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I've heard that the police in Utah have found a .30 caliber hunting rifle and ammunition marked with trans and anti-facist stuff.
Great.
But if the serial number of the rifle doesn't lead straight to the murderer, can we fucking end the charade that filling out all the information on a 4473 does any good at all?
Also, if the serial number DOES lead straight to the murderer, can we fucking admit that the 4473 was gun registration all along?
Can't have it both ways.
When they catch the Charlie Kirk killer, don't show their picture, don't release their name, don't publish their manifesto...
Don't give them a moment of fame for this.
I'd say to call them "Some Asshole" but some people revel in that.
How about Chickenshit.
In it's original 1940's meaning.
Without value, worthless, nonredeemable.
"A Chickenshit was arrested in connection with the murder of Charlie Kirk," is sufficient.
If there are more than one, just apply a Roman numeral to the end.
If they start spewing their manifesto quote them as, "Chickenshit II babbled incoherently, as if what they had to say mattered in the slightest as they were taken into custody."
What they have to say, now, doesn't matter. They chose violence over words and have abdicated having their side of the conversation being heard.
Being the grandson and son of bikers, it means I've been to Sturgis.
Thrice when I was riding.
First on a Honda VF500 Interceptor and last two on an GODS-FORSAKEN-PIECE-OF-SHIT-AMF-SPORTSER.
The ride was far more miserable on that Sportster than the Interceptor. I still thank the Gods that it only had a 1.5 gallon tank so I got to stop often and get gas. Everything was numb from the vibration.
But the experience at the destination was surreal in the difference.
I could park that fucking Sportster anywhere I could find a space.
The Honda? Best be prepared to hoof it.
Dad snuck his Yamaha XS650 in that year because he'd stripped off anything from it that said RICE and the big springer front end disguised it's nature. People were asking if it was a Triumph!
I don't know why this bubbled up.
After years of consideration: Fuck you!
You wanted it, you're going to get it and I'm going to watch.
I tried to talk people out of it, but it's obvious that you don't want peace, you want WAR and I think I will not stand between you and the hot heads this time.
Remember.
You wanted this.
Enjoy.
Glenn Reynolds compares Charlie Kirk to Elijah Parish Lovejoy.
File this under "history might not repeat, but it sometimes rhymes."
"I bet there isn't going to be anyone burning cars and looting stores, before burning them down, because of the Charlie Kirk murder."
M. Harris.
On my side of the fence, I'm happy and optimistic about open carry being legal.
I've got, like, 30 states that have legalized it after once banning it that have nothing really bad to report on my side too.
Harvey expresses worry that someone will open up on a special needs kid for being curious about an openly carried firearm.
I don't see that happening, but... It's something to be aware of.
Something I had not been considering, to be honest.
Neither of us plans on carrying open, but it's nice to not have to worry so hard about accidental exposure.
I did catch her quoting some of our fellow special needs parents on stuff that just isn't so.
I was a little surprised that many of our fellow parents are so lefty and anti-gun.
Toed the Florida Sheriff's Association line about how this will just make things easier for gang bangers to do crime. The reasoning there has always been specious. They don't like losing their fishing license, and let's be honest: They weren't doing a great job stopping gang bangers from doing crime with that line of harassment available.
Greg Gutfeld, reportedly, just said, "you just woke us the fuck up!"
There's a meme, oft repeated that the left thinks of violence as a rheostat that can be turned up and down as needed by their side. The right thinks of violence as a switch marked "Peace" and "Kill Them ALL!"
I worry about how the left keeps testing to see where the "flick the switch" point is.
I think that they think the right, secretly, regards violence the same as they do.
They're wrong.
But we're definitely getting to a point where the more, shall we say, eager members of the right are getting increasingly difficult to talk down after shit like this happens.
Charlie Kirk was assassinated at an event at Utah Valley University.
The shooter is at large.
Anyone wanna lay bets about the shooter and how far off the various camps will be about them?
Shooting an innocent person is immoral. It is also illegal.
Malum en se.
Shooting a thief running away with your valuables is not immoral. It is also illegal.
Malum prohibitum.
We should make it legal to shoot thieves again.
I am not saying my stuff is worth more than their lives.
The thieves are saying their lives are worth less than my stuff.
"It's just stuff!" True, but it's MY stuff. They've no right to it at all.
Letting them run away with it means it's gone. The police will write up a nice report and won't even stop a pawn shop from selling it to someone else when I have the serial numbers and find my property on their shelves. The cops won't even get my property back from the pawn shop!
Dealing in stolen goods is legal if you do it "in good faith," apparently.
"You have insurance for this!" Everyone who says this has never filed a claim for something that was stolen. Insurance companies pay about 2/3 (at most) the replacement value of an item stolen because they figure a used item has depreciated.
So, go on, explain to me, again, the value to society of not shooting thieves.
Because one thing I know for certain about a dead thief is their recidivism rate is VERY low.
Court Strikes Down Florida's Ban On Open Carry!
Link to the decision for those who speak Lawyer.
Anthony Sabatini's reaction on X.
I've long held that open carry should be legal and stood against the people who were OK with banning it because it wasn't a good idea.
Liberty includes the freedom to do stupid things...
But my real support of open carry began with jurisdictions closer to Miami who are prosecuting conceal carry failures.
The legislature in Tallahassee has attempted to keep that from happening twice since I've moved to Florida, to no avail.
In those places, if a cop sees a gun you're either open carrying or brandishing; even if it's the wind that flips open your shirt for a second revealing the holstered pistol.
THAT is what made me an advocate of open carry, not that I think it's wise or preferable to do so; but to take away a justification for The State to mess with me when I'm not hurting anyone.
My attitude about taking away justifications from the cops started when I rode motorcycles, progress through owning a hot rod and matured when I kept odd hours.
I detest the cops fishing expeditions. Letting them fish means they're more apt to go for the law abiding for something minor than be where they're needed.
While I'm ranting about lawyers, like Mark Smith, I need to sit back a bit and admit he's just a symptom.
The line that he and others like him are pushing is similar to the idea that only flintlock firearms are covered by the 2nd amendment because that's all they had in 1789.
How so?
I keep hearing them repeat the idea that it's just small arms, or man portable arms which are covered. This falls from the "dangerous and unusual" idea that's falling from Bruen.
But if they weren't dangerous, they wouldn't be arms, would they?
Even if there was no gun control at all, there would be many arms that would be unusual simply from their price-tags.
If I could buy an M1A2 from the local Chrysler dealership, I couldn't afford the payments.
Even more so for an F-16.
So that makes it OK to ban expensive weapons? Because hardly anyone can afford them?
Somehow I don't think that's really true.
Especially since arming merchant ships against pirates was a thing.
Arms is everything.
That's why that merchant ship with cannon is called an armed merchant.
The 2nd Amendment doesn't say "...the right of the people to keep and bear small-arms shall not be infringed."
That "small arms" includes the modifier "small" means it's a subcategory of the greater term "arms!"
All of the definitions for "arms" the lawyers are using have been made externally to the 2nd amendment and more than a century later.
It's an inversion to the idea of liberty that's saturated into the founder's writings. The historical analog we should be looking at is the government has to prove why it gets to restrict something, not that the citizen has to prove that it shouldn't be.
The government has to prove that something I have decided is an arm is not, I don't have to prove that it is! My rationale is supported by how free speech applies to the medium I am using this very moment to make this little diatribe. It's not controversial that using a blog is free speech, despite there not being digital computers in 1789.
That there are now arms, like nerve gas, that we really don't want ANYONE owning, means that we need to look to passing an amendment that says something like, "except NBC weapons."
Then there's the weapons that are only unusual because they have been banned.
An anti-gun judge even said something to the effect of needing to get regulation out ahead of advancements so they would be banned before they became commonly used.
Such is the case of machine guns, really. A select fire AR doesn't contain thousands of dollars in extra parts compared to its more prosaic semi-auto counterpart.
Aside: Why aren't all pre-86 transferable MG's considered Curio & Relics? One of the definitions is a firearm that's expensive because of its scarcity.
Can we now ban moveable type presses because they are no longer commonly used? Can they be banned because they were never commonly used?
For that matter can the gigantic presses that a major newspaper uses be banned because of their unusually fast rate of printing and very small number?
It's all the same.
But none of these lawyers would entertain the 1st amendment analogs because they are absurd; yet it's OK for entire circuits to ban an NFA item out of fear that we'd get a bad ruling from SCOTUS.
SCOTUS can be wrong. Roe v Wade was bad law for decades, but it did eventually get rectified. We're ever so slowly undoing the Slaughterhouse decision.
Knowing you will lose a battle is no reason to stop fighting!
But never say that losing the battle is a good outcome.
Losing battles is how you lose wars and you shouldn't be happy about it.
I have fewer visitors overall than Silicon Graybeard since I moved to Blogger fifteen years ago, it would seem I'm doing similar traffic lately.
I hit three million in May 2022.
I hit one million in December 2017.
Random and erratic posts about guns and GURPS appears to have a growing audience because I'm on track to break seven million by the end of the year. Maybe even by Halloween.
I'm not watching his channel any more, but I wonder if Mark Smith is celebrating this loss too.
I'm reading there's an uprising in Nepal, triggered by the banning of social media of all things.
I hope it goes well for them, but the specter of Tienanmen Square looms large when West Taiwan is involved... and they are.
I have an old APC 1500w UPS that decided to die for Hurricane Milton.
It's been replaced by a newer CyberPower unit, so I've been ignoring it.
The little UPS in the garage went tits up, so I read some numbers off the old batt and ordered what I thought was the correct battery.
Nope.
But it was 1/2 of the batteries in the old 1500!
They're quite affordable, so I ordered another and what I think is the correct small battery for the little UPS.
With two batteries in hand I tried to replace them.
I untaped the spacer/plug thing from the old batteries and transferred it to the new ones.
And learned how fiddly it can be to get them just so and plugged in.
The first attempt was showing no battery.
But I left it plugged in for a while, thinking perhaps it would come back.
It didn't.
So I took out the new batteries and fiddled around with them until they would go into the hole the correct way. I was essentially trying to put them in rotated 180° because the alignment grooves will let you if one of the batteries is just a little off kilter.
Now it's showing a charge and acting all happy!
I've long loved the Old West (though oddly didn't normally like westerns) and the existence of a Old West role playing game always appealed to me.
Boot Hill from TSR was such a game.
The first time I tried to play it, though, was just using the conversions listed in the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide.
I was such an ignorant waif.
".38-40" meant a gun that could use rounds that were .38 to .40 in caliber. Same same .44-40... It didn't make sense, but I didn't know enough to know why my spidey sense was telling me I'd gotten that wrong.
I got that from looking at the pictures in the Time Life Old West series of books.
I did NOT get that from the DMG or the Boot Hill rules.
Boot Hill 2e doesn't list a make or model, or even caliber. Single Action Revolver, 6-shot is an example.
It was a very simple game.
Too simple for our wants at the time.
By the time I returned to wanting to run an Old West game, I had GURPS: Old West.
I had no player interest.
So I made it weird. I simply added magery.
In a lot of ways, the typical Western runs the same beats as the typical Fantasy RPG adventure, so I figured it'd be a good combination. Deadlands: Weird West is an entire game with this idea in mind, it even got a GURPS 3e version.
I don't think I failed, but the players were not familiar with the technology and some of them seemed to think that a Peacemaker was either a sniper rifle or belt-fed gun.
This is despite being familiar with GURPS and what the stats meant.
I got a near party kill in an early version with a single Indian with a bow and arrow when I'd restricted the technology to 1866. They ran their cap and ball revolvers dry and the realistic reload times really came into play.
"That's why they carried more than one pistol back then!" they all said.
It didn't get a lot better when we moved to 1877 and they got to use cartridges.
This time it was my fault and I sent a monster at them that was way tougher than I thought it was. Total party kill.
Their next attempt went better for everyone but Anglave. He, being unfamiliar with the historical background, had made a tenderfoot from Back East™. He hired the rest of the party as guides to steer him through the exciting world of the frontier.
Being proper murder-hobo desperadoes, they murdered his character and looted the body. They made this decision after spending a good portion of character creation talking about making law abiding characters this time around too!
Liars!
Still, it's a fertile playground for RPGs.
Sabers and Sorcery is a GURPS Old West world with magic, in fact.
Today, in 1987, I reported to the MEPS station in West Des Moines to begin my adventure in the US Army!
At least that's what the DD214 says, I remember it being the 9th.
It did not start well, I have a congenital shoulder problem that makes it hard for me to do push-ups and I ended up spending a couple of months in a Fitness Training Unit before heading to OSUT.
In essence, it takes about twice the effort for me to do a push up than you'd think it should.
No. You cannot put a lanyard on your Glock P80 Classic. The hole is missing.
Yes! Your Glock P80 Classic does fit in an M7/M9 tanker holster!
The 2020 made P80 magazines have two differences from the magazines that came with the 2019 made Glock 45.
First is the follower color, which I noticed right away.
The P80 floorplate has less of a toe sticking out.
The bodies bear the same part numbers.
I was in a rage.
I'd been driven away from having fun at a local brewery by a family that doesn't manage basic hygiene or do much of anything to keep the three kids from running wild while they drink.
Two days in a row.
So I did what any idiot would do and vented to Facebook. Smart people don't do this.
One of the owners thought I was referring to them and not the family.
So I deleted the post and sent a PM apologizing.
Then I unfriended everyone I'd ever met through that business.
You know, like any idiot would. Again, smart people don't do this.
To my shock (because idiot), this did not make anything better.
I am accustomed to people never noticing that I've unfriended them on Facebook. There's people from 2009 who still have not said anything.
I've gotten it, mostly, sorted out with the owners. Her and her husband are even refriended.
One of the beeristas, though, went off at length to a mutual friend and...
Well, I'm embarrassed by the situation I've made and not quite brave enough to actively apologize. I made a weak attempt that Marv didn't even notice (and that I think got a cold shoulder). All he saw was me trying to be small so as to not rub her nose in having to serve a prick like me.
So I'm going to try avoiding that employee until she says to a third party that she's done being actively angry or the heat death of the universe.
On the plus side, I'm gonna save money not going out for beer much any more.
I linked Marv to one of the auctions for a Gen 1 Classic that my $300 low ball had been outbid on and jokingly said, "Still not $350!"
He said, "bid bid bid!" And I left it at that.
Today I checked on it and saw that it was at $356 and I messaged him to say, "It's safe to bid $350 now!"
Then I checked the bid history and saw that he already had bid...
We joked around about that for a bit and he bid two more times to see if he could outbid the person who'd outbid me.
He go lucky this time and never found their max bid...
But this is exactly how he ends up with things like a Curta calculator. Oh, if you want a Curta calculator, I can put you in touch with him.
Playing with the P80 is bringing back memories.
The grip shape and texture are just RIGHT.
I am remembering why I fell in love with Glocks way back when.
The Gen 2 isn't as nice in some ineffable way.
The Gen 5 is better than 2-4, but still doesn't capture the feeling the old style does.
I'm so very pleased that nobody bid to the actual value of this pistol.
My Classic Edition Glock 17 arrived today!
Interestingly, it's not called a Glock 17 anywhere on the gun's markings or the box.
The model number on the label is P80.
Tupperware!
My example appears to be nearly unfired if it was fired at all.
My low-ball bid was $350 (plus shipping, insurance, taxes and transfer fees). The original owner paid a bit more:
The trigger is standard Glock and breaks at about 7 lb.
The magazines are the same as what came with my Glock 45, but with black instead of orange followers.
It's 0.6 oz. lighter than a Gen 2; 1 lb. 8.8 oz. vs 1 lb. 9.4 oz. with an empty magazine. Could that be the metal, tritium sights on my Gen 2 vs the plastic?
The slides will interchange.
The only real visible differences are the slide marking and grip textures. I find I really like the old texture and contour. It fits my hand really well.
Something I think is neat is the tooling left a ghost of a mark where the lanyard hole should be.
The capsule version of Glock 17 (superficial visual frame) differences.
Gen 1: Pebble texture all around on the grip. Only the Glock 17 was ever Gen 1!
Gen 2: Waffle pattern added to front and back of grip.
Gen 3: Awful finger bumps added.
Gen 4: Removable back-strap added.
Gen 5: Awful finger bumps removed.
Glocks are referred to by this generation scheme even if the first generation of a model is in a different overall generation.
The first Glock 21 is a Gen 2 even though there were never any Gen 1 Glock 21's.
The first Glock 45 is a Gen 5 even though there were never any Gen 1-4 Glock 45's.
It's actually quite simple.
Since I accidentally bought a P80 instead of a Gen 1 Classic, I set out to find what the differences were.
The differences in the Lipsey's guns are very slight. Basically just the markings on the slide.
But something that stood out about the Gen 1 Classic was that the US Patent No. was missing from the right side of the grip.
A genuine Austrian P80 doesn't have that number.
I'm thinking that Lipsey's and Glock got a little cheap here. The slide markings are probably a lot easier to change than the mold for the frame, so they didn't bother changing the mold to add the US Pat. No.
Clerics and Druids draw their power and spells from a different source than Mages, so it seems a little unfair that they have to spend the same fatigue points on them.
By way of example, an hour of hiking unencumbered uses a fatigue point. Many spells use three or four fatigue in a few seconds for a single casting.
Dungeon Fantasy 1, anticipating my post here, makes a large hunk of spells off-limits to Mages. This is not the first thing I noticed about the DF series that makes GURPS more like AD&D.
To think; I was trying to figure it out on my own.
It also occurs that DF is ALSO the conversion of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay for the game mechanics side. All I really need to do is make the racial templates, and I have a decent pack of them already.
The 250 point templates in Dungeon Fantasy baffle me a bit. The stats are VERY high and a couple of skills are way high, but they're very inefficiently made. I have a couple of characters for a fantasy setting at 150 that are better at the job, except for melee combat.
I'm less hack and slash than they are, I guess.
Some of the starting career classes in WFRP 1e might be 50 point characters in GURPS 4e! Lots of normies in that list.
I want to put a flex-fuel engine into an El Camino so when it's full of E-85 is an Alky Mino.
I'm here all night, try the veal.
IIRC there's not too many spells that are the same between the OG D&D classes.
You really need a cleric and a magic user to have all the spells you need.
GURPS Dungeon Fantasy clerics and druids use the same spell lists as mages, so a mage could have all the spells needed.
It's a flavor thing.
The big difference is clerical spells will work in zero mana if the sanctity of the location is high enough.
The character will be constructed differently too.
The rules as written don't forbid a mage from wearing armor; but I have applied a penalty to casting based on encumbrance before. I've also applied a penalty based on the amount of iron the mage is carrying.
The goal is to capture the feel of AD&D without rewriting the entire system.
I've even gone with social restrictions.
There's no fundamental reason for a mage to not wear armor, the Wizard's Guild and Warrior's Guilds have an agreement. If a mage is a member in good standing of BOTH guilds, then they can wear armor...
I need a skill list for the minimum entry level guild membership for that; but that's not new rules. That's world design!
Attorney Mark Smith of the Four Boxes Diner YouTube channel is thrilled that we keep losing at the circuit level over whether machine guns can be banned.
Core of his excitement seems to be that we're avoiding it going to SCOTUS, where we're sure to lose.
Dude. We're already losing. You're celebrating another loss.
I recognize the philosophy he's using. As soon as we have the perfect defendant to fight this all the way to SCOTUS, THEN we pull out all the stops and...
I've been waiting for Mr or Ms Perfect since 1986.
They don't exist.
The kind of person they're looking for doesn't have illegal machine guns. The perfect client doesn't break the law.
The thing about how our rights are supposed to work, and I cannot get lawyers to grasp the philosophy, is they also apply to the scummiest of the scum.
So, no, a scumbag should not be punished for breaking a law that's unconstitutional and they are the people who need to be protected from the government more than the beatified saintly law-abiding citizenry at large.
The Bill of Rights is for everyone, not just the best of us.
Today, two hundred forty two years ago, the 13 American colonies officially stopped being English with the signing of The Treaty of Paris.
It would be almost another five years, and a false start, for these polities to become The United States.
I have gone through DF 1 (Adventurers) and DF 7 (Clerics) and I have a better grasp of how to proceed.
Knowing OG GURPS instead of just Powered By GURPS will allow me to scale the power levels back down from the 250 points of Dungeon Fantasy to my preferred 150 points.
I don't mind getting to epic levels, but I like to start gritty and grounded.
There really isn't anything there that I didn't already know, but it's presented slightly differently and the light came on.
I like that.
Turns out what I really needed to make the final connection was a suggested list of spells and how to buy them.
Clerical spells don't have prerequisites like mages. They have a minimum power investiture level. DF 1 has some listed by PI level for Clerics and Druids. DF 7 has more lists based on the sphere of influence of your deity.
I think I can do this now!
Just need players.
The Achilles heel of any gamemaster.
The Lego Lunar Module is about double the scale of the minifigs.
Limitations of the media, I suppose.
I'm going to go teach the neighbor's dog to program a VCR.
It will be simpler.
I am reminded, often, why I did not pursue a career in teaching.
Teachers are not allowed to say, "No, you fucking idiot," when they get frustrated that the student doesn't want to learn.
It's not constructive.
I've never been good at conveying what I know to others.
It's frustrating watching them not understand and being unable to rephrase it so they will.
I fail to communicate.
This makes it harder to spot when the reader is actively refusing to understand.
But when every interaction leads to frustration, over and over, I wonder why they still come here.
I know I will be happier if they stop.
The MO is to be contrarian here in the comments, act like they almost grasp a topic, then run to their own blog and mob of worshipers to bask in the glow of their "OMG you're so right and McThag is SOOOOO wrong!" adoration.
I watched this pattern repeat a couple times and haven't bothered checking their page for what they're saying for a long time. Even if they announce in a comment they're taking their ball home.
He's been banned from commenting here before during COVID.
I think that unbanning him was a mistake. The worshipers coming here to berate me should have been the last straw.
A commenter, Daosus, mentioned the Dungeon Fantasy RPG for a solution to my Cleric/Druid conundrum.
That reminded me that I had not really read the "Powered by GURPS" RPG when I hit the wall of 250 points being more than I like to use coupled with it being a VERY trimmed down version of GURPS.
My original goal was to recreate William the Landless and there's no Social Status! WTF!
But there's also the Dungeon Fantasy series of supplements.
A series that I bought, paid for, and stored the pdf's unread on the drive.
It has a whole book on Clerics for GURPS with hints for Gods to go with them!
Time to get to reading, huh?
I now join Marv in the "surely someone will outbid me" unexpectedly winning a low-ball auction club.
Sometime soon a Lipsey's exclusive Glock 17 Gen 1 P80 will be arriving at my handiest FFL.
On the plus side, I won with a low-ball.
On the down side, I will have to spend the money! Spent... I paid them already.
Another oops here was I wasn't looking for the P80 version of the Lipsey's exclusive retro reissues. I wanted the clone of the 86-88 US version; the Gen 1 Classic.
On the up side, the P80 is supposedly the more desirable of the two reissues.
On the negative side, it has lost value against the MSRP from five years ago.
I'm guessing about a week for shipping, I'll keep y'all posted.
