BAG day gun

Here's my Buy-A-Gun-Day purchase. A Savage Mark II BRJ. A heavy-barreled .22 bolt-action gun with a laminate Monte Carlo stock. Purty, ain't she?

I'd have the scope mounted on it already, but the rings I had were medium height, which didn't give enough clearance on this gun. I previously had the scope mounted on a 10/22 with a heavy barrel, but apparently the rings only worked there because of the extra height the receiver gave it. You could see daylight between scope and barrel, but not much.

Scope

The guy at my club who runs out informal light rifle league recently bought a target scope that he wanted to check out. He's mostly an Anschutz-and-Leupold kind of guy, and he bought the scope mostly just to see what it was like. The nice thing about this scope is that is focuses down to 50 feet at high power. (Actually, he says it focuses down to 10 meters, but I shoot at 50 feet, so that's what I'm most interested in.) The scope I've been shooting is a 3-9x, but it loses focus at 50 feet beyond 7x, so that's what I've been shooting.

I've hit a plateau in my shooting, so I was thinking about getting a better scope. I mentioned to him that I was thinking of getting this model, so he offered to sell me the one he'd bought. I decided to take him up on his offer.

I put the scope on my 10/22 last week and took it out to zero it and try it out. He had it set at 20x, so I just left it there. You notice the movement a lot more at 20x than you do at 7x. At 7x, I thought I was holding the rifle steady when I had it on a sandbag, but at 20x, it looked like I had the shakes. Once I got it zeroed, I did manage to shoot a couple of perfect targets from the sandbag. (I mostly just wanted to shoot a couple of perfect targets. I hadn't the one time I tried it at 7x from the sandbag.)

Shooting off-hand takes a bit of getting used to. My first target was pretty sad, an 84. That's the worst I've shot on that target in a while. I got into the low 90's on the next target, but then I shot a 97 on my last one. None too shabby, and it certainly gives me hope that I can start shooting consistently at 370 or above.

BAD PUN ALERT

So, could the gun lobby also be known as the Molon lobby?

I warned you.

The question

"Dad, do you have a rifle?"

That's the question my 6-year-old son asked me about a week ago. We hadn't planned on talking about this with him for another couple of years. You see, we live in New Jersey, so if uses any words or phrases like "gun", "rifle", "bullet", "shoulder thing that goes up", or the like, my wife and I will go to jail, and our kids will end up in foster homes.

But I guess it was a little naive to think that I could hide the word "Rifle" on those targets he sees me carrying when I leave the house with my "tools", especially since our efforts to prevent him from learning how to read have met with such little success.

So my son now knows that I have a rifle, and he's seen one. I haven't gotten him out to the range yet, but he wants to make one go bang, so I'll probably do that sometime soon. He knows that he's not supposed to touch one unless I'm present. I keep them locked up in one container or another all the time they're in the house, but I'm certainly not going to trust him not to figure out how to get into locked container.

(I have to admit, though, I'm not that upset that he asked. I would have told him already if my wife weren't the one who has to put up with school, other parents, etc. She convinced me that it was better not to say anything yet.)

The Fatal Conceit

So I finally got around to reading Hayek's The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism. The more I read Hayek, the more I like him. In this case, he introduced me to a concept that hadn't really occurred to me before, and that I hadn't yet seen elsewhere. In retrospect, it's logical, and it certainly fits in with other things that I've thought, but I'd never gotten to quite this idea.

The idea is that capitalism is a product of evolution. It's not that capitalism has evolved over time, which is a statement with almost no real content. It's that capitalism is a self-generated order in the same sense that life is a self-generated order (for those who see evolution as a reasonable theory.) And capitalism has survived these many thousands of years because it's a viable system, a system that provides for an efficient allocation of resources based on the information that it produces. As an economic/social system, it has competed with other systems and won because it's a better system.

In contrast, socialism is a creation of those who think they are perfectly capable of designing, from the ground up, a better system. This is the fatal conceit of the title, the idea that socialism can achieve results superior to a system that developed naturally and survived.

Of course, the socialism that's addressed in the book is "sincere" socialism. As we're all too well aware of, those currently in power who are advocating socialism aren't sincere socialists. They simply want the power socialism will give them.

First 2700 results

The match results are out for my first 2700. Woohoo! I made the 1600 Club!

In bullseye competition, there's actually something called the 2600 Club. This is that select group of people who've managed to shoot a 2600 or better. I don't see myself ever making that group.

Refreshing

I just got back from our club's light rifle match. It was wonderfully refreshing -- a few guys sitting around and talking about guns. No politics, no health care, just guns. Mausers, Lugers, Rugers, Garands, M-1 Carbines, 1903's, Anschutzes. Just guns.

Ahhhh.