An Interesting Statistic

I haven’t shot anything in about a week and a half…I think that’s a record, at least in recent times. I’m going to try and get out with .22s in the next day or so. I haven’t shot the 10/22 I built up a few months back for this year’s Ruger Rimfire Challenge, and I have about 10 rounds through my Mark III. I note that I’m running out of time…we’re going to be filming the Colorado State Championships 1 September for SHOOTING GALLERY after filming a “Rimfire Challenge 101” class with Tim Norris before the match.

The antigun nonsense continues apace, but I don’t see any real heat in it. I have a personal metric I use to measure the national conversation…that’s the size of the MSM outlet spouting antigun nonsense. After the Aurora shootings you saw big players like Pravda…excuse me, the New York Times and the Washington Post, the big cable outlets, the networks in full throat, paying like a pack of hounds for “doing something.” That tailed off within a week, because it simply didn’t resonate with the population at large. Even after Wisconsin, what we’re seeing is calls for gun control coming from the East Nowhere Weekly Potato-Basher.  Yeah, the Usual Suspects are still baying, but I just don’t see the heat.

We’re heading into THE BEST DEFENSE filming season, and we will definitely be “modeling” both the Zimmerman shooting in Florida and the Aurora theater active shooter. Yes, they will be controversial, but if TBD has any greater purpose than ratings, it’s to try and find ways to make sure our audience gets home every single night. I don’t want TBD to ever focus on what we think of as “nit-wit” scenarios — “You are targeted by an international assassin who is hiding in the back seat of your car with a garrote and a cruise missile…how do you escape and save America?!?!”

I note that Popular Science has a piece on “printing” firearms using 3-D printers. Essentially, this piece summarizes the year-long threads on AR15.com from “HaveBlue” on creating AR-15 platform guns using a printer. This caused Mark Gibbs at Forbes to begin a whole new round of hand-wringing:

I’m in favor of tighter gun control and a ban on weapons that are unnecessarily powerful but I’m afraid that technology will soon make any legislation that limits the availability of any kinds of guns ineffective.

LOL! I’m laughing because antigunners have never really understood how simple gun technology actually is (largely because they listen to the MSM and their own empty “talking heads” like Josh Sugarman). While I was in Bend for the CT Midnight 3-Gun Shoot, I spent some time with some good friends, both well-known in the climbing community. One had actually been able to visit with the legendary Pakistani gunsmiths and fired some of their wares while he was there. I’ve also handled a “1911” that was built by Viet Cong gunsmiths with a flat file and a few spare parts. I wouldn’t want to shoot an IPSC match with it, but I wouldn’t want it pointed at my chest, either!

The first drawings of “hand cannonnes” are from 12th Century China and surfaced in Europe in the late 1300s. Guns have been around for a long time, and there’s nothing magic about their construction. In fact, as we move to polymer for all the non-stressed part of the firearm, they are in essence becoming less, rather than more, complicated — fewer parts, no hand-fitting, etc. As Forbes fretfully notes, inexpensive 3-D printers working in ceramic and metal will be headed to the DIY maker marker within a couple of years, meaning a whole gun can be “printed.”

I have reached out to “HaveBlue” and would like to feature the printing process on next season’s SHOOTING GALLERY. If you’re working on “printing” a gun, let me know!