Mine enemy grows older

The Commonwealth of Virginia is on the verge of repealing its one-pistol-a-month law, and the Washington Post is dribbling in its didies.

But to tell the truth, I'm disappointed in the Post. Once upon a time, any favorable mention of rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment gave it a fat oaken erection, and you had an exhilarating  fight on your hands to stave off hoplophobic rape.

Today, not so much. When an editorial resorts to a lame and frankly hysterical  question to make its point, you know the Cialis has worn off and your once-feared enemy has become a pansy, hardly worth your attention.

Does the Second Amendment guarantee a right to purchase dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of deadly weapons each month? 

Why, yes, in fact it does. If it were otherwise, Amendment One could easily be interpreted to  limit insipid editorials to one a month. Useful, perhaps, but unconstitutional and therefore out of the question.

As to this business of "hundreds or thousands" of illegal handguns per month, simple economics refutes the possibility. No private thug could afford it -- or find it a profitable venture. (Cf.  any respectable supply/demand treatise.)

In fact, the only major multiple-purchase thuggery we've heard much about these past few decades is that of Eric Holder, gun runner to the Mexican drug lords.

Gun room Monday

It's shaping up to be a .30-06 kind of day.  Thank the windy snow. It makes a warm gun room seem like a logical place to while away a  few late-winter hours,  fooling with rifles that shoot the only really necessary center-fire caliber.

I'll just wipe down the knockabout Stevens 110. The long-neglected 1903 makeover will advance with a bit of final polishing and fitting the Redfield peep so it will be ready for Jeff's bluing tanks.

Then on to the no-longer-a-mystery gun, the 1979 or 1980 Western Auto Revelation, a Mossy RM7 which followed me home from Minnesota a few weeks ago posing as an obscure Marlin turnbolt.  (The mystery story, complete with gun porn,  is here.)

It's already been fitted with a set of QDs and a nice cow-derived sling, leaving only the scope installation to be done and ready for my next grizzly hunt or TEOTWAWKI, which ever comes first.

There's a small quandary here. The Camp J arsenal has about four loose scopes on hand, and one of them is a NIB Revelation 4x32 from Rising Sun, Inc., a vintage piece which would give me a matched set, Revelation rifle, Revelation optics. Blecch, too cute, like mother-daughter matching pinafores. Besides,  it could well be a piece of crap.

Then there's the stainless Simmons 4 x 32 from the Chinese paddies. Naah. A two-tone  gun?  Who wants to present himself as a gangsta mall ninja?  Besides, the Simmons is almost assuredly a piece of crap. (Customary whine about the days when the Simmons marque meant something omitted.)

Leaving  two possibles: A new Tasco 3x9x40 and a clean old Weaver K4. Decisions decisions. The Weaver is the tougher and more patriotic choice, of course, but I'll  probably mount the variable. At 600 yards, nine power could be just what a fellow needs to distinguish between a turbaned terrorist and an odoriferous but otherwise harmless hippie in a do-rag.

Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to suspend the rules.

Quite properly, most writers in this corner of blogville consider it gauche to prattle on about personal good fortune. But we can make an exception when a man's grandson becomes a National Merit Scholarship finalist, can't we?

Well done, Son.

Populating my island

Dorothy would meet my standards of anarcho-capitalist nubility. She was quite a homemaker to boot and could easily whip out a black-and-gold sarong.