Today being a rather nasty day weather wise, my shooting group decided to forego the outdoor range and have an hour or so at the nice, heated indoor range.  Apparently we weren’t the only ones who had this idea, because there was a wait for a lane when we left.

I took along the CZ-82, Taurus Model 85, RIA Government Model 1911, and the new S&W 22A-1.

Thoughts:

• The 22A is a great little pistol.  Mine is the base model, so the sights are pretty basic, but easy to see in good lighting.  I’m going to use it as a pistol trainer for Girlie Bear and Irish Woman, so I won’t be putting an optic on the integral rail.  Only thing I might do is put a dab of orange or white gun paint on the front sight.  I shot Winchester high velocity .22 long through it, and the muzzle flipped less than an inch during rapid fire.  My groups started out at about 10 inches across, but tightened up some as I continued putting rounds downrange.  
• Between me and the rest of my group, we put about 150 rounds down the 22A, and I had three failures.  One was a stovepipe on ejection, the other two were problems with feeding from the magazine.  One of the failures to feed dented the cartridge bad enough I discarded it.
• Disassembly of the 22A was about as easy as I’ve ever seen on a pistol.  Lock the slide back, push in the disassembly button, and lift off the upper part of the gun.  Definitely easier than a 1911 or Mark III.
• The CZ-82 is fast becoming my favorite pistol.  It’s as light as the Model 85, but has enough weight that it doesn’t flip around a lot from recoil.  It shoots very well, has a good trigger, and made a ragged hole in the target at 21 feet.  I was firing Fiocci rounds out of it today.  Next time I go to the outdoor range, I’ll try out the cheap Tulammo steel cased ammunition I bought for it.  
• The 1911 is probably going to come out of rotation as a carry piece.  It just doesn’t want to consistently feed non-FMJ ammunition.  If I can get my hands on some EFMJ ammunition, I’ll try it and re-evaluate carrying the 1911.  It’s a perfectly adequate range gun, and it is extremely enjoyable to shoot.  Some have turned their noses up at the RIA brand, but other than the issues with hollow point ammunition, it’s pretty solid. I’m between 1000 and 2000 rounds into its lifespan, and no components show any signs of problems.  
• The Model 85 is my carry piece, and I need to seriously start doing dry fire on a regular basis.  The DA trigger isn’t too stiff, but I need to strengthen my hands in order to consistently fire it accurately.  At 21 feet, I was still hitting the vitals with every shot, but my groups were between 6 and 8 inches across.  I want to tighten that up so that I can hit a 3 inch group with a cold gun.  Other than that, I really love this little revolver.

Hopefully spring will hurry up and get here so I can get out to the outdoor range and spend a little more time shooting.  It’s hard to linger over your shots and analyze when you’re paying by the hour.  The indoor range is really nice though, and I definitely enjoy going out there when the weather is bad or I don’t feel like driving the 45 minutes to Knob Creek.

An unqualified politically appointed “diplomat” has left our embassy in Luxembourg in a complete shambles.  Apparently U.S. and local employees, some of whom have probably worked there for decades, are described as demoralized and stressed.  Considering how easy-going the State Department types I’ve worked with in the past tend to be, that’s saying a lot.

Apparently, Madam Ambassador Stroum terrorized embassy employees, wasted taxpayer money on searches for personal housing and staff that are commensurate with her station, or at least the station she believes she deserves, and spent thousands of taxpayer dollars in re-stocking the embassy liquor cabinet with booze from Europe when she should have been buying American.

Shocked, yes shocked, I am that a political appointee, who got the job by raising money for President Obama’s 2008 campaign, would abuse her position to make her own life more luxurious while belittling the people who keep the wheels on.  I am also surprised that she did not fly Air Pelosi back and forth to the States, since she seems to be cut from the same cloth as the representative from Northern California. 

Luxembourg, along with the other Low Countries, have been good, loyal friends and allies since the end of the Second World War.  They deserve better than to have a political prima donna sent to be their conduit to the United States government.  But then, the Obama administration doesn’t seem to have a problem pissing in the tea of our oldest and closest European ally, so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.

President Obama needs to remind all of his minions that they are employed to serve our nation, not to be serviced.  And Mrs. Stroum should repay the taxpayers for every penny we paid for her European junket.

Tam over at View From The Porch has been struggling to clear the demon ice from her sidewalk after the latest version of Snowmageddon hit her lovely home of Rosenholme in the wilds of Indiana.

I was inspired by her tale of woe to pen the following comment, and I’m so proud of it I’m reproducing it here:

OK, stop, she’s choppin’ and chippin’
Tam is out and she’s got a mission
Something falls from the sky there nightly
Rosenholme is covered up in white stuff oh so tightly
Will she ever stop,yo, I don’t know
Stop with the work and the drifts will grow
To the extreme she smacks the walk like a vandal
Cover it with mo-gas and light it like a candle!

Snap, the ice breaks with a boom
Hitting her noggin, raise a knot like a mushroom
Deadly when it smacks upside her melon
Get the walk cleared or be considered a felon
So much ice other Gunnies say Damn!
If ice was a drug, she’d sell it by the gram!

If there’s an ice sheet, yo, she’ll whack it
Sharpen the axe so Roberta can hack it!

Ice Ice Baby!

Head on over and give Tam a little encouragement as she clears her driveway and sidewalk in time for the next round of snow and ice.

My attempt to pick the games this year pretty much fell apart due to a lot of factors, but I will pick the Superbowl.

I’m really torn about this one.  I cheered for the Steelers back in the ’70’s, but Green Bay is one of my teams.  I’m going to pick the Packers to win, but I hope it’ll be close.  But if the Steelers win the Super Bowl in the first year that Jerry Jones’ penis extension of a stadium is open, I’ll be OK with that too.

anticsrocks over at Flopping Aces has put together a pretty comprehensive liberal to English dictionary.  Here are a couple of my favorites:

“Fully fund” = Blank check
“Working Americans” = Only lower and middle class Americans
“Tax the rich” = Increase taxes on anyone making $250,000 a year or higher, $200,000 or, er, I mean $150,000 a year – *sigh* this number keeps getting lower

Go and have a read.  They’re quite entertaining and ring true with me.  If you’ve got any suggestions for additions, leave them in comments either here or there.

On this day, in 1943, the USAT Dorchester, a troop transport taking soldiers across the Atlantic, was torpedoed and sunk by a German U-Boat.   On board were four chaplains:  Reverand George Fox, Rabbi Alexander Goode, Father John Washington, and Reverand Clark Poling.  These saints in the flesh not only provided a calm hand to guide men to lifeboats and assisted the wounded, but they also gave up their own life vests so that others might have a better chance at survival.  Soldiers and sailors who survived the sinking remember watching these men pray together on the deck of the ship as it went down.  Their sacrifice probably saved more than a few lives that night, and has been an inspirational example to me since I first heard their story.

Military chaplains are the quiet heroes among the rough men and women that make up our armed forces.  They provide moral guidance to leaders, comfort the wounded in body and spirit, and remind all of us that there are better things than the heat, cold, sand, mud, and heartache that comes with the military.  They act as staff confessor, conscience, and counselor to most military units.  Any soldier knows that if he has a problem, he can go to the chaplain, if for nothing else than to find someone who will listen attentively and make suggestions that are reasonable.  On more than one occasion I have taken Holy Communion from the back of a truck, with the Father just as wet, cold, and miserable as the rest of us.  The difference was that he chose to leave the relative warmth and comfort of the TOC to make sure that the soldiers in his flock were taken care of.

I have known chaplains that were saints walking among men.  I have known chaplains who were only slightly more holy in their manners than the men and women they tried to guide to a better life.  One Catholic chaplain I served with was Airborne, Air Assault, and Ranger qualified, could drink like a fish, would flirt with waitresses as much as the rest of us, and was as viciously loyal to Notre Dame football as anyone I ever met.  He was also the man who baptized my oldest son, blessed my marriage to his mother, and helped to bring me peace when I came home from a particularly hard assignment heartsick and broken.

To all of our chaplains, I say thank you.  There are some debts that can never be repaid, but I hope that my words have some worth in that process.  Even though a good minister can always find a comfortable, safe posting if they look hard enough, they go into the wilderness to preach to and care for the men and women who need them the most. 

Following in the footsteps of BRM and his “Doofus of the Day” posts, here is your Daily Dumbass:

An official in Portland, Ore., says a house fire that caused $30,000 in damage was apparently started by tenants who were using a hole in the floor as an ashtray.

When we lived in California, my step-father used the crawlspace under our house as a dumping ground for every noxious chemical he came up with. Paint thinner, pest poisons, paint, old gasoline cans, and used propane cylinders.  The other corner of the crawlspace housed his crates of ammunition, which my mother wouldn’t let in the house.  He was also a smoker, and on more than one occasion I was worried he was going to kill us all with his non-chalant smoking in high-fume areas or flicking a butt at containers of flammable liquids. 

But to be honest, I never saw him flick his ashes into anything indoors other than an ash tray or soda can.  What kind of moron doesn’t know that you don’t use the basement or crawlspace as an ashtray?  Details are sketchy, and I hope that no-one was hurt in this fire, but if so, it’s only by luck.

By the way, what is the correct term for a group of dumbasses like we have here?  You have a gaggle of geese, a herd of cows, and a grouch of SysAds.  What do you call a group of dumbasses?

Irish Woman, in a discussion with her loving husband:  I am not menopausal, I’m just psychotic.

Some A-1 jerk from Louisville broke some or all of the rules and shot a a young girl in the bloody head due to his stupidity.  Apparently he was practicing his Audie Murphy gun tricks or something and the fool thing went off.


Say them with me now:

1. All guns are always loaded!
2. Never let the muzzle cover anything you are notwilling to destroy!
3. Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on the target!
4. Always be sure of your target!

This blunt skull obviously ignored all four of them, and it’s only by sheer dumb luck that the young lady was only wounded and not killed outright.


Listen Junior, guns are not toys. They are tools.  They are not evil automatons bent on killing.  They almost always require a human being to pull the bang switch before they go boom.  Because you were “playing” with a loaded revolver a child has been closer to death than she has a right to be, is scarred for life, and will probably grow up in fear of inanimate objects.  Personally, I hope they throw the book at you and you spend the rest of your young years looking at the world through barbed wire.  But since the gun will be blamed, you’ll probably be left on the street where your innate stupidity will continue to be a danger to me and mine.  And of course this will just go down as another case of EVIL GUNS hurting children, as opposed to some jackwagon whose father should have pulled out hurting a child.  Jerk.

The Supreme Court has apparently decided to send a pretty blunt message to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.  They’ve unanimously reversed 5 recent cases that came up to the Supremes from the 9th.

Experts seem to think the Supremes are trying to nudge the lower court a little more towards the middle.  I’m thinking it’s going to take a little more than a few judicial black eyes to get the 9th to start living in the real world.

This is the court that has been reversed more often than any other court of appeal.  In my lifetime, it’s been a laughing matter in conservative circles when a conservative cause has come before the 9th.

Hopefully a judicial kick in the ass of legendary proportions is in the works for this wayward court.  Justice needs to be consistent, and it just hasn’t been that way for a long time in the areas where the 9th Circuit holds sway.