Appleseed Shoot

Nearly three weeks ago, I attended a two-day Appleseed shoot. The purpose of the Appleseed program is twofold: to impart a bit of American Revolution history and make known the sacrifices of many of its participants; and to train men, women, and children to become competent riflemen. Think of it as a history class with a lot of fun, extracurricular activities.

When I say train folks as competent riflemen, I mean just that. No benches were allowed, only firing at targets from positions supported by either the ground (prone) or the shooter’s own body (sitting, kneeling, standing). The only support aid allowed was a sling. Practically all firing was done at silhouette targets placed at 25 meters. The silhouettes varied in size to simulate distances out to 300 or 400 meters, IIRC. Although 25 meters sounds close, it was no mean feat to hit the targets, even from the most stable position, prone. More often than not, I missed them.

A number of different guns were in evidence at the shoot, with a fairly even split between .22 LRs and centerfire rifles. Most were semi-autos, but I saw at least one bolt-action .22 and one lever-action .22. The type of shooting Appleseed trains you for is definitely geared towards the semi-auto-type action. Why? With a semi-auto, you don’t have to break your firing position, and then regain it, after every shot to cycle your gun. But that doesn’t mean that just because you have a semi-auto you’re in like Flynn. I had my Marlin model 60 .22 LR, a gnat-drilling gun from the bench, and I still failed miserably. But I learned my weaknesses--practically everything--and I now know what to concentrate on.

Now that I have one Appleseed shoot under my belt—I’ll likely attend another sometime next summer—here’s some advice for you if ever attend one: One, make sure your gun is sighted dead-on at 25 meters. The class is fast paced and there will be little time to make adjustments if your gun does not shoot to point of aim already. Two, if you think you’re a good shot because you can make tiny three- and five-shot groups from a bench, be ready for an epiphany, and a humbling one at that. Three, as mentioned, the class is fast paced and a lot of information is given in a short amount of time. One instructor likened it to drinking from a fire hose. Four, come with an open mind and leave your preconceived notions behind. Five, if the weather’s hot, and it was for us, bring plenty of water, wear a hat, full-brimmed if possible, bring sunscreen, wear light-colored clothing, and bring a lunch and snacks. Six, bring a chair to sit in between stages. I’m sure there’s more, but that’s all I can think of right now.

All in all, I would describe the Appleseed shoot as a valuable learning experience, and certainly worth the $70 I paid to attend. (Women, kids, and active-duty personnel may attend free of charge as of this writing.)

Take care.
DAL357

P.S. My nine-year-old son attended with me on the first day, Saturday. He enjoyed himself, but it was a bit much for him towards the end of the day. In my opinion, twelve or thirteen would probably be the minimum age for a child to get the full benefit of the course.

Another innoculant (I hope)

In practically every life, some rain will fall and some sun will shine, often without warning. A few days ago, my wife gave me one of those out-of-the-blue, ray-of-sunshine moments.

One of my wife's friends, for reasons known only to her--never look a gift horse in the mouth--asked said wife if I could teach her something about handguns. My wife relayed this lagniappe to me and, of course, I instantly said, "Yes." I absolutely love teaching people about guns, although I've only ever trained one other adult (again, one of my wife's friends).

Other commitments will prevent me from assuming this responsibility until June, but I am already looking forward to it, mainly because I enjoy teaching others. But I will also enjoy it because it will add one more person to the ranks of the enlightened about guns. If/when this comes to pass (life being unpredictable), I'll blog about it and let everyone/anyone who happens to still read this intermittently-updated tome know how things went.

Take care.
DAL357

Giving up a little to gain a lot

While I don’t have a lot of personal experience, thankfully, with crime, I have had a few incidents occur in years past that you might benefit from knowing about. Here’s one.

Way back in 1986, on New Year’s Eve, I was returning home from someplace lost in the recesses of my memory. It was an hour or two before 1987 was to begin and my car suddenly went dead, totally kaput. At the time the road it died on was a somewhat lonely two-lane highway on the outskirts of the city. (Now, it’s a major six-lane artery surrounded by thousands of homes and lined with dozens of businesses, but I digress.) With the remaining momentum of the car, I pulled off to a side road, locked the car, and footed it to a 7-11 store about a half-mile away. From there I called my dad, who came to pick me up and we drove to take a look at the car. Neither of us could figure out what was wrong with it, so we decided to wait until morning to fiddle around on it. My dad asked me if I wanted to tow it back to the house, but I said, “No, it’ll be okay here until morning.” (You, no doubt, see where this is going.)

The next morning my brother drove me to my car and I found it not quite in the condition I left it. The car’s windshield was broken, its mirrors were ripped off, the instrument panel was covering cracked, a side window was smashed, and the turn signal lever broken off. The culprit(s) was apparently trying to get at my radio/tape player, but was thwarted by a clever (I thought) trick I employed when I installed the player a few years earlier (I keep my cars for a looong time). What was this trick? A short, stout piece of electrical wire tied to the back of the player and through two small holes I drilled into the firewall, rendering the unit practically impossible for a smash-and-grab thief to lift. Unfortunately, it also had the unintended consequence of infuriating the would-be filcher who, I am certain, took out his frustration on my car. The radio was saved, but at a price of more than five times its value when compared to the damage done to my car.

When I got my car back from the repair shop, the first thing I did was to untie and remove the wire. I didn’t want lightning to strike twice; I’ve learned my lessons. What were those lessons?

1. Be aware that crime can happen at anytime, practically anywhere, and that you are not immune.
2. Make value judgments as to what you are willing to lose; in other words, leave easily-taken fall-guy items for the low-lifes.
3. Listen to and follow through with good advice about preventing crime. (Had I listened to my dad, this could have been avoided, and my net worth would be about $500 more, or greater with interest, today).
4. Crime, and criminals, suck.

I hope this helps you, or someone you know, from repeating my mistakes.*

Take care.
DAL357

*I realize that macho wisdom says to he*l with giving any kind of quarter or reward to criminals, but I have the distinct impression that those who say this are too imbued with Hollywood's scripted versions of how encounters will go down to see reason. Sure, there are things worth defending, but inanimate objects are not usually among them. Giving up a small thing to protect the bigger, more valuable thing doesn't make one a loser, but a winner. You were able to put one over on a predator; that should be cause for celebration.

Jack Weaver

I didn't even know he was still alive. Well, I guess he's not anymore.

*****

The shooting world lost one of its best-known names last week. Former Los Angeles County Deputy Jack Weaver, 80, died Tuesday in Carson City. Weaver, for those of you not familiar with the name, is the man for whom the Weaver Shooting Stance is named.

After experimenting with a variety of shooting stances and modifications, Weaver decided the best position for reaction shooting was simple: two hands on the weapon, gun up a foot or so above the vertical centerline of the body, and head slightly dropped. This gave him what he called a "flash picture" of the target. It also gave him the 1959 "Leatherslap" gunfighting title. As he explained "it looked kind of stupid, and everybody was laughing at me, but it worked."

After three years of losing to Weaver, Guns and Ammo writer and legendary shooting expert Jeff Cooper proclaimed the Weaver Stance "decisively superior" to anything else. In fact, Cooper incorporated Weaver's stance into his Modern Technique of the Pistol.

On Saturday evening, I spoke with Weaver's son, Alan, about his father and learned that this last year of his life had been one "of a rock star" after American Handgunner published a story about Weaver and his stance in its May issue. "All last year," Alan said, "Dad got letters, videos, patches from police departments and shooting clubs, tons of mementos that made him realize that people did remember him and his contributions."

We all remember Weaver's contribution to shooting -every time we take a two handed Weaver, or modified Weaver or whatever you call it.

--Jim Shepherd

*****

Like or loathe his stance (I kind of like it), he did help move accurate handgun shooting to the point it is today.

Take care.
DAL357

The Battle of Blenheim

Here's a little poem I stumbled across that I thought others might like. Take a gander and see what you think.

*****

The Battle of Blenheim
Robert Southey (1774-1843)

It was a summer evening,
Old Kaspar's work was done,
And he before his cottage door
Was sitting in the sun,
And by him sported on the green
His little grandchild Wilhelmine.

She saw her brother Peterkin
Roll something large and round,
Which he beside the rivulet
In playing there had found;
He came to ask what he had found,
That was so large, and smooth, and round.

Old Kaspar took it from the boy,
Who stood expectant by;
And then the old man shook his head,
And, with a natural sigh,
"'Tis some poor fellow's skull," said he,
"Who fell in the great victory.

"I find them in the garden,
For there's many here about;
And often when I go to plough,
The ploughshare turns them out!
For many thousand men," said he,
"Were slain in that great victory."

"Now tell us what 'twas all about,"
Young Peterkin, he cries;
And little Wilhelmine looks up
With wonder-waiting eyes;
"Now tell us all about the war,
And what they fought each other for."

"It was the English," Kaspar cried,
"Who put the French to rout;
But what they fought each other for,
I could not well make out;
But everybody said," quoth he,
"That 'twas a famous victory.

"My father lived at Blenheim then,
Yon little stream hard by;
They burnt his dwelling to the ground,
And he was forced to fly;
So with his wife and child he fled,
Nor had he where to rest his head.

"With fire and sword the country round
Was wasted far and wide,
And many a childing mother then,
And new-born baby died;
But things like that, you know, must be
At every famous victory.

"They say it was a shocking sight
After the field was won;
For many thousand bodies here
Lay rotting in the sun;
But things like that, you know, must be
After a famous victory.

"Great praise the Duke of Marlbro' won,
And our good Prince Eugene."
"Why, 'twas a very wicked thing!"
Said little Wilhelmine.
"Nay... nay... my little girl," quoth he,
"It was a famous victory.

"And everybody praised the Duke
Who this great fight did win."
"But what good came of it at last?"
Quoth little Peterkin.
"Why that I cannot tell," said he,
"But 'twas a famous victory."

Note: Prince Eugene: François Eugene de Savoie-Carignan, a brilliant general who aided Marlborough in defeating the Bavarians and French at Blenheim, Bavaria, August 13, 1704.

*****

Ah, the folly of war. Too bad this bit of wisdom isn't learned by every child in grade school in America. Nah, that couldn't happen, it might give the little darlings nightmares, although many seem to watch movies with vicious characters and graphic, violent action at far too young an age with scant parental supervision.

Take care.
DAL357

Surprised?

Are you surprised at the following piece about the ignorance of the average American voter? I know I wasn't.

*****

5 Myths About Those Civic-Minded, Deeply Informed Voters

By Rick Shenkman
Sunday, September 7, 2008;
Washington Post

One thing both Democrats and Republicans agreed about in their vastly different conventions: The American voter will not only decide but decide wisely. But does the electorate really know what it's talking about? Plenty of things are hurting American democracy -- gridlock, negative campaigning, special interests -- but one factor lies at the root of all the others, and nobody dares to discuss it. American voters, who are hiring the people who'll run a superpower democracy, are grossly ignorant. Here are a few particularly bogus claims about their supposed savvy.


1. Our voters are pretty smart.

You hear this one from politicians all the time, even John McCain, who promises straight talk, and Barack Obama, who claims that he's not a politician (by which he means that he'll tell people what they need to hear, not what they want to hear). But by every measure social scientists have devised, voters are spectacularly uninformed. They don't follow politics, and they don't know how their government works. According to an August 2006 Zogby poll, only two in five Americans know that we have three branches of government and can name them. A 2006 National Geographic poll showed that six in ten young people (aged 18 to 24) could not find Iraq on the map. The political scientists Michael Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter, surveying a wide variety of polls measuring knowledge of history, report that fewer than half of all Americans know who Karl Marx was or which war the Battle of Bunker Hill was fought in. Worse, they found that just 49 percent of Americans know that the only country ever to use a nuclear weapon in a war is their own.

True, many voters can tell you who's ahead and who's behind in the horse race. But most of what they know about the candidates' positions on the issues -- and remember, our candidates are running to make policy, not talk about their biographies -- derives from what voters learn from stupid and often misleading 30-second commercials, according to Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center.

2. Bill O'Reilly's viewers are dumber than Jon Stewart's.

Liberals wish. Democrats like to think that voters who sympathize with their views are smarter than those who vote Republican. But a 2007 Pew survey found that the knowledge level of viewers of the right-wing, blustery "The O'Reilly Factor" and the left-wing, snarky "The Daily Show" is comparable, with about 54 percent of the shows' politicized viewers scoring in the "high knowledge" category.

So what about conservative talk-radio titan Rush Limbaugh's audience? Surely the ditto-heads are dumb, right? Actually, according to a survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, Rush's listeners are better educated and "more knowledgeable about politics and social issues" than the average voter.

3. If you just give Americans the facts, they'll be able to draw the right conclusions.

Unfortunately, no. Many social scientists have long tried to downplay the ignorance of voters, arguing that the mental "short cuts" voters use to make up for their lack of information work pretty well. But the evidence from the past few years proves that a majority can easily be bamboozled.

Just before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, after months of unsubtle hinting from Bush administration officials, some 60 percent of Americans had come to believe that Iraq was behind the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, despite the absence of evidence for the claim, according to a series of surveys taken by the PIPA/Knowledge Networks poll. A year later, after the bipartisan, independent 9/11 Commission reported that Saddam Hussein had had nothing to do with al-Qaeda's assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, 50 percent of Americans still insisted that he did. In other words, the public was bluntly given the data by a group of officials generally believed to be credible -- and it still didn't absorb the most basic facts about the most important event of their time.

4. Voters today are smarter than they used to be.

Actually, by most measures, voters today possess the same level of political knowledge as their parents and grandparents, and in some categories, they score lower. In the 1950s, only 10 percent of voters were incapable of citing any ways in which the two major parties differed, according to Thomas E. Patterson of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, who leads the Pew-backed Vanishing Voter Project. By the 1970s, that number had jumped to nearly 30 percent.

Here's what makes these numbers deplorable -- and, in fact, almost incomprehensible: Education levels are far higher today than they were half a century ago, when social scientists first began surveying voter knowledge about politics. (In 1940, six in ten Americans hadn't made it past the eighth grade.) The moral of this story: Schooling alone doesn't translate into better educated voters.

5. Young voters are paying a lot of attention to the news.

Again, no. Despite all the hoopla about young voters -- the great hope of the future! -- only one news story in 2001 drew the attention of a majority of them: 9/11. Some 60 percent of young voters told Pew researchers that they were following news about the attack closely. (Er -- 40 percent weren't?) But none of the other stories that year seemed particularly interesting to them. Only 32 percent said that they followed the news about the anthrax attacks or the economy, then in recession. The capture of Kabul from the Taliban? Just 20 percent.

Six years later, Pew again measured public knowledge of current events and found that the young (aged 18 to 29) "know the least." A majority of young respondents scored in the "low knowledge" category -- the only demographic group to do so.

And some other statistics are even more alarming. How many young people read newspapers? Just 20 percent. (Worse, studies consistently show that people who do not pick up the newspaper-reading habit in their 20s rarely do so later.) But surely today's youth are getting their news from the Internet? Sorry. Only 11 percent of the young report that they regularly surf the Internet for news. Maybe Obama shouldn't be relying on savvy young voters after all.

*****

Americans, in general, really do deserve the government they have. Blaming politicians for the country's ills overlooks the fact that those same pols mirror perfectly the wants and wishes of the electorate. It's no secret that the average American can tell you more about pop "culture" and sports, neither of which has any direct affect on their lives other than what they allow them to have, than they can about things that directly impact their lives, such as government fiscal policy.

Assuming the above piece is true, and I have no doubt it is, we are doomed, doomed!, I tell you.

Take care.
DAL357

Hardcore survivalism

So, you think you're a hardcore survivalist? Have you made up a few of these, assuming, of course, you have one or more members of the fairer sex in your party? I don't know about you, but I consider this a pretty darn good idea for extended societal problems that might disrupt supplies of personal hygiene items, along with last year's Yellow Pages (crinkle first for maximum utility and comfort--I speak from experience) for another task in that vicinity of the body that both sexes are heir to.

BTW, here's the how-to link.

Take care.
DAL357

P.S. Just in case some thin-skinned individuals might take umbrage to the above, I may have written it in a light-hearted manner, but it is a subject that should be thought of as carefully as food, water, guns and ammo, etc.

A minor milestone

Yesterday, 5-24-07, my son finished kindergarten, his first year of formal education. He goes to a charter school and, thus far, my wife and I are pleased with the results. Not only is my boy reading at a second-grade level, he is also writing in cursive, a skill, along with reading and math, stressed at his school. Speaking strictly from personal experience (but other adults I have talked to have had similar experiences), my own kindergarten education, some forty-odd years ago, seemed to stress playing.

Of course, my wife and I put a lot of time in with our son to make sure he does his reading, writing, and math homework assignments completely and accurately. We also read to the boy regularly, both in English and in Russian. Few children, my wife and I believe, especially in the early years, have the discipline and resolve to make the extra effort it takes to excel at schoolwork, and our son is no exception, hence our active participation in his education. It's not only our obligation as parents to do this, but also our sincere pleasure.

Take care.
DAL357