After tightening it down, you then have to carefully adjust the scope until the bullet strikes where the crosshairs meet.

The reason why I emphasized how tightly the scope has to be clamped down is because it is a precision instrument.  Any movement of the scope, any slight misalignment of the rings or the sight itself, and the bullet will no longer strike where you expect it.

Red dot sights are very similar.  First the sight has to be firmly attached to the weapon.

After the attaching comes the adjusting, just like with something that uses crosshairs.  People generally use red dot sights for more up close and personal situations, so they tend to use a bit less finesse when they sight it in.  But, even so, just slapping it on the gun and then trying to use it is a recipe for failure.  If you don’t make sure it is set up correctly, the bullet won’t land where you want.

A company has been sending me unsolicited emails the past few weeks, announcing that they are accepting pre-orders for a new firearm accessory.  Called an Inteliscope, it seems to be nothing more than a mount so you can attach your smart phone to a rifle.

An app for the phone will activate the camera, and paint a very large red circle on the screen.

The idea is that the bullet will strike somewhere inside of that huge red circle.  Maybe.  If you are lucky.  I suppose.

When you are done shooting, the phone is easily removed so that it can be employed for the purpose for which it was originally designed.

The manufacturer claims that the mount was originally used to train police, which I find a bit odd.  (Impart and hone useful skills how, exactly?)  They also claim that the mount-and-phone makes an ideal toy, which is certainly something I can get behind.  Besides using a mount such as this to record paintball exploits for replay later, this YouTube video details how the device is useful when attached to extremely large toy guns that shoot foam darts.

But something that would actually be useful in a defensive situation?  Because, after all, the makers of this cell phone mount seem to be making that very claim.

I wracked my brains for several days.  It seems obvious that it would in no way be a help in defending lives, if for no other reason that the margin of accuracy error represented by that huge red circle would make the thing worthless.  But then a memory slowly slurped its way up from the fetid and dark recesses of my mind.

Decades ago, I was browsing through the late night cable offerings in order to relieve my boredom.  A snippet of a horror film caught my attention for a few seconds.

A young man, chased by an unstoppable machete-wielding zombie, breaks his eyeglasses.

So near sighted as to be virtually blind, the young man manages to gain a few extra minutes of life by picking up a video camera.  He peers through the electronic viewfinder, and uses the focusing buttons to sharpen up the image enough to see clearly.

So that is the sole serious and practical role that I can imagine for this phone mount.  If someone is extremely myopic, and cannot see very far past the end of their nose, then using this device will at least be able to use their defensive carbine in the case of a home invasion.

Yeah, I know.  It is an extreme stretch.  Why not simply keep a pair of eyeglasses on the nightstand, and slip them on before reaching for their favorite home defense firearm?  But it is the only thing I can think of.

If the makers of this product find my opinion of how worthless it is to be offensive, the only thing I can say is that I would have never heard of it if they had not seen fit to send along emails to my personal account.

I do often count those who hail from third world countries as my neighbors, and it isn’t impossible that someone in the apartment complex brought some visitors with them when they entered the US.  If so, considering the amount of blood coating the pavement, they were in need of immediate medical attention!

But something just wasn’t right.  The hookworms in front of me were awfully big, much larger than the skinny strings that are the usual size for the beasts.  Another concern was that the blood loss must have been considerable, so much that I doubt anyone could have walked away after ejecting the mass.  As there was no body supine in the grass, then the poor soul must have been carted away by ambulance.  If that had happened, though, then why would someone leave the worms alone instead of cleaning them up?

I ripped a branch from a nearby bush and stirred the loathsome stew, looking to see if any of the worms writhed at the woody touch.  They were dead, lifeless, quiet.  And then the smell drifted into my nose and I realized that the puzzling pile was not made from blood and hookworms, but onion rings and ketchup!

Someone had stuffed themselves to bursting with the deep fried delicacy, only to sick it up a few yards from my front door.  I had not actually detected the odor of the food, but instead was hit full bore in the face with the cloyingly sweet scent of the liter or so of fortified wine they had used to wash it all down.

How was the smell recognized if I don’t imbibe myself?  I had to deal with drunks aplenty when working for the police.  The odor of bumwine that has come back up is extremely familiar.

I slung the stick back towards the parent bush, and hurried inside to leash up the dogs for their walk.  They reacted as I expected when walking past the frothy and alcohol infused mass.  “Onion rings, and all for me!”

I kept a tight rein, though, and did not let them feast.  Besides the fact that their breath would have smelled even worse, they also could have become drunk from the leftover booze.  And who would want to deal with a pit bull suffering from a hangover?

This, dear readers, is yet another chapter in my glamorous and thrilling life!

His right hand sports a ring with a skull emblem.  Villains who receive a right cross to the jaw from The Phantom will forever be marked with a skull shaped scar, a visible reminder to all that they are an evil criminal.

This sprang to mind when I ran across the following on my Internet wanderings.

Brass knuckles that sport three little skulls along the striking edge.  Anyone unlucky enough to be on the receiving end would look like The Phantom really, really didn’t like them!

How much would such shiny engines of destruction cost?  Surprisingly little, which indicates to me that they are rather shoddily made.

As has been pointed out by knirirr and others, there are some questions as to the effectiveness of knuckledusters as hand-to-hand defensive devices.  There certainly are questions as to their legality, as ownership and carrying of brass knuckles is banned in various municipalities, states, and even entire countries.  Don’t even think of ordering unless you are sure that you will not be breaking any laws!

So far as I am concerned, I have no intention of using the devices for their intended purpose.  Purchasing a pair would be nothing more than a waste of money.

But they are so gaudy, so gauche, so irredeemably flashy like a twenty dollar whore.  They draw the eye like a dangling key ring draws the attention of a toddler!  Added to this is the allure that they are, indeed, banned by law in so many places.  I desire to own a set just in case they are made illegal in my neck of the woods some time in the future.

A purely American response, I am sure.

Aaron Spuler has, once again, provided a great service for those involved in the shooting sports.  He has collected information and links to the major contests where gear and guns are given away by manufacturers and retailers.

Many will enter, and few will win.  Don’t be disappointed or discouraged if you don’t hit the jackpot.  Just keep checking back on Aaron’s blog every month for the latest list, and try again.

But they also go one step further, as they also provide free shotguns to their students.

I approve, of course.  The usual suspects are nay-saying the program.  They claim that putting more guns in the hands of peaceful, law abiding citizens will increase crime instead of causing it to decrease.  They are wrong, of course.

I never did that myself, the providing guns bit.  Free training, free ammo, sure.  But there never was enough cash in the kitty to help everyone who asked for my assistance.  There would have been an even larger number of people to turn away if I purchased forearms for my students.

Besides, the liability concerns are significant.  No matter how many waivers and contracts I would have them sign, there would certainly be the very real danger that some criminal, or the family of a deceased criminal, would sue me the moment the n’er-do-well was stopped by one of my students wielding a gun that had previously belonged to myself.

I have little doubt that Texas is a very different legal environment than my home state of Ohio.  But, even so, I hope they have some very deep pockets.

Turned out to be a criminal hoax, a scam thought up in order to extort money from the fast food chain through a frivolous lawsuit.   It seems that the finger had been frozen for most of a year, stored in the freezer after an industrial accident was suffered by a friend of the family.  The idea was that the payout from the lawsuit would be shared by all when the money was awarded.

Ms. Ayala was sentenced to 4 years in prison for a bevy of felony charges, one of which was giving a false police report.  I have no idea how much time she actually served, if any.

Now Ms. Ayala is back in the news.  Her son shot himself in the ankle, and she lied to the police yet again.  This time she said some mysterious men had done the fell deed.

Why would she lie about this?  Her son is a convicted felon, and as such is barred by Federal law from possessing firearms or ammunition.  Claim someone else had pulled the trigger, and maybe her offspring would be able to avoid more jail time.

Didn’t work, obviously.

Ms. Ayala pleaded no contest to more felony charges this time around.  She is facing 2 more years behind bars, although it is not known how much time she will actually spend in jail.

This is a clear case of someone who really needs to learn to shut the hell up.

Okay, so some drug dealers were using the home of some random schmuck as a dead drop.  The presence of the dog sitter indicates that the regular residents were not around much lately.  Bad luck for the wannabee drug kingpins that there were people about when the package was delivered, and the contents of the shipment was discovered before they could spirit it away all unseen.

The reaction of the random schmuck who was being used as a cutout is over the top, though.  He turned the leafy drugs over to the cops, which is certainly something I would have done.  But then he took his fiancee and abandoned his house for a time, which is certainly something I would not have done!

Why run away?  Seems he is worried about grumpy drug dealers showing up at his door, upset that the weed is in the possession of the police!

The criminals have no chance at selling the drugs now that the stash was turned over to the authorities, so there is no profit motive for them to visit mayhem upon our quaking protagonist.  And the main reason why they send drug laden boxes to vacant homes, to remain anonymous and unknown, would be for naught if they were seen by the spineless dog owner and his fiancee.  (Or the neighbors, or the mail carrier, or if the license of their car was caught on a surveillance camera, etc etc.)  If the drug dealers staged a home invasion to exact revenge, they would have to murder everyone they found in the house or passed on the street to make sure that their identities remained a mystery.

Isn’t murder a much greater crime than receiving 11 pounds of pot, and one with punishment that is extremely dire?  I’m not a lawyer, but it is rumored to be such.

So this guy is worried that the criminals will hurt or kill him and his lady love, for some drugs that they will never be able to recover, with a much greater chance of being caught by the police, and with a greater jail sentence waiting for them if they are apprehended?  Something tells me he doesn’t have much to worry about.

If this scaredy-cat sad sack had his wits about him, he would have looked up and down the street when he first collected the box from his porch.  There is little doubt in my mind that a  ne’er-do-well was keeping an eye on the goods, waiting until the coast was clear before collecting the prize.  All he would have had to do was write down the license number of any car that started up and drove away when he picked up the box, or a car that had someone just sitting it it with no apparent purpose, and he would have given the police something solid to go on.

A bombing campaign by NATO had turned up some alarming facts.  It seems that the US military was so advanced, so far ahead most of the rest of the world, that allied forces from other countries had a very hard time working with the Americans.

The biggest problem seemed to be with communications.  The US had invested a great deal in computerized aids for air traffic control, as well as simply speaking to the pilot.  Although this was hardly ground breaking technology by the time 1995 rolled around, the majority of Western countries had simply never bothered to spend the money.

How was it resolved?  If memory serves (and it might very well be faulty), the US paid to upgrade NATO communication systems to the new standard.

Why am I mentioning this old news?  Because I just saw some brand new news in a UK publication.  According to the UK Telegraph, defense budget cuts are eroding the ability for UK forces to operate alongside the US military.

This isn’t anything we haven’t seen before.

“Chicago Shootings:  6 Dead As Guns, Holiday Weekend Make Deadly Mix”

Six dead, 11 wounded in a city with the most draconian gun control laws in the United States.  And the holiday weekend still has today!  It isn’t over yet!

Something is clearly not working here.  What was promised is not coming to pass.

(Click on the picture to view the largest size.)

The handgun appears to be a 1911 style firearm.  Judging by the dimensions of the barrel, it would appear that the caliber should be around .45 inches.

And yet we can see another, much smaller hole inside the barrel.  This opening also seems to be a part of the frame itself, with the barrel being nothing more than a bit of ornamental bling glued on to the gun.

Can anyone say what is going on here?