The Gunner's Blog

The next time some social liberal wrings her hands and says "do it for the children," meaning the congress must pass some expensive do-gooder scheme for the sake of future generations, point to this article  about the plight of Europe's young people. Unable to find jobs, in economies exhausted by government excesses, they are very frustrated. What the children need and deserve is opportunity, not the endless nannying of a welfare state. They cannot have both; it is one or the other.

Here's a review  from Peterson's Rifle Shooter magazine. The MVP is a 7 1/2 pound bolt action rifle that fires 5.56 NATO / .223 and--get this--feeds from AR-15 magazines. The design magicians at Mossberg did something rather clever to make the rifle feed reliably. In the past it has been a troublesome thing to make a bolt rifle feed from autoloader magazines, so they rethought the problem. Details are in the review linked above. The usefulness of a rifle of this sort is obvious: It's just the thing for the fellow who prefers a bolt action, but likes the convenience and extra firepower of box magazines. Because it fires the ubiquitous service cartridge and uses commonplace magazines, it will be fairly cheap to feed. At present the only stock offered is a benchrest-styled and robustly proportioned one made of laminated wood. For some uses a synthetic stock of lighter weight and trimmer lines would be preferable. Perhaps that will be an option by and by.  It looks ...

The Pope's remarkable offer to Anglicans, to join the Roman Catholic church on a fast track, while keeping some distinctive aspects of our worship and ministry, has something wrong with it. I am sure the Pope was and is unaware of the defect. After all, he is not an Anglican, and you would have to be one to see it. The people joining up under the Pope's offer are from the high church, and mainly the corner of it called Anglo-Catholic. The low church is not much interested. The problem is, without those low church people, it isn't really Anglicanism. We need them, for they are a part of us, as surely as a thumb is necessary to a hand. The glory of the Anglican communion is our integration of all shades of orthodox* belief in one church. It looks to me as if Anglicanism's Roman branch will lack the very thing that makes Anglicanism great. Links: A news story about the American ordinariate The Apostolic Constitution that frames the enterprise --------------...

This poor jarhead , Lt.  Joshua Waddell,  has gotten jacked up over nice, politically correct rules of engagement in Afghanistan. There are several things wrong with an elaborate rule book about fighting nice, not least of which is the other fellows don't have one.

The good news, per the gummint in Washington, is there is little inflation, practically none--ain't that nice? The only significant increases are in food and fuel. Now, as it happens, those are the only things I'm buying these days. So the news that price increases are largely confined to those things is not real swell news. Obama should stop patting himself on the back about it before he tires out his arm.

Why a shotgun? The fighting shotgun is the best match to the usual scenarios that fall under the heading of justifiable self defense shootings. You need heavy firepower at close range and the best hit probability you can get. Almost all self defense shooting is at short range, and the shotgun, loaded with multi-projectile shells, is simply the best short range weapon. Its hit probability is twice that of a military rifle and nearly half again better than you get from a submachine gun. That is what was reported out of our military's JSSAP efforts and I see no reason to doubt it.  My informal range experiments show the shotgun is fast to address close targets because of the confidence factor. The shotgun's margin for error allows you to shoot quickly. Slugs As an expedient for longer range firing, the rifled slug, from a smoothbore shotgun, is effective at 75 yards, if the shotgun is equipped with rifle sights. When zeroed at 75 yards the typical slug's rise above ...

Our problem is simple. Government, at all levels, has grown too big. It commands too large a share of the economy. It enforces far too many laws, policies, rules and regulations. Big government, the kind set up to solve everyone's problems, is at odds with two things I like very much, individual liberty and a robust economy. Fortunately, mega-governments always implode. They micro-manage what the people are doing and spend themselves to death. These things are interrelated because freedom and prosperity are related. Unfreedom leads in turn to unprosperity. By simultaneously demanding your money and making it harder for you to get some, government creates its own biggest problem. It mars the prosperity it depends upon to generate government revenue. If you, as a businessman, have to carefully tiptoe your way through thousands of pages of rules to make sure it is really okay to start that new business or project you have in mind, you may conclude that the regulatory overhead...

Ruger is on a roll, introducing new guns faster than I can keep up. The Ruger American is a bolt action rifle with closed top receiver, interchangeable magazines, synthetic stock and a  short bolt-lift of seventy degrees. The trigger has a safety blade on its face; the trigger's pull weight is said to be adjustable from three to five pounds. Weight of the rifle is listed as 6.12 to 6.25 pounds. I haven't seen an example of this rifle yet. I remark at this time because the rifle reflects an industry trend toward the closed top, and because it is quite a departure for Ruger. Their high powered bolt actions have heretofore been based on the Mauser 98, a conservative approach. The Model 77 series (son of Mauser) continues in production, including the nifty Gunsite Scout Rifle . Some previous designs that followed the closed top, interchangeable magazine approach are the Steyr SBS and the Tikka T3. These are successful and well liked rifles. Perhaps Ruger called their new ...

S&P downgraded the credit of nine countries; story here . In my estimate this is only the beginning. The dynamic is in place, and has been for a long time, for governments to grow and spend, but no one thought the matter through, and thought they might one day need to shrink and save. The humanist dream of government solving everyone's problems has proven to be a golden calf. Moses is coming down the mountain. Stay tuned for details.

Allow me to vent. Thank you. Sometimes I need to. The government continues to grow in expense and intrusiveness. The economy continues to splutter along, like an engine missing on several cylinders. It now appears the gummint is cooking the books * on the unemployment rate. I suppose there are nicer ways to say it; what is reported out of a formula depends on the inputs and assumptions, but this is looking like a case of garbage in, garbage out. As it happens, the reporting bias just happens to make the administration look better than it would if the numbers were reported more on the square. The public is being habituated to more and more government intrusions into daily life. The founding principle of America, that of limited government, seems to have been thrown away in efforts to. . .run things. If you begin with the assumption that government ought to run things, to assure everything works out right--well, you are in for a disappointment. For starters, we have to r...