The Big Kahuna

That's a Weatherby Mark V, left-handed and chambered in .338 WinMag. I found it at a local pawn shop, the original owner had traded it in for something else.

As I've been wanting to get into distance precision rifle work (and have done a wee bit with a friend of mine), I took the plunge and picked it up.

It's my first left-handed rifle. The action is smooth like silk. The trigger breaks crisply at about 3.5 pounds with no creep at all. It's heavy and fit me like it was designed for me. Is this what right-handed people feel like all the time?

I took the Nikon 3x9 scope it came with off of it and replaced it with my Nikon 4.5x14. Found a day to take it to the range for bore sighting and trial run.

To be honest, I've never boresighted before. It took a long time and I couldn't figure out why I couldn't get the crosshairs to line up with the bore picture - until it was pointed out to me that the ass end of a Leupold STC Mount has "windage screws" that you use to line up the scope before even bore sighting.. and I hadn't set them properly. We fixed that, got the scope lined up and then it was time to test it.

Oh good lord. That first round to go off rocked my world. It was also pretty close to zeroed at 200 yards. Excellent work from my friend that helped me boresight it. Within 5 rounds, we had it dialed in and I fired two consecutive rounds that overlapped in the X-ring.

I loved it.

Sadly, it's way too much rifle for what I am doing right now. I noticed that I was starting to flinch while pulling the trigger. I know that I could get a recoil pad, but I thought about how much it'll take to feed this beast and the fact is - I'm shooting sub-1000 meters right now. I'm not hunting with this rifle. It offers almost no advantages in that useage case than a number of other options.

So, it's my first sale up on GunBroker. It's a hell of a good rifle and someone will love it, I'm sure. click here to check it out

Stupid fucking machismo

  Hi, I'm BearLeft and I'm a gun person who is completely and totally ashamed by popular gun culture.

  It's all based on this hyper-masculine image of the independent self, a go-it-alone badass motherfucker who don't need no one else to know that he's a MAN'S MAN, BABY. No homo.

  There are a few major divisions within this ALL MAN ALL THE TIME world - there's the TACTICOOL ARMY MANS who swagger around like Real Twue Operators with their tricked out AR platforms in combat carries and so many pouches that Rob Liefeld rolls his eyes. The TACTICOOL ARMY MAN is gonna make sure that no damn dirty muzzies inflict their commie Sharia law on Real White Americans Who Are White Like Jesus.

See the pouches? The man has some kind of weird fetish

  Then there's SHEEPDOG IN SHEEP CLOTHING, carrying a gun all the time because YOU NEVER KNOW WHEN THE BROWN PEOPLE WILL GET ROWDY AND YOU WILL HAVE TO PROTECT TEH WOMANS. The SHEEPDOG runs quickdraw drills and reminds me of Tackleberry from the Police Academy movies. Elaborate threat/response scenarios are planned out with the care and dedication usually reserved for sexual fantasies.

Seriously, that face should never be made outside the bedroom. And maybe not inside it.

Our culture at large is filled with rugged gunslinging heroes and anti-heroes, so it's not terribly surprising that some of the tropes would be brightly represented. John Wayne, Charles Bronson, and Clint Eastwood from the rise of the anti-hero. Willis, Stallone and Schwarzenegger for my own generation. A man who needs nothing but his wits, his gun, and  a pithy catchphrase. Bad guys all fall before his righteous fury. It's an attractive image, really. We all want to be The Good Guy, the unquestionable White Hat (even if the halo's tarnished, to mix my metaphors).

There are a lot of gun folk who don't subscribe to these stereotypes (yours truly included most of the time), but it's almost impossible to see them because of how... attention-seeking ARMY MANS and SHEEPDOG and their loudmouth, pushy buddies are. Guns are in, gays are out. Chicks need to be hot and naked, tofu is nothing more than a litmus test for finding who's not allowed in the club.

I was doing some link surfing and ran across an article by a somewhat prominent hunting blogger about the rising interest in hunting that's directly related to foodie/locavore/organic lifestyles (I talekd about this topic myself in one of my first posts here). I was excited to read it because it was from the perspective of someone "inside" hunting culture whereas the article I used as a starting point for my post was written from an outsider perspective.

I couldn't finish it. I just couldn't do it. The dripping contempt that this writer had for hipsters, leftists, and intellectuals was thinly veiled and more insulting for it. I'm sure that the author was trying to be enthusiastic for the people who were discovering hunting, but his overall attitude was something that makes me want to avoid anything that he and his company every do. I shudder to think about how his attitude affects people who are on the outside but curious about the inside. I especially hate cretinous right-wingers who use coded phrases and snark and think they're being SO CLEVAR THAT NO DUMB LEFTIST WILL EVAR FIGURE IT OUT BECAUSE DUMBOCRATS ARE DUMB.

There's a certain level of "you must be this tall to ride this ride" posturing that comes across in a lot of gun culture - you gotta sack up, sacrifice, man up. Be strong. I think that's a bullshit attitude.

As a culture, gun people are not going to sway many with such oppositional tactics, and in a lot of cases will harden potential allies against firearms and shooting sports. Especially with an activity like hunting (which contains a number of visceral actions, textures, and fluids), mocking people for their inexperience is fucking stupid and counterproductive.

Why in the name of Bob would anyone who doesn't look like they got hit by the Cabela's Camo Sportswear truck want to associate with an entire culture with gatekeepers who are complete and total assbags? There's a delicious Skittles rainbow of people interested in guns that don't get to see positive portrayals of themselves in shooting culture. These people are often met with hostile resistance or disdain when they attempt to participate.

As a quick mental exercise, conjure up in your mind the archetypical "gun enthusiast." What does your gun enthusiast look like?

I'd bet a dollar (Monopoly money!) that your mental picture is a chubby white guy wearing at least one piece of militaryesque clothing. If he speaks, his voice probably draws out vowels and softens glottal stops. What does it take to envision a Black person, or a woman. Asian? Queer? Is there a sense of cognitive dissonance that accompanies those thoughts?

In my mind, we need to be more supportive, more encouraging, and drop the friggin' lameass faux hero bullshit. If you want to cosplay Delta Force on your day off, that's A-OK by me; please for the love of all that is holy, don't be a dick about it. If you carry concealed, I hope that it's because you feel a legitimate need or calling to do so and not because it makes you feel powerful and enables weird rescuer fantasies.

Hi. I'm BearLeft. I'm a lefty, I'm a humanitarian, I'm a hunter and I think it'd be awesome if you wanted to join me on a range day.

The (to me, at least) Gun Cleaning Revolution

  A few weeks ago I took the Arisaka rifle to a buddy's house to run the parts through his ultrasonic cleaner, to make sure that I got everything gunky out of it. After that was finished (and WOW, a bunch of goop boiled out of the bolt pieces. I was a little surprised at how well it worked), he had  me run a Bore Snake through the barrel to make sure it was cleaned - and I was instantly sold on how useful it was.

  I'd seen the Bore Snakes before - and another friend of mine even has some - but I was never convinced that it was any better than my old rod-and-brush method. It felt gimmicky. Once I got over my Old Ways Is Best Ways attitude, I was instantly struck by how quickly the Bore Snake cleaned and polished the Arisaka barrel. Looking down the barrel with a flexilight, the lands and grooves gleamed at me.

  I ended up with a bunch of Amazon credit, so I picked up Bore Snakes for .22LR, 6mm/.243 and .30 cal - that takes care of all our guns except for Mama Bear's little Rossi pistol in .38SPL and the two 12ga shotguns. They arrived a week ago and today I got down to the business of using them.

A lean winter...

  Hi everybody!

Hi, Doctor Nick!

  Well, it was not a successful autumn in regards to hunting. I made it out deer hunting on only one afternoon and my elk hunt was a total bust. Which sucked (the bust part, not the hunt part).

  If you recall my last blog post, I was starting to get tuned up for the hunt - I'd looked on the map and found some excellent-looking country between the Pacific Crest Trail and Highway 99. Two scouting trips turned up plenty of elk sign and activity - beds, trails, poop. Everything seemed perfect.

  My two friends and I rolled out to the site on October 11, the day before opening day. We picked a gorgeous campsite (with a bonus game trail next to it) and after we'd set up the camp we hopped into a truck and did one last bit of scouting around. Honestly, that should have been our cue to get the hell out - we passed four camps and at least a dozen hunters right in the sweet spot. However, I felt confident that at least one of us would get lucky on our trip. Fresh tracks and sign really led me to maintain my optimism.

 At camp that night we listened to something that sounded like a cross between cow elk calling, and coyotes. It was really weird, and not something I'd ever heard before. 

  Opening morning dawned - well, by dawn we'd already had breakfast and gotten set up for our morning hunt. We picked a treeline along a game superhighway that bordered a marshland that's about a mile wide and 4ish miles long. I stationed the guys at roughly 100 yard intervals - close enough to be able to support each other if a shot was successful but far enough away to not interfere. I picked a spot and watched the sun bleed colour into the world. It was absolutely gorgeous, but entirely too quiet. After an hour or so of nothing, I got a little antsy and took myself on a walk, slipping into the treeline and following the game trail up the marsh. I slid like a chunky spirit through the misty woods and aside from some squirrels, heard nothing. I looped back, picked up the guys and we drove to another spot.

  Lather, rinse, repeat. All day. We broke for lunch, looked at the maps, picked another likely area and walked and watched and listened. Everywhere we went we found new-but-not-fresh tracks and scat. I wandered through some incredibly beautiful country, like I was stepping out of real life and into some bucolic legend from my Irish ancestors. As frustrating as the lack of success was, I was really happy to be out.

  Nearing the end of daylight, we parked off of a confluence of three creeks and walked in - somewhere in the vicinity of a mile into the walk I caught sight of the literal south end of a northbound elk. Two bounces and it was lost in the trees. I never saw enough of it to determine if it was a boy or a girl, but at least I saw it. My friends, sadly, were looking the wrong direction.

  Still, I felt really validated. We spend another hour there, then packed up and went to a new location, on the opposite side of the confluence. We got turned around and missed the truck on the return - lost in unfamiliar woods after dark is not a good place to be. Fortunately, I pulled out my iPhone, picked up an LTE signal and we Google Mapped ourselves back to the truck - we'd missed it by a few hundred yards but it was on the other side of a stand of timber. I tripped on a stump and sprained my knee, but that was a small price to pay for not having to spend the night in the woods.

  Relaxing back at camp I had a revelation - it had been entirely too quiet of a day. I heard a small handful of gunshots, nothing close in at all. There was also no elk bugling. A picture started to form into my mind.

  Based on my sighting from the night before, we went back to the confluence the next morning. The general idea was that we KNEW that elk transited through that area, though we weren't sure of when. Evening hadn't been the right time, perhaps we needed to be there first thing. I started walked a hundred or so yards back up the road before angling for the creek - the plan was that I'd hit the creek well upstream from the other two and walk slowly towards them. In theory, if there were any elk between us, I'd pressure them downstream and give the guys a chance.

  I'm very good with directions, orienteering, and dead reckoning. If I go somewhere, I can get there again from any direction for years afterward. I'm not sure what happened, maybe it was the grey morning and lack of visual references (though I can dead reckon in the dark...), but I missed the creek. It was barely 200 yards from my starting point through some checkerboard clearcut. I walked for a half-hour, came to a road that I wasn't expecting, followed it for a few yards and saw the truck parked at the end of the loop... whoops. I parked my butt on the tailgate for a while, then went back for it. Walked for a half-hour, realized I was lost and Google Mapped my (now slightly frustrated) butt back to the truck. I'd walked a big circle, and while I *started* walking southeast, I was more than a half-mile northwest of the truck. A few minutes later, one of my buddies makes it back to the truck - he was starting to feel ill so he was going to hang it up and go home when we went for lunch.

  We helped him pack up and as he headed for home, the remaining party (two of us) went into the local town to get gas and hot food. In the restaurant, we over heard a waitress telling two grizzled old guys that NOBODY was having any luck.

  After lunch, we followed a different road that took us up behind the areas that we'd been looking - my new theory was that there was so much human pressure in the grid squares we'd been in that the elk had seen what was up when folks started arriving, and headed off to areas inaccessible. Possibly Maui. We apparently didn't go far enough. We drove and walked more than a dozen logging roads up canyon fingers, saw a lot of recent sign but nothing fresher than Friday morning at the earliest.

  We slept in Monday... packed and came home.

  I was honestly not expecting the level of human pressure that was there. I was so friggin' pissed off at people camping right in the hunting zones - you ALWAYS want to camp away from where the hunting is, so as to not encourage the animals to go to the summer house.

  I think I know where the elk might have gone, but it's going to take a while to figure it out. The area we hunted was apparently too accessible to humans, a series of canyons, draws, and drainages at the transition zone between the eastern side of the Cascades and the foothills. Looking at the map and the trails, there's a boundary wall of significant smaller mountains at the southern end of this network, and there's a saddle that looks like some motivated elk could escape through it - and according to the maps there's one road into that drainage network, and it ends about two miles from the good stuff. 2014 is going to feature a few trips into that area to see what I can learn about it.


  I'm sad that I'm going to end 2013 with no game in my larder, but that just inspires me to work harder in 2014.

Tuning up for the hunt

  My big hunt this year is going to be elk - getting together some friends, camping out in the very heard of the wilderness, and hopefully filling the freezer with a few hundred pounds of meat.

  In preparation, we've inventoried our gear (need to fix up the stove and the lantern, maybe acquire a ground cloth for the tent), found a place to hunt, and now it's all down to the details.

  Part of those details are getting back into shape with my shooting. I'll be honest, folks, it's been 20 years since I've shot with any regularity and I wasn't exactly a marksman back then. After working out a nice recipe for my inherited Remington 760 .30-06, I took a box of homemade rounds out into the field this past Saturday and proceeded to learn how to aim.

  A buddy of mine that went with us (and who will be on the elk hunt) brought his armor-plated steel targets. We set them up about 250 yards out from our firing line. These things are VERY cool; I haven't shot steel very often, but the feedback you get on a successful hit is nice. He hung the 18", 12" and 6" plates for us to play with and with a few shots, I was semi-consistently hitting the 18" plate. At the end of the day, I was about a 60% hit rate - not good, but much better than it could have been. My buddy did me the favour of taking a few shots with the rifle, hitting the 6" plate and proving that the accuracy problems were all shooter, no gun. 

  I also pulled out the Model 99 Arisaka, put a box or so of rounds through that. I aimed at a stump about 50 yards out and figured out where the gun was shooting - then swung up to the 18" plate and rang it on my first try! I should have stopped there, of course, but I tried to do it a second time... and failed. Ah, well. It's a very fun shooter. I'll be playing with it a lot more.

  Mama Bear got a spherical reactive target for working on her shooting skills, and WOW! That thing is nine kinds of fun. It's made of a self-healing rubber and the card says it'll handle anything from .22LR up to .50 cal... but I rather doubt that last one. We're gonna have fun with this thing for a LONG time.

  All in all, it was a great day out in the woods with friends. 

I'm still standin....

Wow, it's been months and months since I posted something here.

Folks, it's been a long, hard summer and the latter half of the month of August sucked like two things that suck a lot. I won't go into too much detail and I apologize for the lack of content, but I had to tend to my own house before coming here and sharing cool things and news stories that make my hairs stand on end.

Mama Bear and I DID manage our first woodlands trip yesterday, we drove out into the mountains and scouted out the area I've identified as a likely place to find elk come the middle of October. Boots on the ground, it looks exactly like the world-class-elk-hunting area from the Old Country. With just a bit of luck, I'll connect with my first elk that WASN'T felled with a 1970 Ford F-100 California pickup truck.

Took a few guns out, Mama Bear had her Single Six (Jayne) and Remington 518 (Vera) to play with. I took Papa's Remington 1100 shotgun and 760 .30-06 deer rifle. I had the box of handloads for the 760 and intended to do a good ladder test - but I didn't bring stuff to make a stable shooting rest. I tried using the bipod against the rear hatch frame of the van and that would have been functional for an elk shot, but not for something like a ladder test. Also, the lightest loads seemed to perform the best (all of them hit within a 5" circle) while the heaviest loads missed the target box ENTIRELY.

Had a lot of fun with the Rem 1100 - I'd never shot it before and after teaching Mama Bear how to throw clay pigeons, I managed to tag the VERY FIST THROW.

Then I missed the next 5

Hit one.

Missed three more and we called it a day, we had to head back.

All in all, it was a fun time and it looks like elk camp's going to be a success.

Rape, gender and gaming

I'm diverging from my "gun" blog to talk about one of the biggest problems seen in gaming culture today. Namely, the overwhelmingly heteronormative cisgendered male experience and the difficulty that other perspectives have in getting taken seriously.

I'm a gamer. Tabletop, board, pen-and-paper, video, whatever. If it's a game I'm usually in. I love games and at one point even ran a video game development company (it tanked, I'm not very good as a CEO, I fear). One of my favourite things about gaming (video and role-playing in particular) is the ability to put your actual self o -hold and explore other potential selves. Especially with roleplaying games, you can be anything that your mind can conceive of. It's a powerful thing.

Video games give you a limited ability to engage in this kind of fantastical what-if - mainly because the you-protagonist is already defined for you. And that you-protagonist is almost invariable straight, white, and male. In games as far ranging as The Legend of Zelda,  God of War, and Halo, the protagonist is very much a white male (Leaving aside the argument that Link from LoZ is actually Hyrulian - his skin tone is within a few shades of mine). Super Mario Bros? While males. Mass Effect was hailed for its character chooser, allowing you to customze your character, to the point of playing someone of Mediterranean or African descent or even *gasp* A WOMAN. However, if you go the FemShep route, the romantic sublots don't change. You can still choose to get your mack on with A) Ashley the Human Marine, B) Lianna the Asari Scientist, or C) Nobody. You can either be straight or a woman in Mass Effect, but you can't be both.

From my own personal experience, my second ME character was a FemShep, and while fiddling with the "Randomize" button a combination came up that made her look almost EXACTLY like a real-life friend of mine. This pleased me at first, because it was a real kick in the pants to see my friend roaming the countryside, blasting baddies into their component atoms. Then I remembered that before long, romance would start to bloom - and the thought of guiding my friend's clone through same-sex interactions actually made me really uncomfortable. I deleted the character and have never run another FemShep.

 One of my very favourite games is 2008's Mirror's Edge, a brilliantly done first-person parkour/free-running game featuring the delightfully ethnically-non-specific Faith as our protagonist. I like this game for a number of reasons, including the fact that the game can be beaten without having to engage the computer opponents in combat (there's even an achievement for finishing the game without firing a single shot from the guns you can gank from the police), and that Faith's gender isn't a gigantic plot point. 

Presenting a not-white-straight-male perspective in gaming has really been difficult. I won't go too much into it, for two reasons: 1) The sheer recalcitrance of gaming culture at large to accept other perspectives makes me fucking sick, and 2) I could never to a better job of it than Anita Sarkeesian, whose "Damsel in Distress: Tropes vs Women" series at Feminist Frequency is an amazingly eye-opening and candid bit of journalism.

Mama Bear pointed me at a blog post by game design house FullBright, about why they're declining to participate in PAX's Indie Megabooth. Boiled down to its essence, FullBright has decided that statements made by Mike and Jerry of Penny Arcade (the folks that produce the Penny Arcade webcomic and also host gaming mega-con Penny Arcade Expo) put Penny Arcade's morals at odds with FullBright's corporate ethics. Namely, Mike and Jerry have had come under fire for statements made about rape and rape culture, and people who are trans and/or genderqueer.

I support FullBright's decision. It's their brand, their product and they need to make sure that the people that they are associating with that brand align with what they find to be moral. The Penny Arcade crowd has fallen afoul of that, and thus the choice was made to not participate.

It makes me sad that this is the current state of affairs. For many years, Penny Arcade was a driving force for presenting gamers as a diverse and respectable group. In direct response to being called all sorts of terrible names by anti-video-game crusader and nutball lawyer Jack Thompson, the PA guys formed a charity called Child's Play, and its mission is to donate games and other entertainment items to children's hospitals the world over. It's one of my very favourite charities, and I'm honoured to have been able to work with them.

For years, Mike and Jerry have worked to show the world how awesome gaming and gamers can be, but they've hit some major bumps along the way (for example, they fucked up bad with the Dickwolves debacle). More recently, I've seen a major shift in tone and instead of being starry-eyed futurists that are all agog with the potential of gaming, the guys have instead turned into onion-on-belt old fogeys. Where there used to be cheeky wink-and-a-smile snark we now see some very real "I don't understand what these damn kids are doing, so they're obviously wrong. and probably dumb. STOP LIKING WHAT I DON'T LIKE" commentary. There have also been some really negative responses to the transgender crowd. That's not the PA that I knew and loved, and I'm sad to see where it seems to be headed.

The genderfail stuff is really appalling to me, because that is something that has been very much against the official policy of Penny Arcade and PAX. For a number of years, I was a PAX Enforcer (one of their volunteer convention staff). In 2008, PAX was held concurrently in the Seattle Convention Center with Gender Odyssey, a convention by and for "transgender and non-gender-conforming people." PAX's policy on the other convention was very clear: Break Wheaton's Law and you get 86'd. As an Area Manager that year, I personally tossed two PAX attendees out for violating the rules. No appeals, no second chances. Out. To contrast that with some of Mike's public statements is jarring and hard to square in my mind. To be fair, Mike responded to the criticisms (and did so admirably well) but I think he still doesn't quite get it. There's a reason he draws the pictures and leaved the words to Jerry - written language is not his bag.

The gamer stereotype runs to two different forms: The socially maladjusted geek living in his parents' basement who spends all of his time immersed as other people, and the hyper-aggressive young man playing first-person shooters and spewing insults over voice chat. The truth is, while those two groups DO exist, they're not truly representative of gamers. The fastest growing segments of gaming are women, casual gamers, and older people. Gamers are actually an incredibly diverse bunch, with all kinds of different and wonderful variation. I know more gamers who are NOT straight-white-male, but the industry tends to act like these people don't exist. The culture, as well, works to disenfranchise these groups; some of the things being said to gay and/or female gamers is completely horrifying.

There are a growing number of games that explore the possibilities of alternate-perspective protagonists (and aren't just male fantasy wish fulfillment). The aforementioned Mirror's Edge, Rockstar Game's Bully, the upcoming Gone Home. All take and modify the "standard" protagonist in some way. Bully is a fascinating game to me, though I have yet to play it. Rockstar is more known for giving us the "Grand Theft Auto" open-world games that glorify sex and violence - sometimes at the same time, in the case of having sex with a prostitute in GTA3, then killing her to get your money back. Bully, however, drops the player into the role of a troubled young hooligan starting out at a new school. It retains the open world nature of the GTA series, but there are serious in-game consequences for preying upon powerless victims. Additionally, the romance tree is pretty open, the player is free to woo and smooch girls or boys, as desired.

I think that the rise of indie gaming markets will help bring about the cultural revolution that we need to combat these hurtful stereotypes and cultural norms. I look forward to the day when the introduction of a game with a strong female lead who isn't just a generic male hero with boobs doesn't make the news (and generate the controversy) that it does today.

Because, like Wil Wheaton says, "Don't Be a Dick"