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Solutions

August 3, 2014, 2:09 pm
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We have problems.

Lots of them.

What I've noticed about many of them is a flat refusal to even consider the measures that worked previously, that when suspended, allow the problem to reoccur.

When confronted with this refusal there seems to me lots of mealy mouthed evasions and justifications why we cannot use the previously time tested solution.
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Racist

August 3, 2014, 2:53 pm
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Let's take illegal immigration from first principles. First we must dispense with a couple of arguments. If a person is fleeing their native land because of political strife or war with no intention of assimilating into the nations they are fleeing TO; they are a refugee not an immigrant. If a person moves from their native land to a foreign on with no intention of becoming assimilated and becoming a citizen of their new land; they are a colonist not an immigrant.

Words mean something. Otherwise the USMC recently emigrated to Afghanistan.

Just as the smallest minority is the individual, that which is immoral for an individual is immoral for the group. It's immoral for me to break into your house and demand you let me live there and that you support me. Nothing about breaking into a sovereign nation makes it moral.

It is moral for me to shoot someone who's broken into my home. It would, likewise, be moral to shoot anyone illegally crossing a nation's borders. Declare it a prima facie case of espionage and shoot them as spies. Legal under several international agreements the US is a signatory to. Any lesser response is an example of our charitable natures and kindness. But note, that even if I decide to not shoot the person who's invaded my home, I'm still under no obligation to shelter and feed them. I may evict or eject them from my home at whim.

Let's go back a bit. A refugee is in exile, effectively. It is compassionate to help them out until they can return home. They likely want to as well. There's nothing immoral or racist about placing them in centralized locations (camps).  There is also nothing immoral about noticing and deciding that you cannot survive supporting such a population and closing your home/border to them.  It is important to note that once the conflict that drives the refugee to flee ends, they go home.

None of this is racist. When the group self selects the response to it is not and cannot be racial. If a black man breaks into my house and I shoot him, it's not because he was black that he was shot!

Now let us discuss the colonist.  They move into a foreign land with the intent of remaining a citizen of their former land and force changes onto the natives of that land.  Special consideration is demanded and through threats of violence the natives are coerced into compliance until the natives are absorbed or displaced by the colonists.

Now that we have the basic principles addressed.  A nation has the right to seal its borders and refuse entry to anyone for any or no reason.  A nation also has a right to allow a defined number of people enter to become citizens, to visit to see the sights to conduct business, etc...  Those rights all stem from the same rights a home-holder has to allow or disallow people into their home.

The main reason that there are limits assigned to the number of people who can enter a nation to emigrate is the speed of assimilation.  Because it's no longer permitted to be rude to people assimilation is even slower.  Notice that in less than two generations the only way to tell someone was Irish or Italian descended is their last name.  Can we say that of Mexicans as a whole?  Something that caused the Micks and the WOPs to assimilate was the only route out of their squalor ridden enclaves was to become like the surrounding natives, and they were forced to.  Immigrants are rarely so forced today because of cries of racism and bigotry.  The foreigners trespassing have all the rights and powers in the interactions with them.

Most of the time I am not asking for anything worse than happened to my ancestors.

Finding a Mexican-American who's fully assimilated today is no more a proof that there isn't a problem with the massive numbers pouring over the border than finding a hold-out Italian in a ghetto in early 20th century New York proves that assimilation doesn't work.

This is why I predict a violent response sooner rather than later.  Predicting it is not wishing it were so.  I often say that I am Cassandra.  I suggest lesser actions which will lead to a solution to the problem and am castigated for it.  I am insulted for looking at the problem for what it is rather than what I wish it to be, for blaming those at fault and not reviling the actual victims.
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Interesting

August 4, 2014, 1:32 am
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"We were surprised to find that we had suddenly gone weak, and we were surprised to discover how much fire men can move through without getting hit."

--S/Sgt Thomas B Turner quoted in The Soldiers Load and The Mobility of a Nation by SLA Marshall

I'm constantly trying to find out stuff that explains my experiences.  And often surprised to see that I wasn't the only one who had them.

I've sometimes thought I was a puny coward when my reaction appears to have been merely typical.

I also oscillate wildly between not caring if anyone believes my reminisces and wanting the evidence to prove they were real.

I'm the only person I can find who was there doing them, the others seem to have dried up and blown away.  Their names lead to dead ends and their supposed comrades have never heard of them.  I have a clearer idea today of who they weren't than who they were.

It's enough to make you doubt sometimes.

Maybe the answer is buried in a file in some needlessly classified vault someplace.

On the gripping hand, not knowing for sure doesn't impede my life much at all.
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Worth A Click

August 4, 2014, 12:07 pm
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Jim Brady, Yes THAT Brady Is Dead

August 4, 2014, 3:20 pm
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Poor guy.  To be married to his wife and then get shot.  You have to wonder what he did in a past life to deserve that.

Speaking of karma, Sarah gets points for the next life if she does Sati.

I've never been angry with Jim, he seemed a victim of his wife in the anti-gun campaign rather than a prime mover there.
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I'm Selling The Glock!

August 4, 2014, 3:27 pm
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Totally Geeking Out

August 5, 2014, 11:20 pm
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Apex Spring Kit For S&W Sigma

August 6, 2014, 3:00 pm
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Because Willard is such a nice guy, I bought him an APEX Sigma Spring Kit.  I got a second kit as well since both The Lovely Harvey and FuzzyGeff have Sigmas as well.  Harvey refused the kit, citing her old SW357V as a "rare collectable" and would keep it original.  She even said it with a straight face.

I offered it to FuzzyGeff and he accepted.  There is geographic strangeness with his guns being here.  His mom forbids him to keep guns in their home and when I moved to Florida; his guns, which had been stored at my house, moved with me.




That video does make it look easier than it is!  Well, it is super simple, but getting the trigger pin past the slide locking bar is very fiddly; both for removal and installation.  It's all by wobble and hope it works rather than a "pull this way every time".  I am not sure the slave pin provided is much help since it's undersized for the hole and lets you move things around a lot.  I think I'll use a normal 1/8" pin punch for the slave if I ever have to do this again.

Once installed, Geff's atrocious trigger was very much lighter.  It started at 8 lb. 6 oz. and has been reduced to 7 lb. 8 oz.  It's gone from dragging a safe over gravel to merely being slightly gritty with a sharp break.  Reset is less vague as well.

Willard's trigger is also improved, but sadly not by as much.  I didn't take a before measure of the trigger pull, but it's definitely lighter at 9 lb. 2 oz. (I KNOW!) and smoother.  The break is still mushy, better, but mushy.  Reset is also still "just let completely go of the trigger to be sure".  There's a very slight click almost at the very end of forward travel.

The differences might be because Geff's is a SW40F and Willard's is a SW40VE.  I've read the VE trigger was deliberately tuned to simulate a J-Frame for some reason after complaints about the F and V series had been considered by S&W.  Hearsay.

Overall, I am still pleased with Apex Tactical.  They greatly improved Marv's M&P9, my J-Frame and now two Sigmas.
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Exceeding Our Mandate

August 6, 2014, 10:44 pm
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Knocking almost a pound off FuzzyGeff's Sigma and an unmeasured but similar amount off Willard's wasn't enough!

The grit was appalling!

So Marv and I (mostly Marv, blame Marv) took apart the sear housing and polished up the poorly faced parts.

There's a helper spring that this video says you don't need so we omitted it from Willards and retained on Geff's.

The reason we kept it on Geff's was his sear spring is a single unit and Willard's is a double.

When all was said and done:

Geff's is down to a SMOOTH 7 lb. 0 oz. from 7 lb. 8 oz. with just the Apex kit.  Without the little helper spring it was 6 lb. 8 oz., but the reset became vague.

Willards needed a lot more smoothing out to get it to stop being choppy.  No helper spring and the nested springs gave us 9 lb. 0 oz. and it's nice, smooth and crisp.  Just a 2 oz. improvement from the Apex only change, but so much more pleasant to pull the trigger on.
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Process

August 7, 2014, 12:32 pm
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I will accept that the the no subsidies for those on the Federal Obamacare exchanges is a typo and that everyone was supposed to be subsidized regardless of where they bought their insurance.

We'll call that a given.

What I don't accept is the courts need to correct the typo when we have a process in place that can fix that in just a couple of days.

Congress passes a law inserting the correction to the typo so that the law now says what they meant and the President signs it.

SIMPLE!

Of course if they'd read the Constitution where this process is explained, they might not have tried passing this leviathanesque monstrosity in the first place...
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Little Details

August 7, 2014, 6:15 pm
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How the hell do you forget red beards and eye-liner?

How the hell did I forget that?
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Disservice

August 7, 2014, 7:18 pm
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There's an infographic going around talking about the interchange between .308 Winchester and 7.62x51mm NATO.

The max pressure for 7.62x51mm NATO is not 50,000 psi, it is 50,000 CUP.  50,000 CUP, in this case, is equivalent to 60,000 psi.

Next, every weapon designed for NATO that fires 7.62x51mm NATO gets proofed with a 140% pressure charge.  That's 84,000 psi and the gun must not break to be accepted.  That's a pretty sizable safety margin.

The 62,000 psi max pressure for SAAMI is intended to the the absolute limit with a 52,000 psi maximum average pressure.

The differences in headspace has resulted in ruptured cases in some rare instances when .308 is fired in a NATO spec chamber.

Another important difference between .308 and NATO is the leade.  Mil guns tend to have longer leades and that tends to lower the actual chamber pressure in the gun.  This is for reliability when the gun gets really hot.

I guess the good news is with the ban on importing parts kits with intact barrels, most "7.62x51mm" battle rifles you'll encounter are actually going to have .308 chamber dimensions.

Anecdotally, when was the last time you heard of someones battle rifle blowing up where it wasn't sketchy surplus ammo (which should nominally have been NATO spec to begin with) or a gross error on the reloading bench?

If this was actually a real problem there'd be a lot more broken gun stories out there on the internet because every negative thing in the world gets a thread.
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Eagle

August 7, 2014, 9:49 pm
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Murder?

August 8, 2014, 5:34 pm
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James Brady death ruled homicide.

I wonder if this means we're going to test double jeopardy.

It seems unseemly to me to come back 33 years and charge him with murder after finding him not-guilty for the attempt because he was insane.
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.308 or 7.62x51mm NATO

August 9, 2014, 3:13 pm
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An important consideration.

Which one is your rifle chambered for?

If you built your gun from a surplus kit, you're probably running the 7.62x51mm NATO chamber.  There are a lot of kit built FAL's out there not to mention the BM59s, G3s, CETMEs...

My DSA made FAL has a .308 chamber.  They mention it several times in the booklet and it's on their web page.

Springfield Armory says "7.62x51mm NATO (.308 Win)." Well, which one?

PTR says ".308 or 7.62 NATO".  Does that mean I get a choice?

This also gets me to wondering how many kits were put together with .308 headspace gauges instead of the correct 7.62, because that difference will matter a lot!
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It's All About Training

August 10, 2014, 4:35 pm
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This is why the US Army is the finest in the world...
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Load Out

August 10, 2014, 6:10 pm
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Reading about soldiers loads has got me looking hard at several characters.

My Rhodesian snake-chimera in particular.  Gotta pick Willards brain over that...

He's got an FAL Para, mag in the gun, five spare mags, 100 spare rounds in a fanny pack and 200 more in his ruck.  A Browning Hi-Power with one spare mag with 100 rounds in the ruck.  Plus several grenades and three Energa rifle grenades.  Plus several days of food, water and shelter.

The reason player characters end up over ordnanced is because Gamemasters do so love cutting off the supply lines.  The very rationale that drives armies to load everything including the kitchen sink onto a grunt is present during character creation.

One thing you get in the game is an ability to carry more easily with just a couple more points of Strength.  This is not borne out by reality where being stronger doesn't seem to add much extra ability to carry a weight over marching distances.

An RPG character is an idealized simulacrum of the soldier that the General Staff has been equipping for centuries!

With GURPS and Twilight 2000 both, there are benefits to offloading all that junk.  You move faster and have fewer penalties for fighting and fatigue.  The down side, of course, is when the GM creates a situation where all of the 7.62x51mm in the world is literally in your pack.

It's a balancing game full of compromise.

Expectations are corrupted by earlier experience with high-fantasy games where the armor you need to stay alive puts you well into medium encumbrance.  The player gets used to the idea that medium is normal and desirable.

My research on what the SEALs were carrying in Vietnam kind of puts lie to that idea.  They emphasized traveling light, but also put a premium on moar dakka!  But when you add up the weight, they end up in light encumbrance.  What they lack is anything resembling staying power because they eschew the camping equipment that most normal infantrymen carry as a matter of course.  The amount of food they carry can best be described as "snacks".

So, how much to carry?
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OK, Candidate

August 11, 2014, 2:04 pm
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I will tell you what, Mr/Ms Candidate for office:  You say you're pro-gun, you even have a top rating from the NRA.

Well after taking it in the shorts about so many other things with Harry Reid, the NRA rating has been tarnished a tad.  It's an imperfect predictor of future behavior, not the NRA's fault, but since so much is out of their control here...

So how do you, the candidate, assure me that you're pro-gun?

Simple.

You put on your web page, no matter how small, a statement that you oppose 922(o), 922(r) and support the removal of short barrel rifles and sound suppressors from the National Firearms Act.

That tells me you know what we're talking about.

Next, when the press inevitably discovers this, you vigorously defend the position.

Gold star bonus points for actually submitting bills that lead to the changes mentioned.

Notice also that I don't care that you're not running for a federal office.  So many of you do after a short stint at the state and local levels that I want this to be a position you take when it could cost you with the media and you can't affect directly.

Being pro-gun here is not going to hurt you with gun owners, so what have you to lose?  Your NRA rating?
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Range

August 11, 2014, 2:38 pm
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I just notice something amusing.

The M16A2 rear sight is marked out to 800m.  5.56x45mm NATO is often derided for it's lack of authority at those ranges.

The FAL, whose 7.62x51mm NATO round is regarded as the panacea of long range and stopping power for the infantry, has a rear sight that only goes to 600m.
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Wisdom Heeded

August 11, 2014, 4:24 pm
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I was a sort of professional race car driver once.

Had the NHRA license and everything.  Not sure the class we raced in even exists anymore.

One piece of advice I heard over and over was, "unless the car's on fire, stay put until someone comes to get you," after a wreck.

Dad would add, "especially if the other car takes you out."

Which part of this advice did Mr Ward not heed?

I also recall my mom telling me to wear light colored clothing at night so people could see me; and that was for drivers who only had a giant sheet of glass on the front of the car not nets and cages and helmets with restricted head movement.

I'd rule it accidental suicide for running down into the path of an oncoming car.

The sanctioning body can begin to do their part by punishing drivers who do crap like this.  Five race time-outs would effectively end it.
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