Neanderpundit

Tam distills all the rules of gun behavior down to one: Assume you’re an idiot.

This works for me, because it’s something I already do.

Today I climbed on top of a machine about thirty feet tall. If I had been thirty feet up a rock cliff, (Which I have done, in my skinnier days) I would have been scared shitless; the fact was I wore safety equipment against falling and though I was in some precarious positions i was never in any real danger.

The inherent danger of firearms makes it important that you follow safe handling rules, and frankly, I strive to be ever more anal retentive about safery- but I have to say, I like Tam’s rule.

I tend to apply it to almost everything I do, because I do a lot of other things that are inherently dangerous. Bluing guns is basically playing with five gallons of boiling lye. All woodworking tools are potentially lethal- if you got your hand in a Lauderdale chop saw, for instance, you would bleed out before it let go of you. Metalworking machinery- don’t get me started. Welding, cutting steel, forging… Just about everything I do offers me an assortment of amusing and varied ways of snuffing it, or at least causing myself serious bodily harm.

So I assume the next move I make is the one that’s gonna get me killed. As often as not, even being careful, I need to be able to get the hell out of the way quickly. And all this is amplified by the fact that I have SEEN the injuries of which I speak; there are a number of friends who I’ve buried or visited in hospital after having been harmed by industrial machinery. And if you want to see gruesome injury, go to a farm.

Good advice, that. Assume you’re an idiot. You won’t be often wrong.

that the computer no longer recognizes my fingerprints.

THe print scanner on my computer is set up to scan my right index, right middle, right ring, and left ring, and last night after trying to log in for five minutes I finally gave up and typed my name in. I looked at the scans, and realized it was the new scars that prevented the computer from recognizing me.

I’ll have to rescan and have it get used to me all over again.

Are not designed with beauty in mind, for the most part, though many of them are indeed beautiful, if only by accident. My M1 Carbine is prettier than most, if only by virtue of having a great stock. The lines of a 1911 Swiss rifle, or a Swedish Mauser, or a Springfield 1873 Trapdoor. All of these rifles have a beauty, imparted by their designers, that has transcended their original purpose.

It would be easy to say they contain a soul that more modern firearms do not, but I don’t think that is the case, they are weapons of war designed to be the best at their respective time. If there was an easily moldable material known as Flimflamulite that was readily available at the beginning of firearms manufacture, all stocks would be made of it, and firearms with wood would be looked upon as weird, or “Steampunk”. No, it’s an utter accident that guns had wood stocks, and a lot now don’t, because there are materials other than wood available, and they work very well.

Still:

“This weapon of iron and wood” sort of loses something when you say “This weapon of plastic and aluminum”.

Suppose it gets the job done, but I still like my M1 Carbine.