Tag: gunsmithing

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 Most Effective Argument in favor of Guns in Soceity: What everyone misses about the need for the Second Amendment–Institituions cannot be trusted

The support for an armed society is a philosophical one, not one of just emotional attachments to tradition. There is a reason the Second Amendment was inserted into the Bill of Rights and was so important to the Anti-Federalists in the 1790-time period of American history that is just as relevant today as it was then. The human race has not “progressed to a certain level where a one world government like the utopian Star Fleet Command is running everything on earth—and it never will. The reason is that there are traits to human beings that so long as they exist prevent the complete trust of individuals into all institutions created by society. To properly have a check and balance against absolute power, individuals must have the ability to overthrow their institutions before they get too big, and too power hungry to handle the affairs of civilization properly. Guns are that fine line of control which keeps our institutions in check with the fear always in the back of their minds that at any moment the population could remove them from office under armed rebellion and replace them. The issue has never been about “assault weapons” or “bump stocks.” It’s about the nature of people and what they do when they have power over other people. Those who want more power over more people obviously are those who support removing guns from society—to whatever degree. But the essence of the argument is that we would be fools to completely trust any institution created by the minds of man. The gun allows us to manage that power we give those institutions—and without that management assistance, institutions by their nature spiral out of control and become oppressive. Because at the heart of most humans who crave power is a laziness that always retreats to default mode and would rather run society as a bunch of compliant automatons rather than free thinking variables.

To put the issue in the most simplistic forms I will provide an example that I have used actually quite often. To provide a little background about myself I am a person who loves personal freedom likely more than most people, and I have always built my life around the ability to be free of institutional control. In my youth I was a martial artist and had developed the personal ability to defend myself no matter what was presented. Growing up I never had the feeling that anybody could “kick my ass” and I still feel that way. I don’t care how big the person is or how skilled, I made a point physically to be the top of the pecking order in regard to fighting in hand to hand combat and that allowed me a certain freedom to think properly about these matters of institutional control. But melee weapons are one thing, if a person approaches you with a gun physical confrontation is not the best way to deal with a threat like that. You really need a gun no matter how skilled you may be in disarming people. The best way to prevent a threat is to show them you have a gun and give them a choice as to whether or not to continue.

For a short while I was a repo man in my early years and I was shot at on occasion. That was back in the old days before there were the kind of rules that there are today. Back then the bank would let you do quite a few things to recover an asset, so I know what it feels like to be a bit of a thief sneaking up on a car to take it away from a hostile person likely armed. I even know what it feels like to break into a home knowing a person was armed to get the car keys. This wasn’t an accepted practice but it’s always better to ask for forgiveness than permission when dealing with bureaucracies and if I could get my hands on the keys, it meant doing less damage to the asset to retrieve it so breaking into a home to get the keys was forgivable—if you were successful. But people did get mad and they did shoot to kill. So in speaking about this kind of stuff I understand it from both sides very well.

I’ve also been to Europe and can report that the people there are pretty much a defeated people. Their gun laws and progressive societies have destroyed individual initiative and expectation. They live in small homes that are too expensive and do not have an expectation of personal sanctity the way that Americans do—and this really does trace back to gun ownership. In Europe the chances of being robbed in your home are much, much greater than in the United States because thieves know that nobody is armed in the home. They think nothing of breaking and entering to steal a person’s possessions even if they are there—because being shot is not on their minds. If they have managed to get a gun off the black market then they suddenly have become the strongest person around and they use that force to their advantage—because that’s what most human beings do when they acquire power—they tend to abuse it unless they are governed by a personal constitution of morality and valor. Without those elements they become tyrants quickly—whether they control a vast institution, or are just petty street criminals. It’s all the same human dysfunction on the micro or macro levels.

The person who trained me in martial arts during my teenage years was a thug. He was a lot like the karate school owner in the movie Karate Kid. His sole purpose for the school was to teach young strong males to be killers so that they’d go to tournaments and win trophies for his wall, so that he could then charge high fees to provide instruction. I thought of him as an evil person and he eventually was busted for many crimes and did jail time, but I learned a lot from the guy. I learned that it wasn’t hard to kill a person with your hands, in fact it was pretty easy and once you learned the basics you had leverage over every other human being that didn’t know that information. Most of his students went on to become terrors—and they got into nearly as much trouble as he did. Once they had the power to literally kill with their bare hands they had no fear of anybody and they began to be bullies that nobody could stop. It was the same concept as the robber with a gun who had something everyone else was missing. Outlawing a gun doesn’t change the nature of dominating others as a human predilection. Until that problem is solved, where humans wish to dominate others, whether it’s the liberal using institutionalism to control individual behavior, or a common street thug beating people over the head with a pipe to steal $25 dollars—the desire to rule over other individuals is the problem that must be solved. No institutional laws will have any effect—because the problem at its core is an institutional issue.

More times than even I can recollect I’ve used the threat of violence to keep peace. If someone is robbing you the way to handle it best is to say, “Hay man,” show them the gun under your jacket “you don’t have to die today. I won’t even call the cops. If you keep walking you can go to sleep tonight.” It’s that simple. Just say that, have the gun to show them—even if they are pointing one at you, letting them know you have a gun and are willing to use it, will most of the time cause them to leave you alone. These things don’t happen like they do in the movies. Criminals want a nice easy hit on someone. They don’t want to die or risk injury. If they have to risk that with you, they’ll move on most of the time. That also goes with hired killers. I’ve also known several of them as well, and deep down inside they are just people like anybody else. They don’t want to die. They know that just because you shoot someone they don’t die instantly. They know if you have a gun on you that you could still shoot them even if wounded. Because of guns in our country, we see much less crime than we otherwise would because nobody really knows who has guns in the house and who doesn’t. That secures our private property in the correct way and allows for Americans to think differently than other people around the world do because private property and ownership is the essence of personal responsibility—and protecting those elements makes for a much more civil discourse at the macro level.

Any person advancing gun control measures of any kind, even the “bump stock” debate after the Las Vegas massacre are avoiding the real issue in human failure in dealing with one another. Human desire to control other humans and their thoughts is the problem and until respect at a fundamental level is established for individual sanctity, violence will always be a threat. Those threats often come from institutions because responsibility for individual behavior is disguised. However, gun ownership is more than just symbolic, they are a proper check against the human tendency to inflict through force beliefs of one group against another. The gun creates a level playing field and forces people to respect each other—which is the first foundation of proper human interaction. There is a fine line between fear and respect, and the gun helps society get there better than any law that human beings could invent. And that is the key to a properly managed society. There is nothing barbaric about gun ownership. In fact, the concept is quite a sophisticated one because it takes the human race to a level of thought that has never been achieved before in the history of the world, and the United States is the evidence that it works. Not in the presence of an active gun culture, but in the type of society and options that Americans enjoy that nobody else around the world has. Guns are key to advancing our civilization in very positive ways because they take the bullies out of contention and allow average people to rule their own lives however they see fit. And if their institutions get out of control, then people have guns to retake control, and that is the most important thing of all. Just having the gun does wonders. Hopefully nobody ever needs to use them. But I can say from personal experience that guns work very well at keeping things……..peaceful. Better than anything else ever could hope to. Institutions want to believe they can, but they can’t. They can’t control individual behavior at its core. They can influence it, but they can’t manage it without the occasional madman emerging to destroy innocent people over any little thing.

When I hold a gun, or buy a new gun, I am making an investment into the kind of human freedom that only a gun can provide. And that is not a symbol of violence. It’s a declaration of independence that is philosophical and unique to our species.

Rich Hoffman

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A Commentary on Will Hayden’s Life Sentence: A good workbench is far better than sex

Every day I have a little place on my property where I can go at the end of the day and shoot my .45 Vaquero.  I wish every person in the world could have that wonderful feeling of standing at a very nice work bench surrounded by lots of unique tools and sip on an ice-cold water with the smell of gun smoke fresh from a good score on an automated reaction timer that I use to practice Cowboy Fast Draw.  I think it’s one of the most satisfying things you can do as a human being for so many reasons.  And I know many people in the gun industry that understand what I just said exactly within the shooting sports professions.  Guns are a mix of precision machining, ballistic science, and a practice which is rooted in psychological freedom from a societal tendency to strive for personal freedom for which the individual ownership of firearms most spectacularly embodies.  So it is baffling to me why someone like a Will Hayden would even think about doing what he did as a serial rapist to young girls over a long period of time.  Yesterday the founder of Red Jacket Firearms and star of the Discovery Channel’s Son’s of Guns television show about gunsmithing in southern Louisiana, was sentenced to life in prison for what he did, and it’s just a terribly sad situation.

I loved the Son’s of Guns show and I thought the people in it were just fabulous.  Looking back on it there was always something I didn’t quite trust in Hayden, but I loved Joe and though Flem among others who were incredibly talented people who were in the business for the right reasons.  That last season I turned to my wife and told her that something was really wrong because after all the success Red Jacket had with their television show, there was no way that Hayden should have been hemorrhaging that much cash where he struggled to pay for his machining lathes and a new facility.  His kids Stephanie and Chris were acting strange too attempting to start their own business under the Red Jacket umbrella and it just didn’t make sense—because they all had a good thing going.  Now we know that there were things going on regarding this problem of raping young girls that Hayden was engaged in and now that the case is concluded it has left me and many millions of others scratching our heads.

I’m currently the same age now that Hayden was in the best seasons of that show and I just can’t imagine any situation where a man in his late forties would even want to engage in sex with a 13-year-old girl.  It just doesn’t make any psychological sense.  I mean biologically the impulse to those kinds of things shouldn’t even be there.  As a man you have so many young ladies in your life who depend on you, daughters, employees, members of an audience who see you as a celebrity—to rape a young girl or even to think of her in a sexual way is just pathetic, and irresponsible. So I’m happy he’s going to do such hard time for the rest of his life.  I’m a big fan of ruthless sentencing and I don’t care if we have entire states full of inmates in our prison system.  I loved Jeff Sessions’s announcement yesterday reversing the policies of Eric Holder.  If there are bad guys out there doing bad things, let’s get them locked up and figure out a way for them to pay for their food and shelter aside from tax payer burdens—but they shouldn’t be free.  And for what Hayden did, he should be locked up.  You just can’t ruin the lives of young ladies and expect to live a free life—just like a criminal cannot take anything from us individually at our homes or within the private sanctity of our cars without being shot dead in defense.  All these issues fall under the umbrella of personal respect and being a great gunsmith, Will Hayden should have known better.

Little girls look to older men to protect them.  When a 3 to 10-year-old girl sits in the lap of a grandpa, or even a father they need that reassurance that they are within the protection of a powerful male and it will establish in her a lifelong trust that she actually needs to live a full and happy, healthy life.  So no man should ever do anything to jeopardize that trust.  A sexual thought should never even enter into your mind and if it means it harms your sexual life with a wife or otherwise because you have turned off those desires—then so be it.  There are many better things in life to think about besides sex.  It can be a fun thing to do, but it’s a pretty primitive and messy act that is overrated in my opinion—if your mind is conducting itself properly on other activities. In Hayden’s case, he had this beautiful gun shop with all the great tools of the trade and he was being paid to do what he loves.  He was on television and was very successful meaning he could then buy more guns to play with and everything should have been perfect. So in light of all that, what he did was reprehensible and goes far beyond the crimes of our legal system—he violated much more than that, he broke the trust of young women including his older daughter Stephanie and that is the worst of it.  Losing the trust of young women and giving them the burden of shame to carry throughout their lives is one of the worst crimes a man can do toward any emerging women.

Then there are the political consequences.  Already there are those communist insurgents within American culture who look for anything to wear away the gun centered lifestyles that the best of us have in the freest country on earth.  Will Hayden just fit the stereotype of the target they present, a powerful middle-aged white guy from the south who loves guns and abusing women just put the Discovery Channel in a public relations nightmare and he hurt the gun industry in incomprehensible ways.  I mean how could he of even thought it was worth all this damage to have some primitive sexual encounter with an unwilling victim who was only a child?  You have tool boxes filled with some of the greatest tools in the world and gun oil filling the smell of your office with leather holsters always lying around—why?  It’s just irrevocably stupid.

Most of the people I know in the gun professions, at shooting ranges, within the NRA and elsewhere are like Joe and Flem from that Son’s of Guns show—they are guys who are fascinated by great machining with intensely tight mechanical tolerances and the science of ballistics which is really what most young boys love about toy guns, and eventually real guns.  It’s not in the ability to shoot someone dead like the political left likes to portray—it’s in the working of tools, the smell of gun oils and the power of science in your hand that makes the gun industry one of the most important industries on planet earth.  Speaking for myself, my work bench on a rainy Friday night with the garage door open and bullets all over the place while listening to a recap of the Rush Limbaugh show sitting on my bench stool working with a couple of pin punches from my gunsmith tool box is about as good as anything ever gets in life.  I really can’t think of anything that I have ever done that gave me a better feeling.  When you’re young and biologically your body is looking to plant seeds in some woman for the primitive act of procreation—I can see being distracted by sex.  I’ve been married for almost 30 years to an attractive woman.  We’ve traveled the world and done things together that most people dream of in their wildest fantasies.  But I’m telling you dear reader that at nearly 50 years old, working on guns at a nice bench on a Friday night next to a talk radio broadcast sipping on a chilled drink is one of the best things you can do.  Will Hayden had really everything a man could dream of.  And he blew it spectacularly and made an ass of himself that brought great harm to the women in his life.  So I’m glad he’s serving hard time for the rest of his life.  He deserves worse.  Under no circumstance should a man ever trade the workbench for sex—especially for a girl a generation younger even if it’s legal and inviting.  It’s just not something any older man should ever do—for the sake of humanity.

Rich Hoffman

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Review of the .500 Magnum: Being on the trigger side of freedom

There really is nothing like Memorial Day.  All through the year I refer specifically to this late spring early summer period as the absolute best part of a 12 month calendar.  In Ohio the temperature is just perfect hovering right around 70 to 80 degrees during the day and dropping down into the upper 50s at night.  Everything has a fresh feel to it in May which climaxes on Memorial Day typically.  And for each Memorial Day my father-in-law has a birthday for which the family gets together to celebrate.  May is a time for blockbuster summer movies, wonderful weather and eagerness toward the events of an upcoming summer.  I always love May and I likely always will.  So for this year we did something special, we finally bought a gun that I had been thinking about for a long time, the Smith & Wesson .500 Magnum with its heavily engineered X-frame revolver introduced in 2003 capable of hunting any form of life on planet earth.  It is the most powerful production handgun in the world and is a real brute to shoot, but I wanted to best to defend my home from the stacking pile of hostiles contemplating aggression, and sometimes the best deterrent is assured destruction.  After a lot of discussion with my wife, we finally made the purchase in May 2015 and tried it out on my father-in-law’s birthday over the Memorial Day weekend.  It was the best tribute to what Memorial Day means in America.  Memorial Day is a time to honor those fallen fighting for the freedoms we all enjoy in America.  But it is also a time to remember that the fight for freedom doesn’t end with memory of losses in foreign wars.  That fight continues daily and a good way to stay sharp and focused to that responsibility is with the purchase of a new gun—well, in the case of the .500 Magnum—artillery.  The .500 Magnum is everything that I hoped it would be as you can see me firing it below.  I have shot the gun before, but this time it was my own weapon fired for the first time outside of the factory.

One of the targets seen in the video was a portion of a tree branch cut to stand on its end.  The second was a standard sedimentary rock out of the river behind the target radius.  It is dangerous to shoot at such things with any gun.  But I had a pretty good idea that the .400 grain bullet would punch through both without ricochet so I wanted to test the punch power of the .500 magnum and its 1,800 fps velocity, 2,579 ft-lbf muzzle energy which is extraordinary for a handgun.   As can be seen clearly the bullet from the .500 Magnum split the log in half and punched the rock in two.  The rock itself was about five inches thick.  The ideal distance for shooting at such targets should have been 50 to 100 yards—but for the sake of this video so that target interaction could be seen, we moved in to about 25 yards.  That was not enough as debris pelted us even from that distance—something I would not have expected.  But when dealing with such powerful forces the strange and unusual can and do occur.  Needless to say, the most powerful handgun in the world did not disappoint.  It exceeded my expectations in every way.image

But that’s not all there was to such a fine day of shooting.  The entire Memorial Day shooting event was just marvelous.  We started the day gathering up our guns and preparing to hit the road.  My wife had several coolers made for a day trip to the south as we went around the city to pick up our family.  On the way to our shooting destination we stopped at McDonald’s twice and enjoyed the fruits of capitalism to its fullest.  We also stopped by the Field & Stream superstore in Northern Kentucky to buy some more ammunition.  It was a glorious start to a magnificently beautiful day.image

But once we settled in at our destination the culmination of much anticipation erupted with the sheer power of the .500 Magnum.  It was a pleasure to shoot.  But after a box of ammunition, the bones in my hand were starting to feel the fatigue.  In some of the slow motion portions of the video it is clear how much a wave of energy was displaced through my body during each shot.  It was truly an exhilarating sensation to have such a controlled explosion occurring in the palm of your hand.  It is truly a hand cannon as it is firing a projectile what would have sunk ships during the pirating days of 15th century buccaneering.  In those times that kind of power would have been strapped to a ship in the form of a fixed device.  It would have been unfathomable to contain such power into a hand cannon designed by the Smith & Wesson team with the X-frame to put such force in the hands of an individual.  Yet that’s why I bought the gun, to possess that kind of power.image

Having the gun however is not enough.  Learning to shoot it is the next great step.  My arms and wrist are already well prepared because of my frequent bullwhip work so the learning curb is less for me than the average shooter.  It takes a considerable amount of strength to handle the .500 Magnum for more than a few novelty shots.  Most of the men present at our event after seeing the power given off by the gun wanted nothing to do with actually firing it.  It shakes the ground when it fires and gives off a shock wave that will stop a target range still with silence after you fire it. The roar of the blast suppresses even a .12 gage shotgun so it’s truly something to behold.image

My son-in-law shot it several times and did very well.  Even from where I stood a good ten feet away from him, I could feel the wave of energy displacing each time he fired the gun.  It is like setting off a stick of dynamite with each shot.  There isn’t anything else like it.  For a person weighing less than 200 lbs, anything more than a 300 gr bullet would be too much to hold feet to the ground.  We went through our 400 gr bullets and I decided to save the 500 gr bullets for self-defense and concealed carry opportunities.  Ammunition as high as 700 gr bullets are available for the .500 Magnum which I will be getting but pleasurable shooting diminishes with so much raw power.  For target shooting and setting sights anything 275 gr to 300 gr is a decent range to stay within.  After firing the 400 gr bullets several times I am certain it would have stopped a 9’ grizzly bear or an African elephant.  I’m not the hunter type, so I will likely never use the gun for that kind of thing, but it was reassuring to know that if such a circumstance presented itself—I had a personal firearm that could handle the situation.  The .500 Magnum is insanely powerful.image

Because of that wonderful Magnum all my future May months will be just a little sweeter.  I will never forget the joy of buying and shooting that gun over this 2015 Memorial Day weekend. I had thought that the .500 Magnum would punch through that rock, but I wasn’t absolutely sure until I saw and felt it in real life.  Rocks are dangerous to shoot at, and it’s not something that I’d recommend.  I won’t be doing it again now that I know that the .500 Magnum will indeed thump through such a target.  It would easily destroy concrete blocks and other similar materials, which is just astonishing.  The .500 Magnum from Smith & Wesson is my favorite gun from one of my favorite gun companies—and its raw American.  So it only made sense that we celebrate such a fine American weapon on one of America’s most revered holidays and remember that it is through such actions that we all remain free.  While those who have lost their lives fighting for freedoms are the purpose of Memorial Day, it is better not to die while fighting that same fight.  A good way to stay alive is to be on the trigger side of the .500 Magnum.  For those on the other side they won’t stand much of a chance.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

The Treasures of Brownells: A gift to the American shooter

Even though I felt at the time that I had lived five lifetimes before I ever hit 20 years of age and had some college under my belt along with two yeas of gunsmithing school, that a fresh-faced kid from Southern Ohio was going to struggle financially under that chosen profession.  Customers after all like seasoned veterans for that kind of work and I hadn’t been around the block much in the shooting world—not officially anyway.  So as a young gunsmith in a little shed behind our home, I was getting work—but it wasn’t the type of high-priced work I’d need to care for a growing family while keeping my wife home so that she could care properly for our children.  The other issue was that clients who would give me a shot as such a young face were the type of people who were in trouble with the law and did not want the older, and orthodox Federal Firearms License holders to handle their needs.  I couldn’t bring those types of people around the house with a one and two-year old children running around.  The other issue was that I needed more experience on the craftsmanship end.  So I took my acquired skills learned through gunsmithing and took professional jobs that required frequent measurements of .001 of an inch reading micrometers and calipers so that I’d develop all the hand skills of the gunsmithing trade.  Along the way I’d write books, get more involved with bullwhip work and spend another five lifetimes over the next twenty-five years getting lots, and lots of experience using many of the gunsmithing skills I had to do work for various companies.  Whereas I made the money to take care of my family in lots of unusual ways my love of gunsmithing never really went away. And one of the great memories from my past during the early days of my marriage to my wife before we started a family was the constant books and catalogues from Brownells which populated our home with huge stacks of shooting literature.

My love for America was shaped during my youth by a gradual introduction to Brownells through my gunsmithing school and our frequent trips to Gatlinburg, Tennessee.  I loved the common sense of rural Americans who found the popular Smoky Mountain resort town such a destination of choosing.  And under that culture was a love of guns, and the people at Brownells even more than the NRA loved the business side of firearms to a point that I found it easy to connect to.  They are such a great organization who unselfishly taught so many neat tricks that they preserved in a way I thought greatly beneficial an aspect of American life that I could see vanishing before my eyes.  Only in the gun circles of companies like Brownells was the true nature of American life being preserved in the way the Constitution always intended.  The videos shown here are just a small example of how Brownells approach the business as they teach how to clean and repair a basic single action revolver.  They additionally break down the care of AR-15s and SIGs with the same patient instruction and they do a lot of this for free.  Also on their website is a section that offers schematics for just about every gun in production so that if you need a little sear for some obscure gun you found at a trade show, you can order it by part number and get a replacement.

When I finally bought my .500 magnum recently after many years and miles of contemplation dividing up my busy life, I took a little more time to admire the vast stock that Bass Pro Shop had to provide materials to the shooting sportsman.  I told my wife that having a place like Bass Pro around would have been very helpful in my early days of gunsmithing because there was nothing like that back then.  You had to go to Gatlinburg or some other exotic place to get that type of positive American atmosphere, let alone the unequivocal support.  But I also told her that Bass Pro had good stuff on their shelves, but that they were no Brownells.  That’s when I realized that I hadn’t visited their site since I stopped performing gunsmithing, so I pulled them up on my iPad and reconnected with an old friend.

I was so happy to see that Brownells was still going strong. They still offer their gigantic full color catalogue which was very expensive back in 1989—it must be ungodly today—but they still ship them to their customers.  They offer hundreds of how-to videos on YouTube completely free of charge and have that same American enthusiasm for the shooting profession they have always been known for, which was a relief.  So it didn’t take me long to reconnect with them after two decades.  As foreign as it sounds, a few decades can get away from you if you don’t watch your time carefully.  I am very selfish with my time because I always have so much going on.  Shooting was only a part of my life, so when you get busy with other things like philosophy, politics, legalisms, economics, and raising a family the proper way, months and years fly by like lightning across the sky.  But it’s never too late to come back to an old project which for me began with the purchase of my .500 magnum from Smith and Wesson.

Another thing that came up when I was younger was the stigma of shooting. I certainly felt it during the late 80s into 90s as the Clinton administration looked like it would be successful in banning military style firearms after the Brady Bill.  I didn’t know at the time if the shooting profession itself was going to be banned all together—it looked that way at the time.  I wasn’t sure how long a company like Brownells would be able to continue doing what they were doing.  When it comes to gunsmithing, they are the primary supplier.  They are the backbone to keeping the shooting industry humming along.  As progressive political activists like George Soros attempt to buy up American gun manufacturers to strategically end the supply of guns in America to private residence, it is the many years of commitment to building a client base of gunsmiths all across the United States that will ensure that shooting never dies out in the only free nation on earth—at least free in principle.  So long as there is a Brownells, there is a gunsmith somewhere who can build a gun from scratch.  Gun manufacturers are not necessarily needed.  But gunsmiths are—and because of Brownells, there are still a healthy number of them around who can keep the sport alive.

It’s easy to forget what America was always supposed to be when you watch the nightly news and read from its newspapers—particularly those from New York and Los Angeles.  But America is quite alive and well in the stores of Bass Pro and the pages of Brownells.  Of that later, Brownells is in a class by itself, and if you are a shooter, it would be a good idea to know who and what they are.  They are a tremendous resource for the modern American shooter—which is a unique company specific to the United States.  You won’t find an equivalent company anywhere else in the world.  Sweden can make tables and chairs for their IKEA stores, Germans can make their cars, France can breed women with unshaved armpits, and the Chinese can continue to make the stuff that Americans want to buy at Wal-Mart but there is nothing like a Brownells in Mexico, Brazil or Australia.  They are specific to the culture of Americana that we all know and love and are the backbone of our lifestyle of freedom.

My return back to my roots is the awareness that strategically progressive activists have sought to end businesses like Brownells and its customer base.  After what I’ve learned in all the other aspects of my life which has filled these pages with so much color and candor is that the best way to defeat that strategy is with an unapologetic embrace of the American art of shooting and caring for our guns.  And when it comes to caring for guns, Brownells as a company are the experts.  A look through their catalogue is enough to make a grown man weep.  There has never been a better collection of tools and gadgets anywhere between the covers of a big catalog.  Brownells does everything right and are a treasure from my past that I am happy to see just as strong today as they were then.  Brownells is the blood behind the body of the shooting profession.  They are what helps keep an interest in the NRA and other shooting organizations so robust, because Brownells keeps guns working and passed down from one generation to another constantly building a client base that has not be snuffed out by activists hell-bent on making America into a restricted nation like Europe.  Brownells keeps the gunsmithing profession alive and is the best source out there for keeping those family treasures functioning and robust.  And if you didn’t know about them dear reader, well, now you do.

http://www.brownells.com/

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.