Group Therapy
When Being An Insider Requires A Trip Outside
Dave gets a break from being an Insider by going outside and it
usually involves burning powder. This time around, he was set
up to check the zero on his trusty rifle.
This Sunday, Sept. 15, is opening day of my 2024 grouse hunting season, and I’ve been prepping for this, and next month’s deer hunting opener, for several weeks by traveling to places where cell phones don’t work, but guns still go “BANG!”
No, I’m not planning a repeat of last year when I fulfilled a promise made right here to shoot grouse with a .22-caliber pistol. Well, maybe not. Okay, there’s a 50-50 chance.
That said, before my deer season opens next month, the U.S. Supreme Court will convene (first Monday of October, just as sure as the sun rises in the east) and one of the cases on the agenda for this session is Garland v. VanDerStok. The Second Amendment Foundation and its partners intervened in a challenge of the ATF’s “Final Rule” which now considers frames and receivers of firearms to be regulated just like fully functional firearms.
The Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals already decided against the ATF, so the government appealed. SAF and its partners last month filed their respondents brief with the high court, which they hope will uphold the lower court ruling.
If you’ve never read court briefs, you probably ought to try it simply to understand why federal court filings make people crazy. They use language in these things that should not be allowed anywhere in the English-speaking world. Read enough of these documents — which I’ve been doing for about 25 years in an effort to make sense of them — and it becomes imperative to be on a ridge somewhere at crack of dawn on the season opener, surrounded by fall colors, rifle in hand and sixgun on hip, waiting for a buck to wander into view.
Now, that makes sense!
Dave’s rifle is a Marlin MR-7 in .30-06 and he’s been
getting it ready for next month’s deer opener. He uses
handloads, described below.
‘Fast is Fine, Accuracy is Final’
The late, legendary Wyatt Earp is credited with uttering the above six-word principle to explain why being able to hit your target makes all the difference, whether in a gun battle or on a big game hunt.
So, a couple of weeks ago I just took my rifle on a little trek up a crummy road just to verify it still shot true. This sort of thing can be better than a trip to the gun range because one can set a target in a spot where you’re shooting uphill or down, at a distance not marked by a post. I set up a portable shooting bench, ran my portable target stand up a hill to a point just over 100 yards away and cut loose.
Checking zero is a good way to make sure your loads are right. I use a 180-grain boattail — in this case, a Nosler Accubond with its distinctive white polymer tip — propelled by 56.0 grains of Hodgdon’s Hybrid 100V, the maximum recommended load listed in the Nosler Reloading Guide #9. The load clocks above 2,700 fps over my chronograph and has accounted for more than one nice buck at ranges beyond 300 yards.
Well, nothing to see here! Move along. The center hole is a double,
and the two flanking rounds were fired after Dave adjusted
his out-of-alignment scope.
The brass is carefully trimmed to length after resizing, and then wet-tumbled. Primers are inserted by hand. Each powder charge is weighed on an electronic scale and poured by hand through a tiny funnel into the case before the bullet is inserted and seated in my single stage RCBS press. It’s something of a ritual, actually.
My first two shots were dead on, the bullets creating a single jagged hole in the orange dot bullseye. I had to adjust the cant of the scope because somehow it had been banged to tilt the crosshairs, and the next two shots were a bit wide, but still close enough to translate to venison in the cooler. All that was necessary was to adjust the elevation eight clicks to put the bullets 2 inches high at 100 so my mark would be pretty close to dead-on at 200.
Good therapy? Oh, you betcha!
The Butterfly Clip
My older son was along, and it seemed a good opportunity to let him shoot my Ruger MKIV pistol at a target placed about 10 yards away. I should have known better.
My portable target stand is made from PVC pipe and I use a large butterfly clip to hold a section of cardboard onto which the self-adhesive Birchwood Casey targets are pressed. He had never before fired this pistol, which shoots well enough to have capped my first grouse of the 2023 season off a tree limb, described in this column from last year.
Shoulda known better! Workman had to replace this big clip
on his portable target stand. The previous one was plugged
decisively with a .22 pistol.
Trust the humor of the gods, because instead of hitting the target, he somehow managed to put a bullet right into the big clip, blowing it apart. In a case like that, one doesn’t get mad, one just laughs, not as hysterically as Kamala Harris, but pretty loud and hard. It was, after all, pretty darned funny. On the bright side, at least his windage was dead on!
Just to make sure the rear pistol sight hadn’t gone bonkers, I quickly reloaded and started bouncing an empty can someone had discarded (we brought it home to the trash!) around until it was about 30 yards uphill and full of holes.
At least my kid didn’t hit the PVC pipe like my brother did a few years ago, only he was shooting a .308-caliber rifle off a fairly crummy rest. He’s a much better marksman, I guarantee, having head-shot a moving Snake River buck with the same rifle, at about 175 yards. A couple of years later, I watched him conk a different buck at about 150 yards in a big canyon in eastern Washington, so the PVC shot was definitely a fluke (he was shooting one of my handloads at the time). No worry. Five dollars for a new piece of PVC and about five minutes with a jigsaw fixed the problem.
Again, I got a good laugh out of it, and it was time well-spent away from the office and out of cellphone range.
Remember this? Last year Dave conked his first grouse of the
Washington season with a Ruger MKIV, fulfilling a promise to
Insider readers. This year…well, we’ll see.
Understanding Lawsuits
For about the past quarter-century I’ve been at the Second Amendment Foundation, which is hosting the annual Gun Rights Policy Conference in San Diego in a couple of weeks.
I won’t be attending, as I’m moving several steps closer to retirement from that job. The plan at this writing is to be out somewhere hunting birds and scouting for deer.
But as the curtain closes on this chapter of my life, it seems appropriate to explain why federal gun rights lawsuits take so long. It’s something most people don’t understand. We’ve become too used to court victories by the end of the fourth act, right before the last commercials.
Lower courts, which are full of liberal judges, habitually let Second Amendment cases drag slowly because they don’t like them. My personal theory is that they simply know there’s only one way such cases can be decided according to the Constitution, and some courts just don’t want to go there. Of course, I’ve been mistaken before about courts and judges.
First, acceptable plaintiffs must be found and vetted by the attorneys. Then the federal complaints are filed. Defendants, usually some state official, are allowed time to respond. Then there are motions, typically for a dismissal and/or preliminary injunction and/or temporary restraining order. Naturally, plaintiffs are given time to respond and file their own motions. At some point, a hearing is scheduled, it is frequently delayed for some reason, and after the hearing, the trial judge takes his or her time to make a ruling.
Still with me? The process described above stretches out over the course of months. Regardless which way the judge rules, there is an inevitable appeal by the losing side. If the judge tosses the case, his decision is appealed, and if the appeals court orders the trial judge to hear the case, that will also take time, more cross motions and on, and on, and on.
The appeal process takes additional months. I’ve seen a couple of these cases stretch out over years. Ultimately, an appeals court hands down a ruling, and then there may be an appeal to the Supreme Court, which may, or may not, grant a hearing.
Now, not mentioned in all of this is the cost of these cases. They can run easily into the tens of thousands of dollars, which is why SAF, the NRA, Firearms Policy Coalition, National Shooting Sports Foundation and other gun rights groups are always involved in fund raising efforts. Attorneys specializing in such cases don’t work for free, and they are typically very good at what they do.
SAF’s Alan Gottlieb some years ago cooked up this motto: “Winning firearms freedom, one lawsuit at a time.” It is definitely appropriate.
If we want to protect the Second Amendment, we need to fund the legal work, and don’t become impatient.
