From the 'Problem? What problem?' file...

Behold the logo of the newest National Reconnaissance Office satellite:

Nah.  Nothing to see here, peasant.  Move along.


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H/T to LRC, via Grigg on Facebook.

And...I loves me some Pyramyd Air.

Wow, that was quick.

Here's the deal, briefly:  

If you know anyone who is either already into the Jeff Cooper "scout scope" concept, or who would like to try it out,  please pass on this news.  A promising new glass from Leapers is now available, and the outstanding folks at Pyramyd Air have agreed to carry it.  It may not be for everyone, but it seems worth trying out.

Here's the story:

It was only recently I found the back-post on Tom Gaylord's blog about SHOT Show 2013, in which he reported on a new scout scope offering from Leapers, a variable-power glass promising a full field of view.  (For anyone who has been around the scout scope concept for a while, that is a Big Deal.)  I must have missed it the first time around (I've been reading Tom's outstanding airgun blog for over a year now), and frankly I don't remember exactly what it was that caused me to look there so long after the fact, but Hugo Foxtrot Sierra, am I glad I did.  :-)

And it now seems that Pyramyd Air will carry the glass.  The funny part is that I may have had a small hand in that.  At the bottom of the comment stream to the SHOT post (the thread starts here), you can see me getting all excited about it, offering up some reasons I think people might be interested in the scope.  And suddenly Tom reports that Pyramyd Air will indeed stock it.

Awesome.  I look forward to seeing what they offer it for, if MSRP from Leapers is $200.  (I don't have a Spidey-sense yet for how street prices and MSRP relate in the airgun world.)  That already seems like a great value for what this represents.

The planning part of my mind has already decided that I may need at least three of these.  (That part doesn't bother to wait around for the fiscally responsible part, before making plans.  :-)   Provided that the glass does what it seems to promise, I'm currently thinking of using it on the following:

• An '03 "Springfield scout" .30/06.  I originally conceived this as a backup to the Steyr, and it would remain that, but...with a 2-7x variable that gives up nothing but (a lot of) weight to the fixed 2.5x, this might well become the primary hunting rifle as well.  Left at 2x, but with the ability to dial up to 7 if appropriate...with significantly improved field of view and light transmission from a 30mm tube and 44mm (adjustable) objective...with adjustment-friendly turrets and available illumination on an etched reticle (i.e., not subject to breakage, and simply black on any illumination failure)...and for $200 or less?  Hell yeah, I'll try that out.


• The Benjamin Marauder .22 air pistol I've got such a jones for right now.  The trick will be mounting, but if that can be sorted out this would seem to be a great fit.  The "pistol" comes with a carbine buttstock, and I would think the advantages of the scout scope would fit that system very well.  Among other things it would clear up the loading area for the rotary pellet magazine.  With airguns especially, if I am learning things properly, the advantages of an adjustable objective and adjustment-friendly turrets are considerable.


• An as-yet-to-be-conceived Airsoft bolt rifle.  The way discussions are going with Tom Gaylord's commentariat, it seems that a spring Airsoft bolt rifle just might be capable of enough precision to make a viable firearm trainer, and so the idea of building one up as an "Airsoft scout" is up in the fore-brain right now.  Again, the trick will be mounting, but I'm hopeful on that.  With the magnification left low and/or the target perspective considered carefully (smaller targets for the closer ranges), this might allow a whole lot of practice cycles for a very efficient use of funds.


• A flattop AR .223.  As I learn more about the AR platform, I find myself coming back to the idea that it might be possible to set up a carbine with scout features.  For a while it seemed like this would be counterproductive, but I'm not at all sure that's right any more.  And the Leapers unit would make lots of sense on a gun I see as being a real sport-utility piece (defensive, varminter, and with Barnes X-bullets, some light big game at moderate range):  friendly adjustment turrets, a useful magnification range, and all the available speed of the intermediate eye relief concept.  The way the AR is arranged, the scout scope is not an essential item the way it is on a traditional rifle (the other AR setup option for me is to use a conventional glass along with the "backup irons" that are offset 45 degrees from the top rail, which is actually more intuitive than I'd have guessed) but the consistency and redundancy of using the same scope style across everything still appeals, and may not give up much in the end.

And of course other ideas percolate as well.  The Marauder (air) rifle might also benefit from the magnification range and adjustments;  it seems that lots of people put much bigger glass on their "M-rods", but jeez, with the Steyr I can hit reliably at 400 with a 2.5x, so I'm still thinking that an available 7x is going to be plenty for even a long-range airgun.  (Do these guys know something I don't?)  As well, if I do get serious about Airsoft (and I suspect I will, soon), it would be smart to set up an Airsoft AR the same way the firearm is set up, both with the glass and any backup irons, Ching Sling, etc.  (And then there are the .22 rimfire versions of both the bolt-gun and the AR carbine, which would also benefit from setups that mirror the centerfires they support...  See where I'm going with this?  :-)

The 2.5x Leupolds will still stick around, of course.  They work well, at least out to the limits of which I am capable.  The Steyr will continue to wear its original glass (I know exactly what I can do with that system, and feel no need to change it), and I like the idea of having quick-detach scout scopes available for rifles whose primary sighting system is irons, like the Marlin 45/70.  Clamp the scope on for load development, then remove to set zero and carry afield.  Or, hunt with it--certainly wouldn't be the first time!

I'm excited about this new option.  (Can you tell?)  Call it enthusiastically hopeful.  Now, it's certainly possible that the new Leapers glass offers little advantage to someone who already understands the scout scope concept.  After all, magnification over 2-3x is usually unnecessary for sighting (since we don't glass for targets through riflescopes, right?), and can even be counterproductive as the disparity of focus between the two eyes (which are both open and tracking, right?) gets larger.  And bells and whistles always come at a cost, which in this case isn't so much in dollars, but in weight.  They should buy something for that cost.

I have a hunch that they do, here.  How much, I'll have to see for myself once I acquire my first example.  But the promise of improved field of view, improved light transmission, and the durability of an etched reticle, with the available options of dialing up and illuminating the reticle--and at a cost which seems very reasonable--may make the option worthwhile.

Kudos to Leapers for offering the glass, To the invaluable Tom Gaylord for making me aware of it, and to Pyramyd Air for carrying it.

UPDATE:

Edith Gaylord updates us both with a link at Pyramyd Air, and indirectly, with the offering price:  $180.   Excellent!

Nixed personally by Bob Costas?

It's not that I get all misty-eyed at the plight of the "betrayed soldier".  Voluntary fealty to the Beltway brass just doesn't impress me at all, and would seem to carry entirely predictable results from the beginning.  But--provided it's true--I've gotta give Daniel Defense one up on this effort.

It seems that this submission for inclusion as a Super Bowl ad got summarily rejected on account of being insufficiently supportive of what might now be called The Costas Opinion.  Not really much of a surprise there;  the NFL has certainly made its opinion of the grubby masses perfectly clear before, and seems to have been stepping it up with some regularity lately.

And that's what I like about DD's effort here.  It's something, on record now, that lots of people can identify with, that exposes the league's transparent bigotry for what it is.  And aside from replacing the soldier with a true Everyman, it makes an excellent and unapologetic point available for pretty broad consumption.

Good on 'em.

Of course, I'm more of a crank, myself, and I'd have probably gone a little farther.  In this vein, it seems that Colion Noir has got the news too, and personally, I'd prefer to see his response run as the ad:

Nicely done. 

But my real pick for a slot to run during the Super Bowl would still have to be this one:

This is significant.

Via airgun ace Tom Gaylord, I recently learned about a new "scout scope" offering from Leapers, which promises a full field of view from a variable-power, intermediate eye relief glass.  Tom had seen a 3-9x;  this one is a 2-7x.

The negative:  at over 25 ounces it's almost painfully heavy, compared to the workhorse Leupold fixed 2.5x unit (7.5oz) I've grown so accustomed to.  Yowch.

The unknown:   how low this unit can mount may be open to question.  I also don't know how Leapers scopes hold up.  IIRC, Gaylord said he found the optical quality on the scope he saw, to be comparable or better than a Leupold Vari-X II, and he would think that the durability and overall quality should be about the same. 

But boy, the rest of it is all very intriguing.  Field of view, the raison d'etre here, is listed (at 100 yards) as 32' at 2x and 10' at 7x;  compare this to Burris' 2-7x scout scope (21' at 2x and 7' at 7x), or to a conventional eye relief 3-9x variable at 33' at 3x and 13' at 9x, and you begin to understand the significance.  (The Leupold 2.5x scout is 22' at 100yd.)  Exit pupil numbers, on a 30mm tube and 44mm objective, are impressive.  Turrets promise to be friendly.  The illuminated reticle options seem more like a frill than a requirement, but they might be nice, and the etched reticle itself really does seem like a nice touch.

2-7x is a pretty useful range, for a variable, and hell, for someone accustomed to scopes fixed at 2.5x, dialing up to 7x is going to seem huge.  For the price (Leapers has MSRP showing two bills) that would seem to be a good value.

So!  Plans duly modified.  Start by testing it on the AR platform, and if it works out there, maybe add a copy to the 03 Springfield Scout. 

It seems that Hollywood shall soon regale us on Walter Mitty.

So I learned today that Hollywood will soon grace us with a production of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

Um...

Oh, I've got no idea about the film itself.  For all I know it might actually be pretty good, although I'm not going to start betting body parts or anything.

It's the irony.

Seriously:  is it just me, or is the depth of the irony of Hollywood doing Walter Mitty so severe that it might meet the technical threshold for hubris? 

The Airsoft term for this would be "full metal".

Q.  What's the most awesomest thing about the DEFCAD project?
A.  The idea grows its own tubers.

This is so cool it's going to be hard to think about anything else today.

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Hat tip to the increasingly indispensible Kurt Hofmann.

LAX attack as false flag?

Oh come now.  Regardless of whether it actually was or wasn't, who with a straight face can say that the Forcible Disarmament Now! crowd is in any way above it?

Via Workman, I just saw this YouTube, which is only really convincing in its perfectly understandable angst. Angst about the obvious sense that something stinks.  And something always stinks about these things, doesn't it?  Always.  And I'm not talking about the pluperfectly predictable stink of a mass shooting occurring in a "gun-free zone", either.

It is truly amazing, isn't it, that all these meme-perfect events only happen when frothing legislators have bills in hand, fresh oil in the propaganda machine, and a sense of either hunger or momentum among their legions of sycophants?  They don't happen in the troughs, do they?  It may have occurred to you before that things like the Brady Bill and the AWB, for all their sound and thunder (you remember that, right?), would not even have prevented the events that inspired them--instead the events that did happen were molded by propaganda to fit the desired political meme, and with enough repetition the lie became...what's that term again?...oh yeah, "settled science".  Even today, the victim disarmers regularly admit that their interest is in the meme above all else;  how many times have you heard some nitwit (with power over people's lives) say "well, sure, what we're proposing may not have prevented what just happened, but fersure we know it's a Good First Step(TM)"?  Yeah, I've lost track too.

So now we have this LAX shooting episode, which from the reports I've seen seems just about as meme-perfect as one could imagine today.   (Try not to imagine tomorrow--it's depressing.)  EBR?  Check.  Note indicating his intentions?  Check.  "Patriot" affiliation?  Check.  Antigovernment sentiment?  Check.  Wanting to show "how easy it is to get a gun into the airport"?  Check.  A scenario that the whole airport just trained for a few weeks earlier?  Check.  Made-to-order "heroism" from a detested agency struggling for legitimacy?  Check.  Really, one could go on.  It rather reminds me of a great analogy Grigg made while illustrating the FBI's manufactury of "terrorism" from which they may then be widely seen saving us all.

What political profit would result from allowing local authorities to prosecute Williams on a charge involving an actual property crime? On the other hand, arresting him as part of a black Muslim terrorist cell -- now, there's a bust with a high Q rating. Or, to recur to the Scrabble analogy, that's like playing the "z" tile on the triple word score square at the intersection of two fifteen-letter words.

There's also all the things that did not happen here, that make no sense.  As just one for instance:  I'm sorry, this shooter survived after opening fire at LAX and reportedly capping a TSA badge?  This isn't just an Only Ones zone, this is LA.  The place where, as Joel so memorably put it:

UPDATE: Mildly concerned police officers basically shooting everybody they see, on theory that it might turn out to be Dorner.

Does anyone doubt that this Ciancia fellow is going to sing the DiFi meme-song, on time, on cue and with perfect pitch?

Other stuff will be found to stink too--count on that.  Apparently the folks who made the above YouTube also feel that the blueshirt in the wheelchair was a dummy, and that the LAX police chief botched lines that were handed to him.  Yeah, well, maybe.  (Their strongest case, really, is nothing more than the idea that "officials vehemently deny...", which always lends a certain legitimacy in any political system.)  One might also reasonably wonder things like why the shooter returned to where he began, and why he bothered to carry boxed ammunition if he was expecting a quick, suicidal engagement.  There's the remarkably meme-convenient "just recently moved from Jersey", and so on.  Plenty of things for people to bicker about while ignoring the core lesson that "gun-free zones" are still a monumentally stupid idea.

Well--for everyone except those running the protection racket, of course. 

And to wrap up this "how amazing is all this?" fantasia, how about the idea that anyone who even notices these anomalies, discrepancies, patterns, histories, motivations, incentives--is inherently suspect, almost certainly a terrorist, and probably a witch.  You know, "agin' us" because they're not "with us".

So, here we go again.  Some creep visibly demonstrates, again, that forcible disarmament does nothing but create an obvious killing field...the slime mold from the statehouse oozes on by to wag its blobulous finger at the little people for not being sufficiently cowed by it all to hand over the rubberstamp...and the war on the people who didn't do it is fired up once again.

"They hate us because we're free."  Hell, after all this time and all those perfectly deserved jokes, it seems that indeed "they" really do.