Now let’s see if I can keep up with a few posts per week. I hope you enjoy it if there’s anyone out there reading this.

I will be exporting the entries from the old blog and importing them here so nothing is lost.

Expect more ramblings by me as I’m suddenly filled with opinion again.

On a forum I run, someone posted his perspective on people who carry guns. It has sparked a lively debate on the merit of carrying, criminals, and society issues. Needless to say, the anti arguments don’t make a whole lot of sense but I try to keep it civil.

http://www.xceedspeed.com/forums/showthread.php?t=87640

My posts appear as the user “Xceed”.

I’m tired of people talking about abortion, stem cell research, global health care, etc… as if they were the real issues of today. No, the real issue of today is the fact that our country is spiraling downward on gigantic spending sprees with money that only seems to exist electronically. While the fed nibbles away at the interest rates, they pumped billions of dollars into the banking world to try to save us from the somehow overlooked mistake of giving money to people with horrid credit. Maybe I haven’t been paying close enough attention, but I don’t think the candidates are even approaching the subject of the credit crunch?

My perfect candidate? Someone who isn’t going to run into office trying to pass laws on the little issues to look important. I want someone who is going to come in and actually do something about government spending and about our failing economy and about this farce of a war. As I see it, the only thing that really matters right now, is our money and our soldiers. Sure, it’s good to have a stance on things like abortion, I’m just not interested in letting that sway my vote.

If there’s one thing I’m sick of, it’s these people who vote on single issues. You know the ones, they vote for someone based on religious belief, or because their union told them to. It always seems to come down to single issues with people and I’m tired of it. I’m pretty sure the religious right got Bush into office and we all see how that has went. I was listening to NPR the other day and they were interviewing normal people about who they are going to vote for.  One lady stuck out to me. The second they called her name, she blurted out that she was voting for Hillary. When questioned why, her response started with “Oh I don’t know.. she seems to really have herself together” ….. uh.. wow, great reason to vote for her. She went on to say that her number one issue was government spending. I’m curious, when someone is worried about government spending, doesn’t the idea of universal health care seem like it might involve … government spending on a massive level? I wish she had just came out and said “I’m voting for Hillary because she has boobs… just like me!! OMG!” ugh.

And that concludes my “just woke up and wanted to blog about politics” post.

Do it! The PF-9 and P11 Kel Tec’s are DAO guns. This means that when you pull the trigger, you have a nice long, hard pull which cocks the hammer and releases it. With DAO, the hammer is not cocked even with a round in the chamber. I carry my P11 with a round in chamber without a second thought and my buddy has been carrying a PF9 for a couple months in the exact same configuration. With a good holster, I don’t think you could accidentally fire one of these guns very easily.  In case you were wondering, the PF9 trigger is heavenly compared to the P11.

For years, I’ve had dreams that circulate around my daily activities. For example, when I worked at Taco Bell as a teenager, I would routinely spend my nights in fitful sleep as my dreams forced me to make taco after taco on some unending assembly line. Shortly after I got my drivers license, my nights became interrupted by dreams of driving my car down some unknown highway and needing to slam on my brakes to avoid an accident. I’d wake, sitting upright in bed, slamming my foot into the end of my bed. Other times, I would wake with my arms flailing, desperately trying to find a steering wheel.

A couple days ago, I finally had a gun dream. Like any good gun owner, I constantly obsess over the 4 rules. I believe that my recent realization that pointing the muzzle downward in a 3rd floor apartment no longer constitutes as “safe” might have spurred this dream on.  In it, I was attempting to clear the chamber of my Kel Tec P11 but was doing it in a rather strange way. As you may know, the P11 has a DAO trigger with a shrouded hammer but in dream land, my 1911 and my P11 merged and the P11 magically had a 1911 hammer. As I cocked the hammer, my finger slid onto the suddenly hair trigger and fired the gun. Even in my dream, I was incredibly frightened and angry with myself but I was shocked to find that it had not fired. I quickly racked the slide back to reveal that the 9mm Luger round had been inserted backwards and the firing pin had harmlessly fallen onto the bullet nose.

As impossible as this scenario may have been, I awoke with a bit of paranoia about me. I’m always very careful with my firearm handling and I know that a little reminder is always good, but I sure don’t want to have that dream anymore!

Visit any gun blog on the net. There are a few gun writers who have a gift for expressing the object of their passion in ways which hold you and captivate you. I’m sure I am not in that exclusive club. The rest of us can be divided into a couple more sub-categories.  There are those of us who might not be eloquent or graceful writers but whom are able to twist our minds around subjects and break them into tiny easy to digest bits. These people think of arguments which I find myself reading and wondering “Why don’t I think like that?” These writers can argue their stance against the anti-gun writers with an amazing persistence and with relentless energy and whit. Again, I’m not one of those.

So that leaves, in my mind, the last definite category of gun blogger. The one who simply yammers on and on with the same points over and over. It was after a few weeks of long winded thoughts smeared across these pages, that I realized… I’m just saying the same crap over and over again. How many times do I need to make the same points before I start sounding like a broken record. Perhaps one of our biggest problems internally is the sheer number of people repeating the same thing over and over and never giving the subject a more thorough look to find a less repeatable line of defense.

This is not a post to announce that I will not be blogging anymore. Simply an explanation of why things have slowed down. I dove into the subject with the gung-ho attitude of a rookie and it didn’t take long until the true size of the job tore away my blinders and made me see the error in my ways. I might have had a few interesting or different opinions spill forth onto my keyboard, but I don’t think they were very frequent. I shall see where the coming weeks bring me, but I’m thinking that you might want to downgrade my bookmark to “check once a month” .. at least for now

But now I’m moving to an apartment. Carrying in a range bag is easy, carrying in cased handguns is easy enough as well. But how do you carry in rifles without drawing attention to yourself? I know, I know, gun ownership is legal, I shouldn’t need to hide my guns at all. Part of me feels like people are going to see that and label me perhaps? Nevermind that my entire rifle collection consists of milsurps and not a single “evil” black rifle (yet), I’ll still feel like I’m being judged.

Or perhaps I proudly tramp them into the apartment, head held high, with my buddies in line behind me, each carrying 50 caliber ammo cans or the heavy tins of 50’s military ammo. If anyone looks at me funny, I’ll give them the evil eye.

I like option 2.

It’s incredibly sad to see something like this happen. Especially when it’s from one of the “only ones”. Unfortunately, this doesn’t really help the belief that only police should have guns I suppose. I certainly hope we go after the actual cause of these types of problems. Society as a whole is getting more and more screwed up and if we keep spending our time running around crying about things that truly don’t matter (aka. controlling an object), we’ll never stop this kind of thing from happening.

Not that I feel you can stop man from killing. Man is inherently evil in my mind. We’ve killed from day one, and I doubt you can stop that. But, I’m sure there’s a way to help the majority of these people who feel that murder is the only solution. Obviously these people are mis-wired and need some special attention. I bet I could go on for hours about the problems in society today that are helping us raise a nation full of people who cannot handle failure or things not going their way.

At least this police officer got what was coming I guess.

So here we are, in a country without firearms. 300 million people without access to any rifle, handgun or shotgun. No one has to worry about being robbed or killed with a gun in this dreamland, because there are no guns anywhere. Unfortunately, one truth remains, you cannot un-invent something. Once an object is invented and made it’s way into public knowledge, it’s an item that is capable of being reproduced by pretty much anyone with the means. Guns have been around for hundreds of years in some shape or form and I’d venture a guess that there are thousands of people who could make one. Go ask any avid gun enthusiast that you know this question: “If the world had all of the guns removed , could you make a gun?” I’d expect a large number of them to say yes.

A modern firearm is fairly simple. You have a projectile placed into a casing which contains gunpowder and a primer to light the gun powder. Combine those 4 items and then place them into a cylinder of metal designed to accept the cartridge and devise a way to ignite the primer, and you will have a firearm on your hands. Barring the items to create a smokeless powder cartridge, you always have the black powder way of doing things. I plugged in “homemade gun” into Google and the #1 site is by a British fellow sharing how to create home made firearms. England has disarmed their citizens and yet here’s an English fellow who is sharing how to make guns at home. I dare say this drives my point home without any room for argument.

But let us go further in this hypothetical situation and venture the possibility that the Brady bunch have a mega genius on their hands who somehow manages to invent a method of time travel. With careful consideration of whom to target, they effectively go back in time and remove the people responsible for bringing us to today’s modern gun. I would guess that they would kill them, probably with guns. That would be rather ironic eh? But of course, they’d claim that the loss of a few lives would save the lives of many. On their return from their epic journey through time and space, I’d guess that they might return to 2007 and find that guns existed despite their efforts. Why? Because the gun is man evolving his tools to suit his needs.

I’ve heard it said that if you brought John Browning and Henry Ford back from the dead, only Mr. Ford would be amazed at the progress that has been made to his life’s work. Mr Browning may be intrigued by some aspects of the gun industry, but his 1911 design is still in major production today, and there have not been huge advancements in the world of firearms. Why? I believe it’s because man has honed it into the most efficient item it can be at this point. Sure, we can fiddle with the powder mixture and change bullet weights, but the basic principle of the firearm remains the same. Mr. Ford on the other hand, would most likely be shocked at our progress. Man is still in the process of finding the most efficient mass produced automobile and probably will be for many generations to come.

Since the dawn of time, man has needed to eat and defend himself. It started out with stones and sticks and progressed from there. When man figured out that he needed something that would allow him to kill his prey or enemy at distances farther than arms length, he began to improve on his tools. The stick became a spear, the spear became an arrow. Over time, gathering food and fighting your enemy became a game of distance. He who could kill from the farthest distance was most likely to win. Imagine an army of men armed with spears facing today’s military armed with M16’s and sniper rifles, it would most likely be a slaughter. The evolution of the firearm as we know it today was simply man attempting to adapt his weaponry and tools to what stood before him.

I think that even if you were to go back in time and remove key elements of the firearm as we know it today, you would probably never stop the evolution. I’d guess the worst you could do is delay its growth. Or the opposite might occur, imagine the Brady Bunch returning from their time travel to find that they had removed the single roadblock to man creating ray guns?

Removing the gun, no matter how insanely hard it would be, would simply force mankind to be more creative and most likely spawn the creation of something much more devilishly clever. I can only imagine what the Brady’s would do in that scenario.