Welcome to my weekly 2A/firearms fever dream. Today’s verse is from Wilfred Owen. Owen was a British soldier during WWI and was killed in action on 4 November 1918 during the crossing of the Sambre–Oise Canal, exactly one week (almost to the hour) before the signing of the Armistice which ended the war. Owen is regarded by many as the greatest poet of the First World War, known for his verse about the horrors of trench and gas warfare.
The End
After the blast of lightning from the east, The flourish of loud clouds, the Chariot throne, After the drums of time have rolled and ceased And from the bronze west long retreat is blown,
Shall Life renew these bodies? Of a truth All death will he annul, all tears assuage? Or fill these void veins full again with youth And wash with an immortal water age?
When I do ask white Age, he saith not so,— “My head hangs weighted with snow.” And when I hearken to the Earth she saith “My fiery heart sinks aching. It is death. Mine ancient scars shall not be glorified Nor my titanic tears the seas be dried.”
Wilfred Owen 1893 –1918
A gun shop in southwestern Michigan was robbed this past week. Two brothers are accused of targeting a Dunham’s near Benton Harbor, 100 miles east of Chicago. They held a manager at gun-point, abducted him and forced him to give up the code for the burglar alarm. They got away with 123 handguns, all but one of which was recovered. The pair are facing multiple felony counts.
Be strapped or get clapped. Stay frosty friends. . .
Tennessee governor Bill Lee has said ‘red-flag’ legislation is off the table in his state. This is a turnaround from Lee who said he’d support a temporary mental health order of protection in the wake of the Covenant school shooting earlier this year. Those efforts met strong headwinds from the Republican majority in the Tennessee legislature.
An Oregon district court judge has ruled that state’s recent gun control ballot initiative, measure 114, unconstitutional. Harney County Circuit Judge Robert S. Raschio ruled that the ballot measure, which imposed a ban on “large capacity” magazines as well as a new permit-to-purchase requirement for all would-be handgun buyers, violates Oregon’s constitution and cannot be enforced going forward. This will not be the last word on the new restrictions, as a related case has been appealed to the 9th circuit court of appeals.
This meme is from a series that’s been kicking around the internet the past few weeks. If I can find the rest of them, I’ll post them in this space weekly.
I mentioned that I killed a deer in yesterday’s Friday Fun. Today I’ll give you a bit of a post mortem, so to speak. I shot that deer with a 150gr Nosler Partition out of a 7mm-08 over 41 grains of Reloder 15. That combo gets me 2790 fps at the muzzle of my Tikka T-3X. I’ve used that load almost exclusively with that rifle for deer and black bear and it works wonders. Thanksgiving day was no exception. The buck I shot Thursday was about 130 meters from me when I pulled the trigger and it dropped in its tracks. Part of that was shot selection, and part was the caliber/bullet/load/gun combo. Unfortunately, I didn’t recover the bullet, as there was a clean pass through. The vitals were a mess though. the bullet entered the chest cavity a bit high, and destroyed the lungs and clipped the top of the heart. I’ve taken 12 whitetail and 4 black bears with this combo and never had an animal go further than 50 meters. And that folks, is why I called the 7mm-08 the best deer cartridge.
Gun owners in Maryland got some good news this week. In a 2-1 decision, the 4th Circuit ruled that states handgun purchase scheme unconstitutional. Judge Julius N. Richardson penned the opinion, going so far as to point out that the state knew it never had the support of a historical precedent. “The challenged law restricts the ability of law-abiding adult citizens to possess handguns, and the state has not presented a historical analogue that justifies its restrictions; indeed, it has seemingly admitted that it couldn’t find one, Under the Supreme Court’s new burdensome test for these claims, Maryland’s law thus fails, and we must enjoin its enforcement.”
Today’s gun porn comes to us in the form of a drilling. The name is German, Drei being the word for three. Thus we have a German three barreled combo gun. From the auction description:
GERMAN DRILLING SHOTGUN RIFLE COMBINATION, ANT. HAYDT, AICHACH, 16 GA. AND 9.3X57, EARLY 20TH C., L 28″ BARRELS, SN S 15912 Elaborately engraved receiver with scrolling floral designs and a fox, hunting dog and deer. Carved walnut stock with a relief hunter behind the cheek rest. External hammers side by side 16 ga. under lever shotgun barrels with German proof marks on the undersides. One rifle barrel also bearing German proof marks. Marked at the rib ‘Ant Haydt Aichach’. Tang mounted lever flips up a rear sight. Engraved butt stock opens to a bullet storage compartment. A work of art and functional firearm. Provenance: Property of a Rochester Hills, MI private collector.
