reasonablenut

This picture has been up for a week with no comment. I posted the picture last Sunday and started to write the post, but then got wrapped up with other shit.

On the day we took out the Enfield, I also tested my new .40 XD. This was one of those "Benny's bummed out, so let's buy a gun" type purchases. This is the first .40 S&W pistol I own. I became curious about this because an EOD guy had been telling me that this is the round they use in the equivalent military Beretta 90-something. Upon testing, it appears to be pretty fucking good.

This was a trial run and gun hasn't loosened up enough to give it an honest evaluation. Price wise (I hit a sale and scored it for $425) it certainly appears to be a good deal. Additionally, I like the trigger a lot better than Glock's.

XD

The spring-powered bolt is impressive. Why American gunmakers abandoned this kind of receiver confounds me.

It would seem to me that, as a sniper weapon, one could not argue with the bolt being spring-loaded and designed to eject once the bolt was released. As such, I fail to understand how this concept got heaped on the dust pile.

Follow-up shots are far easier with this rifle than with any other bolt-action rifle I've shot. Now there may be deficiencies to this concept, but, thus far, I have failed to recognize them.

The entire rifle is a joy to shoot. It's got better balance than an 03A3 and is easy to shoot off-hand. Box magazines sell me on a gun, right off the bat.

Bought the Enfield a couple of weeks ago. Believe it or not, we scored it from Big 5 Sporting Goods for about $150. It is a "Lend-Lease" rifle and was most likely produced between 42' and '44.

Got it out the range with some normal, crap commercial rounds. It performed well above an expectation.

To begin with, the bore was black. It took the Old Man 3 days and untold amounts of reaming to get the fucking bore clean.

On top of that, we've yet to take it down all the way and clean out the Cosmoline.

These are before pictures.

It shot fucking great though. We were on at 300 yards and dancing around the steel at 600. Our plan is to accurize a load for the fucker. To date, the best I've seen is the Hornady Spitzer.

Enfield

As things continue to downwardly spiral, I've become aware that I am acutely aware of all LE officers around me. This has progressed for the last 9 months and has culminated in the knowledge that these people just plain don't like me.

In fact, I think they hate me.



Although there are no grounds, I've been to court twice, spent several thousand dollars on an attorney, and don't really see an end in sight, this shit continues to roll. I appreciate that the police and the District Attorney are key to keeping hardcore criminals off the street. Why shouldn't they be busy with that instead of fucking with me?

For the most part, I have given up on media commentary. There are people like Alphecca and Say Uncle who do a much better job, anyway. I used to try to "fisk" and write with the biting wit necessary to dress down a NY Times column. Alas, I realized I just fell into rage. That is why the blog has been mostly "functional gun" type shit for the last year. In any case, I'm briefly coming out of retirement for Bucky's sake.

Mr. Phillips seems like a genuine psychopath. He's shot 3 troopers and has evaded police for 5 months. Two of the policeman were sniped in their car, outside of his felon girlfriend's house (he did have a kid with the bitch, I believe.) After some blatant theft he's been able to conceal himself from authorities by hiding in wilderness.

So obivously he has shooting and survival skills on top of being batshit crazy. What pissed me off about this story was the picture everyone put out.





Now I've Googled the shit out of this guy and he is a nutjob. There are also a lot of pictures of him. But most media stories run with this picture of him in his Remington hat and accentuate that he owns a lot of guns. They make the leap that, if you own a lot of guns, you are going to kill LE officers.

Doubly, if you see someone in a Remington cap, call the cops because he's about to run amok.

BTW, if you own that many guns, fuck the "suicide by police" thing; just blow your psycho brains out of your head. It saves a lot of people a lot of time and casts a lesser shadow on the rest of us gunowners who aren't out our minds.

MadOgre is an extremely astute commentator, and one I probably should have added to my blogroll a year ago. He rants and I like rants.

Noticibly, I've been a bit out of sorts of late. I missed this really great post that the Old Man emailed to me over the weekend. The Ogre doesn't have permalinks, so scroll down to the Thursday 8-24 post and find the magnum comments.

First off, I think Ogre is a hunter. Most of his examples and anecdotes are in reference to hunting. Outside of quail/shotgun/Cheney-style lawyer shooting, I'm not much of a hunter. I try to hit an 8' by 11' piece of paper at 400 yards, not elk vital zones. I study ballistics and try to load the best match ammunition I possibly can.

What I assume Ogre is referring to is lazy hunters. I don't like them either. This time of year, if you hit the range, you're guaranteed to find some asshole that hasn't touched his rifle since the beginning of last hunting season. He's just verifying his zero so he can do a depradation hunt, where he can bench his rifle off of the hood of his truck. Fuck sport.

In addition, Ogre is correct that extreme magnum cartridges, that shoot so flat one doesn't have to understand trajectory, takes a bit of the art out of rifle shooting. I try to have ballistic models for every cartridge I load (Huffman helps out.) In the end, primarily I am a long range target shooter. Bullet drop is still extreme with a magnum at 600+ yards.

I also know enough decent hunters who would never take a shot where the probability was that it would hit the haunches. That's up there with spotlighting and the like, in my opinion. Know what the fuck you are doing before you enter the field.

In any case, I think Magnums especially have their place if you want to shoot long range. I found out that AMU is slowly adopting the .300 WSM I have been so endeared with. It's a good long range rifle.

Let me state, that if I had an offer to hunt, I have a .308 and a .30-06 that I would pick up before any Magnum rifle.

Update: Apparently some guy died over the weekend. He made his living by wrestling crocodiles. Karma's gonna get you. And, really, I don't care.

Well last week sucked the big one. It was long, involved a lot of bullshit, and I didn't make it to the range. I did purchase a new pistol, that being the first pistol purchase I've made since before Boomershoot 2005. I'll post on that later, as I haven't shot it yet.

Anyway, the weekend hit (the last long one before Thanksgiving, which looks like it's going to be a quail hunt) and I planned on just watching shit, cleaning guns, and maybe even reading. I actually hit the loading bench for the first time since May.

Lo and behold, my mother stopped by Saturday afternoon and provided me with my CHL. Sumbitch finally showed up. Now I've got the government's permission to actually carry a legal firearm that I actually own.

I qualified for semi-auto and revolver and they actually got it right on the license. You'll note that I'm qualified up to a .45 caliber. The geniuses in New Mexico figure that the largest caliber you qualify with, you can carry anything lesser. Thus, if you qualify with a .44 magnum semi-auto/revolover, you can't carry a 1911 in .45. If you think about that long enough, your brains will leak like shit out of your ears.

CHL