Saturday Suckage: Remington 31 Surgery?

It would be elective because:

Not  all that bad. She is what it is, used, moderately well cared for over most of her 65 years, tight and working fine. However:

This can be explained. The owner wanted a selection of chokes. This Lyman add-on was popular in the 1940s when this 31 left Ilion.

This defies logic and even a pretty good imaginative stab. Dropped on a spinning stone? An angle grinder gone postal? Pure malice? 

So, despite her classic status, her collectiblity is long gone, victim of  accessorizing mutilation and some unspeakable workshop atrocity. 

 Does she go on the rack as simply a spare for a hunter who arrives empty-handed? No, not necessary. She would be about a fourth spare, and I don't know that many people likely to come for shooting and forget to bring a gun. (Ammo-free visitation is quite another matter.)

Take her to another loophole and try again to get  something like 150 Federal Reserve Cartoons?  It didn't work last weekend. In fact, I don't think anyone even fondled her. Economics: She commanded a bride price  of either $85 or $60, depending on how my CPA decides to allocate the $25 profit from a J.C. Higgins bolt action 12 gauge which accompanied her. So I'm not in over my financial head on this one, The decision is aesthetic, not monetary.

A makeover is possible. Chop her down to the legal limit, smear some JB on the gouge, smooth everything out with files and emery, then bring her to tactical glory with some of that nice black spray 'n' bake stuff from Brownells.

I suppose that would be okay. At least she'd look acceptably tactical if I decided to pose in my GI combat pants, M1951 field jacket, and the beret, if I can find it. I could put it on the internet and be cool.

But it seems like a cruel fate for a dowager who, however time-ravaged, still retains the grace of, errr, well, say, Princess Grace in her time. 

Sometimes a guy just doesn't know what the Hell to do.

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Bernanke takes Econ. 101

If I didn't already know who Peter Schiff is, I'd probably just go along with John McCain and figure him as a libertarian kid in a dorm room.  In fact, of course, he's a grown-up libertarian long past his dorm-room days. Not to mention he has a record of being right about economic trends.

Here he is suggesting again that the warp-speed printing presses tended by Ben Bernanke are likely to complete the destruction of the American Greenback, also known far and wide as the "Federal Reserve Cartoon."

"Nope," says Ben, cuz this year the dollar is actually rising against that ubiquitous "basket of currencies," that is, against other country's cartoons  which also masquerade as wealth.

But Ben tries to be fair, so he signed up for one of my economics seminars here at Camp J.  I served him fresh-squeezed orange juice from a silver ewer, just so he'd feel at home. Then we gamed his rising-dollar theory.

We stood next to a picnic bench and eyeballed our relative height. We agreed I'm a little taller. Then we each stepped up onto the bench and again eyeballed our relative height.

"Dr. Bernanke, would you agree I'm still a little taller?" I asked.

"Well I'll be a sonuvabitch!" he exclaimed. "Yes. I believe your are."

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It' a start, but I'll believe that the lesson sunk in when I hear the presses slow.

Sometimes it's hard to be an Iowan

Diverting the cops is a standard tactical move if you want to do mischief somewhere else, and I suppose calling a bomb threat to a school 20 miles away could work about as well as anything else. That's what a couple of would-be criminal masterminds from Des Moines did up in my neck of the woods..

The results were non-optimum. Their bank-heist take was an employee's purse. The car they stole was recognized and chased. They abandoned it along the wild bluffs of the  Des Moines River and hid in the woods. Officers quickly found them. Homing in on chattering teeth?

Criminey. When even your criminal class apes a Three Stooges plot, you get to thinking about state pride and all.  I may resort to social climbing.  Claim to be from Arkansas or something.

And to think Ayn Rand loved Colorado

Once upon a time in America, usually west of the Missouri, there was a useful tradition in journalism. It was a private-sector enterprise called "horse whipping." An editor usually earned the honor by revealing himself to be stupid, self-righteous, and incompetent.

We take you now to Colorado:

The Clements shooting illustrated why the bills, fiercely opposed by gun-rights advocates, were necessary, said Hickenlooper, 61. In a televised new briefing, the first-term Democrat said the killing, while not appearing to be connected with the new laws, was “an act of intimidation.”

The Hickenlooper mentioned is the governor who privately giggles, we suppose, at his progress in making the Centennial State a gun-free zone if you don't count the criminals.

Hickenlooper's new law primarily outlaws high capacity magazines  -- 15 rounds maximum -- and requires a peaceable citizen to buy a background check if he wants to sell Pa's old L.C. Smith to his next-door neighbor. This sort of policy, he implies, would have kept prison boss Clements alive.

--Never mind that we haven't yet the faintest notion of what kind of weapon was used. The possibilities run from a dreaded assault rifle carrying 30 rounds to a less-dreaded assault rifle carrying only 15  to a single-shot Winchester high-wall in .25-20 to a Ruger Black Hawk sixgun to a  .... you get the idea.

(But wait. One more. A really thorough police investigation would make sure no one stole Shotgun Biden's double-barrel 12.)

--Never mind that the killer may have been been able to pass a background check, or had stolen the gun, or borrowed it from his brother-in-law. Or or or.

Governor, there is yet no reason to believe your linkage exists, and you are blood dancing over the unfortunate Mr. Clement's corpse. We award you the Scarlet Letter D. For demagogue. Or dope. Or duplicitous.

Now, a bit of cleanup here. I opened with a shot at the reporters and editors responsible for the cited paragraph, and that in and of itself is unfair. Carefully and somewhat charitably read, it merely reports the Hickenlooper dissimulation. It becomes both fair and germane in context of the entire fawning report, beginning  with the lede:

Colorado begins the task of implementing its toughest gun laws in a decade even as police searched for a suspect, and a motive, in the shooting death of the state’s top prisons official.

And ending:

Debra Reed, a spokeswoman for the Washington-based Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said the Clements killing proved why such laws are crucial.

“This is incredibly sad irony that this has taken place less than 24 hours before the governor planned to sign meaningful gun legislation,” she said. “There is no better illustration of what damage guns can do in the wrong hands.”

Those Brady kids are always good for a dandy tear-jerk finish, aren't they?

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The other thing, I guess, is that I'm probably a little over the line in implying that we ought to restore corporal punishment for propagandists posing as journalists.

Okay. I recant. You shouldnt. I will go only this far.  If you horse-whip one who richly deserves it, I shall refrain from editorializing against you.