John Lovell (7-1/2 min.)
- Watching the video above on managing recoil from a pistol, and watching part of a DVD last night on wilderness survival techniques got me to pondering self-learning versus being trained. I have been (and am) somewhat critical of firearms instructors that are adamant that a person needs to undergo X hours of training (preferably from them) before purchasing a firearm for self-defense or even concealed carry. Perhaps I feel this way because I had so much time and experience under belt, had been taught the basics of firearms use by my father, and had read a lot on the topic, that, when I first obtained a concealed carry license, I didn't feel that I lacked the necessary knowledge and skill to safely carry a firearm.
But, as a general matter, I don't believe that using a firearm safely is actually all that difficult. In the book, Marine Sniper, which was a biography of Carlos Hathcock, there is a section where he and his commanding officer are trying to demonstrate the value of aimed semi-automatic fire over mass automatic fire as was the norm in the Vietnam theater at the time. They took a company and had its members all shoot at a single target just as they normally would if they encountered an enemy during patrol, and then counted up the number of hits. They then asked who was the worst shooter in the company, and took that marine aside for 5 minutes of instruction on using the firearm. This "worst shooter" was then let loose to shoot at the target using aimed fire. He struck the target more times than the entire company had done before hand.
The point of this is that it actually takes very little instruction--and not even formal class work at that--to learn how to shoot. And individual practice, focusing on the basics that you were taught, read about, or shown in a video, will result in proficiency.
Instead, as I've noted before, the real value of instruction is for those that seek to excel at their craft, just as a good coach can assist a talented athlete to excel. They do so through two ways: First, they can furnish you with new or better techniques or knowledge. Second, and in my mind the more important point, they can check and correct you to squeeze the most out of your performance. Is your elbow sticking out too far? Is your grip a little low? Can your stance be improved? Are you too slow getting off the X? It is the one-on-one assistance that makes the difference, and is something that a book or video can never replicate. (I would note that force-on-force training/practice is a whole other issue, and will require a trainer for various reasons: providing other people to train against, equipment, and a safe location to practice).
Having said that in regard to firearms, I want to clarify that training and/or belonging to a school/club/gym is required to attain any real proficiency at hand-to-hand combat/self-defense: not only to be taught techniques (and how one flows into the next), but for that instruction to correct bad form or technique; and, for the practice against others.
- "The Sidearm of the World: The Browning Hi-Power and its Everlasting Popularity"--ITS Tactical. A bit of history on this, probably the most widely distributed and used handgun in history, together with some discussion of its place in the modern world.
- "40+ Of Our Favourite DIY Solar Projects & Tutorials"--Knowledge Weighs Nothing. This blog has compiled most of its small solar projects into one location. Some using solar cells/panels and others just making use of the heat from the sun.
- "Seal Team Six E&E kit: cash, Copenhagen and cigarettes"--The Modern Survivalist. An experienced SEAL, Robert O’Neill, made sure to have two things with him when he was deployed (other than his kit): cash and some tobacco. The cash was to bribe his way out of a tough spot, and the tobacco for trade (or his own use). FerFal adds:
Folks that have never been to 3rd world countries just don’t understand the power of a 20, 50, let alone 100 USD bill. With absurd conversion rates in most of the third world, a 50 dollar bill is in parts of the world more money than the average person there will see in the same place in his entire life. You can buy shelter, food, you can buy transportation or even loyalty.
- "Low Tech Electronics"--Survival UK. Skean Dhude discusses his collection of relatively low tech electronics parts (transistors and similar, and basic IC chips--I presume just basic NAND chips and the like), how technology has become so complex that most of us don't understand it let alone know how to fix it, and how his electronics skills have perished from non-use.
- "Soon You’ll Be Able to Snag Your Army Surplus 1911"--American Concealed. An article form a couple weeks ago about the House passing H.R. 2810--a defense spending bill that includes, as part of it, a requirement that the military transfer its old 1911s to the CMP. Looking at the current status of the bill, though, it does not appear to have advanced any farther.
- "How to Get In The Zone"--Functional Self Defense. Most all of us know what is "the Zone": "It is the optimal state for performance, where the performer and performance are one, unobstructed by conscious thought." This article discusses ways to train yourself to more easily enter "the Zone" through waking up your mind via meditation.
- Is the arithmetic that hard? "New targets cut ammo use for soldiers zeroing their weapons"--Gear Scout. Drill sergeants are celebrating the introduction of a new target for soldiers to use to zero their weapons. At the proscribed distance, each square on the target is equal to one click on the weapon sight. This relieves the soldiers from having to remember how many clicks to an inch.
- For the hand loader: "Would You Reload a Bear Claw? Federal Premium Now Selling their Trophy Bonded Tip"--The Firearms Blog. The bullets are being sold for hand loading in three calibers at two different weights for each caliber:
- .270 caliber--130-grain
- .270 caliber--140-grain
- 7mm caliber--140-grain
- 7mm caliber--160-grain
- .30 caliber--165-grain
- .30 caliber--180-grain
The bullets are being sold in boxes of 50, and the prices vary from $30 to $35 per box depending on caliber and weight.
- The government givith, and the government taketh away: "NYC Not Renewing Concealed Carry Permits. No Reason Given."--The Truth About Guns.
- You have the deadlier weapon: "Dashcam captures terrified grandmother screaming in fear as she and her grandson are ambushed in their car by daylight robbers wielding BASEBALL BATS in Russia"--Daily Mail. There is a video at the link, but the basic story is this:
The pair were driving in rural Chelyabinsk, in a south-western section of the country near the Kazakhstan border, when two men blocked off the road with their van.
The thugs then jumped out of the vehicle and walked slowly up to the victims' car with one of them holding a baseball bat nonchalantly at his side.
So, basically its a narrow road and the van was able to mostly block the road. One man was already standing in the middle of the road with a baseball bat, while the other was at the van. When the driver began slowly backing up, the first man kept pace, while the second man retrieved another bat. The driver then stopped the vehicle. The second man approached the driver's side of the vehicle while the first man stayed at the front, first trying to pull up a windshield wiper, then quickly feeling along the under edge of the hood to see if he could find the latch (back in the day, when there were no interior hood releases, it was a not-uncommon tactic in cases like these for the robbers to pop the hood open in order to obscure the driver's vision). When both men had gone to each side of the vehicle, the driver gunned the car and was able to drive around the van.Other Stuff:
Things turned out okay, so the driver to that extent did okay. But I don't understand his not rapidly backing away for a longer distance and, with the room it would give him, then attempting to turn around.
- "McCain, Romney, and Rubio Join the Republicans for Antifa Club"--Breitbart. The allegation is that, by both factions for what happened in Charlottesville, Trump has accredited the two groups with moral equivalence. In that regard, Mitt Romney posted on Facebook: "No, not the same. One side is racist, bigoted, Nazi. The other opposes racism and bigotry. Morally different universes." Well, lets just compare the two.
I have no idea what part of the political spectrum is occupied by Unite the Right. I know that the KKK were the militant arm of the Democratic party for a long time, so that would put them on the left. I know that Nazis were socialists, so that puts them on the left. So, presumably, Unite the Right is also leftist. It is debatable how racist or bigoted the Nazis truly were since their idea of Aryan seemed to include pretty much everyone other than sub-Saharan Africans, Jews, and the Russo-Slavic peoples--Palestinians and Arabs were some of their staunchest supporters.
The Antifa and Black Lives Matter are die hard socialists/communists. That means that they are intellectually rooted in the ideology that has murdered more people than all other ideologies combined (e.g., Stalin's purges and starvation of peasants, Mao's "Great Leap Forward" and famines, Pol Pot, etc.). Antifa and Black Lives Matter appear, based on the public comments of followers and supporters, to be vehemently anti-White, with some even calling for the extermination of white men. And we know that they are so bigoted against Christians and conservatives that they will not even allow those groups a public voice.
So, in a way, the three cuckservatives are correct in stating that there is no moral equivalence between the two sides that clashed in Charlottesville. But they have the balance out of whack: it is Antifa and BLM that occupy the lower moral ground, and who are the true racists and bigots.
- Related: "'Punching Nazis should not be a crime': Middle School teacher charged with assaulting Californian white nationalist calls on a judge to throw out her case"--Daily Mail. She's arguing that she acted in "self-defense" by attacking someone peacefully expressing a point of view that she didn't like.
- Related: "In Texas, Even The Socialists Are Carrying Guns"--Houston Press. Supporting an ideology which first's act, when it comes to power, is to disarm the populace.
- "Single-Molecule Transistors Get Reproducibility and Room-Temperature Operation"--IEEE Spectrum. In a couple hundred years, if not sooner, Charlottesville will be forgotten, but it will be technical advances like this that will be remembered.
- This is what the Left wants to replace us with: "15 Moroccan Teenagers Treated For Rabies After Sex With Donkey"--Anonymous Conservative. According the article cited in the post: "[A]ccording to the scholars Allen Edwardes and Robert Masters, Ph.D, FAACS, the Muslims of Morocco believe that sexual intercourse with donkeys 'make the penis grow big and strong' and masturbation is often scorned by them in favor of bestiality."
- The bigger picture: "The Erasure Of The Southern Heritage"--Captain's Journal. After noting that the Civil War was not really about slavery, but the supremacy of the central government over the state governments, Herschel Smith goes on to write:
... Reverence to confederate monuments has to do with a philosophy of decentralized government, not slavery, smaller government, not more control, reverence for time-honored institutions, and liberty from a quarrelsome, meddlesome government and ruling class.
Roy Cooper’s project in North Carolina won’t be the last you see of this. Stone Mountain is next, and then CNN has an entire list of monuments they think need to come down, essentially all of them. This is a war against what America was, and what the progressives want it to become, with the skirmishes (and ultimately the larger battles to come) being so much the better because it justifies more state control for the purpose of safety, security and stability. You can see law enforcement in the role of national stability operations as we speak, and even aiding and assisting the transition. The police will never say there isn’t a need for greater stability.
... Monuments are just that, symbols. They are important symbols to be sure, but in the end they are still just symbols. What’s significant is that they represent the first fruits of the war against Southern and conservative culture. The progressives won’t stop with symbols.
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