Is it just me, or are the people marketing .22LR ammo getting a little silly in their product names?

[and yes, I know some of these have been around for a while, but it was seeing them neatly lined up in a row that got to me]

Earlier, I mentioned that the common claims about a kids-and-guns “crisis” are largely based on baldfaced lies, particularly when they talk about small children finding a gun and shooting themselves or a playmate. California activists used this myth to pass safe-storage laws mandating trigger locks, lock-boxes, gun safes, safety testing for buyers, and safety testing for all handguns sold in the state, and every year they ask for more.

Unfortunately, the number of children aged 0-14 who died in gun accidents in California in 1999 was… one (source: National Center for Health Statistics; total gun-accident deaths were 47). Note that this is the same year that all those “safety” laws were passed, which gun-control advocates promised would protect children.

Protect them from what, exactly?

While browsing the list of potential California governors, I decided to take a quick peek at their web sites, and since they’re in alphabetical order, one of the first ones I hit was Brooke Adams.

Summary: she’s young, pretty, not a socialist, not a member of the Religious Right, and seems to grasp the major tax-and-spend problems in California. If she weren’t clueless on the subject of gun control, I’d be willing to back her.

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Every once in a while, after some poor schmuck has been arrested (maybe for a good reason, maybe not), some official will announce breathlessly that a search of his home turned up “thousands of rounds of ammunition.” This sounds impressive, until you realize that a box of 500 rounds of .22 Long Rifle — by far the most popular ammo in the country — is about the size and weight of a brick, and costs less than $25.

A few days ago, anticipating the release of my new Buck Mark, I picked up a brick of .22 so I’d have something to feed it. Tonight, I went through some boxes that had remained sealed through my last two moves. Imagine my surprise when I found four bricks inside. I think two of them were an impulse buy at a 24-hour grocery in Ohio, which makes them at least ten years old.

Obviously I’ll need to invite some friends along when I go to the range.

Just finished adjusting the trigger on my Remington 700. It now has a crisp 2.5-pound trigger pull, a vast improvement over the creepy 6-pounder it came with. It’s an easy, safe procedure, but the final step involved something I don’t keep around the house: nail polish.

After a leisurely walk to the grocery store in the middle of the night, I am the proud owner of a half-ounce bottle of Maybelline Infinite Shine Clear Extended Wear Base And Topcoat. Sealing the threads on the trigger-adjustment screws required approximately a third of a drop of the stuff, suggesting that I have enough left over to fix about a thousand rifles. Which is about a thousand more than I own.

I suppose I could always use the rest to seal the quick-and-dirty paint job I do for my D&D miniatures (prime gray, paint black, drybrush metallic, done!).

After taking a week off to drive to Washington and back, I resumed my quest for a Browning Buck Mark Classic Plus. As I suspected, the only store who had one was 100 miles away, and thanks to California’s silly-ass gun laws, I have to make the trip twice, once to fill out the federal and state paperwork and supply a thumbprint, and again ten days later to claim my property.

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Spent two days this week at an Operations forum up north, and since most of the sessions had very little to do with the service I operate, I was able to do some real work while casually keeping track of the discussions.

My online target archive contains a bunch of bullseye targets I built using a Perl script. The native output format was PostScript, ’cause I like PostScript, but PDF is generally more useful today, and not everyone uses 8.5×11 paper. I hand-converted some of them, but never finished the job.

The correct solution was to completely rewrite the code using the PDF::API2::Lite Perl module, and generalize it for different paper sizes and multiple targets per page. It’s still a work in progress, but already pretty useful.

My friendly neighborhood gun dealer has been completely unable to track down the Browning Buck Mark Classic Plus that I want to buy. All of his distributors are out of stock, and while they promise to have some Real Soon Now, they can’t say exactly when.

There are probably thousands in stock elsewhere in California, but the law is designed to make it tedious and difficult for me to buy one of them. Not because I might use it for crime, mind you; just wanting one is sufficient offense.

Most likely, I’ll end up driving 100 miles to a store that has one, make the purchase, and then drive there again ten days later to pick it up. Cheaper than having it shipped to my local dealer, paying him for the transfer, and letting it sit at his place for the ten days.

Of course, if I were interested in crime, I could have it today, or something much more lethal. California’s gun laws have no impact on the black market, because they’re not designed to.