F&S.

In 1955, Smith & Wesson and Remington teamed up to introduce the .44 Remington Magnum, and gun writer Elmer Keith was a great inspiration in the cartridge’s development. The .44 Magnum’s starring role in Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry movie gave it immediate credibility and fame. It is, however, a handful to shoot, which is why it’s common to find used .44 Magnum revolvers being sold that come with a half box of ammo. Many shooters find they’re just not quite the man Inspector Harry Callahan was. Fortunately, .44 Magnum revolvers can also safely chamber and fire .44 Special ammunition, which has much less offensive recoil. In factory ammunition, there are more than 50 .44 Magnum loads to choose from, and about half as many .44 Special loads.

The 44 Magnum does not use a 0.44-caliber bullet. The bullet diameter is actually 0.429-inch in diameter, but, 429 or 430 Magnum just does not have the same ring to it. The cartridge is loaded to a maximum average pressure of 36,000 psi, which is about twice that of the .44 Special. As powerful as that seems, the .357 SIG is actually loaded to a higher pressure. The .44 Magnum has been used to successfully take every game animal on earth, and it’s a personal protection favorite with those who like to tromp around in big bear country. Marlin and several other manufacturers currently offer lever guns chambered for the .44 Magnum.

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The .454 Casull was not approved by the Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers Institute (SAAMI) until 1997, and their standard specifies a maximum average pressure of 65,000 psi. This is absurdly more than the .44 Magnum, and it’s where the .454 Casull finds all its power. The cartridge can push a 200-grain bullet to more than 2000 fps. By comparison, the .45 Colt is only loaded to a maximum average pressure of 14,000 psi. In a 50-ounce revolver, .454 Casull is intimidating to shoot with full-power loads, recoiling with around 36 foot-pounds of hand-numbing and wrist-twisting force. Rossi and Big Horn Armory both offer lever-action rifles chambered for the .454 Casull.

If power is your main consideration, there’s no comparison; the .454 Casull is the clear winner. With its most powerful loads, the .454 Casull can generate nearly 2,000 foot-pounds of kinetic energy at the muzzle. This puts it in the same class as some popular rifle cartridges, but with bullets weighing twice as much. However, with high performance +P+ ammunition, the .44 Magnum is not that far behind the .454. Take note, however, there is not a SAAMI standard for +P or +P+ .44 Magnum ammo. Dirty Harry’s cartridge will not shoot quite as fast or hit as hard as the .454 Casull, but like the .454 Casull, the .44 magnum is capable of handling any critter you want to tackle.

I find shooting a .44 magnum wheel gun quite enough, and after a couple of wheels of ammunition I’m ready to put it away.  I shoot it enough to know what to expect.  The power is great for the bush, but I don’t think I want to sport a .454 Casull handgun.

However, I would surely have a lever action rifle in 454 Casull, except that Big Horn Armory charges an arm and a leg for their rifles.  I know Rossi makes a rifle, but it surely doesn’t have the looks of a quality gun.  Henry doesn’t make one in that caliber either.

Ruger has several revolvers in 454 Casull but their choice is certainly limited.  That the selections in 454 Casull are so limited seems to me to limit the use and popularity of the cartridge.

Source.

In a ruling that seems fated to find its way before the U.S. Supreme Court, a judge in Illinois has recently found that the gun rights of a felon convicted of multiple armed robberies are protected by the Second Amendment.

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The finding from U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman was issued on Nov. 2 and stems from a case involving Illinois resident Glen Price. Price, 37, allegedly brandished a gun and robbed someone on a train in September 2021. Police said he stole a cellphone and a train fare card too. When police arrested him, they found a 9 mm gun in his possession, cocaine, ammunition and a stolen credit card.

Price was charged with unlawful possession of a firearm since he already had a criminal record featuring no less than three felony convictions for armed robbery and one conviction for aggravated battery of a police officer.

“Although there are strong policy reasons for doing everything possible to keep guns off our streets and out of our communities, this court can find no such historical analogue,” Gettleman wrote.

Bruen, the judge reasoned, required courts to deem whether a statute dispossessing someone of their right to own a gun posed a “comparable burden” on the right to bear arms itself.

The judge wrote:

“Although the historical record … demonstrates this nation’s tradition of ‘comparably justified’ categorical dispossession statutes, the government has failed to meet its burden of providing evidence of a dispossession statute with a ‘comparable burden’ to § 922(g)(1). Specifically, this court is not persuaded that the government has met its burden to show a ‘distinctly similar or even a relevantly similar’ historical analogue to 922(g)(1)’s permanent prohibition on firearm possession by felons which can only be lifted by expungement, federal pardon or other method of restoring civil rights that lifts the underlying offense from a conviction …”

By failing to provide felons with any means to repair their lost gun rights, there is a “far greater burden on the right to keep and bear arms,” Gettleman found, “than the historical categorical exclusions from the people’s Second Amendment rights.”

“The government has not demonstrated why the modern ubiquity of gun violence, and the heightened lethality of today’s firearm technology compared to the Founding, justify a different result. This nation’s gun violence problem is devastating, but does not change this result under Bruen which this court finds rests on the severity of § 922(g)(1) rather than its categorical prohibition,” he wrote.

I suspect that this is a disingenuous ruling.  That same judge would likely find ownership of semiautomatic rifles unconstitutional.

You see what’s happening, don’t you?  They’re trying to force the SCOTUS to review their Bruen test of historical analogues.  I suspect it won’t work.  I suspect that the supreme court will do is allow confiscation of firearms in cases of violent crimes and disallow confiscation of firearms for non-violent felons, and say that it all comports with Heller and Bruen.

Anyway, if you apply Biblical law, I see no problem whatsoever.  As I’ve said so many times before, I don’t believe in the rehabilitative power or authority of the state.  The Scriptures give no such authority to the state, only to the family and church.  Further, since the Scriptures give no such authority to the state, that implies that the state has no power or tools to effect rehabilitation.

With the Holy Writ, I believe in retribution and restitution.  Retribution for violent crimes against others (the death penalty for murder, rape and kidnapping), and imprisonment to the offended party to repay debts two or three-fold.  If you advocate incarceration of criminals who owe debts to offended parties while they work off their debts for repayment to the offended parties, I’m okay with that.

But no one owes a debt to society or the government writ large.  Debts are always to individuals.

Alas, we don’t follow the Scriptures in America.

Cops.  Arresting people on false grounds and just making things up about it during Google searches using cell phones.

Only the best and brightest.

Oh, and somebody should tell fat boy to start and exercise program.

And it just seems like we’re being inundated with this, especially the invasive kind.

Asian longhorned ticks (ALTs) have been spreading across the Eastern and Midwestern U.S. since at least 2017, according to the Center for Disease Prevention (CDC), and the pests’ numbers are now on the rise in Ohio—a recent study from the Ohio State University reveals. According to the study’s authors, 9,287 invasive ticks were removed from a farm in eastern Ohio in the summer of 2021 after three cattle were reported dead from tick bites by the landowner.

During the study—lead-authored by Ohio State Assistant Professor of Veterinary Preventive Medicine Risa Pesapane—scientists continued to monitor the invasive tick population after most of the pests were killed off with pesticides. They found that the Asian longhorn ticks returned to the pasture and continued to spread in June 2022, despite the tick control efforts undertaken in 2021.

“You cannot spray your way out of an Asian longhorned tick infestation,” Pesapane said in a Nov. 3 news release. “They are going to spread to pretty much every part of Ohio and they are going to be a long-term management problem. There is no getting rid of them.”

Pesapane said that the cattle killed during the 2021 ALT infestation in eastern Ohio sustained thousands of tick bites. “One of those was a healthy male bull, about 5 years old,” she said in the press release. “Enormous. To have been taken down by exsanguination by ticks, you can imagine that was tens of thousands of ticks on one animal.” The term “exsanguination” refers to the action of draining a person, animal, or organ of the blood needed to sustain life.

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According to Pesapane, the invasive tick’s rapid spread lies in its ability to reproduce asexually, without mating. “There are no other ticks in North America that do that. So they can just march on, with exponential growth, without any limitation of having to find a mate …

Great.  Does anything good come out of Asia?

If it isn’t ticks, it’s chiggers.  This one is especially dangerous to humans.

Wildlife researchers at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro found a novel pathogen for the first time in North Carolina that is carried by chiggers.

Bacteria called Orientia tsutsugamushi causes the disease scrub typhus, which is spread to people through bites of infected chiggers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“That is a disease that has never been described in North America or in the Americas altogether,” Dr. Gideon Wasserberg, an infectious disease expert who works in the UNCG Department of Biology, said.

Symptoms include:

• a dark scab at the site of the bite
• confusion
• fever
• chills
• headache
• body aches
• rash
• larger lymph nodes

In some extreme cases, it can lead to organ failure.

Just great.

I’m happy that the suffering from summer is over and we’re facing some cold weather now, but summer will be back with a vengeance, so stay diligent.

This guy had some gear I’ve never seen before, and I need to take a look at the water purification system he had going on.

Related, I see that he recommends powder mix (e.g., Gatorade) for electrolyte replacement.  This is important because water isn’t enough.

In the oral argument he presented from the trial, I’m surprised that, when questioned by the judges, the lawyer didn’t bring up the analogy that if a city, county or state chose to tax firearms or ammunition to the point that poor people couldn’t afford them, that would be a violation of the second amendment.  Likewise, preventing anyone from being able to practice with firearms also violates the second amendment.

It’s our choice how and when to train, and what to train with, as well as what firears to own.

I have several remarks before you watch this video.

First, I’m neither a S&W fan nor a detractor.  I don’t like the gap between the M&P frame and slide, and never have, so I don’t have any.  Next, I don’t know the real reason their 10mm models are duds, nor even if they are.  I will say, however, that the first video of someone shooting one shows him firing it limp wristed.  In fact, he is using almost “cup and saucer,” which will never cycle the firearm correctly, or at least, it reduces the likelihood that it will.

Then finally I’ll observe that I’ve never heard any complaints about the Springfield Armory 10mm handguns, despite how much grief they take over Reddit/Firearms and Reddit/Guns.  I simply don’t get why the grief – the only one I ever had was a fine, well-functioning machine.  I just don’t use striker-fired pistols.  If Springfield Armory sold a hammer-fired option I might consider it.  In fact, I think they do in the 1911 model.

But I don’t have a 10mm handgun anyway.  I just don’t see the point because it would be so redundant with 450 SMC and .44 magnum.

He answers the legal questions.  Here are my problems – or at least, a few of them.

I don’t believe cops should be doing any of this. Entering homes should be verboten, and the fact that our society allows such as this shows its sickness.

Next, the cops use pistol-mounted lights and muzzle flag literally everyone, or if anyone would have been in the domicile, they would have been muzzle flagging them.  This violates the ruled of gun safety regardless of how cool you want to be.

Next, many cops are just plain stupid.  He explains what it means to make good effort to ensure that you have the right home, including “reliable informants.”  There is no such thing as a reliable informant.

Finally, my biggest problem with all of this is that the American citizen simply cannot trust it when someone announces that they are cops, or Federal Marshal, or anything at all.  That has become a favorite tactics of criminals.  But unholstering or presenting a weapon in order to secure your home from possible invaders is a sure way to get killed if the invaders are police (and I did use the word invaders).

As I said, the fact that we allow this sort of thing to occur is a sign of a very sick society.

If you have the time for it, these are two interesting videos. There are an awful lot of devotees to the 7mm Rem Mag. For those who have a rifle chambered in this cartridge, what are your thoughts on it?