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.

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.

The Future, The Present, and printing guns

  The shape of the world got a bit more spacey-agey on Friday, as Cody Wilson of Defense Distributed debuted the world's first 3D printed firearm, the Liberator. The intentionally provocative name references the FP-45 Liberator, a weapon designed by the US in WWII to distribute to resistance fighters in occupied territories. I'll pick up that thread later. 
  
  Anyway, in a twenty-eight second YouTube video (resplendent with swelling classical music and footage of B-24 Liberator bombers), we get to see the cutting edge of a new kind of distributed firearms manufacturing economy. The Liberator is made of printed ABS plastic with a metal firing pin, and a steel shank that brings it into compliance with the Undetectable Firearms Act of 1988 (a measure enacted in 1988 to address things like all plastic pistols, in the wake of the introduction of the Glock 17 - the first production pistol to feature a large number of plastic composite components). It's chambered in .380 ACP and is a single shot. 

Nothing but footprints?

  One of my biggest pet peeves with shooting culture is the crap that gets left behind at shooting sites. For some reason, jerkoffs think that they can haul a bunch of garbage out into the woods, blast at it all afternoon, then casually stroll away without picking up after themselves. This is squarely against what my father and the Boy Scouts taught me - Pack it in, Pack it out. Take only Pictures, Leave only Footprints... Isn't that what we, as the supposed Stewards of the Wilderness are supposed to be doing? What the hell possesses someone to bring a 1960's era console TV out into the woods, blow it to hell, and leave it out there? Are the magical forest sanitation gnomes supposed to sweep it up when you aren't looking?

  When my posse of friends go out in the woods to make sudden loud noises, we have a rule. You pick up all YOUR material, including targets and spent cartridges, but you *ALSO* pick up a reasonable amount of left-behind trash. Usually, this amounts to a garbage bag per vehicle, which is a tolerable amount.

  For some reason, the waste that really sets me off is all the spent brass that's left around. What the fuck, guys? I've kept all of the brass we've picked up in the last three outdoor adventures we've had and last night, I brought it out to look at, sort, and be vocally pissed about while doing so.

Freedom, rights, the Second Amendment and slippery slopes.

  I'm a big fan of rights and freedoms. I think that I'm pretty lucky to live in a country where, for the most part, you're free to live your life the way you see fit. There are some restrictions, mostly in the name of "the public interest," and by and large I'm OK with those. My neighbour can't dump toxic waste in my garden, I can't drink a pitcher of margaritas and drive home. You can't cry "FIRE!" in a crowded theatre if your only goal is to incite panic. Restrictions like that help bolster us as a society and enable us to move forward without having to worry about needing to protect ourselves from quite so many dangers.

  I believe that the most effective government is not the one that is (metaphorically) positioned over the citizenry, pressing down on it - but rather the one that is structured beneath the citizens, boosting and bolstering everyone, giving them basic structure and support to freely seek their own goals and agendas. My perfect government is part cheerleader and part wire boundary fence; there to cheer you on and help inspire you to greater success, but also lurking at the edges of acceptable. It protects us from the most dire of circumstances - even if we've brought them on ourselves.

Gun safety - it's not a theoretical subject, it's a skill.

I was going to get to this topic eventually, but now seems like a perfectly cromulent time to do so.

  Last week, a firearms safety instructor accidentally fired a pistol during a class - fortunately, no one was harmed. The gentleman reportedly retired from firearms training over the incident, and I can imagine that his buddies won't let him live it down. Ever.

  The cold, hard truth that needs to be faced is that guns are dangerous. They aren't toys (in the sense that Tonka trucks and Barbie dolls are toys), they are tools that produce a destructive force. Safe handling isn't a guideline, or a recommendation, or something that poncy little jerks do. Each and every person who interacts with guns needs to be fluent in gun safety - it needs to be as natural as breathing. If I had my way, *everyone* would get gun safety training at a young age.

Why I don't carry concealed

  I have made a conscious choice to not carry a gun. I support the right to do so, and will defend it vehemently. It's just not the right choice for me at this point in time.

  There are two major reasons for that - the first is that I don't feel that I live the kind of life where carrying a gun on a regular basis is a good part of my EDC (Every Day Carry) kit. Two pocketknives, a flashlight, and my Leatherman Wave, sure. A gun is just extra weight for a one-tenth-of-one-percent chance of being the right tool.

  The other reason is because I simply don't trust myself to carry right now.

  On the night of October 22, 2007, I was mugged on my way to work (I was working graveyards doing technical product support in Seattle). I'll paste in some of my LiveJournal post from the next day and then talk about what the last almost six years have meant to me.

Note: Pictures inline, might be distressing for some.

These are a few of my favourite things...

  I was born into "gun people" - a lot of my fondest childhood memories involve shooting or hunting. Many a glorious hour was spent in the company of my father and the hunters in our family. My wife would like for me to make it VERY clear that we were food hunters - if we shot it, we ate it.

  One of my earliest shooting memories was the first time I ever fired a scoped rifle - it was a .22 Hornet owned by one of my dad's best friends. They forgot to tell me that I needed a little distance between the objective and my eye - and although a .22 Hornet doesn't have a LOT of recoil, it's considerable for a five-year-old kid. I was the envy of the all the boys on the playground that following Monday; what with the shiner, the crescent-moon cut on my eyelid, and the lurid tale of their genesis.