School Board shootout

Here's the video footage taken from the room where it went down.



It was apparent that the shooter was not using live ammunition. Also, he fired the gun once or twice towards the ground accidentally. An armed man in the building killed him dead, which is odd considering the video says that the gunman took his own life. If you go to this link, there's the same footage from another angle, but towards the end the video feed locks up and you can only hear what's going on. I count a total of fifteen shots fired.

There's a lady that tries to fight back by hitting the gunman with a purse. I think her efforts would have been more effective if she had pulled a J-frame from that purse and put a 125 grain hollowpoint right through his twisted mind.

I have heard that the scumbag had a lengthy criminal record, as we already anticipate these days.

AK Kaboom

Wait. . . .what? I thought AKs never jammed or stopped running? Nothing can stop them!!



I don't know the back story, but this sucker was definitely firing just fine, and then blew to pieces. Couldn't happen to a better person though!!

"I fought"

This testimony flies right into the face of those who say to give your attacker exactly what they want, and do not resist. I remember vividly the time when a the deadly serial killer she's referring to was afoot in my AO, the second of three, and everyone was terrified. This girl, at 15 years old, fought for her life and won, and it's certain that she would be dead and in the ground if she had not.

If it moves, salute it. . . .

The rest of that saying is: "If it doesn't move, pick it up. If you can't pick it up, paint it."

I laughed out loud at this cartoon at Terminal Lance, ****NSFW, Language**** which has become a daily read for me. I remember one time saluting a Corporal in the PX parking lot at Camp Lejeune because his chevrons were unsat. I felt like an ass until I realized how much of an ass he must be feeling right now as he just got saluted because he didn't bother to keep up with his uniform.

Life comes at you fast

Been with a family member in the hospital for the past few days. Everything's good to go, but everyone was bracing for the worst there for awhile. This on top of other obligations: financial, travel, other family; you know how it is.

Man, the holidays can be harsh!

I'll get it together here shortly.

Entry level tacticool scope: Weaver Grand Slam 3-10X40mm

This was a contender for a spot on my LR308; the task fell to the Super Sniper in the end though. It's on sale right now at MidwayUSA for $300 big ones!

Here's an excellent video review over at Sniper's Hide. Good stuff.

Larue OBR 5.56

Wow! Apparently those suckers can shoot!

I first layed my mitts on one at this year's Modern Day Marine Convension, and noted how nice it felt. It's good to know that some things are built well!

Technologically challenged

I took one look at the Edit Template page on Blogger and knew that it was too far over my head. I used one of their given templates, which still means that I'm uncool, but I wanted an updated look. That, and the way my old page was set up made it hard to read.

I'm really dumb when it comes to this sort of stuff. I only recently figured out how to "Follow" other blogs, or what it even means. And I still have no idea what the RSS feed thingy does. It's just there.

One day I will figure out how to make this blog look cool, but until then, I hope it's easier to read.

Equipment Change Proposal: Cameras, cell phones, and other electronic junk

This post is rage against the electronic machine, and it probably ain't gonna be pretty.

My bane in life is that nothing electronic lasts around me, and that shit is for real. I'm waiting for the CIA to knock on my door with a one-way ticket to China for a new job sitting in an office across the street from the servers for their intelligence agency. If you want connectivity problems in a building, around office computers, or around people with cell phones, just sit my happy ass twelve feet away and it will happen. Mrs. CTone has commented that I have a magnet in my head.

Now that that is out of the way, whomever designs cameras, cell phones, and other electronic doodads can go blow a goat. Tonight the fam and I were decorating the ol' Christmas tree, you know, something that only happens once a year, and the only working camera in the house ironically was the one in my brand new but barely functioning cell phone; my seventh in two years. OK, technically my sixth as one of them - a BlackBerry - was slain dead by a 33" tire on my XTerra due to the shitty engineering of the bastards at Maxpedition.

Why yes, bitterness IS my middle name. How did you know?

Flashback to yesterday: I picked up the not-quite-two-year-old Sony A300 DSLR camera to take some pictures of the little ones, and when I turned the thing on it made this "Brrrrrraaaaaaaaappppppp" sound that emanated from the lens. Did the same thing when I turned it off. I went to reach for it tonight as it was a picture taking moment, with the kids hanging ornaments on the tree and all, and remembered that the Sony happened to not be capable of doing its designed duty due to suckage. My old standby is my shitty Canon PowerShit SD750 that had to be sent back to the factory brand new, right out of the package. . . . . .twice. Well, that camera sucks too! Turning it on gave me a white screen. It still makes a flash, and you can zoom in and out, but no picture takey takey.

My relationship with the PowerShit is not a nice one; the first time I used it was on a trip to Germany, and out of almost a thousand pictures taken, about a hundred of them you could make out what they were.

Mr. Goat, I am pleased to introduce you to the folks at Canon.

My new cell phone is a Samsung Captivate with Android operating system, and it randomly gets so hot sitting idle on my desk at work that it warns me to turn it off or it will burn up. Also, it turns itself off about once a week for no reason at all that I can establish. WTF?

I don't know much about low voltage electronics other than they are unreliable as hell. Laptops are a perfect example; anything with Windows in it only lasts about three months for me. That's not a lie. The only reason -- Only. Reason. -- that I no longer do Movie Guns anymore is because out of the three laptops that I own, and two desktops that I did own, none of them stay functioning long enough for me to do a post. Either the CD/DVD drive burns the fuck up the first time I use it, or Windows Media Player shits the bed (every time; I was burning the second CD I ever attempted in my new work laptop the day before yesterday and WMP took an unrecoverable dive. It does not work anymore), or the operating system crashes (often), or an update installs a driver that doesn't work and the computer won't boot.

I can't tell you how much moolah I would drop down for some tickets to watch a pride of syphilis afflicted lions tear apart the whole Microsoft staff in one horrific bloody massacre. I'd even spend the ten bucks for some stale popcorn.

I may need a custom made tinfoil hat to shield my magnet from my electronics, or the folks making em' need to figure this shit out and make them not suck. It's true that I may be a mutant - I have DVD players that don't work, cell phones that don't work; I've seen every register at my local Wal-Mart reboot simultaneously at the very moment I swiped my bank card . . . .twice (once while the Mrs. and I were dating and, no shit, I was right then telling her about how I have some sort of issue around electronics).

The chances though that it's really me are slim, while the chances of mankind making mother boards and microchips so small that the copper running through them grow from the heat and short out are startlingly high. It speaks volumes though, to me anyways, that there are so many things that we humans use day-to-day that are just not built to last. If they were, then I wouldn't have so much to bitch about, now would I? What has to be done or not done for some people to build useful stuff that doesn't fail when you need it? Why is it that products used nowadays that has low amounts of voltage running through it barely seem to make it through the year? Is it because technology is advancing at such a rapid pace that it's better to just buy a new phone every year than update it?

I will make it my Christmas wish to have one electronic gizmo last the full 2011 year, or the fuckers that build the stuff will again hear my wrath!

Bad mamba jamba

Just how badass was Lieutenant General A.P. Hill?

So badass that even over 150 years after his death, he's still in the midst of battle.

Dude just causes conflict wherever he goes!

Future Weapons: Railguns

I get a little hot and winded reading American Handgunner, so to read about the US Navy's sweet foray into the world of railguns got me going this morning:

The Navy would like to have a fully functional 64-megajoule system aboard a ship by 2025.

A shot of that power could reach a target 100 nautical miles away in a matter of minutes. The projectile would travel so fast that no warhead is needed; kinetic energy is sufficient to destroy its target.

Killing baddies with the shear awesomeness of fast moving metal! RIGHTEOUS, RIGHTEOUS!!!!

Now, the Navy wants to have this weapon adorning their poop deck by 2025, which isn't all that far away. My hopes are to be toting one of these beasties with a walnut stock in the backwoods of the Old Dominion no later than 2050 or so. Think it's possible?

Once I vaporize a few hundred groghounds and a dozen elk with very fast metal, I envision writing an article on the matter about how 10 megajoules is not humane enough to drop an entire herd of whitetails with one round, so it's best to stick with .22 caliber railguns or higher and leave the pussy .17 caliber rounds for the plinkers.

Rule violator

It is being reported that some immoral piece of scum has done gone out and violated the good intentioned rules of the University of Mary Washington by bringing a handgun on campus. When will these people learn to not break the rules!

Oh, and none of this is confirmed, and it's a day old, but it's still at the top of the page on Fredericksburg.com.

Strong language

I note yet again that all it takes to get cash to pay the bills is to walk into a bank and demand money.

That banks will just hand it over without question based on the presumption of force, without seeing any sort of weapon, begs the question of why banks need vaults and tellers to begin with? Why not just have a wall of ATMs inside so that would-be robbers don't have anyone to rob? If Federal Reserve Notes are so valuable that they need armed guards to store them in massive steel vaults, why is it that it's so easy to just demand it at the counter with some tough talk?

Sure, anyone crazy enough to suggest that they have a gun and will shoot you if you don't hand over the loot may be able to back up their claim, and tellers aren't going to wait around and get shot over some baseless paper, but my question still stands: why even have people in banks anymore to begin with?

Gun P0rn: Now I've seen it all edition

A Dutch Madsen short barrel Light Machine Gun. . . . . . . . with a forward grip (scroll down)!!! More here if you want to see how real SWAT operators fire a Madsen: with eyes closed, no cheekweld, and stock under the arm pit!

Expert badge for that one!!!!!!

There is an 80+ year span in firearms development in this one single post on this thread about the war in Brazil. There are weapons there that I don't even have time right now to identify. I get a kick out of seeing the Bushnell 3200 fixed 10X scopes used on M16s, FALs, and beat to hell, wooden stocked bolt action rifles! Awesome!

Also, seeing pepper-haired Klauseus Schteinmunfuertez with a 10" AR15 sporting a ginormous Counter Sniper scope with an EOTech tacked to the side gives me the screaming giggles. Is he wearing the MP3 player Oakleys?!?!?

Oh man! There's an AK type rifle with an upside down stock, a guy casually taking pictures of some poor fella who just got cut down by gunfire, a bare-chested balaclava'ed drug dealer totin' a SIG 551/552 hybrid, and my personal fav, the one guy on a mounted machine gun of some kind cowered down in terror while his buddy gets some with the Right Arm of the Free World!!

I can't stop giggling!

Go check this one out folks; you don't want to miss it!

Upgrade or downgrade?

Last night I replaced my Horus Hawk scope on the LR308 with a 10X Super Sniper. The Hawk has been good to me thus far, and the reticle works better than I had hoped, but it's a hunting scope, and the only thing I hunt these days are Shoot N' C targets. It was time to go to dialing in my shots for more precision.

Since Christmas time is right around the corner, I couldn't afford to drop $1,000 on a Leupold or Nightforce. The Super Sniper scopes are budget priced and have a reputation for being tough as nails. Also, the fixed 10 power with parallax adjustment makes it super simple, and I figured I might as well give Mil-dots a try. It's got MOA adjustments, which these days are old school considering the long range shooting world has realized the benefits of the Mil/Mil type scopes.

Thinking about that, how is it that it took mankind like fifty years or more to figure out that ranging in Mils and then doing complicated mathamatics to find out how to adjust the trajectory of your bullet in Minutes might be a stupid idea, especially in the heat of battle where even simple math is hard? One would think that Ludwig Von Tasco or whoever the fuck designed the first precision adjustable rifle optic would have put two and two together and just made it correct right from the start. Who knows; but now I have willingly joined this madness with the procurement of this type of scope. To my rescue is the Mil-Dot Master, which is pretty badass.

Comparing it with the Horus, the SS is significantly lighter, which makes sense as the Horus is a variable optic with a 50mm objective, while the SS is a fixed 10X with a 42mm objective. Glass is heavy, and the Horus has more of it. They are about the same size though:



I took off the Horus and added the SS upstairs on my kitchen counter so I could watch Lie to Me with my wife like a good husband should. There's only so much hiding in the man cave in the basement that she should endure. There's also a liquid attractant somewhere on that counter top that I normally reserve for when we watch Boardwalk Empire, as they somehow go together.

I continued with the learned trick of coating the inside of the Burris XTreme Tactical (matte black = tactical) rings with black silicon to give them more purchase on the scope tube. I had problems with the Horus sliding around in the rings until someone on Sniper's Hide gave me the remedy. The silicon also cleaned off of the Horus and rings really easy.



Once I had the scope mounted, I realized that the scope was too high, so I have to order some lower rings in order to get a good cheek weld. Oh well, it was a good evening regardless.



Of note is that I do not need a 20 MOA canted base to get this scope to 1,000 yards. Right out of the box, I started twisting the SS's turrets and found it to have 137 & 3/4 Minutes of total elevation, which is amazing even for a 30mm scope tube. The contenders for a spot on this gun were 1" and 30mm tubes from the likes of Burris, Bushnell, and Weaver, and none of them had more than like 60 Minutes total elevation adjustment. That means more cash for a canted base, as well as the task of figuring out what rings to buy with that base. Keep all this in mind when buying a scope. I have no idea how the glass compares with the Horus; I wasn't able to check it out last night as it was already dark.

This weekend if I get the chance to do some shooo-eeeehn done, I'll get some through-the-scope pictures at some wildlife to give an idea of the glass quality.

Reporters and guns

Guatemalan style! I like how those folks think!

And, Russian heads of state continue to be more awesome than the US, as here the Prime Minister is helping a young boy holster a gold plated Makarov. Obama plays golf and gets stitches in his lip, while Putin plays with sniper rifles, takes down tigers, and flies airplanes. I see a pattern here.

Amtrack starting to become rational

Come December 15, they will join most of the rest of mass transit and allow firearms to be in checked baggage. Now, about that carry on stuff. . . .

Also, I do note the guidelines for checked baggage says:

". . .the maximum weight of each piece (50 lb/23 kg)."

So your mortar tubes and 20mm rifles will have to be checked separately.

Actually, I took that rule entirely out of context. Forgive me?

A new type of marksmanship

Shooting long range is never a quick process. You have data books, wind meters, wristop computers, ballistics applications for laptops and phones, etc. and it takes a true marksman to put all that information together along with the fundamentals of shooting to make the projectile hit its mark.

Not any more.

The revolutionary advance involves an array of sights, sensors and lasers that reads the distance to the target, assesses elements such as air pressure, temperature, and ballistics and then sends that data to the microchip embedded in the XM25 shell before it is launched.

The round already knows how to get there before it's even fired. That's pretty cool.

"It takes out a lot of the variables that soldiers have to contemplate and even guess at," Lehner said.

****

Lehner said the XM25 was special in that it requires comparatively little training, because the high-powered technology does so much of the work.

"This system is turning soldiers with average shooting skills into those with phenomenal shooting skills," he said.

Let's not make it too easy boys!

I hope this weapon truly is a game changer. Military advancements have sometimes made old tried-and-true methods of warfare obsolete, like how artillery made fortified walls not so appealing as had been for thousands of years. Damn military/industrial complex!

"You get behind something when someone is shooting at you, and that sort of cover has protected people for thousands of years," Lehner said.

"Now we're taking that away from the enemy forever."

Awesome! So how long before I can get a XM25 on Bud's Gun Shop? I just hate when I can't get the shot on that doe-of-a-lifetime because she's selfishly feeding behind a big tree.

Dangerous jackassery

You have to be a real asshole to shoot deer well outside of your limits. Shooting animals at distance is cool if you can actually hit where you aim at, but this douchebag lobs round after round of .50 BMG at deer at a mile until he finally kills one. The reason I decided to post this here is to show my several readers that most rifle rounds actually do ricochet.



The ones ricocheting off the water near the end are perhaps the most dangerous.

Stupidity begets a Claim

The University of Mary Washington is a "Gun Free Zone;" and despite their insistence that the campus is safe, people still get hurt there.

The thing about it is, when you say that a facility is safe, and prevent folks from protecting themselves under written code, you have a contract; anything that happens contrary to that contract opens you up to a claim.

"The suit says UMW creates "an illusion of campus security." The school's literature and other advertising material "emphasize safety and note the presence of campus police."

The university assumed responsibilities for the victim's safety because she was a full-time student who lived on campus, according to the lawsuit."

Yup. This is interesting to me because the whole purpose of "Gun Free Zones" is to avoid the bloodsucking lawyers coming forward in droves to sue for some sort of negligence. It seems to me that the opposite is true.

Now the very policy that UMW took to insulate itself from littigation will probably cost $10 million. I hope that poor girl gets every penny.

It's telling though that students willingly embrace this assinine policy; in the past, UMW students have made statements to the effect that security cameras in the parking garage would have prevented the attack on the victim because the cops would be able to later identify the rapist. Read that sentence again, because I'm not making it up. That's the sort of youth that Americans are sending to these campuses.

That still doesn't take away from the fact that if a corporate type entity makes the statement that you cannot provide for your own security, as the entity will provide that for you, than when they fail at their stated duty, they can and will get their asses sued. Common Law can be a bitch.