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.

Apparently I'm feeling very snarky today.

So I got wind of another school shooting on Facebook, yesterday:

The "annotation" provided with the picture makes the intent perfectly clear, in case there was any doubt:

Guns!  'MURICA!

 Wow, man.  That's, like, witty.  But you know, with just a small change it might at least be useful:

There, that's better.  More honest, at least.  (But you knew that already, right?)  I suppose one could re-caption the thing with a similarly honest phrase ("Moar!  Defenselessness!  Now!") but it somehow seems unnecessary.

But really, the weird part is that I haven't seen more agitprop about this yet--you know, with a whole day having gone by since the incident.  The machine is usually much better than this;  usually, I find out about this sort of thing from a long stream of such jabs, parading by on my Facebook "news feed", within what seems like minutes of the shots fired.

What, haven't Salon, HuffPo, Kos, NPR, WaPo (and friends) given sycophants their orders yet?*

I'm sure it'll happen, of course;  victim disarmers are nothing if not tiringly dependable.  But this does seem odd.


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* At least judging by my own FB stream, it's pretty sad.  For any such event, you can essentially triangulate the issuance of official opinion from master to hive down to the hour, without even looking at source documents, just by the cascade of shares that roll by.  And I'm not even NSA!  :-)

Milestone.

It has taken very nearly five years--astonishing what two quite marvelous little girls can do to one's sense of schedule--but the reloading operation is now officially up. 

The re-christening is a new load for .308, pushing 165s with 4064 over WLR in once-fired PMP cases.  Five rounds to confirm the consistency of the starting charge, and get the seating depth correct.  Five more rounds at the starting charge.  Headspace gauge is happy;  tomorrow will chamber-check to confirm, and then load up in fives to the target charge. 

Can't say enough good about the press.  Five years, five moves, and the first charge it threw was within half a grain of where I'd left it set at back in Colorado.  Consistency testing got boring quickly.  Everything's tightened back up and lubed appropriately, and we're back!

As soon as possible then:  fresh batteries in chronograph and active muffs;  bring out the grouping targets.  Find a good range day.  Company if possible.  Measure, record, analyze.  And go from there.

Here's looking forward to a productive winter.  :-)

How cool would it be to hang with this guy?

Some people's enthusiasm is just infectious.  Pair that with both an Ed McGivern trigger finger and shooting a "Bill Drill" with a Barrett .50 BMG, and you have Jerry Miculek.

I bet it would be an absolute hoot to hang with him for a day.  That has got to be among the best jobs in the world.

Hat tip to Gunmart Blog.

This is what tone-deaf looks like.

Seriously, folks.  Just update the dictionary entry now, 'cause we have us a clear winner.  Gabby Giffords and Mark Kelly have made an appearance at a New York gun show, to show all of us what swell, normal, gun-loving folks they are.

Hey now, stop that double facepalm!  That was so totally, completely, not a staged stunt at all.  Honest Injun, no.  Why on earth would you think that?

Thing is, though, this is at least arguably very encouraging:  the degree of "know thy enemy" fail is just staggering.  If this is the quality we are up against, then if they get the war they seem so desperate to get [someone else to start for them], the routing may well be so embarrassing that it might actually restrain the level of vengeful bloodlust among those otherwise susceptible to it.

I don't for a minute, of course, think that Giffords and Kelly actually believe their own bilious act, and although I hate to say words like never, it sure would take an...exceptional recovery to have any sympathy whatever for whoever these snake oil salesmen manage to take;  that is, nearly anyone fooled by this Dynamic D'oh may well already be brain-dead beyond repair.  I can't even bring myself to believe that they think they'll sway anyone with their preening, but maybe the depth of my understanding of narcissistic chutzpah is just insufficient.

You can see my conundrum.  Are they smart, and therefore fully calculating in their deceptions, or are they simply "congenitally insane or irretrievably stupid"?

(I jest, of course. Otto is far, far more sympathetic. :-)