Ted Gundy is a veteran of World War 2. He fought as a sniper through the Battle of the Bulge until he zigged when zagging was called for and snagged a German shell with his right leg.

He recently sent an e-mail to the producer and host of the Outdoor Channel‘s Shooting USA programme, asking about the intricacies of making a thousand-yard shot.

The result of that e-mail is here:

Grab a kleenex or two, the air is going to be a wee bit dusty in your area.

84 years old. 1000 yards. Five inch group.

Hoo-AH!

LawDog

While I appreciate that it takes a ruggedly heterosexual man to wear Hello Kitty bandaids when nothing else is available, must get manly bandaids for the odd handyman mishaps that will occur.

XOXO
Phlegmmy
– Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

“Usagi” is the Japanese word for rabbit. It is also “U.S.A. GI”, which — if you are of punnish bent — can be a nice co-incidence.

If you want to see bunny commandos doing Bad Things to extremist fundamentalist camels, there is a video you must see.

Be advised, there is violence. Graphic, blood-spattering violence. A lot of it. There is also more than a bit of foul language — and that includes the title of the video.

Clicky here. Remember that I warned you about the graphic violence and the graphic language.

Oh, and watch it in High Definition.

The twitching bunny tail on the sniper caused me to about lose it. I am a sick, sick person.

Watch. Enjoy.

LawDog

After steadfastly refusing to be winkled out of his seat, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has resigned, leaving the Egyptian military in charge of that country.

Huh.

My Prediction For the Day: In five years — ten at the most — the Egyptian people will look back with considerable nostalgia and longing upon the Good Old Days of Mubarak’s reign.

LawDog

Last summers slam order on tree rats, along with the removal of anything that might constitute a Squirrel Highway to a distance of eight feet or so from the house, has resulted in a blessed absence of skittering noises coming from the attic.

So, when Farmgirl pointed towards a fat arboreal rodent busily making his way from tree to tree across the alley towards Casa LawDog and mentioned that he was most probably en route to the attic, I assured her that the surviving squirrels had had a season or two of training and weren’t that dumb.

Of course, you know what happened next.

I was of the impression that as that fluffy tail disappeared into the attic, I set my tea down, excused myself, strolled into the house, picked up the Browning, checked the chamber, and walked back out to see if the little furry bastard would peek out before settling in.

Other folks have opined that there was a yelp, and that I was gone and back before the tea-mug hit the ground.

Anyhoo.

There I was, concentrating on the front sight, when there was motion to my left, and EvylRobot was there with his own .22 rifle.

And then I noticed that Vine has the exit hole lit up, and that there were a large number of people inside of the house, banging on the ceiling and barking (yes, the dogs were barking, too, but I’m here to tell you that MattG has a bark to put the fear of God into just about anything that walks on this little green dirtball) to drive the squirrel out through a hail of rim-fire lead.

I have the best friends.

The topper to the whole episode, and what sent the Fair Sex present into absolute gales of laughter, was when someone tapped me in the ribs and Holly handed me one of her ambrosial deviled eggs.

Folks, if you’re a fan of the deviled egg, don’t turn the opportunity to put the gobble to one out of Holly’s kitchen.

I’m stuffing the hen fruit into my gob, when I hear a strangled yelp from next to me, and EvylRobot manages, “Wait, wait, I don’t have you covered!” as he noshes an egg of his own.

I’m not sure exactly why this was so funny, but it just about kicked the gigglebox right over for the ladies present.

I had an absolutely wonderful time, and made out like a bandit with swag.

OldNFO; Jennifer, EvylRobot and Isaac; Vine; Farmgirl; Holly and JPG; MattG and his lovely wife; ChristinaLMT; my brother Chris; and Ambulance Driver blessed us with their company, and the Atomic Nerds were there in spirit (and by spirit, I mean they sent two cases of Nerd Beer. Oh. My. Gawd.)

Everything under the sun was discussed; there was laughter, good friends, good beer and everyone had a good time. I couldn’t ask for a better party.

LawDog

What is “primer wipe”?

Oh, boy. Got some time?

To explain primer wipe, first let me explain what the “firing cycle” is in a modern firearm.

The “firing cycle” is the series of operations involved in a modern weapon to fire a round. Generally speaking it goes something like this:

1) Feeding. This is the step in which a complete cartridge is introduced into the chamber of the firearm. It is followed by:

2) Locking. In this step the bolt or breech locks to the barrel, so as to contain the pressure generated by the next step, which is:

3) Firing. Sometimes this is called ‘ignition’, it is when the primer is ignited by the firing pin or striker, and the round is fired. Next is:

4) Unlocking. Once the pressure in the chamber of the firearm has dropped to a safe level, the bolt or breech unlocks from the barrel, which leads to:

5) Extraction. The empty case is removed from the chamber; and finally:

6) Ejection. The empty case is removed from the firearm.

And the cycle continues back with “Feeding”.

Primer wipe is a condition in which the firing pin or striker impacts the primer during the “Firing” portion of the cycle, and remains embedded therein through “Unlocking”, “Extraction”, and “Ejection”. As the empty case is kicked out of the firearm, it is dragged across that un-retracted firing pin, causing a characteristic oval or tear-drop gouge, and — in extreme cases — smearing the metal of the primer out of the primer pocket and onto the case itself.

There are many different causes of primer wipe, but they all boil down to one of two reasons.

The first of which is that the firing pin or striker is unable to retract after firing.

While, in and of itself, not a dangerous condition, the typical firing pin/striker assembly is a light-weight metal alloy designed to be driven hard enough by a relatively dinky mainspring to ignite a primer.

It is not designed for lateral stress. Sooner or later being yanked sideways every time the weapon fires is going to break, bend, spindle, mutilate or otherwise damage the needle-shaped firing pin or striker assembly to the point that it can no longer function.

Which, since the firing pin or striker is kind of necessary for the whole ‘bang’ part of your bang-stick, pretty much guarantees said bang-stick is going to be Paws-Up until fixed.

This can range from being Rather Annoying if it happens at the mid-point of the Palma match or as the trophy of a lifetime disappears over a ridge; all the way up to A Bloody Nuisance if it happens during the third shot at five critters trying to get up under your hat with you.

The second reason for primer wipe is when the firing pin simply doesn’t have the time to retract.

In other words, the firing pin itself and the firing pin channel are clean and to spec, but the firearm unlocks, extracts and ejects before the firing pin spring has time to push the pin back to its’ resting position.

Folks, this can be a Bad Thing.

There’s a reason for the second and fourth segments of the firing cycle. When that pin hits the primer for a brief part of a second there is all sorts of nastiness going on inside that chamber. The locking and unlocking is to make sure all that nastiness stays in the chamber and does its’ job: driving the bullet out the muzzle-end at velocities up to, and including, trans-sonic.

If the firearm unlocks too soon — well, that afore-mentioned nastiness is all of sudden up under your nose, introducing itself to you.

I’ll let the Gentle Reader ruminate on that for a moment.

Anyhoo, “primer wipe”. Hope it was informative.

LawDog

The first gentleman who taught me combat with a firearm — as opposed to shooting with a firearm — had some squirrelly ideas about the subject.

As a “fer instance” he thought that each side of your brain could do one thing at a time under stress; so the obvious thing to do under stress was look at the threat with one side and kill the threat with the other side.

Anyhoo, he was of the opinion that the natural position of the human hand under stress was clenched into a fist. Based on this. he opined that the problem wasn’t pulling the trigger, but rather relaxing your trigger finger out of the natural clenched fist enough to allow you to re-pull said trigger.

The solution? Pull the trigger, and keep the trigger pulled back through recoil, keep it pulled back until you reacquired the threat, then release your index finger and immediately pull it back. Rinse and repeat until the threat was gone, then relax your finger, remove it from the trigger-guard, safe your weapon and holster it.

When I got to the Panhandle Regional Law Enforcement Academy in the early ’90’s, Ken Ferrin and Mike Dunlap taught a similar method of shooting, called IIRC, “Trigger Reset”. In this, we were taught on the first shot to pull the trigger until the pistol fired, then relax our trigger finger enough (about an eighth of an inch on the S&W 5900 series pistols we were training with) for the trigger to reset, then pull to the rear again.

When taught correctly, this is a fast and accurate way to shoot; but it can create a bit of a hullabaloo from newbie range-masters who see me transitioning to my second or third target with the trigger clamped all the way back*.

Good, bad or indifferent, under stress I default to this. Once the shooting starts, my trigger stays clamped to the rear more often than it’s released. I do this with my pistol, with an AR15‡, and with my Mossberg.

Yes, under stress, I pull the trigger, work the pump, release the trigger, pull the trigger, work the pump, so-on and so forth.

I mention this, because by way of Caleb over at Gun Nuts Media we discover that this decades-old habit of mine renders the new Kel-Tec shotgun useless to me under stress.

*sigh*

I’m trying to like Kel-Tec’s newest stuff — really, I am — but the last two of their guns I’ve played with have been problematical.

Oleg Volk brought his PMR-30 and his RFB to Blogarado, and I wasn’t impressed by either one.

The first time I fired the PMR-30 — and, granted, several other people had been playing with it before I got my paws on it — it was pulling the rims loose from the case walls and failing to feed. I fired a couple of rounds through it and passed it off.

Later that day, Farmdad handed it to me after he had dunked it in CLP, and it went through a magazine fairly well — only had to tap it into battery once — but to my mind a pistol shouldn’t have lube literally dripping out of it to get it to work.

The RFB was worse. Oh, it fired like a champ and ran everything we put into it … but every case it chucked out had one of the most beautiful examples of primer wipe I have ever seen. To the point that OldNFO pulled the trigger once, looked at the case and then refused to shoot it again.

Vine, Farmdad, and I dinked around with that rifle for a while, trying to isolate the cause of the primer wipe, but only managed to launch the gas regulator knob across the Colorado high desert.

I understand that the Kel-Tecs that Oleg brought were early models — if not prototypes — but between the PMR-30 and RFB I’ve personally handled, and the news about the trigger bug feature on the new KSG …

… folks, I’ve got to give the new Kel-Tec stuff a thumbs down.

LawDog

*No, I don’t move with the trigger held back, unless I’m shooting as I move.

‡No, auto-fire isn’t a problem. Unless the weapon is belt-fed, crew-served and/or involves an electric motor, auto-fire is a fantastic way to convert money into noise, and is significantly less-efficient than rapid single-fire at punting critters in front of the Pearly Gates.

Tightened up the place some. Added some long-overdue links to my blogroll, with some more coming — probably.

LawDog

Six people died in the Tucson, AZ shooting:

Christina Taylor Green
Dorothy Morris
John Roll
Phyllis Schneck
Dorwin Stoddard
Gabriel Zimmerman

Fourteen others were wounded, but these people — each some mother’s child — died.

These people were killed and injured by a deranged dungheap rat, who probably should have been taken out behind the barn and Ol’ Yeller’d a long time ago.

I do not name this pile of walking fungus-scrapings, as I have seen his smirking face repeatedly on the National Media, and it is clear from his expression that he is enjoying his moment of fame and glory — he shall have none of that from me.

Also notice, do, that I make no mention of his political leanings, aspirations or alleged beliefs. This is intentional, as rabid dogs have no politics — only a disease.

I notice that others have made no such distinction. To these people I have two things to say:

One: have the common decency to stop dancing in the blood and making political hay with their dead bodies long enough for their kith and kin to lay their loved ones to rest. There will be more than time enough for your hypocrisies and your political agendas once the mourning is done.

Two: have a care to remember that when you point a finger at me, you’re pointing the other three at yourself. When you’re running your sanctimonious mouth about the “violent tone of political discord”, you’d better take a good, long look at your side — it wasn’t Republicans who filmed an “art movie” about assassinating President Bush.

And where the hell was your outrage when someone (hint: not a Tea Party member, not a conservative, and not a Republican) shot and destroyed his television because the daughter of Sarah Palin happened to be on a popular dance show? Where was your concern with “civil political discourse”?

Have members of the Tea Party and other conservatives stepped up to, if not over, the courteous line in politics? Oh, yes.

But before you go flapping your sanctimonious, hypocritical cake-holes in our direction, I strongly suggest you take a broom to your own damned side. The lovely Michelle Malkin has a list where you can start.

LawDog