When in Wyoming, . . .

The weather here isn't going to get any nicer, whether the global warming is really taking place or not, whether it is anthropogenic or not. We thought it would be useful to upgrade the Pundit Sedan to a Pundit 4x4 of some kind.

The Primary Pundit Offspring Transporter is the only new car permitted in the household, so I had to work with used-car dealers.

I originally had my heart set on a Toyota 4Runner, but those things are priced like p00#t@n&. It's as if they are made of gold.

After 5 testdrives and some discussions with Mama-san over goals, objectives, strategies, criteria, and finances, I threw all caution to the wind and chose a vehicle in a matter of seconds, on the basis of how it felt as I drove it to Chez Fûz's garage to see whether it would fit.



I made it fit.

Say hello to Fûz's daily driver and huntin' wagon. A '99 Dodge Dakota with the V6 and a greatly appreciated 5-speed.

Is this unusual?

TCM and I were busting caps the other day, and my FAL stopped ejecting its empties.

After looking the rifle over a bit, I saw threads where threads did not belong. Through a crack in the gas regulator ring.

Now how often does this sh17 happen?

We figured out how to get the split one off, and there is no shortage of replacements online. But is this gonna happen again?

UPDATE: often, if the ring was made by Imbel rather than FN, and mine was. The finish that Imbel applies insulates the ring from the spigot it is threaded on to. The ring heats less quickly than the spigot. The spigot expands, the ring doesn't. Pop.

I'm told lapping compound will remove enough of the finish that a new regulator will be my last.

Crossroads and taking offense

TCM and I met Jed Baer at the Crossroads show this weekend.

I laid in another tin of 7N6 for Jadwiga and inhaled the sharp tang of the pheromones of gunowners all discombobulated because Democrats are back in power.

FAL mags were on the shopping list, but I didn't find any priced near what I could claim new-in-cosmoline from some online suppliers, so I passed them up.

On the way home, I stopped in at a shop open for its last day of business, everything must go. All the magazines FIFTY PERCENT OFF!

He had a little box of 5 mags, clearly FAL, but some of them marked for AR-10. Hmmmm. All of them were marked for $19.95 each, and half off put them at around $10 each. That sounds a little high for used mags with some wear, mixed provenance, and the guy wasn't quite sure what they were, FAL or AR-10.

I offered him $30 for the box, he said "I don't think so" and slid them back under the counter and turned away. OK fine, he's the one going out of business, not me. I'd rather be swabbing cosmo out of cherry $9 mags than sandblasting and rebluing and Teflon/Molying $10 mags. I'll eat the shipping, I would be anyway.

You think I offended him?

You think I care whether I offended him? Truth be told, I do care a bit; gun dealers are some of America's greatest heroes in my book and they have to put up with a lot of shit from many sources (ATF, zoning, protesters, threats of lawsuits, etc) to keep doing what they've been doing. None of them are making a fortune at it. They have to be doing it for the love of it.

One can never have enough love, so this fellow apparently either had had enough shit, or just wanted to retire and go do the things he's been selling gear to other people to do. It's finally his chance. I wish him well.

But I am not paying $10 and sales tax for used mags when I can pay $9 and shipping for new.

Scrumptious

I come up briefly for air from my election-imposed navelgazing, to promote NZBear's solicitation of questions for the GOP's new minority leadership, over here.

Please pile on. I have two questions there and I'd appreciate it if some buds went over and jacked mine upward in the popularity polls.

Some moonbat questions have been posted there too; a few Strongly Opposes are richly deserved.

That, sadly, may be the only good that comes of the enterprise.

Meanwhile I'm pondering what ammo and optics to buy for the kids.

Jadwiga

Nadia now has a cousin, built from a Wz88 "Tantal" kit bought from the good people of Gunthings. The receiver is vanilla Tapco, as are the trigger pack. She has a stack of Bulgarian brown 5.45mm magazines from Copes, equipped with domestic followers and floorplates offered by a fellow on one of the boards. Manson supplied the headspace gauges. Another guy on the boards supplied a domestic piston to take me over the Federal domestic content minimum.

After 3 ugly attempts to plug-weld the rails to the receiver, I gave up and ran to the nearest Harbor Freight for a proper spotwelder. Close-up photos would reveal the attempted plugs, so I won't show them to you. Sandblasting and some bench grinding cleaned them up as well as will ever be.

TCM's good results with Brownell's Teflon/Moly Oven Cure Finish, plus his offer of the remaining portion of his can, suggested that I give the same treatment to Jadwiga. While they were still disassembled, the rear sight base, receiver, receiver cover, bolt carrier, and folding rear stock all got a coat and were cured in a barbecue grille set carefully to the right temperature. The gas block and front sight base were treated with common barbecue paint. Final assembly created several dings in the finish, but she'll get a second coat after she's run in.

The bolt carrier meets some rough spots and won't spring closed every time, and the trigger pack needs proper retainers to hold the axis pins in place; the rubber bumper on the sidefolder needs a new rivet. But all can be tuned up right.

She's purty, I think, and she is the reason I got the jones to build a Kalashnikov. I understand now how the jones becomes a regular hobby.

How she shoots? Dunno. Jeez, man, I have two tins of 7N6 and I need range time. But I have to get out to Area 46 and 39 for speedgoat first.

A $300 weekend

The POS dishwasher we got with this place began tripping the GFCI outlet we put in a year ago. It tripped the GFCI with increasing frequency until, last Friday night, the damned thing wouldn't even run, just trip the outlet as soon as it was turned on. The GFCI even arced when I reset it with the dishwasher on and ready to draw current.

Mama-san insisted there might be problems with the wiring. I dug through it, even replaced the GFCI outlet in case the arcing had ruined it. While I had the unit out from under the cabinet, I noticed corrosion gunk all over.



The house wiring looked OK though the dishwasher's didn't. I plugged the dishwasher itself into another circuit (I dragged an extension cord in from the garage) and it blew that GFCI instead.

So off to the local big box to bring home a replacement.

This is the third dishwasher to have been in this house; the water supply line had an extra length spliced to it with compression fittings for the unit I removed. With that extra length gone, the original supply line reached the new unit comfortably. So a house built in 1973 goes through two dishwashers in 33 years, meaning a dishwasher lasts about 16 years?

Surprising, not fascinating: No Liquids Aboard edition II

Mr Keillor would never have made his eloquent pronouncement on the farce of airline security had he still been able to bring his Starbuck's aboard the plane.

Most people will not speak out like this unless and until they can visualize their own ox being gored. In his case the ox is a latte, but, well, we knew that.

His wit is the only thing he brings to the table, and he can turn it on and off like a spigot. The spigot itself has not changed: "'I'm a liberal and we love ridiculous government programs that intrude on personal freedom." I wonder whether he heard his own irony there?

"But where are the conservatives who used to object to this sort of thing?" A little more telling, that.

He'll have his answer to that question here.

No news here, kids. Certainly no new ally.

Three alternative angles of approach, or Second meet Ninth

Aim_Small_Miss_Small discusses a grand strategy to restore the Second Amendment of the Constitution to a fully-protected civil right:

. . . we must start and then move [non-committed antis] along gradually with the kinds of things they will find persuasive . . . we need to meet them (on the rhetorical and philosophical battleground) where they are instead of where we wish them to be.

I agree, but maybe we also need to look at other places where they already agree with us. Note the poll on the right sidebar of The Gun Blogs, where I found the post: which strategy should we RKBA types emphasize to what should the focus of gun rights activists consist of next? Expanding CCW, repealing "sporting purpose" language, et cetera. As you look at the poll results, you'll see there's not enough consensus for us RKBA proponents to concentrate and achieve one of them.

For example, many staunch gun rights activists argue that a national CCW would be a step backwards, because we'd be subordinating a right to a nationwide (read Federal) system of licensing.

Similarly, should we support BATF reform? Bullshit, some of us (including me) will shout back---shut it down instead. No good can come of it.

Between the poll and Aim's post, it occurred to me that we should explore other options that foster divisions, or just as good, doubt, among the antis instead of arguing over the divisions among us. Our options should not discuss guns openly either, because the antis will smell such tactics coming from far, far away and circle the wagons. Focus on collateral, apparently unrelated issues.

It will readily become clear to the gun rights activist that he or she ought to be fighting for other rights anyway, because the infringement of those other rights makes gun control that much easier---standing the old bromide "the Second Amendment is the right that guarantees the rest" on its head.

Recent events supply many possibilities.

• Asset forfeiture. Read the travails of the owner of KT Ordnance and you'll see that ATFE---the force-initiation arm of the anti-gun movement---doesn't need gun control per se to screw people over. They didn't charge Mr Celata with any crime. But they did raid him, copy his hard drives, seize his inventory, and then . . . nothing.
  
  They can bankrupt him by continuing to do . . . nothing. While his inventory sits in their vaults, or ships to the scrapyard, Mr Celata goes without the income it could have gotten him, and has to come up with even more money from elsewhere to petition to have his property returned to him. If he does nothing, he loses.
  
  No doubt the same tactic has successfully shut down a number of other businesses serving us gun folk, many of them not even needing a license from ATFE to be businesses because they weren't making firearms or ammunition in the first place.
  
  Asset forfeiture has been used to take cars from beneath the butts of guys looking for prostitutes, other guys looking for abuse drugs, and even more guys merely being accused of looking for prostitutes, accused of looking to score drugs, and accused of numerous other victimless crimes. The City of Denver has used it to seize cars and guns from ordinary folk who've been silly enough to drive through that city with certain models of gun aboard, in spite of Colorado's peaceable journey law and McClure-Volkmer.
  
  Don't argue about the victimless crimes themselves. That's a non-starter among our own community, and it will lead only to failure among the antis. If this were not so, there would be Libertarians in the Oval Office. There aren't, so don't. (Plenty of libertarians like me in the RKBA movement, granted, but we're part of a coalition and we have to cooperate.)
  
  But you definitely can argue about how asset forfeiture is unjust, how it makes the owner's innocence (or absence of being charged) irrelevant to the case the State is making against the property. Sure, it's a long-standing tradition of English law to charge a piece of property, rather than the owner. So what? Why should we even tacitly support a law that allows the State to get away with theft? Do we want our courts, cops, and prosecutors to be corrupted by it?
  
  Taking asset forfeiture away from the Man means taking an arbitrary and frequently-abused power away from anti-gunners. How to sell the dismantling of asset forfeiture to the antis? That could be tough, I haven't an idea yet. Perhaps by linking it to the campaign to end eminent domain abuse, which seems to be trending positively.
  
  
• Dynamic entry. I don't know whether KT Ordnance's raid was a peaceful, knock first, "hey we got a warrant, let us in," wait for Mr Celata to answer the door kind of raid. If it was, it's rare. Radley Balko will tell you more than you want to know about the overuse of forcible SWAT-type raids, in the dark of night, on the wrong house. He'll also tell you about the trend in using dynamic entries to carry out what used to be plain old police work.
  
  The bodies are piling up. Lawsuits to recover damages from mistaken raids are failing, justice is being denied. Puppies and kittens are not being blended, but shot, stomped, and Tased.
  
  Gun owners aren't the only targets of these raids. They started with the War on Drugs, but now that dynamic entry is becoming the default method of serving a warrant, gun owners are getting their share.
  
  How to sell this to people who are inimical to gun owners? The same way you sell it to the non-libertarian gun owners: Cops are dying in these raids too. And if only a percentage of the lawsuits by innocent victims succeed, you'll see cities and counties in deep financial trouble to pay the judgments.
  
  If you want to appeal to the feminists, call it an outrageous example of testosterone poisoning.
  
  Dynamic entry must be restricted only to saving the life of a hostage. This can, and should, happen state-by-state, much like liberalization of CCW is taking place.
  
  
• Marginalizing the weird. I have to be careful with this one. Consider: more people believe that extraterrestrial astronauts visit our planet, than that they will ever draw money out of their Social Security accounts. I'm not that sure of the latter anymore myself. That says more about Social Security than about the existence of UFOs.
  
  Lots of people think homeschooling is weird; I definitely do not, but many people do, and I'd wager a good number of them are part of the giant government apparatus that spits out search warrants and arms men to execute them. An animus against homeschooling, or unusual religious practices, can easily be exaggerated into a claim of child abuse. An animus against guns in a home with children is less of a leap.
  
  Unwholesome attention to weirdness easily becomes an intense desire to look for infractions of the law. In case you haven't noticed, there are more than enough laws now to blindly infract.
  
  How to sell this one to the antis? There are lots of other weird people in the world, and we need not give them respect, but they demand to be left alone unless they make real flesh-and-blood victims. The biker, the furry, the kink, the performance artist suspending yourself in midair by hooks through your flesh, the addict to plastic surgery. Leave weird people alone. You might be one.
  

Well, there are three ideas, in matters where gun rights activists can expand the effectiveness of their efforts and divide the antis, without even having to utter the word "gun."

Holding his nose cannot be enough

How can Glenn Beck stand to have to talk to Nancy Grace?

Let alone have to hear her voice?

It must be the magic of production, like how the Beatles could record an entire album with only one Beatle present in the studio at any one time. Ringo laid down the percussion, all else could be tweaked by engineers.

Soulcraft

Mlle Sklodovska and I had the house to ourselves today. I scratched an itch---homemade pretzels.

Reminds me of this article that TCM pointed me to recently.

Quote for the day

You say you are worried about your kid getting run over? I dealt with that concern by taking [offspring unit] for a ride in the country and stopping by the side of the road to point out roadkill racoons, particularly three day old gas-bloated ones buzzing with flies. "This is what happens if you play in the street."

The Wheat / Rye Guy

Medicine Bow Peak on Labor Day 2006

On impulse, I drove all of us up into the nearest mountains I knew, the ones I saw in the distance on my last speedgoat hunt. The offspring units behaved themselves quite well and seemed to enjoy the 10,847 feet above mean sea level.

Oh, I'm full

Dinner at Sal Grosso off Powers Ferry Rd this evening. Excellent, Smithers.

Nadia debuts

Nadia is a Romanian AKM with laminated furniture, built from a non-matching kit from Classic Arms.



I folded a Tapco receiver flat for her, gave her a Tapco piston and G2 ignition group, and refitted the magazines with Falcon Arms domestic floorplates. A domestic muzzle protector sits out front.

Work to create her was spread out over several weeks, including a couple abortive attempts on the receiver. Some work remains, such as a replacement disconnector spring, a replacement safety lever, and a better rivet fixture for the trigger guard, which is screwed on presently. More sanding and oil for the wood, and another coat of flat black paint for the receiver, after she's been shot in.

She is unfired, waiting for me to find a good place to try her out. I ran the bolt carrier in repeatedly until it's as smooth as I remember Kalashnikovs ever to be.

The cheapest kit I could find was chosen for a reason: if I was going to dick this up, I didn't want a lot of money in it. In retrospect it wasn't difficult, it just demanded patience and a willingness to consult the gods on the bulletin boards.

Everybody should try one before the kits dry up; ATFE knows this homebrewing is going on and they're bent on stopping it the one way they can, by blocking importation of the parts kits unless key components, expensive to make domestically, are destroyed.

An Army of Davids will still need its slings

The biggest reason for the slack posting of late is that since KT Ordnance was raided, I've been obsessed with building my own blaster from parts.

Not just any blaster. A Kalashnikov. An AR will come later, when KT is open for business again and can sell me an 80% receiver blank. But dammit, something had to be done now.

TCM and I discussed it---normally I'd keep my mouth shut and avoid the attention, but if I have the huevos to post on the KT mess, I ought to have the huevos to do what ATFE raided KT to try to stop. Otherwise the domestic terrorists ATFE will have won.

A plain-jane Romanian AKM copy, with the laminated furniture and vertical foregrip, is almost complete. A few dollars have been sunk in Harbor Freight goodies such as a 12-ton press and a fluxcore wire welder. Pictures to follow.

And a few more Klashes, in particular a wz88 and a Polish AKMS.

I can stop whenever I want.

Quote for the day, no-liquids-aboard edition

From a highly placed source in the API list:

I heard a Department of Homeland Security public service announcement today asking Americans to report anything suspicious. If I were to call and report that I find it suspicious that we're in a war but we're not controlling our borders, I don't think I'd be well received.

a little closer to reality, perhaps?

Usually, my posts titled "Idea number xxx" are flights of fancy, if-wishes-were-horses proposals. If I could finance them, I suppose they would be feasible, technologically, but they'd need someone with completely different skillsets to find the willing market and make the sale.

It pleases me that STOL airships are far closer to reality. Of course Dynalifter does not list medium-haul domestic passenger airlift as a potential market, as I had wished. By the time such craft and services are available, if ever, I will have little need to go to the East Coast anymore.



But that's not the point. Maybe I'd buy stock in it.

at VC

An interesting post by Ilya Somin, about the divide among libertarians on the US occupation of Iraq. Milton and Rose Friedman are quoted.

Please don't challenge me on the choice of "occupation" for what the US is doing in Iraq. By plain-English definition, that's what we are doing, and I use it with no intent to challenge the intent or wisdom of it.

I left a comment there, after wading through mounds of libertarian blather about abstraction versus the concrete, moralism versus consequentialism or utilitiarianism, and walls of flame. Plus some gems. It deserves the rare, vaunted Second Reading.

It isn't enough to simply oppose or support this conflict. Slogans such as "oppose the war but support the troops" and "regardless of how we got involved, we still have to win" don't even scratch the surface. In a way that transcends foreign policy or the face Uncle Sugar puts on diplomacy, regardless of whether American boots marked Saudi soil, this war was coming to us one way or another. Why we fight it predicates how we fight it, and how we fight it determines whether we will win it. If we are not fighting for the right reasons, we will lose.

Why the DoD will not switch from SSN to random service numbers

Bruce Schneier:

We generally think of computer security as a problem of technology, but often systems fail because of misplaced economic incentives: the people who could protect a system are not the ones who suffer the costs of failure.

DoD will not suffer if my SSN is compromised and my identity is stolen. I do.

Unless the incentive can be turned on them, they have no reason to change.

Mideast, short and sweet

James Rummel prompts me to remark that the face-packing in the Levant is a bit overdue.

One newsreader earlier this week referred to Israel's defending herself against Qassam rockets and UCAVs as "perpetuating the cycle of violence."

Madam, this is no cycle. The violence over the last few weeks all seems unilateral to me. We can hope that the Lebanese government, if there is one (or if a sensible one is in waiting) will see this as an opportunity to eject unwanted puppeteers and determine their own future, and set their own relations with neighbors.

If the US intervenes as a so-called nation-builder, let them learn from recent experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. Do not value democracy so highly that this new democracy you build can merely vote down the rule of law, the right to own oneself, and the right to be equal before the law regardless of one's practice of this or that religion. Talk to the speechwriters and find some word other than democracy to bring tears welling in Americans' eyes.

*****

And speaking of James, I'll be taking dinner with him this evening.