I think Lyle on the Joe Huffman site would be the last to advise a shooter or reloader to depend on intuition. And also the last to advise against ignoring those vague feelings. He paid attention to his own "something feels a little wrong"  hunch and avoided a blown Model 94, maybe worse.

It's worth a careful read, especially if you shoot reloads.

Not a gunchick

She's a pretty blonde woman. She's married to a close friend. She thought she would feel safer with a handgun in the house.

Up here on the lake she feels secure enough, but she gets nervous in winter when they return to their gracious old neighborhood in the heart of a big city. There, the Vandals aren't far from the gate.

After chatting about it for years, her husband led me to believe that she now definitely wanted a pistol and enough training to use it in an emergency.  He's a veteran hunter but claims he's never fired a handgun. She  has never even held one.

So far it sounds like a routine exercise in introducing a neophyte to the world of practical defensive shooting. Ground School 101 to outline the concepts --, practical, legal, moral. Discussion of the available hardware. Hit a good gun shop to let her handle steel and select a few possibles. Then some range time with a pro who knows what he's doing. (EDIT: I don't mean me.)

It was more complicated because Mrs. Pretty is well into her 80s. She thinks she might not be able to kill and would shoot him in the leg.  This is not a promising student.

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Nevertheless I thought about it for a while, then, when the subject came up again, decided to lend my  smallest DA, a ported Taurus .357 snubby,  on condition that no ammo would be allowed in the same house. She would handle it and dry-fire it for a couple of weeks. The idea was to introduce a bit of reality into whatever mass-media-derived notions she harbored about pistols. Mrs. Pretty's husband, the hunter,  would  "supervise."

It turned out just as we expected, and the lady is no longer interested in late-life  handgun education. Her man returned it to me a few days ago. "She's says it's too heavy but  I think she's just afraid of it."  We agreed that if she had second thoughts down the line -- unlikely --  we'd put something different in her hands, probably a .22 rimfire, K22-ish.

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There's no cosmic lesson here,  but if anyone cared to interpret the exercise as a reason to teach our daughters about shooting, I would be the last to argue,

They're coming to take me away, ha ha

I do not hate crazy people. If I did I'd lose half my friends including, possibly enough, myself.

In fact, if you ask me, the trouble with American politics is that we have too few crazy people. Worse, the loonies we have aren't crazy enough.

Rand Paul, for example.  He'd rather be president, of course, but he thinks that, at best, he might have to settle for No.2. This accounts for the semi-libertarian lip prints all over the Romney carcass.  At least he'd get to live in the Naval Observatory and look through the cool telescopes when ever he wanted. Besides, there would always be Chief Quartermaster to tell him to the split second what time it is, meaning he could swap his Rolex for a semi load of Brylcream, effecting a personal economy.  All this is only a little bit nuts. In fact it is quite common across the governing class -- from Obama's outright statists to neoconniest thugs of the Republican "right."


That's why I am supporting Randi, our newest United States senator. And no, it isn't just because she's an attractive woman. It's because I admire spunk, and appointing yourself senator in a wacky American alter-government seems spunky to me. It's also because The Republic  of the united States of America occupies ground in that delightful no-man's land where genuine genius mates with stupendous delusion.

These guys are mostly libertarian/ancaps writ large, albeit with a discouraging quotient of Pat Robertson prating. They claim to believe what most of us believe. Pro-gun. Free markets. A little more federalism,, etc.

However, the political philosophical underpinning seems  to be a notion that American government(s) were legal up to about 1870 when somebody or something else took over. As nearly as a guy can tell from their site, they served some legal papers on Obama or Holder or one of those guys and thereby became our de jure government .

These guys really like to stick "de jure" into their prose at every possible opportunity. I approve. "De jure" sounds rillyrilly intellectual. I mean it's Latin, and you can't get more intellectual than that. In fact, the news about Randi reminds me I've been meaning to practice my own Latin more religiously.

So postus endus cuz it's time to turn on airem conditionem. Hottern Hellica here, and that's de facto.











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