Articles by Herschel Smith

Why is this in dispute?  There is nothing sacrilegious at all to me about putting a scope on a lever action rifle.  I’m in favor of whatever makes it easier for me to hit my intended target.

But I will remark that the prices of scopes seems to be going up, up, up, up and up.

This is a SFP fixed-parallax scope, albeit a good sized objective lens for letting light in, that’s going for $600.

This video is apparently a well-watched video.  I don’t usually like to embed video that I don’t really think is worth the viewing time it will take to go through it all, and I especially don’t like stream of consciousness presentations that could be done more efficiently, any more than I like watching other men scratch their beards.

However, I wanted to ask these questions of readers.  What adult needs to be told that manufacturers are out to sell things and take your money?  What adult needs to be told that there is a difference between what you want and what you need?

Exclude the category of collectors, which as far as I’m concerned, is a legitimate category and limited only by the size of your bank account.  And also exclude investors – guns can be a legitimate investment as well.

If a man can only afford a single rifle, or in other words, he must make the decision to eat or buy another rifle, what mature adult is going to go hungry or let his family go hungry so he can buy another rifle because some video tells him to?

He does make some interesting points about the monetary transaction necessary to get your product “reviewed” or get it good press.  I had always assumed that.  And the great majority of the time for me, I do an awful lot of research before I buy any product, be in rifle or refrigerator.  But I’m just not that impressionable from videos and popular reviewers telling me anything at all.

Whether rifles, refrigerators or truck tires, I do my research and I buy what I want if I have the financial resources to do so.  If I don’t, I settle for second best.

This is how most mature men do things.  And I don’t have thermal scopes, ballistic helmets, NODs or night vision.

Outdoor Life.

The .45/70 outperformed everything else in penetrating brush and delivering a bullet that’s still flying straight and true—something that will surely inflate the egos of its contemporary fans. I expected the .45/70 to yield the best results simply because of the mass of the bullets, but it exceeded my expectations substantially. With extensive enough testing some other big-bore cartridges might outdo the .45/70, but when it comes to common and available brush rifles today, the .45/70 wins.

The best brush bullet in my testing was the 325-grain, .458-inch Lehigh Defense Extreme Defense bullet. It was in Black Hills Ammo’s Honey Badger factory loads, traveling at 1900 fps. These are solid copper machined bullets with a nose that’s fluted and resembles a Phillips screwdriver. The bullet is designed for zero deformation, and to penetrate deeply. The fluting at the tip is designed to cause cavitation and a wound channel like expanding bullets. I’ve seen bears shot with them, and they are formidable. This load had an average deflection of only 0.63 inches, without a single key-holed bullet in 15 total shots.

You can see all of his testing protocol at the link, but the bottom line is that it’s the venerable 45-70 for the unqualified win.

Outdoor Life.

Chase Watson shot the biggest buck he’s ever killed two weeks ago while hunting from a treestand on his family’s farm in Arkansas. The buck dropped close by, but as Watson climbed down the tree to make a follow-up shot, the strap on one of his climbing sticks broke and he fell roughly 17 feet to the ground. He fractured a bone in his right leg, along with three vertebrae in his back, and instead of retrieving the deer, Watson went straight to the hospital.

[ … ]

In hindsight, Watson says the buck was probably dead after the first arrow passed through. But in the moment, after making a good shot on the biggest deer he’d ever hunted, he was focused on finishing the job.

“So I went ahead and let the bow down to the ground, climbed over and onto the climbing sticks,” he says. “I unhooked from the rope attaching me to the safety harness, and I made it two steps down. That’s when the strap on the stick broke.”

Watson doesn’t remember the 17-foot fall. But he was so full of adrenaline that when he did hit the ground, he picked himself up, walked over to the downed buck, and put another arrow in him. He says that at first, he thought he was good enough to walk himself out, but after trudging back uphill past the stand, he started feeling the pain and sat down to call his dad.

Guys, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever NOT to use your safety equipment.  None.

Use your safety equipment at all times during the sit and climb.  Never … NEVER … NEVER … untether from the tree.  My daughter treats deer hunters who have fallen every fall and winter, many of them suffering pelvic fractures, almost all of them suffering broken ribs, if they live at all.

Use a harness.  No, don’t use those traditional hunter’s harnesses that tether at your back like you see in hunter safety courses.  Those designs are stupid.  If you fall you hang facing away from the tree where you can’t do anything to help yourself, and the harness will cut blood supply to your legs.

Get a rappelling harness.  I use a Black Diamond harness.  It’s designed not to cut off blood flow, and it hooks you up in front.  Hook your tree tether to the harness.  Wrap your tree tether around the tree, and never detach it until you’re out of the tree.  Use the tether while sitting and while climbing.  Use it at all times while elevated off the ground.

This is easy.  A climb and sit in a tree stand is safe if you get the right gear and use it at all times.

Source.

HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) – Hawaii County has issued 19 concealed carry licenses so far and another 58 are pending approval, following the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that eased gun rules.

West Hawaii Today reported that some police officers are concerned they aren’t getting proper training for when they encounter license holders.

The Hawaii County Police Department said training was implemented last week. But, West Hawaii Today said it mostly consisted of a short PowerPoint presentation and a quiz.

One un-named officer told the paper that the training did not address real life situations.

There are now 19 CHPs that have been issued.  Why not 19,000?

Source.

A federal judge based in Mississippi has released a scorching order expressing frustration with the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment opinion issued last summer and ordered the Justice Department to brief him on whether he needs to appoint an historian to help him decipher the landmark opinion.

The opinion in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen changed the framework judges must use to review gun regulations. Going forward, Justice Clarence Thomas said that a gun law could only be justified if it is “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

Judge Carlton Reeves – who is considering a case concerning a federal statute prohibiting felons from possessing firearms – said he is not sure how to proceed.

“This court is not a trained historian,” Reeves wrote in an order released last week.

“The justices of the Supreme Court, as distinguished as they may be, are not trained historians,” he continued.

“And we are not experts in what white, wealthy and male property owners thought about firearms regulation in 1791,” he said.

The Bruen decision, he said, requires him to “play historian in the name of constitutional adjudication.”

Well if you haven’t been looking to the historical context, what have you been doing with your decisions?  And don’t conflate your own ignorance with that of the Justices.

So here are some suggestions for you.  Read the primary source literature – such as the writings of the founders themselves, and also the newspapers of the era.  I think you’ll find that free men were allowed to possess firearms, that rapists, murderers and kidnappers were punished with death (as they should have been), and that there wasn’t generally a belief in the rehabilitative power of imprisonment.  So a man who is convicted today of assault and battery with intent to kill, for example, is likely to have been put to death in Colonial times even if he would be released today.  Much of this is a problem of our own creation.

Then after studying the primary literature, study the secondary source literature.  You can learn all about American history, like you should have done in your “education.”

Then maybe you won’t be a dummy.

David Kopel debunks a stupid set of claims with a made-up set of indices that proves nothing, all promulgated by the idiots at Duke University (among others).  We’ve run into these dummies before.

The authors, one at Duke, and one at Wesleyan University (who has probably never shot a firearm in her life), should read Kopel’s analysis and be ashamed for the poor “research” and bad analysis and writing they did.

Anyway, if you want to read all about this stupid notion of the lethality index, read Kopel’s analysis of what these writer claim.  I found the most interesting part of Kopel’s article to be these few paragraphs.

Miller and Tucker write:

The Founders lived in a period when they could perhaps be forgiven for thinking that “a gun is a gun is a gun,” because the basic flintlock hadn’t really become significantly more lethal in the previous 150 or so years. If the Constitution had been written in the middle of the nineteenth century, instead of the 1780s, the Founders would have been much more aware of the pace of innovation. (p. 2511).

This is incorrect. The American colonists from Europe who arrived in the early 17th century came mainly with matchlocks. In a matchlock, pressing the trigger lowers a smoldering hemp cord to touch the gunpowder in the firing pan. Over the course of the century, Americans shifted to the more expensive flintlock. In a flintlock, pressing the trigger causes a sharpened flint (held in the gun’s “jaws”) to fall forward. The flint strikes a piece of metal, and the shower of sparks ignites the gunpowder in the firing pan.

Unlike matchlocks, flintlocks can be kept always-ready. There is no smoldering cord to give away the location of the user. Flintlocks are much more reliable than matchlocks, and all the more so in adverse weather.

Americans made the shift from matchlocks to flintlocks sooner than did European armies or European civilians, because the flintlock was so vastly superior for use in the dense woods of the eastern seaboard, and for Indian fighting, which was very different from the rigidly organized, linear tactics of European warfare. For the same reasons, American Indians greatly preferred flintlocks to matchlocks. The TLI of a 17th century musket is 19 and the TLI of an 18th century flintlock is 43. So the transition of firearm type in the American colonies more than doubled the TLI. There is no reason to believe that the American Founders were ignorant of how much better their own firearms were compared to those of the early colonists.

Besides, the men who penned and approved the 2A had spent their lives and fortunes on overthrowing tyranny, which is the singular point of the 2A.  It would be idiotic to believe they would have written the 2A any other way based on a “lethality index” created by ne’er-do-wells in the twenty first century.

I like his choices, and especially his paint job.

I’m not trying to be a gun snob, but one thing the Italians know how to do is make shotguns.  Beretta for gas operated guns, Benelli for inertial shotguns.  Additionally, anyone who claims that pump action is the only reliable action in a shotgun has never shot a Beretta A400 or 1301.  I’ve shot both, and I’ll say the same thing about semiautomatic shotguns to the malcontents that I say about ARs and 1911s.  I’ve never had a single FTF or FTE, or a malfunction of any kind.  And I run them hard.

You get what you pay for with any product, and guns are no different.  This think looks cheap.  You couldn’t give it to me.

My experience with a .44 Magnum wheel gun is that shooting it is a bone rattling event, at least with a short barrel.  I don’t think I ever want to shoot this thing.

I suspect that by characterizing this thing as controllable, there’s more than a little irony.