Mike's Campfire

Presidents’ Day, and a Question That Begs To Be Answered

It’s Presidents’ Day, in which (presumably) we celebrate a whole bunch more U.S. Presidents than merely the two traditional favorites, Washington and Lincoln (although Lincoln’s star doesn’t shine all that brightly in my sky).  In the spirit of the holiday, here’s a few choice nuggets of Presidential trivia for you (mostly courtesy of Richard Lederer’s Presidential Trivia Revised and Updated):

• Although Barack Obama is considered our 44th President, he’s actually only the 43rd man to hold the office.  Grover Cleveland, who served two different, non-consecutive terms, is traditionally counted twice.
• John Adams (our second President) and Thomas Jefferson (number three) both died on the same day:  July 4, 1826.  Two other Presidents, James Monroe and Calvin Coolidge, also died on July 4, although in different years.
• Twenty-two of our Presidents have also served as governors of various states, and sixteen have been U.S. senators.
• More U.S. Presidents have been born in Virginia than in any other state.
• Sixteen out of the last nineteen Presidents have been golfers.
• Both Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt served as governor of New York and Assistant Secretary of the Navy before becoming President.  The two Roosevelts were fifth cousins, and Franklin’s wife Eleanor was Theodore’s niece, making her also Franklin’s fifth cousin, once removed.
• Franklin D. Roosevelt was the only U.S. President to serve more than two terms.  While Washington set a widely observed precedent by refusing to run for more than two terms, the statutory limitation on two Presidential terms was imposed by the 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1951.
• John F. Kennedy and William Howard Taft are the only U.S. Presidents to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery, although 30 of the 43 men to have held the office were military veterans.

And just for grins, since just about everybody has strong opinions in this area, a poll for you:  who do you think was the greatest U.S. President?  Recognizing that greatness can wear many faces, I’m generously letting you vote for up to three Presidents.  Have at it.  (And yes, I’m only listing Grover Cleveland once, in blatant defiance of convention.)

Really, Winchester? I’m So Disappointed…

While casting about online yesterday for some information on ballistics for a particular cartridge, I ran across a rather cool ballistics calculator on the Winchester Ammunition web site.  Now, I have no beef with Winchester on general principles; not only do I shoot their ammunition on a regular basis, I also own two Model 94′s.  And their calculator seemed to work well enough, at least for my purposes.

What set me steaming was when I decided to take a look at the ballistics glossary on their site, to see what information I could glean from it.  As I started scrolling through the various entries, I came upon “clip,” the definition for which said, “See MAGAZINE.”  No, I thought to myself, they couldn’t have done that…could they?  After all, these are firearms and ammunition professionals, who surely know that a clip and a magazine are two totally different beasts, right?

Filled with optimism, I scrolled along to “magazine,” expecting to find some clarification of the differences between that and a clip, and finding, alas, only this definition:

A receptacle on a firearm that holds several cartridges or shells for feeding into the chamber. Magazines take many forms, such as box, drum, rotary, or tubular and may be fixed or removable. Note: The 1994 crime bill banned the manufacture and importation of magazines with a capacity greater than 10 rounds.

Fabulous.  Just fabulous.  Not only does this leave the gentle reader with the distinct impression that a magazine and a clip are inherently the same, it also doesn’t even bother to point out that the “assault weapons” provision of the 1994 crime bill it references, which was responsible for the 10-round magazine abomination, was allowed to expire in 2004.  Shame on you, Winchester, for spreading misinformation.

For those who don’t know the difference, a magazine is, well, just what the definition above says it is.  A clip, however, is not a magazine.  It is a metal piece designed to hold several cartridges for the purpose of storing them and loading them into a firearm’s magazine, and can be either in the form of a “stripper” type clip, from which the cartridges are pushed into the magazine while the clip itself remains outside, or an “en bloc” clip such as that used by the venerable M1 Garand, in which the loaded clip is inserted into the weapon’s magazine and then automatically ejected once the last round from it is fired.

If you’re going to be presumptuous enough to hold yourself up as an authority on something, and even have a glossary available for people to reference, it’s probably a good idea to know what you’re talking about.

Range Time With the 10/22

You’ll recall that I recently completed my Ruger 10/22 build by replacing the factory barrel with a Green Mountain heavy barrel.  Of course, once the work was done, I had to get down to the range and see what the new barrel can do.  I was not disappointed.

First order of business was to sight the scope in again, since I was pretty sure the new barrel wouldn’t be grouping in the same place as the old one, and sure enough, my first group I fired went about four inches high at 25 yards.  After diddling the scope some, I brought the group back down to center and moved the target out to 50 yards, where I only had to make some small adjustments to get everything centered up nicely.  I sighted in using Federal bulk 36-grain hollow points, since that’s what’s available at the nearby Wally Mart and what I generally use for plinking.  The groups were mostly nice and tight, but as expected, there were a few fliers in there, which can get rather frustrating when you’ve got a good string going.  At its best, the Federal ammo is capable of some very nice groups.

I wanted to try all of my high-cap magazines to see if they would feed properly with the new barrel’s match chamber, and for the most part I was pleasantly surprised.  My Ruger BX-25′s fed flawlessly, which wasn’t any real shocker, although the literature that came with them was careful to point out that they were guaranteed to feed in any unmodified, factory original Ruger rifle – which mine certainly is not.  I had equally good results with a pair of well-used, older (ca. 15 years) Butler Creek Hot Lips mags, with no malfunctions at all out of a total of 150 rounds fired.  Two newer Hot Lips magazines purchased within the last year and a half or so didn’t do so well, with each of them consistently failing to feed either the second or third cartridge.  Each failure to feed resulted in the bullet catching on the lip of the chamber, with resulting deformation of the bullet.

My Tactical Innovations mags, which are designed to be fine-tuned to work with an individual firearm, performed miserably, but that’s likely because I need to adjust them to work with the new barrel.

Just for grins, I decided to pick up a couple boxes of Eley Target Rifle ammunition, to see if I could discern an appreciable difference in accuracy between that and the bulk ammo.  The Eley Target cartridges are supposed to be manufactured to a higher quality control standard, and should (in theory anyway) give better performance than the Federal bullets.  Just looking at the different ammo side by side I could see that the Eley was much more uniform in appearance; it also had a fairly heavy coat of lube that had an almost greasy feel to it.  Needless to say, I didn’t use my bulk loader with the target ammo for fear of damaging the bullets.

My first shot off the bench from a warm barrel with the Eley ammo impacted a full inch low at 50 yards, and I thought I had flinched.  When the second and third shots made a nice cloverleaf with the first, I realized what I would have known had I done my homework before hitting the range – the Eley ammunition is loaded differently, pushing a heavier bullet (40 gr lead round nose) at a slower velocity (1085 fps at the muzzle, as opposed to 1255 for the Federal hollow points).  Once I began holding high to compensate, I was able to turn in some pretty impressive groups.  I had a nice windless day at the range, and I found that as I continued shooting I was able to “call” my shots very accurately.  There were no fliers here except for those that I dropped through poor technique.

So all in all, I’m very happy with my new barrel.  As I’ve said elsewhere, I’ve got a lot of work to do before I’ll be able to fully utilize the advantage in accuracy it gives me.  And an important lesson learned, too, about how much differently two types of ammunition can perform when fired out of the same gun.

Friday Night Music

Weather Haiku

Big storm blowing in
Lots of snow on the mountain
Oh, my aching head

RIP Whitney Houston…

…now let’s all get our priorities straight, shall we?  (Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words.)

File This Under “Why Didn’t I Get One of These a Long Time Ago?”

You’ve probably gathered by now that I enjoy shooting my Ruger Mk II pistol and 10/22 rifle.  As with most of the firearms I enjoy shooting, I have several magazines for each, so that when I get to the range I can spend more time shooting and less time reloading.  The flip side to that, of course, is that eventually all those mags are going to run dry, and that means a lot of loading if I want to fill them all up again.

Up till now I’ve gotten by with a pair of manual reloading tools – a Christie’s E-Z Loader for the rifle, and a Wilson Combat Versa-Loader for the pistol.  Both have the distinct advantage of being both inexpensive and small enough to toss into a range bag or ammo can until you need them.  And they both do a fair job of sparing your thumb during those marathon mag loading sessions, either at the range or parked in front of the TV the night before.  The one downside to them both?  They’re slow.  Neither of them makes loading much faster than using your unassisted thumb.

So I finally broke down and bought a couple of bulk loaders for my .22′s in the hope of speeding up the process.  For the rifle I picked up Butler Creek’s Hot Lips Loader, and for the pistol mags I bought the unfortunately named Ultimate Clip Loader (which loads magazines, not clips, and yes, there is a difference).  I had been eyeballing both loaders for some time, but was sitting on the fence because reviews of both products seemed to be strangely mixed.  Some people were calling these things the greatest invention since sliced white bread with jam, while others derided them as Murphy-ridden, prone to breakage, and difficult to use.  I finally decided the only way to know for sure was to try them out.

Now I really wish I had bought them both much sooner.  Not only are they easy to use, they speed up the magazine loading process by an order of magnitude.  I can only conclude that the people who said these loaders are cranky and unreliable probably didn’t bother to take 30 seconds or so and read the directions before using them.  I have had no problems with either one.  For details on how they work, and some pretty pictures, too, read on below the fold.  Read the rest of this entry »

Lincoln’s Birthday

Today marks the 203rd anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, who served as the 16th President of the United States.  As a child I remember we used to get Lincoln’s birthday off from school as a distinct holiday, followed a week or two later by Washington’s birthday.  For that, I guess I owe old Abe a debt of gratitude.  For his actions as President, probably not so much.  During his tenure in office, Lincoln did more outright harm to the U.S. Constitution than just about any other President I can think of (and no, I’m not referring to his emancipation of the the slaves, so just slide that race card right back into the deck and be quiet).  In honor of his birthday, here’s a little history lesson.

So just how many ways did the man violate his oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States?  Let’s see here…Lincoln suspended the right of habeas corpus without consulting Congress, in defiance of Article I, section 9; had a number of outspoken critics of his Presidency arrested without any due process or probable cause in violation of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments;  consigned many of these arrestees to prison indefinitely without a trial or hearing in violation of the Sixth Amendment; used the power of government to intimidate or completely shut down newspapers opposed to his policies, thereby violating the First Amendment; and created a whole new state – West Virginia – out of land belonging to the state of Virginia, in complete disregard of Article IV, section 3.  Lincoln even went so far as to issue a secret arrest warrant for Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, for ruling in ex parte Merryman that his suspension of habeas corpus was unconstitutional and issuing an order that all political detainees be freed.  (After some reconsideration, that warrant was never served.)

Lincoln also refused to honor the doctrine that individual states, although part of the federal union, retained a measure of sovereignty, using this as his basis for refusing to recognize the seceded southern states of the Confederacy as a nation unto themselves – although he waged war against them as if they were, and paradoxically facilitated the secession of the region now known as West Virginia from the state of Virginia, which was not only an act of blatant hypocrisy but also unconstitutional on the face of it if we buy into his stated premise that Virginia, although seceded from the union, was still legally a U.S. state.

And for what it’s worth, Lincoln’s reputation as the Great Emancipator is a bit overdone, also.  While the debate over slavery was definitely an underlying cause of the southern states’ secession, thereby leading eventually to civil war, it was not the only, or even the primary, cause of open hostilities between the Union and the Confederacy – the fighting was actually precipitated largely by disagreements between the U.S. and the Confederacy over trade and import tariffs.  And the Emancipation Proclamation?  Abe didn’t issue it until the beginning of 1863, almost two years after the fighting started, and did so then primarily as an expedient to help weaken the ability of the Confederacy to continue to make war.  The proclamation only freed slaves within those states which were part of the Confederacy at the time it was issued; it did not affect the status of slaves in states remaining in the union.  It took the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865 to actually outlaw slavery in the United States.

In spite of all this (and directly because of some of it), many Americans hail Lincoln as one of our greatest Presidents.  Go figure.

For some very well done and enlightening reading about Lincoln’s Presidency and the period leading up to the Civil War, try America’s Forgotten History, Part 2:  Rupture by Mark David Ledbetter; Lincoln Unmasked:  What You’re Not Supposed to Know About Dishonest Abe by Thomas J. DiLorenzo; and The Coming Fury, the first volume of Bruce Catton’s excellent Civil War trilogy (if you can find it at anything approaching a reasonable price).  Be prepared to learn a lot of stuff you were never taught in school.

And if you haven’t ever taken the time to read the U.S. Constitution, sit down and do it.  You may be surprised at what illegalities our government has been getting away with for the last 150-odd years.

Friday Night Music

There Is No Beach Football In The Soviet Union L.A. County, Comrades

You know, it amazes me the stuff that they come up with in California.  I’ve known for a long time that the folks there have, to put it rather mildly, a tendency to overlegislate.  The latest brilliant idea to come out of the Golden State is a ban on throwing balls, frisbees, and other such toys on the beaches of Los Angeles County.

Los Angeles (CBS) – The Board of Supervisors this week agreed to raise fines to up to $1,000 for anyone who throws a football or a Frisbee on any beach in Los Angeles County.

In passing the 37-page ordinance on Tuesday, officials sought to outline responsibilities for law enforcement and other public agencies while also providing clarification on beach-goer activities that could potentially disrupt or even injure the public.

Because, you know, those footballs and frisbees are dangerous.  Or something.  I’d be curious to see how many people have actually been injured by some football-hurling hooligan on L.A. beaches (other than the ones actually playing ball).  Somehow I have a hard time believing it’s enough to justify this ridiculous law.

Of course, the county generously gives you options.  Since the law is only in effect from Memorial Day to Labor Day, beachgoers can always choose to simply take the football and the frisbee to the beach during the winter months, when apparently no one gets hurt.  They can also play with acceptable toys approved by L.A. County”s Central Committee Board of Commissioners, which include volleyballs and beach balls, or make use of “predesignated ball throwing areas” (no, I’m not making that up), or even obtain a permit to use a football or frisbee – doubtless at an additional cost.

Next thing you know, they’ll be mandating helmets for all beachgoers.  Just in case.  ‘Cause you know, it’s dangerous out there on those beaches.