Bear Warning

Marlin 1894 Cowboy

My Marline 1894 Cowboy, chambered in .45 Long Colt, was a gift from my wife last Christmas. It is an exceedingly beautiful rifle, that I will cherish forever. As of this writing, I have not shot it yet, but look forward to doing so in the near future.

The fit and finish of the rifle are excellent, and the action is tight and smooth. The gun points well. It has a good heft, while not being overly heavy, and the skinny forearm is perfect for my smaller hands.

The stock sites are very nice as well. They should allow for rather fine target acquisition. I will most likely have a tang peep sight installed in the future however.

Manufacturer's Website:
Marlin Firearms

Pics:


Links:
Marlin Owners
Chuck Hawk's Article
Kim du Toit's Article

Specs:
Caliber: 45 Colt
Capacity: 10-shot tubular magazine
Action: Lever action with squared finger lever; side ejection; deeply blued metal surfaces; solid top receiver; hammer block safety.
Stock: American black walnut straight-grip stock; hard rubber butt plate; tough Mar-Shield® finish; blued steel fore-end cap.
Barrel: Tapered octagon with deep-cut Ballard-type rifling (6 grooves).
Twist Rate: 1:16" r.h
Sights: Adjustable Marble semi-buckhorn rear, Marble carbine front sight. Solid top receiver tapped for scope mount; offset hammer spur (right or left hand) for scope use. Serial number is on left side of receiver instead of tang, allowing custom installation of a tang sight by a competent gunsmith.
Overall Length: 37.5"
Weight: 6.5 lbs.

Remember This?

Harry Reid at his finest.



Oops!

Whites Keeping Black People Down with Global Warming

This has got to be a joke.

Story

Now Global Warming is racist too!

This is yet another hint that this is a political issue and not a scientific one.

From My Beautiful Wife

My wife wrote this to me in an email. I thought I would share it, and hope that I can live up to it. Thank you honey. I love you.

To My Wonderful Husband

How do I begin to tell you how lucky I am to have you in my life?
I'll start by saying what a gift you gave me the day you asked me to be your wife.

You're my best friend in the good times and my rock in times of sorrow.
You're the reason for sweet yesterdays and my promise for tomorrow.

I never thought I could feel this loved until I became your wife.
You make my year, and every year the best ones of my life.

You’re more than I could have ever dreamed, more than I could have hoped for.
Each morning I wake to see your sweet face, I love you more and more.

This is NOT How You Do It

All to often we see videos posted on YouTube like the one below.



This one shows a small lady shooting either a .44 Magnum or perhaps a .500 S&W revolver. She almost kills herself in the process. The first shot sends the barrel straight up, and she apparently squeezes off another round accidentally. The poor girl is not at fault in anyway, and is damn lucky she was not shot in the head.

The person that needs to be beaten severely, with the butt of this revolver, is her presumed boyfriend/friend shown in the video. He knew for a fact that she could not handle that gun so he braces her shoulders. This is probably what caused the accidental discharge of the second round. The recoil could not be absorbed by her body, so the gun went straight up. She was not in control of the firearm, and his bracing probably made it much worse. Hopefully she didn't receive any damage to her wrists from this fiasco. Luckily for all involved no one was shot and/or killed.

Why some douchebag men think it is funny to scare and possibly injure females or young boys with firearms is beyond me. It is immature, and ruins the persons possible enjoyment of shooting. If it is their first time with a gun, they will often times never shoot again.

Congratulations asshole. You have just ruined the best ability your girlfriend could have had in defending herself in the future. You are a disgrace of a man, and should be beaten to knock some sense into you. I have seen several of these videos. Another infuriating example showed a small woman shooting a large caliber rifle with a scope. Her asshat in charge, decided to brace her back as well. The result was a very nasty scope injury to her forehead. Smooth move moron.

I must admit that I made a smaller version of the same mistake with my wife when I took her shooting for the first time. We started with my 10/22 rifle, and she loved it. Great, I thought, let's try a pistol. So I handed her my 1911 with some standard practice loads. She shot it a couple of times and did not like it at all! It hurt her wrist a bit, and was to loud. Now my wife is not a little five foot pipsqueak, she is right at six feet tall, and I mind my manners for the most part, so she doesn't whip my butt. :) She did not like the recoil from the .45 though, so we stopped shooting it.

Unfortunately, my mistake with the 1911 took a while to fix, and we are still working on that one to a certain extent. Live and learn. My solution was to buy her, a Ruger 22/45. This is Ruger's .22 LR semiauto pistol, with a 1911 grip angle. My thought process was to get her used to the .22, and then work up to the 1911.

This was good and bad. Her little .22 is a joy to shoot. It is easily as accurate as my 10/22, and points beautifully with that heavy barrel. She loved it, and sent clip after clip full of Mini-Mags downrange with glee. My progression back to the .45 never materialized however. She decided to just stick with the .22.

Crap, this wasn't good. I was overjoyed that she liked shooting, but I can't let her try to defend herself in the future with an anemic .22. Sure it would be better than nothing, but only marginally so.

My fiasco with the .45 also made her shy to shoot rifles. I took her to the range to shoot my AR-15, and had similar results. "It is too loud and I don't like it. Can't we just shoot the .22", she said. I noticed we were in a range that had 20' concrete walls on each side, magnifying the sound. She was of course wearing proper hearing protection, but the concussion from the .223 round going off was amplified by the barriers. She also did not like the recoil from the AR. Anyone who has shot centerfire rifles knows that, an AR has about the lightest recoil you will find. It is almost nonexistant.

Well it wasn't to her. I don't think it hurt her at all, but was more violent than she expected, and she was not comfortable with it. So, strike two on me.

Luckily for us, she fell in love with a nice little .38 Special LadySmith revolver at the gun store one day. It really is a sweet shooting little gun. She loves it, and will straight out kill someone with it if need be. She is quite the marksmen with that little 3" barreled jewel. It's small grip fits her hand perfectly. She feels in control, when she shoots it, and has enjoyed the satisfaction of shooting it well.

She is now open to shooting the AR again in the open, out in the woods, so I look forward to doing that in the future with her. Hopefully we can get her to liking semiauto handguns that are a larger caliber than .22 as well at some point. My ultimate goal is to get her used to some recoil so she can shoot a .243 or 30/30 with no worries.

I type all this to illustrate how easy it is to scare someone away from guns, if you are not careful. I, unlike the douchebags in the videos, had the best intentions and still screwed up a bit.

Guns are not something to use to scare your wife or kid. You can cripple their ability and desire to shoot irrevocably if you are not careful. Any gun fan wants nothing more than to have his wife, and kids, enjoy shooting with him. Don't be the guy that makes that permanently impossible with one stupid stunt.

Remington .17 Fireball

Wow. I totally missed this cartridge release. From some brief research it shoots a 20 grain projectile at over 4,000 fps! That is really moving. I bet it is hell on varmints. This would be a neat little hot rod round to play with. Gunbroker has some Remington bolt actions listed for it for around $500.

Remington designed the round based on the .17 Mach IV, which was based on the .221 Fireball. The neat thing is the round uses less powder, and burns much cleaner. The Mach IV is a very dirty load apparently. From what I have read, you have to totally clean the barrel after 15 rounds or so. No thanks.

I love tiny bullets, I have a .17 HMR, so this little ball of fire is right up my alley. Hmm, may be a candidate for my first modern bolt action.

Info From Remington

McCain '08!

I am getting ready to make a small donation to the McCain campaign. It will be the first donation I have ever given to a politician. He is not my ideal candidate, none of them ever are. He is however our only choice now.

John McCain does have some very good aspects that have swayed me away from just jumping off the cliff and not voting at all. Here are ten reasons I will be voting for McCain in November.

1. He is not Obama. Enough said for now. I will contrast their positions in the future.

2. He is about as good as we can hope for as an RKBA guy. The only thing that I disagree with him on is required background checks for all sales at gun shows. This is a minor disagreement really in light of his other positions. Here is a link to his "Protecting Second Amendment Rights" page. Link

Read it.

It makes a lot of sense, and I agree with just about all of it. McCain opposes stupid gun manufacturer lawsuits, opposes renewing the Assault Weapons Ban, opposes banning foreign hi-cap mags, requires manufacturers to include trigger locks in their packaging (which I support), opposes ammunition bans, tried lifting the handgun ban in DC, supports quick background checks, opposes waiting periods, opposes illegal seizure of weapons after a disaster, and wants stiffer penalties for criminals who commit crimes with a gun.

That is a pretty good list there. Again I disagree with his position on checks for all gun show sales, but it is a small thing compared to some of these others.

3. He is very pro life.

4. He promises to send good constructionist judges to the SCOTUS.

5. He understands the Islamofascist threat, supports the military, and will defend us.

6. He believes lower taxes help stimulate the economy, and he is fiscally conservative.

7. He wants to expand oil exploration, and find other ways to reduce and / or eliminate our dependence on foreign oil.

8. He seems to have some common sense approaches to fixing health care.

9. He is a war hero and supports our veterans.

10. He is a supporter of NASA.

These are just ten reasons that McCain is a better choice than Obama. There are more I am sure, but I have not gotten beyond this really. I will have another post later that lists out some of what I disagree with McCain about.

Many of us did not want McCain as our nominee. We have sworn not to support him, said he is no different than Obama, and vowed to take our ball and go home. I am asking all of you to look at this list, peruse the issues section of his website, and then think about what an Obama presidency would look like. We have no choice, but to elect this man.

The Media has Betrayed Us

This of course is not news at all, but this little video from Senator McCain illustrates it perfectly. There is no objective reporting going on as far as Obama is concerned. I am starting to think he will have to slap an old lady, or drop a baby before the media focuses on his negatives.



HT: Anarchangel

Gore Has Completely Lost His Mind

In Father Gore's speech yesterday he said we should commit to generating all our electricity with green energy sources within ten years. A certain senator had the perfect comment for that.

Ridiculous!

I heard yesterday that it would cost about three trillion dollars. I am sure that is just a wild-assed guess, if such a thing would even be possible. Idiot.

Gitmo Lawyer Drops His Pants

So a lawyer for a bunch of Yemeni terrorists we have locked up in Gitmo dropped his pants during a press conference to illustrate, supposedly, how prisoners are searched at Gitmo. Personally I think the searches, if they are indeed happening, are just fine. American prisoners all over the country are subjected to worse.

At any rate, this guy is a piece of work. He should be drug out into the street, beaten by our citizenry, and locked up in the stocks for a couple of weeks. Here is his quote to the WSJ from their story here.

“I’d been to Guantanamo in mid-June,” explained Remes, “and there’s a certain amount of normalcy that has settled over the normal miserable conditions of confinement, which amount to solitary confinement without sleep and without sunlight and without anyone to talk to. So at the news conference, I said that, in addition to this torment, which has become so typical that we don’t even talk about it anymore, now the torment also consists of constant body searches in which the men are required to pull their shirts up to their chest, drop their pants, and then the corn-fed U.S. military sticks their thumbs under the prisoner’s underwear band and circles the prisoner’s torsos.” Remes said these searches can take place several times in the course of a day.

This is completely infuriating. This guy is trying to free terrorists that want to slice babies heads off, simply because they are not Muslim babies, and he is worried that a simple search procedure offends them. I am sick of these weak-minded fools. They are the scum of the earth as far as I am concerned.

His backhanded snipe at our military is another problem with these prick elitist communist bastards. They look down their nose at the very people that protect them. It is disgusting, and should not be tolerated.

This is Tacticool Right?!

Good to be Back

My two week vacation is now over, and I am glad. It was a good time for the most part, but it will be good to get back in my routine.

The Independence Day fireworks show went off without a hitch, and my mortar racks functioned flawlessly.

The entire vacation was a mixed blessing however. We have taken on the responsibility of raising our three month granddaughter. It wasn't really a voluntary thing, she was pretty much dumped on us. We love her so, so much, and just want what is best for her, so we hope to be raising her for the duration now, with no insane interruptions. We are financially able to handle her thankfully, so the only sacrifice is our freedom to some extent.

The vacation turned into a mourning period of the loss of our ability to come and go as we please, and a period of time to deal with our new situation. We have gotten through the emotional turmoil for the most part now, and are enjoying our little Brooke as if she were our own. She is such a sweet, sweet baby girl.

It is a sobering experience to realize that you are all another life has in the world. This precious life is totally dependant on you for all it's needs. I think it may be a bit easier when you are expecting such a thing, but to have it suddenly thrust upon you without warning takes a bit of getting used to.

Besides who could refuse such an angel?


Hmm, maybe it is time to go look at those pink Cricket rifles now!