HS Precision Gets Endorsement by Lon Horiuchi

{Via AR15.com.)

This should be enough to make every freedom loving American vomit.  HS Precision, manufacturer of stocks and other parts for precsion rifles, is featuring an endorsement of their products by Lon Horiuchi on the back of their catalog.  Here's a scan (click on the thumbnail for a full size image):

For readers unfamiliar with Horiuchi, he is the FBI sniper who shot Vicki Weaver during the the standoff at Ruby Ridge 1992.  He was also present at the 1993 Waco siege where he was again suspected of misconduct.  He charged with manslaughter for Weaver's death but the charge was eventually dismissed in a Federal court, the basis for which was the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution.  (Note that this ruling doesn't go to the merits of the case.)  In gun owner circles, he is regarded as a murderer.

As pointed out by Arfcommer "dedfella," this is akin to having a fertilizer company get an endorsement by Timothy McVeigh.  Poor taste, putting it mildly.

The owners of HS Precision would have to be living under a rock to not understand the revulsion this would incite among gunnies.  Obviously, they don't give a shit about us and are only concerned with securing .gov contracts.  Screw 'em.

Edit: If you click on the link at the top of this thread, a couple of AR15.com members have spoken with people at HS Precision and confirmed this.


Edit 11/27/08: Well, this post has certainly attracted a lot more visitors than normal.  Welcome, and please poke around my site.  If you're interested in the subject matter of this post there's a lot more shooting and RKBA content.

Weekend Update

Saturday morning I went over to my MIL's condo to work on her old XP PC.  I built it for her a few years ago using one of the PCs Wal-Mart was selling w/o an OS.  I give it a tuneup about once a year and generally it's been OK for her light use.  However, recently it became unusable.

The box has a 900 MHz Duron CPU and 256 MB of RAM.  Not bad for when I built it but obviously considered slow by current standards.  Anyway, I saw that she'd let Windows Update install IE7.  Even though she uses Firefox, just having IE7 on it caused the machine to slow to a crawl.  I uninstalled it, cleaned up the registry and got rid of a lot of junk with Crap Cleaner, and got it to the point where it's usable.

The other problem she'll have soon is lack of disk space.  The box has a 10 GB drive with only a couple gig free.

At this point I don't feel that it's cost effective to sink any money into the PC.  I'm considering getting her a cheap laptop, possible a refurbished Dell Latitude from somewhere like eCost.com, and moving her over to that.  One nice thing about a laptop would be that instead of me having to schelp to her condo if it needs attention, she can bring it to me.  We'll see.

Yesterday I was able to get out to the range for a couple of hours.  I ran about 80 rounds of .45 ACP through my Springfield M1911 without a bobble.  I'm confident now that the functioning issues I had a little while ago were magazine-induced.  The last time I had the gun out I identified the bad mag and junked it.  I currently have one 7 round Springfield factory mag, four Chip McCormick 8 round Shooting Star mags, and two 10 round CMC Power-Mags.  (I generally use the latter in my Marlin Camp Carbine because I don't like how the pistol feels with the extra-capacity magazine.)  I need to pick up some more of the 8 round Shooting Stars.

After using up all my .45 ACP I went to the 75 yard range and put about 40 rounds through my 1944 Fazakerly No.4 Mk.I Lee-Enfield.  I bought this rifle back around 1985 or '86 and shot it quite a bit through the early '90s.  I haven't shot it much lately and decided it would be fun to give it a workout.  Watching some videos of Lee-Enfield rapid fire on Youtube whetted my appetite.  E.g., this one .

The .303 I show was a mix of my last 3 rounds of HXP Greek surplus, some Sellier & Bellot, and some 1981 Winchester.  It wasn't a problem to keep all my shots inside the black of an SR-1 target from 75 yards, from the bench, shooting pretty rapidly.  I was able to hold the 10 ring if I shot slow fire.  I used to be able to keep them all in the black from 100 yards offhand, slow fire, but I'm out of practice.  Need to fix that.

Cabela's Trip

This morning we all piled into the Expedition and went to Cabela's in Hamburg, PA.  I figured the girls would really like the various mounted animals and the aquariums, and I wasn't disappointed.

Not surprisingly for this time of year, the store was mobbed.  This in spite of the current down economy.  The crowd in the gun section was especially heavy, stacked two deep in front of the gun counter.  I expected this in light of last week's election results.  I restrained myself and only bought a bulk pack of 525 rounds of Federal .22 LR ammo for $14.99 and a large spray can of RemOil.  (I've come to like RemOil as a cleaner, but IMO it's too light for general lube or anti-corrosion protection.  It's especially handy for hosing out the innards of a dirty AR-15, and the smell isn't bad.)

Aside from the ammo and oil, we got the girls stuffed horses, Judith got some clothes, and I got a new cap to replace one I lost a couple weeks ago.

While there we had lunch.  I can recommend the venison bratwurst.  Yum.

Range Report

Dad and I made it out to the range today for a couple of hours.  Dad had his Colt AR-15A3 while I brought my Savage 93GL in .22 WMR, 1944 Underwood M1 Carbine, and my Marlin 336 in .30-30.

Dad was shooting mostly Wolf 55 grain .223 today in his AR-15 and experienced a couple failures of the action to stay open on the last shot with it.  He also ran some Radway Green SS109 loads through it with no problems.  He probably has less than 500 rounds through the gun so it's not broken in yet.  I suggested that he stick with the hotter milspec ammo for another couple hundred rounds, after which time it should run better with the Wolf ammo, which is not as hot as American .223/5.56mm.

This was the first time shooting the Savage 93GL since I put a Nikon 4x32mm Prostaff rimfire scope on it.  I did my initial zero using some Winchester Dynapoints I picked up over the summer at Wal-Mart.  I've read that they are a bit less destructive on game than most .22 WMR JHPs so I wanted to give them a try.  Accuracy with the Winchesters was good -- well under an inch at 50 yards -- but I had two rounds in one box of 50 which required a second strike on a different part of the rim to go off.  Very dissappointing.

I also shot some CCI Maxi Mag JHPs through the Savage to confirm the zero, since this is my normal .22 WMR load of choice.  I had my first ever dud with CCI rimfire ammo today.  One round failed to fire even after being hit on three different places on the rim.  {grumble}

This was also the first time shooting the Savage after installing a Rifle Basix sear.  My rifle was made before Savage put Accu-Triggers on their rimfire bolt actions.  The factory trigger was heavy and had a lot of creep.  With the Rifle Basix sear most of the creep is gone and it breaks at about 2.5 lbs, greatly improving shootability.

I only put about 30 or 40 rounds of Remington UMC FMJ through the M1, but experienced no malfunctions.  As expected it shot a little high at 50 yards but I kept all shots in about 2 or 3 inches, typical for an M1 Carbine in my experience.  This Carbine was one of the batch imported from Israel last year.  It has a fair amount of surface character but the bore is excellent.  The recoil seemed a just little brisk for an M1 so I think the recoil spring may need to be replaced with one from Wolff Gunsprings.

Debian Linux

One of the projects with which I'm involved at work requires me to determine how much bandwidth a streaming IP video product is consuming.  To do so I wanted to run ntop, a protocol analyzer which can present data in nice pretty graphs (important for showing to PHBs).

I've used ntop off and on in the past but one thing that's always been a PITA is installing it.  I first tried installing it on my CentOS 5.2 box but ran into dependency hell.  Next I tried on my Dell Latituded D600, which was a dual-boot XP Pro and OpenSUSE 11 box.  No dice, YAST couldn't find it or rrdtool (a dependency) in the OpenSUSE repositories.  So, I decided to give Debian a try.

I haven't tried plain Debian in years, though I've used derivatives, such as Knoppix and (K)Ubuntu recently.  I am pretty impressed.

To install Debian I downloaded and burned the netinstall image to a DVD (it'll fit on a CD but I didn't have any handy).  The installer recognized all the hardware in my Dell and didn't screw up my XP installation, either.

To get my Intel Pro2200BG wifi NIC running, I had to download firmware, but basic support was already in the 2.6 kernel I'm running.  I'm on an open network and haven't yet tried it on a network with encryption.

Aside from ntop I installed some other network monitoring tools, including nmap, Wireshar, and airsnort, all from Debian's repositories.

So far, so good.  I wish I had tried Debian years ago.

Post Election Thought

After watching the results last night this is the first thing that came to mind:

THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.

--Thomas Paine, Crisis In America I.

And then this:

[N]ever give in, never give in, never, never, never, never-in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.

--Sir Winston Churchill, October 29, 1941, Harrow School.

Voted This Morning

This morning I arrived at my polling place about 7:10 and had a ten minute wait.  By the time I left the line went out the door.  In the two decades I've been voting at this place, I've never seen such a line.

It's going to be a nail-biter.

Obama Exposed

One last pre-election bump for my other blog, Obama Exposed.  If you haven't checked it out in awhile please take a look.

McCain/Palin '08!