Tag: CFDA

The Best Option for Dry Fire Practice: Having a great relationship with your firearm

Not to take anything away from one of the most incredible people in the world, Tommie, the owner of Premier Shooting in West Chester, but I am excited to report on a great new dry fire technology that many people may not know about. I mention Tommie because she told me about her exciting new dry fire range at Premier, the latest craze in shooting, for a good reason. Much of the time, dry firing involves a laser in the gun instead of a bullet and can be measured against a target by some electronic method. It’s becoming more common to use a smartphone for dry fire action. More sophisticated dry fire can be utilized like they do at Premier. There is still nothing like live fire with a real bullet striking a real target. But dry fire can be a great way to stay proficient with a gun without all the expense of firing live ammunition and can be every bit as enjoyable. Well, I have found that practicing for my Cowboy Fast Draw events a wonderful invention sold by the Cowboy Fast Draw Association called the Gunslinger Mark IV laser targeting system that I finally treated myself to, and I’m in love with it. It has been around in the fast draw community for several years but has only recently been perfected to a near-perfect system, as shown in the video above. I can’t think of anything better than this as a dry fire option for people looking for a home dry fire solution to their shooting needs. Practicing with one of these dry fire systems makes the range time much more valuable. I’m certainly not saying gun enthusiasts should replace range time for dry fire time. But that dry fire will make that range time much more useful. 

As I say all the time, especially these days, it’s essential to have a relationship with our Constitution, specifically the Second Amendment. Some people lose touch with the Constitution because they live in areas where they get used to concessions to utilize Constitutional rights in favor of collective need. For instance, in urban areas where it’s almost impossible to shoot every day in the backyard, it’s hard to maintain a relationship with your favorite firearms because they stay locked up all the time. One of the things that I like most about Cowboy Fast Draw is that it allows me to have a wax firing range in my workshop that makes it possible to shoot every day. When I want to fire real lead bullets, I go down and see Tommie at the range. But it’s not possible to shoot every day for me, because of time really, so having a range in my home makes it that much more practical. For many years now, I have enjoyed going into my shop and shooting at my strike plate range. But, for me, that wasn’t enough. I want to shoot while sitting in my reading chair and watching movies and football games. So I had been looking to get one of these Mark IV laser targeting systems, which essentially does everything my strike plate range does, except fire actual primers. Firing live fire rounds in the house and having wax bullets explode all over the living room just was not possible. But with a laser, I can shoot all day and all night long, as much as I want without the expense of using up rounds of ammunition. 

This particular unit is unique because it was invented by the Cowboy Fast Draw Association for the specific problem of fast fire and the need to register the hit in thousands of a second. Much dry fire activity is specific to just hitting a target and seeing how you do from shot to shot. The added element of speed is something special. Whenever the laser hits within the 8″ circle on the target system, it picks up a hit and measures it within fractions of a second. The light blinks three times in practice mode to let you know that your shot is coming. Then the light comes on solid and counts the time it takes you to hit the target. I not only use my target system for fast draw for all types of target shooting. I shoot from 30′, 21′, 15′ down to 5′ like I did in the video, up close so that the camera could pick up the gun and the hit in the same frame and still see the indicator. Even better, the unit is free from an internet connection, so nobody is snooping around on you while you are target shooting. It’s free of internet control, leaving target shooting the personal relationship between you and the practice and nobody else. Other types of dry fire where the smartphone is involved are giving vast amounts of information on all of us to some data collection company. So while convenient and neat, there is a cost to the technology. The Cowboy Fast Draw Association people make the Mark IV advance the sport. So, it’s a trusted source of shooting applications that makes using the Mark IV a much better experience. 

Best yet, the Mark IV Laser system allows shooters to have that daily relationship with their guns. It takes away a lot of the taboo that politics has placed on guns over the years and will enable users to use their firearms more for sport than just self-defense. Practicing with dry fire lasers has the feel of shooting baskets in the driveway. Shooting is a sport just like basketball or football—even golf. But until dry fire technology evolved to the level it is now; it wasn’t possible to practice with firearms virtually anywhere at any time of day. With the Mark IV, as I showed I was using inside my RV, shooting can be done anywhere. Even in a McDonald’s parking lot in Vail, Colorado, while you are waiting for the grandkids to get a Happy Meal and use the restroom. And the system is so reliable that it works perfectly every time. Once you have one of the Laser Training Cartridges that ignite the laser and allow the shot to fire down the barrel, you can shoot all the time, with the only cost being batteries for the cartridge. The total cost of the whole setup is around $800 for the laser and the targeting system and can all be purchased from CowboyFastDraw.com. I buy from them all the time, and they are always good about delivering high-quality items. I even recently ordered from them on New Year’s Eve, and they fulfilled the order that very night. They are like dealing with the way America used to be, always attentive to the customer’s needs, and competent. So overall, I can’t recommend one of these dry fire units more for all the reasons I mentioned and more. The best thing about it is that it takes shooting into the realm of every day and allows shooters to become much more proficient with copious amounts of practice than they could get otherwise. And making better shooters with much more handling only helps everything, from Constitutional consideration to the advancement of shooting sports, because more people can now participate. There is no downside, and for shooters everywhere, knowing that something like this is out there is something that could be life-changing in a good way.

Rich Hoffman

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Why to Love the NRA: Give Wayne LaPierre the credit to stand tall when everyone else failed

If you really want to piss me off then drag me into the insanity of what I would consider very stupid people desiring to engage me into their bad decisions. I’m pretty open-minded about what people do with themselves and how they live—that is, until they try to make me a part of it. Then I have no tolerance, because if there is one thing I truly desire in life it is to live well, and the way I want to. My life is not the possession of anyone else. Its mine, and I love it. Honestly, I don’t need a firearm to protect myself. But if someone threatens my life they’d be an idiot to think they are going to walk away from that engagement alive whether or not I happen to be carrying a gun or not at that moment, because I know how to protect myself and the people I care about. However, a gun is the most efficient way to equalize a conflict with someone with ill intentions, and these days due to many social breakdowns, that threat is greater than its ever been before. Even in a week when President Trump has let us down with a move to the left on gun control and I find myself at odds with people like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity on the issue, it was so nice to hear Wayne LaPierre speak on behalf of the NRA at CPAC.

My membership to the National Rifle Association is one of my most treasured memberships. I am proud every time I see the words, “NRA.” I am equally proud of my membership to the Cowboy Fast Draw Association, which is an NRA affiliate. Those are some of the finest people I know and not to brag too much, but I know a lot of people. I’m a business professional that does work with many hundreds of people all over the world so I’m not living in some cave in Montana when I say how much I love the NRA. It’s not some wacko group of right-wingers like the gun hating press would like you to believe, they are good people who want what America has always been about, the pursuit of personal freedom—and the support of guns is the most efficient way to protect that freedom.

The gun haters want, and expect that society at large has all the answers that an individual may need in their life, which is pure fantasy on their behalf. If you’ve ever been to Europe or get a chance to go you will quickly get an idea what left leaning people want to do to the United States, they’d like to replicate European culture. But what Europe has is a deep history that is at the heart of everything that they are—they are a people always looking back at what they were, not what they want to be. America is different, it is a country always looking forward at what individualized potential might drive forward culturally. And to facilitate that optimism, individual freedom is encouraged and treasured, whereas in Europe its frowned upon. Even on the topless beaches of France and Spain where women declaring themselves liberated and equal to men sunbathing with their breasts exposed we see the basic foundations of collectivism, because the women are cheapened into a collective entity as opposed to a sanctimonious specimen of a treasured loved one holding her treasures for the father of her children in the most idealistic individual fantasy of love, honor, and privacy. In America we don’t necessarily like to share ourselves with the world as we guard against the unwanted appraisal of others as innovation pours forth from our minds hoping to ride the waves of capitalism to a better life, and we protect that life from encroachment by parasitic personalities with a gun.

If we look just at the case of the many institutional failures of the Parkland assassin Nikolas Cruz, who was rejected by his school, kicked out so to preserve the sanctimonious public school. Over a seven-year period the local sheriff’s office visited Nikolas Cruz 39 times due to concern over the kid’s behavior. 39 times! The FBI directly had tips on Cruz and failed to act on those observations. When the shooting happened a hired gun that was supposed to be protecting Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School by the name of Scot Patterson took up a defensive position outside the school never engaging the active shooter for over four minutes. Patterson resigned in the aftermath in disgrace. His failure cost 17 lives. But then there was the tape delay on the security cameras and the slap stick cops’ scenario of the police radios trying to figure out what was happening. While Cruz had already killed his targets and was having a sit-down meal at a local McDonald’s, the police were viewing videotape that they thought was live of the shooter moving from the third floor of the school to the second, only to be embarrassed by the revelation that they were watching something in past tense. The killer had already come and gone. It was only by luck that one alert officer an hour later thought correctly that he had spotted Cruz apprehending the killer. It wasn’t just one failure that caused the death of 17 people and wounding many others, it was several—really a failure at every level of the supposed safety nets that were supposed to be in place. Yet the anger leveled at Marco Rubio at a CNN anti-gun forum was astonishingly brutal as everyone there advocated for more of that kind of mess. More laws, more police, more mental health screening, more, more, more institutional control mechanisms when we just observed that even the ones in place had failed at every level.

When it really comes down to it we are all we really have. We must guard our own lives with responsible action and through that effort, others around us are saved. The only real solution to most of our modern problems is an improvement of individual action. If everyone took care of themselves and declared responsibility for their lives, then a lot of these problems would go away. We don’t have a gun problem in America, we have a responsibility problem. And the reason things are so dangerous these days is that responsible people, good people are at risk from the many lunatics out there especially on the political left who are starving for attention and salvation created from their rotten lives and they want what good people have. Guns have always provided a barrier of protection for individuals against those who would seek to take from them what they personally possess—even their very lives. At the most fundamental level, our lives are our most treasured possessions, and the destitute of our species do not have any collective right to the merits of our lives. They don’t get to walk across our yards unimpeded, they don’t get to drive our cars. They don’t get to molest our children, our wives, even our mail boxes without the threat of engagement—because all those things are products of our individualized lives and the hours of hard work it took to build such a life. The world of our institutions may have good intentions, but as we have seen, when lazy minds inhabit those institutions from the FBI to the local police, to the ultimate failure of Scot Patterson we can’t trust them and there has never really been any evidence that we ever could.

Every gun grabber who ultimately wants to confiscate all our firearms in America and send us to the league of nations around the world drowning in socialism and repressed governments perpetually looking into their own pasts—to their better days—expect us to trust completely the many intuitions that failed in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School case. They have president Trump’s ear about stricter background checks, but what about the crazy ex-wife who wants to burn her husband with false accusations of misconduct because she is jealous of the next woman? Would that husband pass a background check if there is a pending case with a traumatized former wife? What if she is really jealous of his guns and she makes up some story of abuse, and acting on that the police come and take all his guns away? Is that fair to the man who did nothing but decide he didn’t want to be married to the woman? And those are just a few examples that most people can relate to in some way or another—there are countless ways that someone’s background check could be corrupted to lose their Second Amendment rights, and that is what the NRA is fighting against. The NRA stands against all those left leaning encroachments because ultimately the gun is there to protect individuals from a world that has a tendency to fail under institutional control. Our best hopes for the future are always in the conduct of individuals. So even if a man makes a mistake and runs off with a girl half his age and the ex-wife is upset about it, he shouldn’t lose his right to possess firearms. He may need that right for other things going on in his life—because all life has value, and deserves to be protected from the aggressions of others who might have intentions of dark design.

It is for all these reasons that I love the NRA so much and because of this aggression against the gun culture of our nation, I feel compelled to make more gun purchases, to support the industry. Gun makers, sellers, and the people who buy them are some of the best people you will find anywhere in the world. Not very long ago I was on the balcony of a very rich man in Japan overlooking some of the most expensive real estate in the world. This was a guy at the top of the world and could literally have anything he wanted, but do you know what he desired? He was in love with images of a Montana rancher who had a big pickup truck and a shotgun in the back window, and even a concealed carry gun under a warm jacket overlooking a vast plain of endless horizon. The NRA protects that very specific lifestyle from the jealous hordes around the world who secretly want what America has, and will do anything to get a piece of our lives. And the only real protection we have is ourselves and the guns we carry. Because as much as we’d like, we can’t trust anything else.

Rich Hoffman

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The Morality of being a Gunfighter: How guns make America a more intellectual culture–and improve lives

From the anti-gun people, especially after the Vegas mass shooting there has been this constant term they use “you don’t need so many guns.” They say it as if they were the authority on living and had the complications of life all figured out as a superior philosophic matrix. Yet I look at their lives, the losers on Saturday Night Live, the Hollywood industry, the open criminals like Hillary Clinton and the DNC workers of 2016 and I must conclude, who on earth would take advice from people so messed up? Who are these people to give us advice about anything? I wouldn’t trust them to tell me where the corner deli is in New York city that could sell me a pack of gum, let alone advise me on how many guns I should have or even why I should have them. Even worse, their declarations that guns should be made illegal in any form indicates a complete lack of respect for the kind of living we have in the Midwest of the country—essentially the Red State middle of the entire country. Essentially only the coastal regions have these liberal losers driving policy. Guns for everyone else is a fact of life. They are certainly a big part of my life. Here is video of what I do almost every night for exercise. It’s how I practice Cowboy Fast Draw in my private range. The goal of this activity is to draw and fire my Ruger Vaquero as fast as I can once the target light blinks on solid. Once the target blinks three times it lets me know that the next time the light comes on that I need to draw and fire. My time is registered on a display on my workbench. It’s a fun activity that really sharpens your mind, and I enjoy doing it almost every night at least for 15 to 30 minutes.

When people say that we don’t need guns, well I’d say, we don’t need footballs, golf clubs, or baseball bats either. All of those things could be used as weapons if people were so inclined, but in a civil society nobody would even think of such a problem. Most of the people I know have guns and nobody goes out on a killing spree after dinner. When shooting in my private range I never think to use those guns on other people. Always my use of them is to increase my speed and accuracy in shooting a target under conditions of duress. The process of doing that helps me in other parts of my life. Now to the pot smoking loser on Saturday Night Live who does things during the after party that they’d never want to tell their parents, I wouldn’t expect them to understand my love of guns. Because they are still looking for mechanisms in life to help them manage all the pressures they experience. I look at their lives where they smoke, drink or have too much sex and would say that those are all factors contributing to the problems they have in their lives. I don’t have those problems. Instead I shoot and spend time in my range working out solutions to very complicated problems. Shooting helps me and many others live a better life.

If you visit England presently you will find everywhere some visage to their Norman period where knights were part of their national identity. It doesn’t mean that people want to go cut off the heads of their enemies when they hold a wooden sword from a gift shop in London—it’s just means that people are paying regional respect to an order which built the identity of the nation. If you go to Japan you find much of the same, everywhere is some visage to the samurai culture and behind that is the constant symbol of the sword. Even going to a hibachi grill to get some very expensive Kobe Beef you will see the cooks emulating the ghosts of their samurai heritage as they prepare food in front of you. It is very important to them and is a huge part of their national character. You don’t see radical leftists attacking these countries for their history of violence and the modern respect that is still given regarding the weapons which forged their nations.

In America it is the cowboy which created the nature of our country. And behind the cowboy was the six-gun and the mythology of dueling. The reason that dueling is still such a romantic idea in the period of the Old West is that it is respectable that people would face off against each other to settle a value judgment. To have a value that people were willing to defend to the death is actually a noble idea—especially in these complicated days of leftist interpretation into the events that leave people always feeling empty. In that emptiness they seek to fill the void with bad habits—such as the smoking, drinking and over charged sex. Regarding sex, if you spend more than a half hour per day thinking about sex—you are wasting your time. When you are young and always looking for some flower to pollinate, maybe you spend more time thinking about it if you are a male. If you are a female you likely won’t because you are in charge of the sexual experience and can decide when and how often, but nobody should spend more time on average than a half an hour per day. Anything more is an obsessive activity that degrades the experience. People who do think about it more than that allotted time need to develop more hobbies.

I view shooting in America as a deeply philosophic experience. The political left has successfully painted an opposite picture, that gun users in America are a bunch of dumb hillbillies who can’t speak in words longer than two syllables. Yet the opposite is true, liberals who criticize the gun culture are the dumb people, they are ones who can’t change their own oil, or fix a leak in their sink. They are the ones who fall apart whenever there is a death in the family or run to substance abuse when they feel insecure about something. People I know who shoot guns, especially people in the Cowboy Fast Draw Association, or in SASS are some of the nicest and well-rounded people I’ve met anywhere—including in those European and Asian countries that people think have so much “rich” culture. I would argue that in America we have our own rich culture built on westward expansion—which was a very “moral” enterprise in the scope of history—and guns were the backbone of that culture that we should all be proud of.

In the video the times I was recording were in the .450 range. I’m not happy with those numbers and the purpose of the slow motion is to show myself that I need to fire the gun much sooner out of the holster instead of pushing the gun forward. That is what makes that kind of training so satisfying, and worth pursuing. Shown in regular speed everything happens very fast. But when you slow it down, I can see where I need to improve, and that requires training my mind to think that much faster. In applying those techniques to my life that I learn at the gun range, it makes me a much better person in my day to day life. I think much faster when there are problems to solve and my thinking is much more accurate. After all, the brain doesn’t know if you are trying to solve the problem of hitting a target or trying to solve global economic problems. It sees everything in context, so by practicing something productive like “shooting” it helps the mind solve other problems not directly connected to the shooting sports. That is why shooting is a good thing for all Americans to do, and if more people did, especially the coastal liberals, they’d find that they could lead better lives and would have a lot fewer problems.

I’m not personally going to allow people who are broken intellectually—which most liberals are—and have them beat on gun owners anymore. My experience with guns is a very positive one and violence has nothing to do with it. Guns may have been invented to expedite the experience of death, or make people more efficient in killing others—but as tools of intellect, they are more useful in making a respectful class of people who think independently, and can manage their affairs in a superior way over their liberal protestors. I see nothing negative about my experiences on my private gun range in the sport of Cowboy Fast Draw. The practice of it makes me more efficient as a person and gives me an outlet for the stresses in my life that shooting baskets in my driveway or playing golf don’t quite reach. People who speak against guns just don’t understand why they are important culturally, and there are likely a lot of reasons for it. Maybe they had crappy parents. Maybe they didn’t have grandparents around to teach them important lessons when they were younger. Maybe they are just losers in life. Whatever it is, it’s not the problem of gun owners to bend their habits to these broken people. Broken people are not allowed to create the standard for what America is. And gun owners are not the broken people. It’s the people who criticize that culture who are in true need of a different way of thinking. A trip to the gun range would help a lot of them. But for the rest, they need a lot more.

I am proud to call myself a gunfighter. For me it’s no different from training to be a boxer, a martial artist or an MMA fighter—it’s a sport. And becoming good at that sport has a carryover effect into other things in life that are more important to good living. That is why the anti-gun people are so wrong on the gun culture in America. They don’t like America even though they try to sell their ideas by saying they are part of our culture—they clearly aren’t and seek to change it in everything they do. For them it starts by pissing on a bar wall outside drunk off their young asses and it ends with them becoming radical progressives in congress, or heads of major networks. They are all equally wrong. To speak against guns is to speak against the concept and intentions of American life. Part of that life is displayed in the sports we use to articulate our culture. Being a gunfighter isn’t the same as being a killer. These days it means a person is building foundation skills to become more precise and quicker in their life—and it’s a personal challenge worth the undertaking. It’s certainly not something to be outlawed because the more sensitive and less intellectual people on the west and east coasts are afraid of guns. What they really fear is what they might learn about themselves if they were to embark on a journey where they had to become better at something and challenge themselves. What they might learn in that process is what they are running from—and that is all the reason why guns should be more prevalent in America, instead of less.

Rich Hoffman
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The “Train Song” by Federale: Devil’s Tower and the legend of 19,000 foot trees

As I’ve been reporting, my son-in-law is on the final leg of a massive motorcycle ride across the United States that he started weeks ago.  Now he’s in South Dakota after snapping the picture of Devil’s Tower in Wyoming shown here which had my mind racing.  Devil’s Tower, some are saying these days is actually a giant petrified tree, a tree that used to be 19,000 feet tall.  While that might sound outstanding, and even outlandish, given what we are learning about our own hidden history its worth considering.  After all, we are talking about an area that Paul Bunyan’s legends started.  Who knows, but what we do know is that it’s a cool place and I’m very happy my son-in-law is finally in this part of the country.  It is the heart of the Old West and is an exciting place on earth full of legends, mystery and the culmination of human achievement unleashed for the first time.

Thank God for Pandora because I spend a lot of time in my garage these days shooting my Ruger Vaquero and practicing Cowboy Fast Draw, and my workout music is typically Ennio Morricone who is best known for his spaghetti western tracks conducted in the 60s. I have several reasons for getting involved with Cowboy Fast Draw—which has been quite a challenge for me because it has required a psychological shift.  The skills needed for it are much different from those for which I am known for, which is bullwhip artistry.  There are very few people in the world that can put out a candle with a bullwhip and I’m one of them, so it would have been easy to just sit on that skill and use it as a novelty item into larger opportunities.  But I was never quite satisfied with that.  I always wanted to become very fast and proficient with a classic Old West six-gun without really having a strong sense of why.  I’ve thought about it a lot and the articulation is pretty complex, and seeing my son-in-law’s photos from the Devil Tower region hit on something I have been thinking hard about for about 25 years.  Then I heard one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard on Pandora while I was reloading my Vaquero in my garage shooting range between practice sessions.  It was the “Train Song” by the rock group Federale.  Obviously they were very inspired by Ennio Morricone and it was refreshing to hear new, fresh music done in that style.  But that had been at the core of my thinking for a long time—why was that music so special to me and what was it about that South Dakota and Wyoming region of the world that has always meant so much to me?  If I had to be honest with myself I had joined the CFDA to go out west and shoot with other fast draw artists because I didn’t want to just visit the west from time to time—I wanted to become part of its mythology—and that is why I joined the CFDA.  And if I were to have a theme song for my journey it would be that “Train Song.”

Here’s where things get confusing since we are in the age of Donald Trump where the word fascism gets thrown around a lot.  Well, Trump isn’t a fascist and it certainly wasn’t a bunch of fascist white people who took over the west in the Dakota Territory and pushed the Indians off their land for evil intentions.  The people who inhabited that region of the world were fleeing the tyranny of the Vico cycle inherited from Europe and they wanted freedom from essentially the four-part cycle of theocracy, aristocracy, democracy and ultimately anarchy which had painted all known history. That battle was a clash between eastern and western ideas on the plains of America and became the legends of the Old West.  The Indians represented the eastern philosophy of collectivism whereas the cowboys and gunslingers of western legend represented mankind’s struggle for freedom.   Facism in Italian is a word meaning “groupism” or collectivism and it was precisely that which the “white people” were running from in westward expansion colliding with the Indian culture that had at that time inhabited the area.  Now I don’t consider Indians or whatever you want to call them Native Americans because they were essentially no different from the gunslingers of the Old West, they too were seeking freedom in another land from their ancestral heritage of South America, China, Russia and the Mediterranean region.    Perhaps even further back to a time when people were much larger and trees were a lot taller—more Pandora -like.  When I listen to Ennio Morricone’s spaghetti western tracks from the Sergio Leone westerns I hear people who were using their hope in American inspired imaginations to shake off their role in the fascism of Mussolini.   The music is very individualistic and in many ways Sergio and Ennio captured America’s westerns better than American filmmakers did because they had the baggage of fascism to shake off their culture and they used westerns to make their case.   The desire to not be associated with fascism I think is what makes Morricone’s music on those spaghetti westerns so special.

So I’m listening to Pandora in my garage and a Morricone song drifted off and I was ready to hit the advance button to get to the next one but I was putting shells into my Vaquero so my hands weren’t readily available to make the move when I heard the start of the “Train Song“ by Federale and I was captivated.  What a marvelous piece of music, nothing like it had been done since Ennio Morricone had done it for a movie soundtrack half a century earlier yet the song seemed more at home today than it would have back then.  The reason of course is the politics of our day and the human desire for an authentic experience.  It was the reason my son-in-law was on his massive motorcycle journey and why I had joined the Cowboy Fast Draw Association—the hunt for an authentic life.  Ultimately that is what came to war in the Dakota Territory where east met west and the west won.  The difference maker was two things, the equality that the gun gave to people for the first time in human history.

Anyone could shoot a gun so being a big man or a fast man didn’t have much to do with success in the west.  You just needed to know how to shoot straight, the gun did all the work.  Learning to appreciate that has been my difficulty in switching from a bullwhip to a six-gun as my preferred western arts point of focus. I enjoyed the exclusivity of working with bullwhips because not many people could use them the way I did.  And that was the mistake the Indians made; they relied on over specialization of their warrior class to keep the migrating frontiersman out of their land.  But it didn’t work, the frontiersman had guns, the Indians didn’t.  What they managed to steal from the white people they had to keep loaded with ammunition so they were always at a loss to the encroaching “whites.”  But is that the fault of the “whites” who settled the Old West.  No.

Having firearms to protect themselves and advance their position white settlers were free to mine for gold which gave America a much-needed jump in the world economy with the Gold Rush period.  The combination of guns and gold unleashed the human potential of the human race for the better and those two things were never better rendered than in the Ennio Morricone music of the 1960s.  Because of the Italian history with fascism he saw probably clearer than any other artist in the world what was going on in America and he captured all the hopes, dreams and pitfalls with his very crafty notes which have stood alone in our imaginations for half a century.  That is until finally a modern rock group decided to make new music in the same type of spirit, and they were actually successful.

On the surface westerns look incredibly simple, just like the landscape of Wyoming and South Dakota.  That is until you start thinking that perhaps Devil’s Tower wasn’t formed by high pressure magma from under the earth’s crust, but may have been a 19,000 foot tree at some point in the distant past.  Listening to old Indian legends such things take on new meaning if you really listen to what the world is telling us.   But for millions of years life on earth struggled to find its own footing without become tyrannies in and of themselves and long before the “whites” came to the West Indians fought among themselves.  Life was not in harmony before frontiersman settled the western territories of a young America.   The “whites” brought peace behind their war, and their guns and now in modern times my son-in-law can ride safely across that vast landscape without much worry.  That is because our American culture tamed the land to the will of human kind and the hopes and dreams that came with it.  Those lofty goals are what Ennio Morricone’s music has always been about and now the group Federale has captured that same spirit, refreshingly.  I know the “Train Song” is my new favorite and I will listen to it often—especially while I’m practicing Cowboy Fast Draw in my garage preparing for competitions all across America.  I can’t think of any song that better tells such a story and lends its weight to the philosophy of western expansion rising above the mess of conflict to the idea of a better day for all humanity.

Rich Hoffman

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