under each individuals' personal belief system
[indivisible,] divided into innumerable unique communities of culture,
[with liberty and justice for all.] where some are more equal than others."

Finally! After This, Cold Fusion...

Scientists solve unpopped popcorn

To pop or not to pop lies in the hull

INDIANAPOLIS, Indiana (AP) -- Eat your way to the bottom of almost any bag of popcorn and there they are: the rock-hard, jaw-rattling unpopped kernels known as old maids.

The nuisance kernels have kept many a dentist busy, but their days could be numbered: Scientists say they now know why some popcorn kernels resist popping into puffy white globes.

Turns out it has something to do with the new Pope...

PS To Antigunner

PLEASE, keep commenting! I love it when antigunners comment; while I've yet to be converted (although I'm thinking Druid chanting might work for me!), I've had a lot of luck converting antigunners. Heck, I'd like to invite you guys to the range!

Cruising the Beach with Rich White Folks!

So today I biked 17-Mile Drive between Monterey and Carmel-By-The-Sea, which once boasted of Clint Eastwood as mayor. It is truly one of the great bike rides in the world — you got your otters; you got your seals and sea lions; you got your billion year-old Monterey cypress and drop-dead scenery; you got your deer on the golf courses and flocks of artists trying to capture the Pacific at its best.

I got to ride by the world-famous golf courses (hey, even I've heard of Pebble Beach!) and the ritzy-titzy resorts I used to speak at when I was a semi-famous motivational speaker. One of the resorts is the home of Ansel Adams' prints, and I once spent a wonderful afternoon looking at the master's test print series (zone system for b&w prints, remember?), including the series for the magnificent McKinley Reflected In Wonder Lake. Once I got offered a tee time at Pebble Beach as a bennie for speaking...I asked whether they had a good sporting clays course, since golf in the absence of exploding balls pretty much blows past me.

[And yes, I will STILL come speak to your group, if you're willing to chum the water with a few bucks! Plus. I'll cut you a deal if you're a gun/firearms industry group. Actually, I've been working up a new talk that should cause most speech brokers to break out into hives — I call it GUNFIGHTER LOGIC. Cool, huh? It'll rock.]

Tomorrow, I though I'd go sea kayaking...

Chrysler LeBaron Snuffed! Man Charged!

From the South Florida Sun-Sentinel:

A man was jailed briefly over the weekend for shooting his broken-down car -- five times.

Broward Sheriff's Office spokesman Hugh Graf said John McGivney, 64, walked out of his home at the Bougainvilla Isles Apartments, on the 4500 block of Bougainvilla Drive, clutching a loaded .380 caliber semi-automatic pistol in his hand around 1:30 p.m. on Friday, April 15th,

McGivney, Graf said, walked across the parking lot and up to his green 1994 Chrysler LeBaron. He pointed the gun at the aging auto and calmly pumped five rounds into car's hood.

When George Haberkorn, the property's manager, asked what he was doing, McGivney replied, "I'm putting my car out of its misery, George."

I gotta say that a .380 is a little light for a LeBaron. Maybe a .44 Magnum would have been a better choice. Or an RPG.

And Speaking of Idiots...

This from the Houston Chronicle's coverage of the NRA Members' Meeting:

But the former ATF officials say the NRA's policies actually protect criminal gun purchases because they are the bread and butter of the U.S. gun industry. Since a gun lasts about 100 years, most law-abiding gun owners buy only one or a few in their lifetime, Nunziato said.

Criminals, on the other hand, buy new firearms every few years, he said.

"If it wasn't for criminals, there wouldn't be a gun industry in this country," Nunziato said, adding that the claims of the NRA and other gun-rights groups that they are protecting law-abiding citizens with their policies are false.

"The only people it's protecting are criminals."

"Nunziato" is Gerald Nunziato, the former head of ATF's National Tracing Center. Nunziato is now a partner in Crime Gun Solutions, another one of the numerous antigun group trying to scam a few dollars from local law enforcement budgets or suck on the public tit. This guy's a rocket scientist, isn't he? I mean, there's five acres of displays of GUNS GUNS GUNS, which are purchased by law-abiding gun owners who actually WANT MORE THAN ONE GUN! Maybe he should get out more.

Our guys, in the person of Alan Gottlieb from the Citizens Committee to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA), were quick to call a spade a spade:

CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb fired back: "If it wasn't for remarks like Nunziato's, perhaps law-abiding American gun owners would not consider ATF an adversarial agency when it comes to Second Amendment rights. His comment is nothing short of slanderous. I guess in his opinion, we're all criminals."

Maybe we should all form a local branches of Crime Gun Solutions (which, BTW, only turns up anecdotally in a Google search) to try and scam a couple of bucks on our own, which we could then donate to the NRA. I'm sure we could all do a better job than Nunziato. Hell, that SWAT MONKEY could do a better job!

Who Shocked the Monkey?

Yes indeed, it's Tuesday, and I'm happy to report that monkeys — yes, monkeys! — are finally getting their due. This from AP via Drudge:

MESA, Ariz. - The Mesa Police Department is looking to add some primal instinct to its SWAT team. And to do that, it's looking to a monkey.

"Everybody laughs about it until they really start thinking about it," said Mesa Officer Sean Truelove, who builds and operates tactical robots for the suburban Phoenix SWAT team. "It would change the way we do business."

Truelove is spearheading the department's request to purchase and train a capuchin monkey, considered the second smartest primate to the chimpanzee. The department is seeking about $100,000 in federal grant money to put the idea to use in Mesa SWAT operations.
[...]
Weighing only 3 to 8 pounds with tiny humanlike hands and puzzle-solving skills, Truelove said it could unlock doors, search buildings and find suicide victims on command. Dressed in a Kevlar vest, video camera and two-way radio, the small monkey would be able to get into places no officer or robot could go.

I'm liking this a lot! As you know, I've gone on record saying that Michael Jackson's chimp, Bubbles, could blow the lid off the California trial. Koko the gorilla is checking out breasts; Peter Jackson is remaking King Kong...believe me, primate fever has tipped.

My question is whether, in addition to the itsy-bitsy Kevlar vest, are we talking a North American Arms mini-revolver, or do we need to speak to Kel-Tec to put together a good semiauto, maybe the same size as the Kel-tec .32 but in, say, 5.7 X 28? That would be One Bad Monkey!

Meanwhile, for those of you worrying about what the future holds in weaponry, here's a long analysis of the weapons used on the hit television series Battlestar Galactica. Apparently, in the far distant future, space marines will use all the leftover MP-5s discarded by 21st Century police special teamms in their rush to M-4 5.56 carbines. Of course, over on Stargate SG-1 they're hosing them down with FNH P90s. I always kind of liked Outland, the Sean Connery B-movie version of High Noon in space, where James Bond cranked up a sawed-off pump shotgun. If I was going to do a space movie, I'd only use SASS-authorized pre-1900 weaponry. Be kinda cool, wouldn't it?

Words for the Week

Especially for my friends who come up with the clever ways for me to die. This from the redoubtable and reprehensible Al Swearengen on HBO's DEADWOOD, after bitch-slapping the hapless newspaper publisher who "despaired" after he found his presses destroyed:

"Did you die? No, you didn't die. The world ends when you die. Until then, there's more punishment. So stand to it like a man, but give 'em somthing back!"

AMEN Brother Ted!

"Remember the Alamo! Shoot 'em! To show you how radical I am, I want carjackers dead! I want rapists dead! I want burglars dead! I want child molesters dead! I want the bad guys dead! No court case. No parole. No early release. I want 'em dead. Get a gun, and when they attack you, shoot 'em."

Ted Nugent
Speaking at the NRA Convention last weekend

Can you give me an "AMEN!?!" Having been on the front lines for a long time, I got a lot of questions at the NRA members meeting about what individuals can do as the battle for our rights enters this new phase. I'd thought about my answer beforehand, and I decided there was no better advice that a phrase I stole from the gay rights movement in New York City in the mid-1970s:

"Out of the closets and into the streets!"

For too long gunowners — myself included — have tended to keep a pretty low profile. We might write letters to the editor, but we weren't necessarily visible in our communities. Part of that invisibility was, of course, a question of security — we have stuff scumbags want to steal. But another part was that we were constantly under fire by the liberal media and the liberal elements in our community who had access to the media. And we simply got tired.

Well, it's time! I am no longer invisible. I no longer allow antigun crap to pass unchallenged, whether it's in the media or at a friendly party among friends. If my guns make you uncomfortable, tough. Either get over it or get gone! I am not interested in "understanding your side of the argument," because your side of the argument is based on lies, falsehoods, spin and propaganda. Sure I believe in "gun control" — front sight, squeeze the trigger.

Hardware Update

As promised, a quick look at the newly overhauled polymer-framed FNP pistols from FNH. Here's the AMERICAN RIFLEMAN piece on the original gun, which wasn't bad. Still, it was pretty much what one wag termed, "AFPP" — another friggin' plastic pistol. What FNH VP Rick DeMilt, a long-time shooter, did was, essentially, "de-engineer" the gun. The truth is there's a difference between a gun designed by engineers and a gun designed by shooters [a micro example of that might be double-stack pistol magazines...which is more important, minimum size and efficiency of feeding, or the magazine's ability to function when it's full of sand?].

DeMilt replaced the outsourced barrels with FN hammer-forged barrels, redesigned the hammer-drop mechanism to make it the easiest to use in the business and executed a whole series of small ergonomic changes to both the 9mms and .40 S&W vedrsions. Whhere he really hit the jackpot was revising the manufacturing process on the fire contrl system. The guns came off the line with very crisp 3 1/2 pound single-action triggers. "That was a fortuitous accident," DeMilt said Saturday. "If we had specified that, we probably couldn't have done it!"

I shot the hell out of both the 9mm and the .40s, and I would rate the news guns a solid TWO TRIGGER FINGERS UP — a light polymer-framed pistol with great trigger pull that feels like a Browning High-Power (which, of course, FN has made since the Dawn of Time). MSRP??? Less than $500. Beat that, sports fans! This is going to be a serious police contender.

Meanwhile, over at Taurus, I got a look at production line versions of the Taurus cowboy revolver, the Gaucho. Golly gee...beautiful case-hardened frame and hammer and deep bluing on the barrel, cylinder and gripframe, .45 Colt, familiar four clicks when you cock the hammer, crescent ejector button, swwwwwweeeeeetttt trigger, checkered black plastic grips, that perfect hand fit...looks and feels like...one of them Raging Pony S.A.A.s! This is a damn nice gun, and I predict it's going to rock Cowboy World...especially with an MSRP in the $650 range. Here's one of the early reviews; Tequila, host of COWBOYS and 5X World Champion cowboy action shooter, and I should have our T&E versions in a couple of weeks, and the guns should be in the retail pipeline pretty quickly.

The Taurus version of the old Colt Lightning pump action carbine, the Thunderbolt, is still a couple of months off. Tequila will be getting a first run gun, so we'll soon see how a short-pump action gun runs against a traditional lever action.

The Taurus 1911 project has been fast-tracked, and the first guns should be available late summer/early fall if everything goes smoothly. I had dinner with a top 1911 mechanic a few weeks ago, and he waxed poetic about the proto version Taurus sent him to wring out.