Don't mess with old people

Somehow I doubt Jay Leone of Marin County, California, is about to get a nice congratulatory card from his Senator Boxer.

Mr. Leone is 90, seems fit , and is without doubt feisty. A burglar got in and shot him in the head.

Now, there are a lot of  possible reactions to that sort of affront, including trying to call 911 before you die. But Mr. Leone's was, "F---- you, you son of a bitch. Now it's my turn." Whereupon he got his SW .38 snubby and emptied it, hitting one Samuel Joseph Cutrufelli thrice in the stomach.


Burglar Sam is one of those rare Californians without a highly developed social conscience. If he had one he would have  reclined and quietly bled to death, dreaming his last dreams of aromatherapy and unleaded condors.


He survived to become an expensive public charge, accused of attempted murder and other sins.


So far no one has proposed indicting Mr. Leone for anything.  


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I recommend reading the story for its funny scatalogical deails and the grace with which reporter Gary Klien tells the tale of Mr. Leone's testimony.


H/T Nephew Mike

Fresh .45 fodder

The rain is putting my home improvement drive  on hold, so it's back to the loading shack. There's enough componentry on hand to build close to 200  .45 ACP rounds. About half of them will be 230-grain fmjs, the rest 200 grain cast semi-wadcutters.

A  conservative  (n)  grains of Unique has been  standard here for the 1911s, but  I've recently acquired a post-lawyered Colt Series 70 with that "accuracy" barrel bushing/collet.  The collet and heavy recoil spring create a stiff action, so I want  to  concoct a more authoritative load.

(There are four or five suitable pistol powders on hand, but somehow  I always seem to just tinker with the amount of Unique, and I suppose that will happen this time, too.  What the heck would we do without that powder?)

You say they've super-sized the zombies?

Why, I have just the thing,  Watson. 


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There was too much clutter in the loading shack -- such as hundreds of .30-06 cases and oddball .308 bullets -- old  220 -grain round nose fmj's that may well be .30-03 pulls. Cleaned up and loaded ahead of (n) grains of 4350 they will fly at  just under 2500 fps and strike terror into the hearts of the not-quite deceased who, the movies tell me,  threaten the world as you know and love it.

If the zombie scare turns out to be just another passing Madness-of-Crowds phenomena, they will still be useful. This load should work well enough to control  elephants migrating  to my latitude as the globe warms.

From the reloading shack

I've been fat on.38 Special brass and 158-grain RNs for quite a while and finally motivated myself to check that chore off the list yesterday afternoon.  The result is 150 rounds of the stuff.


I resolved one quandary on the conservative side. My only primers  were magnum, and In a large library here I simply couldn't find  data for .38 Special with mags.   Since I am something of an old woman about unknown  pressure factors,  I backed off a tenth of a grain from the  a Speer starting load of Unique. They'll be fired for practice and entertainment  only from a ported Taurus .357 snubby. Unless, of course,  someone makes me an offer I can't refuse for a nice used (Bill) Ruger single action in .357.