About that range day,

Had half a dozen loads in .45-70 I wanted to test, but a phone call cut my time short, so was only able to try four.  All bullets were cast of 20-1.

First was the Lee 405-grain hollowbase over 70.0 grains of 2f black, with a .060 wad between bullet and powder

I have no idea where the first one went.  I suspected high, so I lowered the rear sight, and got this.  Not a bad group, not outstanding.

This was the prize: 500-grain Lyman roundnose bullet over 65.0 2f, .060 wad

That far/right was me, one of those where just as the trigger breaks you know you pulled it a bit.  Those other four were right on aim.

This was a smokeless load I've tried before, 525-grain Lyman Postell, 23.0 Accurate 5744, the usual wad under the bullet

Bad breath control on my part.  Every time I haven't watched it, I've gotten that vertical stringing.  It's shot quite well before, and if not for me would have this time as well.  Which leads us to #4, same everything except 24.0 grains

The first was that very high hole.  Lowered the rear sight, two more, my second 'knew I blew it' of the day, and one more.  Definitely trying this one again(yes, I recorded all the sight settings). 

I did remember to take the tripod and Chrony today but discovered that the tripod isn't high enough for the way the ground drops in front of the firing line.  I'll have to figure a way to extend the vertical pipe so I can check the velocities.  That last one must've made a big jump over the 23.0 load.  Easy ejection, no bad signs on the primers, and this is well below the max load in the Lyman manual.

And thus went most of that trip, all I had time for otherwise was checking zero on another rifle.  So now I need to make up some more of these, and hopefully be able to shoot the others, next time.

There was insufficient headfire here,

he was able to walk away

Yesterday was a range day,

though it was cut a bit short.  Had a couple of interesting results, which I'll update this with more later.

Right now I've got to catch up on the stuff I'd planned to do yesterday after the range.

Tab clearing

Snowy owls in Detroit.  Considering the amount of rats and such to eat, why not?


March For Our Lives Raised Nearly All Funding from Secret Six-Figure Donations 

The gun-control group responsible for a 2018 march on Washington, D.C., raised the vast majority of its funds from undisclosed donations over six figures, a recently released tax document shows.


Let's say I'd want proof of actual 'threats of severe violence' before I'll believe them.


Yes, the enviroweenies are (still) full of shit.


Those states/cities trying to run the NRA out of existence?  Didn't go so well for them.


Apparently the dickheads at CNN really didn't want this to go to court.

Some of the asshats running Virginia really seem to want the boogaloo

to kick off.
They want to shut down every gun range in the state that isn’t owned by the government. 
According to House Bill 567, any indoor shooting range would be prohibited by law – UNLESS it was inside of a building owned or leased by the state. 

And any business owners who decided to defy the law could be facing up to a $100,000 fine and potential additional civil penalties.
And the ones allowed to stay open will have to have complete records of whoever shoots there.  Because that registration won't happen voluntarily.

Just how badly has the Evil Party screwed up the impeachment?

This badly.
The witness was Charles Kupperman, a deputy to former national security adviser John Bolton. Other than Bolton himself, Kupperman is one of the officials most likely to have direct knowledge of an alleged quid pro quo on aid to Ukraine. After subpoenaing him last fall, the House withdrew its request before the court could rule on compelling his testimony for the record. The House also decided not to subpoena Bolton or any other key witnesses in the administration. Judge Richard Leon dismissed the case before New Years Eve with a hint of frustration, if not bewilderment, that the House did not seem interested in hearing from a possible eyewitness. Historically, that lack of attention in not only witnesses but also a triable case will remain one of the most baffling blunders of this impeachment. 
... 
Schiff is not the only Democrat undermining the case for the obstruction article. Representative Eric Swalwell, who seeks to be a House manager at the Senate trial, recently declared that not only should a sitting president be impeached if he goes to the courts rather than submit to Congress, but that contesting demands for evidence is actually evidence of guilt on all of the charged offenses. In a complete denial of the critical concepts of the rule of law and due process, Swalwell claimed “we can only conclude that you are guilty” if someone refuses to give testimony or documents. It is unclear if his concept of due process would be extended to President Obama, who refused both critical witnesses and documents to Congress on the basis of claims that were eventually dismissed by federal courts as untenable. Likewise, former Vice President Joe Biden has made headlines by declaring that, if subpoenaed, he would defy the Senate. But someone must have explained to Biden that the man he seeks to replace was just impeached for defying the House, even without a subpoena, because he clarified his earlier remarks by stating the opposite in a later interview.

Why, you'd think this was being done by a bunch of incompetent partisan hacks or something...

Anyone messed around with one of the old Savage 340-series rifles?

Coworker picked one up recently, and likes it.  I'm wondering about the barrel band that holds the barrel to stock about 2" back from the forend tip.  If you've ever used on, did you try removing the band to see if it would affect accuracy?

I did do some digging around, and found the usual mix of opinions.  The design only uses one receiver screw to hold it into the stock, so the ones removing the band that sounded best(to me) involved bedding the receiver and first few inches of barrel and free-floating the rest, or bedding the receiver and barrel full-length.

"THEY'E JUST LIKE SLAVERY SUPPORTERS!!"

Yeah.  Right.  From a clown in the Washington Post:
In linking it to slavery, he wrote, “A sad irony is that the ‘sanctuary’ movement conjures the disturbing nullification movements of the past three centuries in Virginia. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison argued that the states have the right to ignore federal laws they consider unconstitutional. That thinking was applied to proslavery movements, leading to the Civil War and the fight over integration in the 1950s and 1960s.”

How much you want to bet that he LOVES the idea of sanctuary cities and counties for illegal aliens?

But that, of course, is different.

I'd heard of Parker shotguns,

but never knew the history of the name.

Saturday, clear & cold,

and more data to examine

A profile update

The weekend is arriving

Not bad for the first of January, cold but not nasty.  Assuming you're not out doing something constructive, study materials are available

What happens when intelligence gets data to the generals,

and the generals won't believe it.
NHK’s documentary lays out the following:

1. The Japanese military knew of the Manhattan project in 1943 and started its own nuclear weapons programs (IJA & IJN) as a result.[2]
2. The Imperial Japanese Military gave up these nuclear programs in June 1945. [3]
3. The Imperial Japanese Military & Foreign Ministry were informed of the American Atomic test on July 16, 1945 and refused to believe it was a nuclear detonation.
4. The code breakers of the Imperial Japanese Army had been tracking the combat operations of the 509th Composite Group including both A-bomb drops.[4] The Imperial General Staff was told of the special message to Washington DC for the Hiroshima attack, sat on the information, and warned no one.
5. The Imperial General Staff repeated this non-communication performance for the 2^nd nuclear attack on Nagasaki.

Ah, the Evil Party...

 You may have heard that the President ordered an airstrike that took out Iran's Quds force leader and #1 Asshole in the region, along with some other terrorists, in Iraq.

This is after, when our Embassy was attacked, not only was it held by the Marines, but they got reinforcements without anyone having to beg for them.*

 Enter Sen. Chris Murphy(EP-CT)

That was when the embassy was attacked.

Then came the airstrike, and Murphy is horrified

Because whacking one of the biggest terrorists in the Mid-East, who was in a country he had no legitimate business being, who'd undoubtedly been involved in the embassy attack, is a Bad Thing to Evil Party idiots.

Ran across this on Bookface, seems to sum it up nicely:
Trump has held back as Iran provoked. He pulled back on an attack because he didn't want collateral damage. For that, the Democrats implied his foreign policy toward Iran was weak and he was a coward. Fast forward to yesterday where he authorized a focused, limited, tactical strike against two car loads of Iran and Hezbollah's military leadership (who had no business in Iraq to begin with) with no collateral damage and now Democrats are calling him a warmonger.

You couldn't make this crap up if you wanted to. It's just too ridiculous for fiction, so it must be true.


*I suspect that, under this President, if it had come down to the Marines having to use lethal force, the 'protesters' would've gone back a lot faster than they came.  The ones still able to move, at least.

They're not neutral, they're on the other friggin' side

Some things to start the year with

A bunch of asshats are just furious that they have not enough blood to dance in,

and the reason was the good guy with a gun they insist doesn't exist.

'Gone by 2020'

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
In recent years the National Park Service prominently featured brochures, signs and films which boldly proclaimed that all glaciers at GNP were melting away rapidly. But now officials at GNP seem to be scrambling to hide or replace their previous hysterical claims while avoiding any notice to the public that the claims were inaccurate. Teams from Lysander Spooner University visiting the Park each September have noted that GNP’s most famous glaciers such as the Grinnell Glacier and the Jackson Glacier appear to have been growing - not shrinking - since about 2010. (The Jackson Glacier—easily seen from the Going-To-The-Sun Highway—may have grown as much as 25% or more over the past decade.)

The reference to Venezuela is important because that asshat Sanders

was praising it to the skies, until it fell completely apart and he decided that made socialism and him look bad, at which point he started bleating "It's not fair to compare MY democratic socialism to that of Venezuela!"

I like how "real socialism" is whatever they want it to mean at a given moment, so they can tell you you "Don't know what socialism is."

Venezuela--it was real socialism, until it failed, which was somehow capitalism sneaking in there. Sweden--is real socialism, despite having multibillion dollar corporations. But wait, we'll come back to that.

The American welfare state--Someone actually told me that, "It's not socialism. It's just taking resources from those who have them and distributing them to those who need them." Which it LITERALLY THE FUCKING DEFINITION of socialism. But it's not real socialism. Except it should be universal for everyone.

Tab clearing

That is to say, there is precisely no correlation.

Which means there cannot be causation.

And that is a complicated way of saying, “the number of firearms in America is not driving the number of firearm-related deaths in America.”


Options and Constraints


Assholes hiding behind badges.  This one requires an excerpt:
When police lab tests for cocaine came back negative, prosecutors dismissed the felony drug charges. What was never brought up at the arraignment is that the gang unit members left field drug test kits at the scene which also tested negative for cocaine.

What cops also left: that destroyed recorder.  The brothers took it to a friend who is a computer engineer and he recovered footage from two cameras.  The video shows two different angles, one from an external camera and the other an internal camera. Officers are seen handcuffing the two owners. A few minutes later, a captain gestures to the location where the camera is located. He gets a step ladder and pulls the cords. Eventually, the camera goes blank.


More from the craphole that is New York.


Sounds like a lot of people are trying very hard not to deal with what's actually behind this crap:
...The fact that the victims are most often outwardly identifiable, i.e., religious rather than secularized Jews, and the perpetrators who have been recorded on CCTV cameras are overwhelmingly black and Hispanic, inverts the perpetrator-victim dynamics with which most national Jewish organizations and their supporters are comfortable. A close look at these cases reveals no apparent connection to neo-Nazis, the alt-right, Donald Trump, jihadism, the BDS movement, or any other traditional cause of anti-Jewish behavior.

Again: "It's DIFFERENT when OUR guy does it!"

More Professional Journalism on display.
"So what if he can't remember if he was the one wearing blackface or the one in the Klan uniform?  So what if his Lt. Governor abuses women?  So what if the AG wore blackface?  He's wonderful now!"