Vlad

Hey don't make fun of point shooting! We actually have an older gentleman who shows up at our practice matches who can aim and all that, but also just point shoots at open target and gets his A's. Apparently he practices at home with his .38 and primer driven plastic bullets shooting at empty cereal boxed. And then he somehow translates that to shooting a single stack Colt. Not my way but it works for him. Vlad

Odd but I don't know what they base that on. All the local Sports Authority's and Dick's around here have them out on the shelf, P99, 1911s, S&Ws, and full size M16 with plastic shots. Vlad

Thanx Jake, USPSA just posted the score today 62.4886 helping me to B class. Vlad

Yay .. I just made B in production, which kinda worries me because I normaly shoot in the C's. And one of my last classifiers was an A. Yeek! Though I think the number are better then my normal performance at least I can strive to keep up appearences. Vlad

On both guns the barrels can be removed with ease. Also a lot of people (including top rimfire shooters) recommend never cleaning your bore on .22s. If you want to clean your bores but not take the barrels off the guns then invest in bore snakes or a patch worm or an Otis cleaning kit. All of those are pull though cleaning implements and the last two allow you to use whatever brushes and patches you want, while the boresnakes do both without any other accessories. Vlad

I want to play golf with them, too. I never steped on a golf course in my life, but if they give out Glocks I might pick it up! Thumbs up for the Sarge! Vlad

No seriously, isn't anyone worried about the backstop in that first photo? I mean knife throwers at the circus have been using pretty ladies for a while now and at the range shown in the second picture the shooter would have to be an exeptionaly bad shot to hit the target holder, but how could you not hit the building behind the target in the first photo? I guess when you have more then 1 billion people life is cheap, but I suspect shooting pedestrians and grandma while she is making soup may be a bit out of the norm even in China. Vlad

Forget the target stands, some are so expensive there are some people I would use first. But I would be more concerned about the price of dirt, when you start using inhabited city blocks as your back berm. Vlad

I also have the Rydon but I think the insert is too small as well. I had the lens cut for the proper PD but I can see too much of the insert rims. It doesn't bother me much while shooting but I notice it when I just hang out and with the clear lense I look funny because you can see the small insert. But I look funny anyway so that doesn't bother me. As far as I can tell a lot of the models use the same insert. The RB3 uses a different layout and that might work better for long pupil distance folks. BTW, mine is 65 to give you an idea what they don't work for. Vlad

Accoridng to EO, the electronics are different and as far as I understand the military version is basically filled in with some for of glue, to make it even more shock proof. Plus the military versions have the metal hood which can not be retrofited on the civilian version. I'm actually considering one myself and I think I'm going to go with the military N-type battery non-nightvison model. Vlad

Man, you make it sound like it's real easy to take it out. Or, is it? Figured you just drive the pin out from the top of the slide? Thanks. Oh yeah. Just drive the pin out from the top and the extractor and its spring are free. It is so easy there is no reason not to clean it as part of the normal cleanup. Vlad

Not really. What made the problem hard to deal with is that it would happen at the first mag from a clean gun or maybe one the last stage of a 7 stage match or anywhere in between. I do check my extractor when I clean the gun including taking it out, cleaning it, wipping it dry and putting it back in. With a clean gun, it is hard to see how I would get enough crud and oil in there after 2 rounds. I think it had to do with the load vs the spring ratio, but I'm not sure yet. I'm leaving it the way it is for a bit and see what develops. Vlad

Well, I don't know that I NEED them. The symptoms of my problems were that the top round in the mag was moving foward as if dragged by the slide and given that my problem started as my original mag springs were aproaching their end of life I decided to buy new springs. As I shoot Production with only 10rd in the mags as per USPSA but I use 15rd mags I figured that the extra power springs will provide a bit of extra push without fully loading the mags. However, it may be that with the extrapower mags I get to much upward pressure when I do load them all the way and now I am pushing the top round too hard against the slide and getting it dragged forward anyway. I had one more failure during the second day of the 3gun match but I know that I limped wristed that one as I was shooting it one handed through a low port at a funny angle. I will report back if the gun works well in Production conditions from here forward. Vlad

Just an update, after I established that with a 10lb recoil I have no problems what so ever, I upped my load to around 138pf and replaced the recoil spring with a shockbuff and a 12lb spring from which I cliped a few coils to make it fit. I then shot a 7 stage (6 field courses and 1 classifier) with 0 problems. I cleaned my gun and this weekend I have been using it in a 3gun match but I did have 2 or 3 failures. However these failures though similar with my original one happen within the first couple of rounds in the mag and the mags are filled up with 15 rounds and HARD to load with the extra power mag springs. They push up really hard so I think that may be part of it right now. If the gun works with 10rds loaded I'm happy. Vlad

If you think that the Heinz money are not politically driven and that anything coming from that group is anything but militant lunacy, then this is clearly a issue of belief for you, less then one of fact. It is my policy to not argue religion with people, so I respectfully bow out. Vlad

So on the average the direct taxes are %40 to %50 (state +18.5 federal). How about corporate taxes, transport taxes, and so on? Just because it is not part of the simple breakdown it doesn't mean you are not paying it and it isn't a tax. I'm not quite sure what the source of oil has to do with the rest of this thread. Is it cleaner if comes from Texas or Russia? As for the books you listed I think you need to check your sources on the authors lack of bias. I have no idea when it was the last time someone called McGovern unbiased and Nestle is an out right loon who has made it clear that she is more concerned with telling you what to eat and taxing your "bad choices" while fighting the corporate world, more then with weather what you eat is good for you. Whatever experitse she has, has been clearly overiden by her political drive. As for De Soto, last I check he maintained that what the third world need it as more property rights and more basic capitalism and greed then anything else, so I'm not sure what your point is. Vlad

I shot this earlier this month with my CZ. 86points in 18.73 for 4.59HF. I was not unhappy being that I'm unclassified in production and only a lowly C in L10. Vlad

Well, hold a min. gmw2b and SIG Lady have some valid complains but they have not much to do with the state of nature, and more with financial matters. I'm sorry SIG Lady, but none of your last complains mean anything more then "I need more money" and I can certainly sympathize, but that doesn't mean that the world in trouble. Look folks, the price of gas has NOTHING to do with us running out. We have enough petrolum to continue increasing our consumption at the current rate and still be ok for a hundred more years, and that is in deposits we know about. The price of oil is a geo-political variable, and controled output commodity. Welcome to the monopoly folks. Further, take a look at the price of gas and break it down. Almost 65% of it (last I checked) was TAX, not value. Lets put it in perspective. For $2 you get a gallon of fluid which has been extracted across the world, shipped here, refined, tested, transported again, doubled in price by taxes, and then put into your car, and it moves you, your car, and the crap in it for about 20 miles. Also for $2 I can go to my local convinience store and buy a gallon of water poured in from the hose by local discount destributor, and if I walk 20 miles I proabably need 2 or 3 such bottles on a nice day, nevermind a hot day. Gas is VERY cheap folks, its just not as cheap as it was 10 years ago. You want to rebel against modern man and his smelly technology? Feel free. Here we go, buy a horse. Of course a horse costs about as much as car to maintain and feeding him is more expensive then buying gas. Your car also carries more then one person and unless you buy a convertable, doesn't make you stay out in the rain. And then there is polution. Perhaphs you would like to know how sidewalks came to be? I'll tell ya, they were away to avoid walking through the horse shit. For me, I'll take the cancer rate as caused by polution rather then the typhoid, and cholera rates of years past (those had a lot to do with the horse shit and the like) Look, I'm not saying we should rape nature for no good reason. Raz has a very valid point about some of the chemicals we play with and the lack of care we exhibit with them. I go hiking and I pick up the trash the rest of the people leave behind. But there is a difference between being carefull and screaming "Death to the human race" because the latest coffehouse politics dictate that humans are the evil upon the planet. I too want to live on a 40acre farm and only see my neighbors when I choose. But the facts remain that the world population grows. We can mope on the couch and complain, and call for the death of the humanity, OR we can do something about it (and I don't mean going out and causing the death of half the human population). Maybe your Tolkien like philosphy makes you see technology as the big evil. The truth is that technology is the only saviour we have. Note that I'm refering to us the human race. The planet is fine. it has survived volcanos, plate tectonics, meteor strikes, ice ages, solar cycles, gravitational shifts, and many more but somehow if I stop recycling the planet will crumble? I worry that too many people have a very idilic view of the uncorrupted past. Too many folks complain about air quality without knowing what the mediaval village smelled like. To many people complain about disease without remembering what true pestilence was like over the majority of human time span. Some bemoan the amount of garbage we generate. I say make more, your grand-grand-kids will thank you for being thoughtfull enought to provide them with a easy way to mine resources. Its easy enough to stay home, recycle (even though it is actually worse for the planet), and complain how other are not doing their part. It is a lot harder to go out there and figure out a real solution, and do the hard math of figuring out what the real problem is, and figure out a way to make life better for animals AND people (who are also part of nature) and not just wish that half of them were dead. Now, can someone please help me down from this horse? It is the tallest beast I have ever seen and I really need to take out the recycling before the smoke belching truck comes to pick it up. Anyone? Help! Vlad

I know my scores have gone up as I have gone to a softer load (though my gun has more problems with the soft loads, but that is another thread). How much of that is psychosomastic and how much is real I do not know. Does it matter? I shoot a CZ75B with 147FMJ over 3.1gr of Tightgroup (128PF) or 3.2gr (132PF) or 3.3gr (138PF). The 3.1 is one soft load and the last classifiers I shot where around 70% (not posted on uspsa.org yet so I'm guessing based on scores posted in the other forum category). I am not yet classified in production but I used to shoot solid C scores. I think the soft loads combined with my new glasses helped. The rest of the rig is CR speed belt, 2 Uncle Mike's double mag holders and Cen-Dex Storm for the holster. Actually your test would be interesting. Maybe shooting an El Prez over and over again alternating ammo would be something to try, but I suspect it would screw with your timing so I'm not sure how much I would trust the results. I suspect the mental game and the confidence based on the lesser recoil and blast may make more of a difference then the actual recoil and blast. Vlad

Actually you point out some of my favorites. The price of oil is still dirt cheap. You don't believe me? Do the math or look it up here. The short of it that despite the cries of record highes, the price of oil right now is about 40% of what it was in 1980. Milk? Talk to your senator. The price of milk has to do with price controls and "pork" in the farming industry. Water? Actual drinkable water from your faucet is cheaper then ever before (if you account for inflation). If you want to drink water from France and Fiji, then you are paying a tax for being a snob and a transportation fee. BTW, I highly recommend that everyone watch the Penn and Teller show called Bullshit! and pay attention the water, recycling, and enviormental scare episodes. The rest Raz addressed so I'll leave it alone. Vlad Edited cause I left out some words and diminished the sense/words ratio.

Sorry guys, but this stuff has been going around for years. Maybe you want to go back and look at all the noice about the "Population Bomb" about 20 years ago. According to those expert reports we are all dead and starving right now. Whenever someone write a book/report/paper/article the predicts the end of the world/humanity/nature/eco-system you have to ask yourself a couple of question. 1) Does the author have an interest scaring you? 2) Is his/her interest actually to protect something or to affect social change? 3) How good is the data? The last question is a lot more relevant then you may think. A lot of this studies assume 0 growth in productivity which is insane. For example the population scare crap of the 80's was using food production numbers from the 70's and assuming no change. However by the 90's we were using GPS guided farming equipment and bio-enginered foods and now the world has about 120% of the food need it to feed everyone above standard nutritional requierments (if it get to who needs it is a political issue). For example the US is the number 1 food exporter in the world and the arable land is less the %20 with permanent crops on the less then 0.2%. And most of this land stays unused anyway, by government grants. Almost every tree we cut down, we grow for that purpose. The article about "ecological footprints" forgets that technology reduces that footprint. If you had to farm the land with 18th century tech it would take a lot of land to feed a family. Unfortunatly more then half the world still does, and a good portion of the other half its inching its way through the mid 20th century tech. Taking any statistical number and assuming it will not change for 30 years is the worst kind of "science". Vlad

Isn't it a zero sum game? Did you somehow manage to make matter disapear? No? Then we are not "destroying" natural resources, we are just changing their energy state, and it is quite possible that we may be able to bring them back to the same energy state by the use of other energy sources (and the Sun isn't supposed to pitter out for a while yet, and thats just an example). At least that would be an option when it comes to "consumables" When it comes living things, I think the US is doing pretty good. There is more wildlife around then almost ever before, though pershaps a bit different. Heck I can hardly walk to lunch without stepping on a squirrel, and just the other day a walked 10ft from a deer who was calmly standing in a bush munching away. And this is in the middle of one the most developed, highest population density, and most industrialized areas of the US. And don't get me started on farm animals and the evolutionary lottery they have managed to win. Strip mining the earth clean of its living things as a scare tactic is rather silly as if the demend for it a renewable resource exists, then someone will be making money renewing it. For example 50 years ago there where no wild turkeys where I live, now there are too many because hunter sponsored programs brought them backs. Same with forests and the like. If there is a 20% increase in demend then there will be an increase in supply, or the prices will rise and the demand wil diminish. Dimonds where expensive and now we can make them in a vat. Meat had to be hunted and now we raise it. Gold used to be currency, now it is used an industrial metal. Holly thread drift though! Vlad

I keep on freezing when I walk around with a spray bottle of cleaner, thinking I DQed myself by having my finger on the trigger while moving. And it doesn't even happen all that often as I normaly take my finger off when I am not activily spraying something Vlad

Well that line of thoughts is not new. Humanity needs culling events every now and then, and the plagues, famines, and the like used to do that, and efficienently too as they favored overpopulated area. However modern technology, medicine, and climate control have greatly elimintated the risks. We are still at risk from the trully sever stuff like hemoragic fevers (in fact maybe more so because of increased transportantion) but the old fashioned stuff is not mostly gone. I'm not saying that I want to return to the days of bubonic plague and cholera, but they sure served a funtion and we seemed to have not been able to deal all that well with their abscence. Vlad

Interestingly, Mr. Sunshine and Raz both agree and disagree at the same time. Like Raz, having recently turned 30, I also grew up through the transition between what the original post refers to and the current state of stupid. However the point that I think Raz was trying to make is that the very same generation which the original post tries to glorify is also the very same generation that changed the world away from those values with the help of the 60's and the entrenching of the nanny state. However what I think you are both missing is that it mattered greatly where you were raised. Myself, I grew up on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain yet I can very much relate to original post. Raz grew up in the suburban sprawl of the East Coast Megapolis, when the area was still not one giant town. I suspect that if he grew up in a more urban area he might have been on the other side of the line in the sand, as those areas led the way towards the current state of afairs. And I suspect there are still many spots of the country where the "good life" as described above is still the norm, but I suspect that is directly realated to trhe distance from "civilization". Without getting all anthropologic, the higher the population density, the more laws society needs (or feels that it needs) to deal with all the complex interactions of many folks in way to small of a place. No one cares how many cars you have in your driveway or how late at night you choose to work in your garage with power tools if you live on 50 acres. But try living in the suburbia and those things become problems because they annoy your neighbors, reduces the value of their property and all that. This is not to say that those sort of things couldn't still be resolved the old fashioned way by reasonable folks, but every now and then you find a prick and good folks would good intentions would decide they need a law, as opposed to a good punch in a head. This grows upon itself and we end up with a world in which is almost illegal to walk down the street or make eye contact with your neighbors. My point is that Raz is right in that the same last couple of generations celebrated by the original post are the same generations that have harmed that way of life. And Tightloop is also right in that it wasnt the same individuals within those generations which were both raised with proper values and lessons AND destroyed that way of life. They just happened to live at the same time. Vlad