End the War on Freedom

# Summer cometh. That and daylight saving time conspired to push yesterday's sunset to 8:01pm. That means I can easily stop at the range on the way home from work. Whoohaaaaa! I shot the targets below yesterday around 7:30pm with my Marlin 444P. The smaller NRA 100-yard Small Bore Rifle Target was at 25 yards, and the FBI Q target on the left was at 50 yards. I fired 34 rounds offhand as quickly as I could load them and get my sights on target, alternating between the two. Not bad for a ghost ring iron sight and my middle-aged eyes. I've gotten pretty good at shooting the Marlin with both eyes open. I'll have to try it sitting next time. And with the M1A (which is harder to shoot with both eyes open, since it has a tiny aperature in the rear sight). The smudges on the Q target are mud, likely spray from shots at the other target. I noticed some of them kicking up lots of it when they hit the ground. Click on the image for a larger version (78K, 901x673).

# My Fulton Armory order (M1A/M14 hammer and recoil buffer) arrived yesterday. He (Clint McKee) sent it UPS Second Day Air, though I didn't pay for that. Slight overkill to air ship a package from a seven-hour drive away, but I'm happy at how quickly it got here: ordered on Sunday, shipped on Monday, arrived, at my house in the boonies, on Wednesday.

It was as much of a pain putting the trigger assembly back together as I remembered. Maybe more so. Getting the trigger pin out was difficult. Getting it back in HURT. But I now have a really nice two-stage trigger. It compresses to a nearly-audible stop, then just a little more pressure, with no movement whatsoever, and it fires. Perfect! I am now unable to make the hammer release while releasing the trigger. With the old hammer, that was easy to do. I'll range test it this weekend, in sha' allah.

It's hard to judge the Buffer Technologies Recoil Buffer with just manual cycling of the action. My guess is that it will be obvious at the range, however. Tell you when I find out.

# Reuters - Shooter Goes Out with a Bang - hehe. [stanleyscoop]

Friends of a champion Irish clay pigeon shooter have fulfilled his dying wish by packing his ashes into shotgun cartridges and blasting his remains over firing ranges around the world.

Shooting enthusiast Tony Mullan made the request before he died at Easter aged 63 after a year-long illness.

"Tony said 'I want to go out with a bang and it's up to you guys to help me,'" said Willie Hughes, Mullan's best friend and shooting partner of 20 years.

"So I took the lead out of 50 cartridges, put Tony's ashes into them and recrimped them, and now every ground I go to I fire one off," he added.

# Charley Reese - War Propaganda - great peace on the racket called "war".

No, the Bush administration doesn't want you to see the bodies -- not the bodies of our men and women, and not the bodies of Iraqi men, women and children. The administration wants you to see the war as an electronic game with bright lights in the distance and good sound effects, or close-ups of our brave warriors firing their guns at an invisible enemy. It doesn't want you to see the torn flesh, blood, intestines, feces, urine. If you did, you might not support the war, and billions of dollars depend on your support.

The government line is that if you don't approve of the war, you are disloyal. If you don't agree to give the Pentagon whatever it says it wants, you are disloyal. If you don't agree to surrender your civil liberties to the Patriot Act, you are disloyal. If you disagree with the Bush administration, you are disloyal. If you disagree with the chicken-hawk demagogues on radio and television, blathering about the war from the safety of their studios, you are disloyal.

This entire glorification of war -- as if the whole and only purpose of the government and the country were to fight wars -- smells of fascism. The news media glorify the war and militarism; we get the same dose on television, in the movies and in video games. If the American people aren't careful, they will wake up one day to find out they've become a nation of mindless heel-clickers.

America should not be about war. War is justified only in self-defense. We've been involved in many wars, but the last war fought in self-defense was World War II. That was also the last war that was constitutional, with a formal declaration of war by Congress. Not one single poor soul of the more than 100,000 Americans who have died in the Cold War and the hot wars since 1945 has died in defense of America.

...

We should emulate the Swiss. No American should ever kill or die except in defense of this country. And no corporation should be allowed to make a profit off the blood of American soldiers, as is now happening in Iraq and has happened in every war.

# Massad Ayoob at Backwoods Home Magazine - Body language and threat recognition - some clues that someone may mean you harm and your best response: move away. Here's the text of the Ogden Nash poem which Mr. Ayoob quotes in his concluding paragraph:

A panther is like a leopard
Except it hasn't been peppered.

Should you behold a panther crouch,
Prepare to say, "Ouch!"

Better yet, if called by a panther,
Don't anther.