Dry-fire your way to misery

It's a coincidence on a par with His Ineptness uttering two coherent sentences on the same day.  Two bunged-up firing chambers on two pretty .22s purchased at the same loophole? Impossible.

Both the Challenger and the Speedmaster went shooting with us Saturday. The pistol worked only as an awkward single shot. A round would chamber but not extract. The rifle wouldn't chamber a round at all. In firearms, looks usually don't lie, and these two were stunners for ~1960s production, moderately used, carefully cleaned and maintained.

And dry-fired by click-happy mad men. Each carried a disabling burr at the firing pin strike point. The good news is that both Browning and Remington made barrel removal easy.  A few cautious strokes with a fine rat tail file and a finish polish of 220 emery smoothed things up.

I knew the Challenger fired dependably despite the slight indentation left by the uncushioned firing pin, but I was worried about the  Remington, unnecessarily as it turned out.

Lesson emphasized: We click our .22s at our peril.

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Fortunately we took lots more iron with us, so the afternoon was in no sense lost. The grandson got a plenitude of coaching as he broke in his new 10-22, but he seemed to enjoy it anyway.

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And after a hard day of creating noise and smoke, what could be more relaxing than a nice ride over the lakes and the spring countryside in J & K's new 182?

Sure, I rather approved of Margaret Thatcher, but

I can save you quite a bit of time this morning if you're the sort of person who gets up, pours a coffee, and clicks the electric teevee in hopes of getting a general sense of what is happening in the world today.

Across all three cable news channels there is but one story, the passing of Ms. Thatcher. Friends, I'm afraid she's going to be dead almost as long as Michael Jackson. 

So you can safely leave your Telescreen blank and go do something useful. 

There is one exception. CNN decided that one other news development was worth a long treatment. They have hired Anthony Bourdain to do some fly-in-and-eat shows for them. 

But is is art?

                  "Still Life on Tractor"

         (From the artist's later bang period.)

A clip full of toilet paper, if you please Ma'am

We've all been subjected to a good a deal of deep, dynamic, unalloyed ignorance in the current debate.

We're used to it, of course. Every Second Amendment rights defender  is continually explaining facts at a kindergarten level.  "And the bullet goes round and round and it comes out here..."

Anyone who hasn't isn't in the game.

Occasionally, however,  despair is understandable. Somewhere in Colorado, adult Americans elected Diana to public office.

Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO): "I will tell you these are ammunition, they’re bullets, so the people who have those now they’re going to shoot them, so if you ban them in the future, the number of these high capacity magazines is going to decrease dramatically over time because the bullets will have been shot and there won’t be any more available."

Setting aside the basic illiteracy of  "...these are ammunition," has this woman actually sat through the lengthy debate in America's  highest councils and come away assured that firearms magazines are as reusable as Charmin?

When dumb goes that deep, I doubt the synapses can be repaired. Stitch her lips shut. Roll her west from Wolf Creek Pass. Just to see if she makes it all the way to Pagosa Springs.