Month: December 2009

Lasers… feh.

/ hsoi / 6 Comments

So JayG discovers what some already knew: lasers aren’t all that.

They don’t solve your shooting problems. They have to be remembered to be turned on and off. They get in the way. They make the gun more bulky. You spend your time focusing on finding that little dot, and that eats precious time.

I’m not convinced laser sights are worthwhile things.

Sure, I can see a niche for them in practice because they don’t lie about what your muzzle is doing. But that’s rather an expensive training aid. As well, it comes across to me as still ingraining bad habit since you’ll still be looking at the target at the little red dot instead of focusing on your front sight. Learn to read your front sight as that will take you further.

Nicely Said, Joe

/ hsoi

From Joe Huffman:

The gun lobby isn’t “pushing guns into every corner of our society” any more than the ACLU is pushing free speech, the NAACP is pushing blacks, or the ADL is pushing Jews into every corner of our society. The right to keep and bear arms is a specific enumerated right guaranteed by the U.S. and most state constitutions. It is an inalienable right recognized by the people that wrote the constitutions and has been a part of our society since long before they wrote those documents.

Night Hogs

/ hsoi / 3 Comments

Steve at The Firearm Blog has a posting about hunting feral hogs with night vision.

As of this writing Steve’s posting actually has a mix-up regarding the hog hunting businesses, but a bit fortuitous as he writes-up the Night Hogs outfit that I went hunting with back in July 2009. I notified Steve via a comment, and hopefully he’ll remedy things soon.

I’ve actually had some thoughts about calling Randy and Gerald back up and doing another hunt. Just not right now… too cold. 🙂

Teaching “the rules”

/ hsoi / 6 Comments

Caleb made a posting about “the rules” and it spurred me to finally write about something that’s been rolling around in my head for a while.

I written before about “the rules” — both Col. Cooper’s rules and the NRA’s rules. The first rules I learned were Cooper’s, then after spending a lot of time in KR Training Basic Pistol 1 courses I came to better appreciate the NRA’s rules.

When it comes to “which ruleset to teach new shooters,” what really sold me on the NRA rules? Teaching Youngest.

I started trying to teach him Col. Cooper’s rules, mostly because that’s how I started teaching Oldest and Daughter and the consistency for when I talk to all 3 kids is welcome. However it became cumbersome to discuss this with him. Why? Because children like things to be simple, and Cooper’s rules are not simple. Yes some parts of his rules are straightforward, which is good. But let’s consider Rule 1 and all the various exceptions that can be had to that rule. Consider as well that others may or may not have the same exception set as you (does dry fire violate rule 1? does cleaning a gun violate rule 1?). There was no way I could explain these rules to Youngest without risking overload… too many new things on a young brain is a sure way for things to get forgotten, and these safety rules are not something you want people to forget!

So I opted to teach him the NRA rules. That approach worked out great. The more I think about the NRA rules, the more I find them to be a better rule set that doesn’t have to have exceptions and qualifiers. To be fair, it’s not perfect. For instance, you have to discuss what a “safe direction” is (that between the muzzle and where the bullet would come to rest, it won’t damage anything you don’t want to damage… or perhaps that it does damage what you want to damage). While you can certainly discuss this with the child, they may not have enough depth of life knowledge to know what materials can and cannot stop a bullet; you can talk about how the walls of the house won’t stop it and give some references relevant to the child’s life experience, but will a brick wall stop a bullet? Depends upon the bullet… these things a child just can’t know.

I’m not going to go with Caleb and say Cooper’s Rules are merely guidelines, but I will say they risk that, especially the much vaunted Rule 1. Once you start having a parade of exceptions, how useful of a rule is it? Once it starts being too complex to follow, is it going to serve the intended end? When there’s no established set of exceptions, how dangerous can things become? And should there be exceptions in the first place?

Any time I drive to the range with the kids we always talk about what we’re going to do, including a review of the rules. This last range trip with Daughter started off with her telling me the Cooper rules, but then I opted to reinforce with her the NRA rules. Then we had a discussion about the two rulesets, strengths and weaknesses of them, how they overlap, how they are unique, how they work to reinforce each other and ultimately in the end knowledge of and adherence to the concepts an directives of both rulesets will serve you best. I think in the end it’s best for people to know both sets of rules. There are subtle aspects the Cooper set touches on the NRA set does not, and the NRA rules touch on things the Cooper set does not. What needs to happen is teaching people the rules as statements and immediately following into discussion of the rules to ensure they are more deeply understood. And while I may prefer the NRA rule set, I will always teach Cooper’s ruleset as well because there’s good mindset in there and if nothing else… gunnies tend to prefer Cooper’s rules so it’s just good to know them.

Updated: Ah, I see. Caleb’s posting came about due to some other discussion, like from Sebastian and SayUncle and JayG who seemed to start all of this.

Actually yes, I do believe there are people out there that demand the rules be taken literally (Cooper himself, for one) — they are rules, after all. But when pressed, it’s hard to find people that don’t violate the rules in some way (e.g. dry fire, cleaning the gun, etc.). However, these people will always find ways to justify their position.

So to me, that just weakens “The Rules” as rules. To have exceptions, to have “allowable violations”, and so on… what good then are The Rules? If for no other reason it removes simplicity. You make a rule too hard to follow well… just look at the tax code from the IRS; extreme example, but thus is the slope. Even things like the “i before e except after c” rule has so many blasted exceptions, no wonder it’s difficult to learn the English language.

Interesting in all of this discussion it only beats on Cooper’s rules. I’d like to see more discussion then about a better rule set. Could the NRA’s set be better? If so, let’s make that The Holy Grail and move foward. If that isn’t good enough, then why are we as a gunnie community satisified with what we’ve got — this less than ideal rule set? Why aren’t we trying to make something better?

First Roast

/ hsoi

A lot of Wife’s family are coming over to our house today for the annual Christmas season gathering. Should be fun.

I decided one of the roasts from my recent deer hunt would make for a fitting course. I also found some feral hog backstrap in the freezer and since we needed a little more meat to feed everyone, I thought making both would be good.

I decided to try out the crock pot approach.

Simple enough: flour, salt and pepper the meat then brown it in the skillet just to seal things up. Roughly cut up potatoes, carrots, onion. To the venison I added some whole cloves (started sticking them in the meat but it was so tedious I stopped and just put them in the pot). The pork got a mushroom-based broth. The venison a beef-based broth. Both enough liquid to cover everything (meat and veggies). A couple bay leaves in each. Also added a sliced up bell pepper and minced garlic to the pork.

Going to slow cook them for about 8 hours on “low” and we’ll see how they turn out.

It could be great. It could be a big disaster. Either way it’ll be fun to learn. 🙂

Updated: They turned out pretty good.

The cloves with the venison was an interesting twist. First, you have to like cloves (I do). If you do, give it a try. It added a really nice flavor to the venison. Nothing too strong, just a nice and different flavoring. The cloves also made the potatoes taste really cool. I don’t think we’ll use cloves all the time, but certainly it was cool to discover this mix.

The bell pepper made all the difference for the pork. It turned out very tender and just so flavorful from that one large bell pepper.

One key thing to do when serving is to keep all of the liquid the meat cooked in. Put some roast on your plate, shred it, then ladel some of the liquid onto the meat. Mmm.

Excuses Excuses

/ hsoi

Yes, posting has been light. Work’s been crazy. Second job has some work for me to do, which I’m happy to take on because I can use the extra money. Got many relatives from Wife’s side of the family coming to visit tomorrow. Just much going on.

Oh, and that posting on hunting with the .223 took me a while to write up (as you can tell by the length). Any spare time I’ve had lately has been working on researching the topic and writing that up. It’s a bit rambly, but there was a lot of stuff I wanted to record for posterity.

So go read that one long post instead of a lot of little short posts. 🙂

.223 Remington for hunting?

/ hsoi / 23 Comments

If you bring up the topic of using the .223 Remington cartridge for hunting, invariably strong opinions arise:

“It’s great! Works just fine.”

“Only for varmints; I wouldn’t shoot deer-sized or larger game with it because that’d be inhumane.”

“Anything less than .30 caliber isn’t a real hunting round.”

“If you use it, you better make sure your shot placement is perfect.”

and it goes on.

Of course, some people have no opinion whatsoever because it’s illegal to use that caliber for game hunting in their state. As well, some people use the fact it’s illegal in some states as justification for why you shouldn’t hunt with it (ignoring all the other ways it’s illegal to hunt that could actually be beneficial, like using suppressors). Here in Texas, it’s legal to hunt with .223 and many people have reported successful deer and hog hunts using .223. Of course as well, there are many stories of failures with a .223 and those one or two stories someone has are reason enough for them to say it’s inadequate. The simple reality is any round can fail, no round is a magic bullet (pun intended). Yes you cannot pick your ammunition blindly, but in the end if you pick the right equipment and you do your job — which you should be doing no matter what you’re using, a .22 or a .300 magnum — it can be effective.

This isn’t any sort of definitive piece about hunting with .223 and shouldn’t be taken as such; it’s merely me thinking out loud and presenting things I’ve found on the topic.

Continue reading →

Morning with Daughter

/ hsoi / 6 Comments

Had a fun morning with Daughter.

The main purpose was to go to the gun range to have her try out the AR with the scope. But we made a morning out of it, stopping for breakfast at Denny’s. We were going to go to Waffle House but there was a Denny’s on the way and Daughter wanted to try it because she’s never been to one. No problem, we changed plans and stopped at the Denny’s for breakfast. I figured as long as we were doing firsts, I had a t-bone steak and eggs for breakfast; never done that before but always wanted to. It was terrible, but I loved every minute of it. 🙂

We were surprised how many people were out at the range this morning, given the temperatures were just above freezing. Apart from that tho the morning was very nice, so it made sense some people were out. We settled over on the “E” range because no one was there so it would give us the most flexibility. The one downside was I wanted to start her at 25 yards (thus originally I hoped to use position 41 on the “A” range), but 40 meters would have to do and frankly I didn’t think it’d be a problem.

Got settled in, got her set up on the rest. Still, she was too short. Luckily we found an old office chair and we could raise the seat up some, which got her there. Set up the targets on the 40 meter rails, and let fly. Daughter did quite well. A few days ago I had a talk with the kids about trajectory, “height over bore”, zeroing, point of impact vs. point of aim, and things like that. That this rifle was sighted to be zeroed at 100 yards, thus when they shot at the closer targets they wouldn’t hit where they were aiming. I told them, for, now, to keep aiming dead center on the target and just watch where the bullets impact and strive for good groupings. I’m glad we had the talk before we went as it made it much easier to handle things on the range.

Daughter shot for a bit, then I shot for a bit. I was pretty happy with my shooting, with some pretty tight groups. I did have some fliers and I know it’s because I am not used to that heavy single-stage trigger. I know the trigger also was giving Daughter some troubles, and I think that convinced her to dry fire the rifle at home to work on it. Between the cold air, the steady cold breeze, and the heavy trigger, I know it was giving Daughter troubles in breaking the shot. She had no trouble getting on paper and putting the bullet basically where she wanted, but doing it in a timely manner was rough. It’s just going to take practice with the rifle, but I think she’ll be fine. Next time we go out I’ll try “walking” the target rails on the “E” range (it’s a silhouette range), starting at 40 meters, then 50, then 75, then 100 and see how they do. I am pretty sure that as long as they can keep things steady, they’ll do fine out to 100 yards/meters.

Daughter didn’t get as much trigger time as she wanted — she was just too cold. So we packed it up and she sat in the car while I worked with my XD-9 a bit. No targets, just shooting into the berm. I’ve been re-reading the Brian Enos book and I wanted to do some stuff with grip, relaxation, and “floating the gun.” I picked up some good feedback and some points to ponder. I’d like to try running a lot of Bill Drills at this point and see how I do, as that’d give me a lot more tangible feedback. The cool thing was how much I stopped thinking about everything else and just let my eyes “drive the gun,” as Enos puts it. It really does make a big difference. As well, while I see lots of merit to the Todd Jarrett “grip 20% tighter kung fu action grip”, there’s also Enos’ take of being more relaxed and just letting the gun do its thing. You can’t be limp wristed, but yes I find the gun works a lot better when I have a “medium” grip and just let the gun do what it does. There’s a balance to find. More things for me to play with later.

A good morning. Not just because I got to go shooting, but because I got to spend time with Daughter. That’s the best part.

Updated: I forgot. Daughter got to learn some things about ammo. We were shooting Georgia Arms Canned Heat. Daughter pressed trigger, it went “pop” not “bang”. She looked up, puzzled. Her first misfire. I took care of it. I pulled back the charging handle and when the case ejected I noticed a lot of powder still in the case. Ugh. Good thing I had a cleaning rod with me. Bullet was only lodged an inch or two into the barrel, but I explained how this could be a bad thing. When I examined the case I immediately saw the problem… and I showed it to Daughter and asked her if she saw it (I didn’t say what it was), and she saw it. The primer wasn’t fully seated.

I’ve generally had good luck with Georgia Arms stuff so I’m not really holding this against them. But these things can happen. Glad Daughter got to experience and learn about them.