Shooting Illustrated.

The new Hornady 4DOF ballistics calculator is so precise because it combines what Hornady calls the Four Degrees of Freedom. In other words, it takes into account windage, elevation, range and angle of attack to generate a drag coefficient.

Typically, my ammo column focuses on the technical aspects of ammunition; it’s not a place to tell stories. For this installment, I’m going depart from that because about the only thing better than a good story is a sloppy wet kiss from your spouse or a winning lottery ticket. (Both of which are beyond my ability to deliver.)

Recently, a few magazine editors visited for a week. Egos were on display and opinions were as thick as brass on the range at Gunsite Academy. The purpose of this soiree was to test about two dozen rifles, some purpose-built for connecting at extended distances. I have access to a 1,700-yard range and we spent the day there. My 17-year-old son, Bat, served as the official range rat.

After our 500-yard testing was complete, I told my associates I needed to get the DOPE (data of previous engagement) on my son’s African rifle. This would save a trip back to the range and give him some time behind the gun as payment for the support role he’d been filling. On the outside everyone happily assented, on the inside I’m sure they were thinking it was time to get out of the rain.

The previous evening we’d chronographed the Hornady Precision Hunter ELD-X load for the 6.5 Creedmoor he’d be using. That velocity, along with the bullet and related specifics were entered into Hornady’s 4DOF ballistic calculator, which is available online. I’d printed the results and our goal was to confirm elevation come-ups out to 500 yards. Amazingly, this was done with five shots; my son connected center target at 100, 200, 300, 400 and 500 yards. The data generated by the Hornady 4DOF calculator was spot-on.

This article appeared in 2017, but I’ve never seen their calculator.  I see that its results can be sent to spreadsheet.  This is nice.  I’d rather have the full calculations including math models.

Readers, weigh in for a friend please.

I was asked a question about red dot sights for MSRs, and I really don’t know that much about them.  I have an EOTech for an AR pistol, but as best as I’m aware, EOTech pretty much has a lock on the holographic side of things.  I don’t think anyone else makes a holographic sight.  I could be wrong.

As for standard red dots, there’s Trijicon, Burris, Holosun, and a whole host of others.

Which red dot sights do readers like, and why?  List them by price point if you can.

From reddit/firearms, this interesting report.

At the local range. We were talking AK rifles. He admitted the russian rifles that weren’t burnt out barrels were excellent rifles. However how they got them was going to door to door confiscation. “to get the good stuff” and give it the the new government soldiers of Iraq. They treated the civilian as no rights and used them as armories.

Him being LEO now. All i can think of he knows where to start the confiscation and “get the good stuff”. If ordered. I doubt he would hesitate at AWB and being the gun club president would use his knowledge to best rifles first.

Very surreal vibe he gave off and I think he became aware of it afterwards. Conversation got to a little awkward at the end.

And Gosh, this strategy worked out so well for Iraq and the American troops, didn’t it?  Leaving them defenseless when the foreign fighters came by in the night, drug heads of household out and took a power drill and drilled holes in their heads as examples to anyone who would cooperate with the Americans, just did wonders for morale, winning hearts and minds, and pacification of the people.

That LEO is a retarded idiot.

Now for the rest of the story.  This only happened as long as the retarded idiots were in charge.  The story was different when the thinking men took charge.  This report was provided to me by my own son, who fought and earned the combat action ribbon in Fallujah in 2007.

The insurgency in Fallujah ended because we locked down the city and made it to where the people had to deal with it or live in utter isolation from everyone else and with no means of transportation, with two ways into and out of the city.

Lt. Col. William F. Mullen (now Col. Mullen) was the unmitigated sovereign of the city.  Nothing happened without his approval.  The Iraqis may have had a right to automobiles too, but we took them away.  If Mullen had wanted to confiscate AK-47s from the folk we could have done that.  The chain of command in Baghdad left us alone, and we did what we wanted to do.

Every family had a fully functional, fully automatic AK-47.  It wasn’t a problem.  I was never shot at except by the insurgents, and mainly the foreign fighters – bad people from Syria, Egypt, Iran, blacks from Africa, and some fighters with slanted eyes from the Far East.  I looked in the face of every man I killed, and some of them had slanted eyes and were of Far Eastern descent.

We did confiscate some weapons caches, but only the ones hidden by the insurgents when the people gave us the intel.  The AK-47s were used by some of the people to fight the insurgents, but they weren’t used on us.  We were fighting the insurgents, and mainly foreign fighters.  We were not afraid of the AK-47s owned by the families.  The families helped us shut down the insurgency when we made it clear that they had to do that.

I have no doubt that Mr. LEO would conduct the same sort of confiscatory practices today on Americans if ordered to do so, as would 99%+ of all other LEOs.

Weapons confiscations are happening as we speak via red flag laws, and they are bound to intensify.  They happened before after Katrina (readers, please ignore Wayne LaPierre commenting in the video).  This will work as long as the people tolerate it, but when they get fed up, there will be hell to pay.

So if you’re a LEO, listen up.  If you support or would participate in these types of confiscatory practices in America, you are a retarded idiot, just like it was retarded to do that in Iraq.  And you just may end up paying with your life.  Many did in Iraq.

As for the rest of us, the lesson is that LEOs are willing to do this.  Don’t let that happen.

News from New Zealand.

The president of the Police Association says it’s only a matter of time until police carry guns at all times.

His comment comes as police search for a man in the central North Island who allegedly pulled a gun on two officers and stole their car on Saturday night.

Chris Cahill says the incident highlights the risk that many officers face.

“It’s pretty scary and it’s just an add-on to so many others we’ve had,” he told the AM Show on Monday.

Cahill says that in the six months since March this year, there have been 179 incidents where criminals have pointed a gun at either an officer or a member of the public.

“It’s a bit more common than a lot of us realise,” he says.

“It continues to be a big concern in New Zealand – there’s just far too many firearms in the hands of criminals.”

Cahill says around 72 percent of frontline officers in his association support being armed at all times.

“What are you going to say to those officers who get a gun pointed at them and have nothing to protect themselves with?”

He says the Government’s gun buyback scheme introduced following the Christchurch mosque shootings is a great first step in limiting the number of firearms in circulation in the country.

“It’s great those New Zealanders that are handing in their firearms,” he says. “We know criminals arm themselves by stealing them from licensed firearm owners, so if we can get those sort of firearms out of the community and make sure security is better for the other firearms then there’s less chance of criminals having them and New Zealand will be safer all around for that.”

This is truly rich.  He advocates the disarming of the peaceable population so that criminals won’t have access to stolen firearms, so that cops won’t get guns pulled on them.

You read that right.  “What are you going to say to those officers who get a gun pointed at them and have nothing to protect themselves with?”

The same thing you say to anyone else who gets a gun pointed at them and has nothing to protect themselves with.  Welcome to gun control, where no one is safe.  It sucks to be you.  Glad you could join the party.

David Codrea.

… noting that Mr. Trump now really needs to keep his supporters rallied, a tweet from the president came across as bizarrely counterproductive:

“The Democrats are so focused on hurting the Republican Party and the President that they are unable to get anything done because of it, including legislation on gun safety, lowering of prescription drug prices, infrastructure, etc. So bad for our Country!”

Really? Now’s the time to demotivate the gun owners who put him in office? Not coming up with new infringements is what’s “bad”?

While he is also saying this.

In a fresh effort to dismiss the impeachment inquiry as nothing but a partisan fight with no real merit, Trump characterized the effort as a move by the Democrats to take things away from the voters who elected him as well as an attack on democracy itself. “The Democrats want to take away your guns, they want to take away your health care, they want to take away your vote, they want to take away your freedom, they want to take away your judges,” Trump said in the video. “It’s all very simple: They’re trying to stop me, because I’m fighting for you.”

I’m afraid he is so tone deaf to common Americans that he doesn’t realize that he’s already in serious trouble with gun owners, perhaps never to regain their trust or their vote, with the nomination of Canterbury to head the ATF, the bump stock ban, support for red flag laws, and apparent support for universal background checks.

So much for the highly heralded 6.8mm, caseless, not-battle-tested whatever it is thingamajig.

The U.S. Army Contracting Command will soon release its final request for soliciting and award up to two, 5-year firm fixed price – Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contracts for M16A4 5.56mm Rifles.

In a notice posted on the U.S. government’s main contracting website on 27 September, the Army Contracting Command announced that the Government intends to evaluate proposals and award up to two, (but not necessarily two), contracts without holding discussions with offerors for delivery of 215,000 5.56mm Rifles (maximum quantity).

Also states that a license agreement between Colt’s Manufacturing LLC and the U.S. Government requires the items procured to be manufactured in the United States Territory.

Perhaps Colt pulled back from the civilian market because they expect to get awarded a new *.mil contract.

Whatever.  I hope their deal with the devil was worth it. Or not.

This is a strange article anyway.  Why would a license agreement between the FegGov and Colt be pertinent to award of a new contract, especially if Colt wasn’t going to be involved?

So we may learn from this that FedGov is going to Colt yet again for M4s.  Not DD, not Rock River Arms, not BCM, not FN, but Colt.  Quality?  Maybe not so much.

Via WiscoDave, this disturbing report.

Four seconds.

That’s all the time it took for the two police officers assigned to check on Plack to decide to use lethal force against her (both cops opened fire on the woman), rather than using non-lethal options (one cop had a Taser, which he made no attempt to use) or attempting to de-escalate the situation.

The police chief defended his officers’ actions, claiming they had “no other option” but to shoot the 5 foot 4 inch “woman with carpal tunnel syndrome who had to quit her job at a framing shop because her hand was too weak to use the machine that cut the mats.”

This is what happens when you empower the police to act as judge, jury and executioner.

This is what happens when you indoctrinate the police into believing that their lives and their safety are paramount to anyone else’s.

Suddenly, everyone and everything else is a threat that must be neutralized or eliminated.

In light of the government’s latest efforts to predict who might pose a threat to public safety based on mental health sensor data (tracked by wearable data such as FitBits and Apple Watches and monitored by government agencies such as HARPA, the “Health Advanced Research Projects Agency”), encounters with the police could get even more deadly, especially if those involved have a mental illness or disability.

Indeed, disabled individuals make up a third to half of all people killed by law enforcement officers.

That’s according to a study by the Ruderman Family Foundation,  which reports that “disabled individuals make up the majority of those killed in use-of-force cases that attract widespread attention. This is true both for cases deemed illegal or against policy and for those in which officers are ultimately fully exonerated… Many more disabled civilians experience non-lethal violence and abuse at the hands of law enforcement officers.”

Then at the expense of sickening the readers, the author goes on to list these awful incidents.

For instance, Nancy Schrock called 911 for help after her husband, Tom, who suffered with mental health issues, started stalking around the backyard, upending chairs and screaming about demons. Several times before, police had transported Tom to the hospital, where he was medicated and sent home after 72 hours. This time, Tom was tasered twice. He collapsed, lost consciousness and died.

In South Carolina, police tasered an 86-year-old grandfather reportedly in the early stages of dementia, while he was jogging backwards away from them. Now this happened after Albert Chatfield led police on a car chase, running red lights and turning randomly. However, at the point that police chose to shock the old man with electric charges, he was out of the car, on his feet, and outnumbered by police officers much younger than him.

In Georgia, campus police shot and killed a 21-year-old student who was suffering a mental health crisis. Scout Schultz was shot through the heart by campus police when he approached four of them late one night while holding a pocketknife, shouting “Shoot me!” Although police may have feared for their lives, the blade was still in its closed position.

In Oklahoma, police shot and killed a 35-year-old deaf man seen holding a two-foot metal pipe on his front porch (he used the pipe to fend off stray dogs while walking). Despite the fact that witnesses warned police that Magdiel Sanchez couldn’t hear—and thus comply—with their shouted orders to drop the pipe and get on the ground, police shot the man when he was about 15 feet away from them.

In Maryland, police (moonlighting as security guards) used extreme force to eject a 26-year-old man with Downs Syndrome and a low IQ from a movie theater after the man insisted on sitting through a second screening of a film. Autopsy results indicate that Ethan Saylor died of complications arising from asphyxiation, likely caused by a chokehold.

In Florida, police armed with assault rifles fired three shots at a 27-year-old nonverbal, autistic man who was sitting on the ground, playing with a toy truck. Police missed the autistic man and instead shot his behavioral therapist, Charles Kinsey, who had been trying to get him back to his group home. The therapist, bleeding from a gunshot wound, was then handcuffed and left lying face down on the ground for 20 minutes.

In Texas, police handcuffed, tasered and then used a baton to subdue a 7-year-old student who has severe ADHD and a mood disorder. With school counselors otherwise occupied, school officials called police and the child’s mother to assist after Yosio Lopez started banging his head on a wall. The police arrived first.

In New Mexico, police tasered, then opened fire on a 38-year-old homeless man who suffered from schizophrenia, all in an attempt to get James Boyd to leave a makeshift campsite. Boyd’s death provoked a wave of protests over heavy-handed law enforcement tactics.

In Ohio, police forcefully subdued a 37-year-old bipolar woman wearing only a nightgown in near-freezing temperatures who was neither armed, violent, intoxicated, nor suspected of criminal activity. After being slammed onto the sidewalk, handcuffed and left unconscious on the street, Tanisha Anderson died as a result of being restrained in a prone position.

And in North Carolina, a state trooper shot and killed a 29-year-old deaf motorist after he failed to pull over during a traffic stop. Daniel K. Harris was shot after exiting his car, allegedly because the trooper feared he might be reaching for a weapon.

Good Lord.  Am I going to have to  write something to the cops about how to communicate with people and how not to be terrified of everybody they see, sort of like I did for cops and animals?

I said if their daddy had raised them without ever teaching them about how to raise dogs, handle horses and livestock and doctor animals, his daddy was a failure and that problem should be ameliorated immediately by volunteering at a farm or ranch.

Now look where we are.  We’re going to have to make cops volunteer in kindergarten classrooms and assisted living centers to learn the nature of people.

On second thought, we don’t want any negligent discharges to kill people, and we don’t want the morgue to be filled with children and the infirmed.  So hold that idea in abatement.  I’ll have to come up with something more clever.

And still not get paid a single penny for it as a police consultant.

Via David Codrea.

The National Rifle Association’s executive vice president and CEO, Wayne LaPierre, has named Jason Ouimet to serve as executive director of the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA). The NRA Board of Directors unanimously affirmed Ouimet’s selection at its recent board meeting.

Unanimously affirmed.  Has anything happened in the world lately that the NRA board hasn’t unanimously affirmed?

Good grief.

So take a look at David’s links to this guy’s dealing with Len Savage.  I don’t trust him.  Besides, Len Savage is a friend of TCJ, and when you take a swipe at a friend, you take it at me too.

That’s just the way I roll.