Range time! Test driving the 4-H curriculum.

Spent a marvelous day absorbing the curriculum for the 4-H "intro to rifle" program, which I will be deliriously happy to make available in Homer once all the pencil pushing gets sorted out.  It's a basic program, covering just safety, core marksmanship, and simple positions, but within those limits it's all there. 

The use of well-thought out pellet rifles strikes me as inspired genius.  Low noise, cheap to shoot, and adaptable to a huge range of possible venues;  we actually shot live-fire in a church gymnasium, into pellet traps in front of a portable Kevlar backing blanket.  Nice! 

The rifle (Daisy Avanti Medalist) was new to me, and other than the trigger being spongy and the system not being purely ambidextrous, it seems like a great choice.

The powerplant is CO2, which surprised me a bit (CO2 would seem to be at a considerable disadvantage in Alaska, because its performance drops off rapidly in the cold), but when I asked about this the team all smiled and said that this intro course is almost always done indoors, much like we did today.  Very well then!  At any rate, I can immediately see that the pre-charged operation is definitely the way to go with first-timers on a square-range, cold-line-driven course;  with either a breakbarrel springer or a multi-pump by comparison, simply working the action can invite bad muzzle discipline from someone who doesn't have that practice metaphysically embedded yet, and this course experience is designed to make it easy to get your feet under you before introducing complexities or distractions.  (This is something the curriculum seems to do well, at least at first glance.)  The hardest gunhandling manipulation is certainly getting those tiny pellets into the breech with the skirt oriented the right way (nothing beats a breakbarrel springer for ease of manually single-loading pellets), but theoretically that problem will be worst for the adults and less so for the kids, with proportionally smaller hands.  Other than that, it strikes me as a great rifle to learn on.

Personally, I somewhat deliberately stacked the deck against myself today, using a set of tinted shooting glasses with a prescription that is several years out of date.  Things were distinctly fuzzy even at the meager distance of 10m.  My eyes are also absolutely not accustomed to using a target aperture for a rear sight, and between the glasses' tinting, indoor lighting, fuzzy prescription and low light transmission from the pinhole aperture, it took some willful effort to aquire the right sight picture.  (My psychological need for peripheral vision is apparently very strong.)  Add to that the lack of a shooting sling, two shooting positions that are only relevant on the target range (true standing and unbraced kneeling), and a spongy trigger, and you don't exactly have the environment I'm most familiar with.  Nonetheless, I was happy with my consistency;  even with a called flyer on each of standing and kneeling, my composite group (total of 30 shots) was right at 1", and without the two flyers it was a hair under 3/4", with sitting being the best of the bunch (even better than bench, which always pleases me) at just under 7/16".  That's just about as well as I can see, even with the right prescription.  Now...my understanding is that this is pretty pedestrian by serious airgunner standards, but on rough glance it would have scored a comfortable second place today, among ten.  (Top score would unquestionably have gone to our one woman, a fairly common outcome and one that always makes me smile.)  Not bad for a rifle I hadn't met before today.

I'm most happy to say that the curriculum seems solid, well thought out, and very adaptable to plugging in additional items.  It will be easy to make this fun and build on success quickly.  And with a solid understanding of handling safety, core marksmanship and basic positions, progressing to lots of other things (e.g., shooting slings, alternate sight arrangements, compressed surprise breaks, snapshots, etc.) will be a logical step rather than a giant leap.  And the idea mill is now in business.

Man, I need more days like this.  :-)

In which I loves me some Feens.

Tough times lately.  At times like this, it's nice to have folks like the Freedom Feens around.

Love this observation about New York's new "narc on your neighbor" program:

I’m not a Christian. But all Christians should remember this: Jesus was killed by the government…with the cooperation of police and soldiers who were “just doing their job”…after a legal trial in a court of law. Christians should also remember that it’s not very Christian to nark out your peaceful neighbors. And you may be held accountable for this in heaven.

Non-Christians should also remember this: at some point this statist tyrannical insanity will end. And there may be Nuremberg-type trials for collaborators. In other words, you may be held accountable for this on earth.

Indeed.  This all seems very straightforward, if you put forward even a moment's thought about it, but then I'm a heretic already, so maybe it's just me.

It's not that I'm happy to hear about all this, understand, but still...I needed that one today.  Thanks, Feens.

Arthur Silber on the Dorner exercise.

I make pretty regular references to Arthur Silber, and there is good reason for that.  The man is a magnificent commentator, and one doggedly obsessed with things that matter.  (As opposed to Things That Matter(TM), see?)

A few days ago I saw this piece, which is a rather classic Silber device, regarding--um, Christopher Dorner, yeah...

Killer at Large, Panic Ensues

Everyone on talk radio in Los Angeles goes on and on about just a single topic these days. I'm sure the same is true in much of the rest of the country. It's a huge national story.

A man has murdered several people, and he's threatened to murder many more. He says he has his reasons, and he thinks they're good reasons. He thoughtfully published his reasons so all of us can consider them. But when you read what he's said about why he's killing people, you realize it doesn't make any sense. He uses words that are familiar to us, but he uses them to mean whatever he wants them to mean.

...

I'm confident they'll catch him soon. After all, we've seen him on television a lot. Someone is sure to get a glimpse of him any day now. He can't hide forever, can he?

...

It will be fine. I think we should all calm down. Obama will be locked up very soon.

But wait, wasn't this about...?  Oh, yeah, right.

But as to Dorner...  So last night the claims of vic'try! started to roll in, with all the usual trappings:  conflicting details (does anyone doubt that these will officially settle into meme-supported patterns?), ignored eyewitness accounts, and of course the obligatory overlooking of whatever combat tactics our noble protectors decide(d) to use "onsite".

See, the cabin seems to have burned to the ground.  (It certainly appears that the cops wanted it that way.)  And there may, or may not, have been a body in it.   Gosh, we're just going to have to take the investigators' word for it on the final details of what went down.

Silber today says "Welcome to Afghanistan.  This is just the beginning.":

I'm like really stupid, so these really stupid questions occur to me. There was absolutely no way to take this suspect alive eventually? They couldn't wait him out? I guess maybe they had other important stuff to do -- the kid's high school play, a book club meeting, maybe a department barbecue (har dee har har). And since they're not absolutely sure it's Dorner who was burned alive ... well, um, does that mean maybe they burned someone else alive? Did they determine that no one else was in the cabin? Does anyone care?

Just the heretics, from the look of it.  The cops' problem is nearly already "fixed";  with a body, a unified story and a cordoned-off pile of ashes for evidence, who are the little people to say differently?)

Silber goes through the nearly comical over-reaction of the Dorner manhunt (which Joel brilliantly summarized as "Mildly concerned police officers basically shooting everybody they see, on theory that it might turn out to be Dorner"), and returns to his larger point:

Like I said, I'm totally stupid, but I think the lesson goes something like this: If you threaten the State itself or interfere with its plans, and especially if you threaten one of the State's armed, militarized branches, the State will go to war, including here at home. I don't mean "go to war" metaphorically. I mean the State will go to war. So I think we know what the response will be if/when there is widespread domestic unrest, when the economy further falls apart, for example. Entire neighborhoods cordoned off, whole blocks incinerated, checkpoints everywhere, people shot for any reason, or for no reason. Oh, yeah: no more fourth amendment for you, either. Well, it's not like you were doing anything with it. If you haven't done anything wrong, you don't have anything to hide, etc., etc., etc. And just to be safe, you don't want to be there. Yeah, where you are right now. Don't be there. And don't move. Haha. Gotcha!

Just as the fish rots from the head, the horrors start with the president. Why should Obama be the only one to have a Murder Program? It's only right that every police department should have its own Murder Program. Especially in war time.

The "don't be ridiculous" crowd may need to be reminded at that point, that it wasn't so long ago that we used to make fun of those stupid Russkies because they couldn't travel freely about their own country without showing their papers.  Or those stupid 1930s Germans, because they couldn't see the Nazis metastasizing from "legitimate government" into murderous evil, until it was too late.

Some days it's easy to remember that a determined minority can usually outsmart and fend off an institutionalized majority--lots of people have observed that the Dorner case illustrates well that one man can tie up the resources of an entire state for nearly a week.  (And if that pile of ashes is Dorner, he doesn't seem to have been all that competent a baddie in the first place.)

Other days, though, when you get a glimpse of what's coming, of what "we" have made all but inevitable...well, it's a reminder of what the cost of such a "victory" might look like.

To commemorate the occasion of the State of the Union lecture...

...it seems only fitting to share this Larken Rose classic.

Back to work now, people!  Your country needs you...or something.

Meet NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake.

Hat tip to Claire.  This is quite interesting.  Former NSA "senior executive" turns whistleblower;  is prosecuted for it;  interviews with Abby Martin at Russia Today.  Here's Thomas Drake:

He's an interesting witness, and for some people this might be quite powerful.  You have to put aside some of the tooth-gnashing statements he does make (including another installment of the aggravating "giving" rights fiction);  keep in mind that he did after all, at some point, agree to be employed by the NSA--so we probably shouldn't expect Rothbardian libertarianism to spew forth.  And at any rate there is still a whole lot in here that Master would really rather you not hear, regardless--so it's certainly useful.

It's good to see that RT is still unafraid of performing actual journalism, since the US industry any more seems to be interested only in "legitimate media" urinealism.  (Take a moment to savor the deep irony of that.)

Let's hope that Mr. Drake doesn't find one of these in his pocket tomorrow morning.

...message for you, sir...

I first got wind of this via Wendy McElroy...but Joel had it in color.  :-)

It needs no explanation.

The original artist appears to be here.  By all means show some click-love.

Gad, I love this.

Resistance lives.  Behold, the "Cuomo Mag", parts 1 and 2:

From the comments (I know, YouTube comments and all, but still, this was right there...):

Seriously, how can you not love these guys?


It actually makes me want to dig ARs (and AKs, for that matter) more than I do.  Sorta like I just want to have a reason to patronize Ronnie Barrett.

Keep going, fellas.  Every day it gets better, and people are watching.