Life Off the Edge

 I received a knife and stuff catalog in the mail today.  They have a lot of self-protection items -- stun guns and pepper spray.  Since my granddaughter will be going to college this fall, I was thinking about items she might be able to carry for self-defense.  We are sending her to a class in April.

Anyway, I often see knives of certain types with a blurb that says "No Ship to CA, NY, MA".  The list of states varies.  Even here in a relatively sensible state, there are knives and weapons I can own but which would get me in trouble if I carried them.  I think this is stupid, but it's generally not too restrictive.

Check this out -- stun guns:  "No Ship to HI, MA, MI, NJ, NY, RI, WI, PA".  Seven states do not want women to have so much as the benefit of what amounts to a cattle prod in case they are attacked.  My understanding about stun guns -- based on the opinions of people who know more than I do -- is that they are next to useless.  Tasers are very effective.  Stun guns just make people mad.  OK, so maybe that's part of it.  I doubt it.

Impact baton:  "No Ship to CA, MA, NY, NJ, PA".  Remember that scene in "Lonesome Dove" where Captain Caul (Tommy Lee Jones) takes his quirt to the rude Army Scout who is trying to commandeer Newt's horse?  A collapsible baton is about like that.  If you were attacked, it is not a bad impact weapon, if you have room to use it, and if your attacker has no room to run.  But, really, couldn't we say the same of a good, stout hickory limb?

Mace is illegal, apparently, in DC, MA, NY, HI, MI, WI, NJ.  People can probably get mace and pepper spray with a permit or something -- I mean, if they really need it.

Double-edged daggers cannot be sold to customers in CA, MA, NJ, or NH (live free but only with one sharp edge). Looks like some -- but not all -- are also illegal in Arkansas -- maybe a length issue.   Trench knives -- with knuckledusters, on the other hand, are banned in NY and DE, in addition to the usual suspects of CA and MA.  Does any of this make sense?

Looks like you may need state permission to purchase a BB-gun in CA, MA, and NY, because -- all together now -- 'You'll shoot your eye out!'

And so it goes.  Any kind of assisted opening knife cannot be legally owned by residents of New York City lest they drink too much soda and start re-enacting "West Side Story".

Gentlemanly sword canes are forbidden in CA, MA, and NY, likely related to the extinction of gentlemen in those bastions of the safety dance.   

Finally there is an item called a "Full-Metal Core Cedar Tire Thumper".  It's 19" long, and looks something like a cut-down baseball bat.  Apparently they drilled out the center and stuck in a piece of rebar or something -- instead of cork.  It is illegal to sell such a stick to the grateful subjects of CA, MA, NY, NJ, and PA.

Why would this "tire-thumper" be more dangerous than an aluminum baseball bat?  Why would it be more dangerous than an 18" piece of pipe from Home Depot?  I can almost guarantee that I have chunks of dried and seasoned cedar laying on the ground around here that would split a person's skull with or without a chewy lead center.

When all you have is a lawmaker, everything looks like a crime. 

Catch .303

I posted this link in a reply to John, but I think it might be good to put up separately, too.

Ian Robertson was an Australian soldier during the Korean War, a digger.  He was a sniper, armed with a .303 Enfield.

All snipers were hated, good ones were feared. The better he shot, the more desperate enemy officers would be to kill him to stop the loss of morale. This is the sniper's dilemma: the more enemies you hit, the more return fire you attract and the more likely you are to die. Call it a Catch .303.

There is nothing glamorous or glorious about killing, even when it is necessary. I do not want to have to fight my fellow humans, let alone my fellow Americans.  I hope that "come and take it" never becomes a literal process.  Still, life and freedom -- two sides of the same coin, are worth fighting, even dying, even killing to save. 

The North Koreans and the Chinese were beasts.  Don't think, though, they were born any different than the rest of us.  If war were to come to America we would see the same kind of horrors perpetrated, the same kind of heroism exemplified.

Be careful what you wish for.   

Keep both eyes open, point and snap-shoot, count the shots and reload after six.

One Year On, Trayvon Gone

And so is much of the enthusiasm.  The administrator over at the Last Refuge (Conservative Tree House) gives a first-person account of the "rally" for Martin in NYC. 

It's worth the time to read it.

The Last Refuge has great information on the whole timeline if you go down the page.  I'm adding it to the sidebar.

The way this whole mess has played out really points up how the media works, how twisted it is.  Initially this appeared to be an Obama-friendly narrative.  An over-zealous, incompetent, gun-crazed white male chased down some innocent little black kid and callously shot him down.  While it quickly became apparent that it was more complex than that, the media continued to push supporting imagery and to do their best to keep the disinformation campaign going.

The bit-players in this bastardized daytime drama, Lawyer J. Nobel Daggett Crump and Martin's parents, saw a chance for a payday.  The parents are as stupid and despicable as the media and quickly exhausted any sympathy I might have felt over their loss.  To them, Trayvon alive was a problem, another violent, arrogant thug-wannabe auditioning for a spot at the gray-bar resort; Trayvon dead looked, for a while, like gold.  

Sadly, George Zimmerman will likely never get his life back.  I hope and pray that he is at least able to live in freedom.  Perhaps he will be able to re-locate and find a new direction in life.

Did Zimmerman do anything wrong?  Not morally.  He may have acted incautiously and gotten himself into a situation he did not, but, perhaps, could have anticipated.  But he was trying to look out for his neighbors and his neighborhood.  That's not a bad thing.  It's a shame that he has had to suffer for it, simply because the propaganda wing of the new fascist Amerika decided they needed some racism and anti-gun material in an election year. 

Care and Feeding of the .44 Remingon Magnum

I talk about the .22LR a lot because it is ubiquitous, easy for people to shoot and amazingly effective, and, of course, I love the .22 WMR.  Still if one were to put a gun to my head, so to speak, and demand that I pick one and only one gun to keep and carry, one of the choices I would ponder, after my shotgun and the rimfires, would be my Ruger Super Blackhawk .44 magnum.  If I were able acquire plenty of ammunition or knew that I had access to plenty of components and my reloading setup, the .44 would be hard not to choose.

At the top of my list for any firearm is accuracy.  It's a fact that I have tested over and over again.  For some strange reason, I shoot the Blackhawk as well or better than any of my other firearms.  Given the fact that is has open sights, I shoot it about as well as I do my scoped rifles.  I would say it is rivaled only by my Single-Six.  Maybe I was born to be a plowboy because the old plowhandle works for me.

The thing about the .44 is that it can be loaded to do all kinds of jobs.  Stick a relatively soft cast bullet in over a modest load of fast powder and use it for small game.  Put a 180-grain jacketed bullet on top of a bunch of H110 and you have a longer-range varmint or whitetail walloper. 

A maximum load of H110 behind a 300-grain solid would probably work for dangerous game.  I'm not going to try it, but people have taken some mighty big game with Mr. Keith's baby. 

Speaking of that patron saint of the Double-4, Keith's original load was a 240-grain (relatively) hard-cast bullet clocking along about 1200 fps.  Remington loaded their first 240, gas-checked bullet to give 1400 fps out of an 8-inch S&W Model 29.  That's a good stiff round.  I shoot a 240-grain jacketed bullet over a non-max load of 2400 that will exceed 1300 fps.  It might actually approach 1400 in my 7.5 inch Blackhawk.  Even in my big SA, you don't have to wonder if it went off.  Generally speaking, that bullet will not stay in one of our goaty little whitetails. 

Then I have my "light" load.  The load that I use for general plinking, pest eradication, and, if it came to it, self-defense, is a gas-checked, hard-cast 240-grain bullet (Oregon Trail, I think, could be wrong because I didn't write it down). I load that bullet in a .44 mag case with a regular Winchester LP primer and around 12 grains of Blue Dot.  That's a way reduced load.  The minimum listed in the manual on the magnum side is around 15 grains.  It's really a very mild .44 Special load in a .44 magnum case.  It shoots to basically the same point of aim as the jacketed bullet load out to forty or fifty yards.  I'm pretty sure it would kill a deer just as dead as the other one, and it's mild enough for rapid fire.  I found it to be quite adequate for most purposes. 

REMINDER and CAVEAT: I have had no problems with these loads in my particular revolver.  That DOES NOT mean they are safe.  Refer to manufacturers' reloading manuals and  DO NOT EVER use any load you run across on the internet from some half-wit like me.   

Should a person be inclined to use a .44 magnum for self-defense, one option would be to simply pick up some .44 Special high-performance rounds -- such as Hornady Critical Defense, Winchester Silvertips, or Speer Gold Dot.  The good old Silvertip, for example, is pushing a 200-grain bullet at 900 fps, yielding 360 ft/lbs -- probably from a 4-inch barrel.  That will certainly do the job on the business end while being mild and controllable for the shooter. 

Practice ammunition would be easy to load up in magnum cases using cast bullets and .44 Special recommended loads. 

The .44 magnum is a very versatile and useful round.  I used to think the .357 magnum was the perfect handgun round -- and it is very good.  Yet, over the years, I have come to rely more and more on the .44 as my go-to hunting handgun.  Accurate and powerful, or accurate and mild, the .44 is what it eats.   

Tumblin' Dice

In case you didn't notice, Karl Denninger has put up his Tickercon 1 post.

This is taken from the old DefCon levels back in the Cold War.  Tickercon 1 means that all your preparations should be done.  Do not delay. 

Has Denninger correctly called it?  There's no way to know.  A tornado is going to pass over your house.  Will it be on the ground when it does?  That's where we are at. 

The thing to watch out for is being stampeded.  The election in Italy signals that the problems intrinsic to Europe and the financial union are completely unresolved and unresolvable (long term).  The Japanese decision to devalue was already making things unstable.  The sequester is being pitched as TEOTWAWKI, but it's miniscule.  The great fear of the political class is that people won't be hurt by the cuts and decide they can live just fine with less and less expensive government.  

I recommend taking everything you hear for the next week or two with skepticism.  To the extent possible spread serenity.  Try to keep those around you thinking rationality rather than emotionally.  Beware of media hype and of conveniently propaganda-rich events. 

Aside from making sure you are well-supplied, no action is better than panicked action at this point. 

How to Work with Your Local Law Enforcement

A Fort Worth police officer shot a dog.  Frank Brown shot Lily for no good reason, other than cops can do that and get away with it.  Those of us who love dogs, and even those who simply respect property rights, get all upset when we hear one of these stories.  Mark and Cindy Boling, Lily's owners, were upset, too.  To them, it was roughly equivalent to murder.  It was certainly wanton destruction of private property.

The Bolings wanted revenge at first, but they decided on a better course of action.

[They] switched gears and began advocating for more training. Lo and behold, police Chief Jeffrey Halstead listened, expressed empathy, and established a training program that will eventually reach 800 local patrol officers.

It turns out that Officer Frank Brown, who was suspended for his actions, came to understand the unnecessary trauma he had caused the Bolings.  He signed up for the training class as soon as it was offered. 

Lileks suggests the proper way to complain in today's Bleat:

Anyway. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: Complain. Not with anger. Not at the person who has no power. Not in a fashion you would like directed at you. But complain.  

We can feel bad when we get mistreated.  We can take it personally.  We can take it out on the perpetrator.  Or we can take positive, constructive action.  This is power and the benefit of operating locally.  This is the horror of a massive, centralized, faceless and amorphous bureaucracy. 

You can deal with a person.  Sure, you will occasionally run into a wicked, dedicated, irredeemable jackass.  They are out there.  They are, however, a lot more prevalent in the mob-like atmosphere of government bureaus and regulatory agencies where they can hide behind "policies" and "supervisors" and "rules".  IRS, DMV, ATF, EPA.  They are drawn to those type of environments like rattlesnakes to prairie dog towns. 

Anyway, study the approach the Bolings took.  Read Lileks.  Have a good weekend.

No Kidding

Economists Warn Fed Risks Losing Control (via Denninger). 

Some witchdoctors dowsers economists, including a former Fed governor, have decided that money printing could get out of hand, even if you call it quantitative easing.  It could even result in (gasp) inflation.  It's really insightful:  The combination of a massively expanded central bank balance sheet and an unsustainable public debt trajectory is a mix that has the potential to substantially reduce the flexibility of monetary policy ....


Who would have thought that printing money would paint the central bankers into a corner? 

The central bank is currently purchasing $85 billion a month of Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities, following two previous rounds totaling $2.3 trillion, in an effort to lower an unemployment rate stuck near 7.9 percent. Once the economy strengthens, the central bank plans to unwind its balance sheet by raising interest rates and selling many of the assets acquired over the past four years.

To be sort of fair, I understand that, since they are all bankers and buddies, they felt that they had no choice except to try and keep the financial system afloat for a while.  The idea -- the hope was, I'm sure, that things would pick up, and the Fed could shift the burden, and if federal revenues were enhanced, that, coupled with some sensible spending cuts would close the gap.  They could not reckon with the political regime of a Chicago mobster like Obama & Friends.  The political calculation of expanding the reach of government, of destroying the entrepreneurs, of creating more and more extensive government dependence took priority over the raw reality of economic considerations.  It was what was good for Obama, not America. 

Now, of course, there is no one interested in buying those assets.  Europe is coming apart.  The Chinese and the Russians are hunting for gold, and Bernanke is insulating his mansion with Treasuries. 

Fiscal dominance refers to a situation in which a central bank is forced to purchase government debt and finance deficits through inflation. If the central bank does not do this, interest rates will rise and the economy will contract and the government could even default, leading to a crisis that would cause an even worse contraction, the authors say. The central bank “will in effect have little choice,” they write.

The problem is that the Fed is supposedly obligated to keep inflation at 2% or less.  They have done this by playing fast and loose with the statistics and claiming that "core" inflation was 1.6% last year.  We all know it was higher than that but as long as the fiction can be maintained, the Fed can leave interest rates at or near zero.  Once they are forced to admit inflation is getting out of hand, they will be pressured to jack up rates.

My guess is that this paper is sort of a shot-across-the-bows, not so much for the Federal Reserve, as for the Obama Administration.  It will be interesting to see if the thugocracy takes note.