Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Ballistics, Feedback, Guns, Publishing, Science, Science Fiction, Writing stuff
OK. It’s April 1. A day which I have come to hate, at least online.
Be that as it may, I’m not joking around about looking back at the past month, and I have some good numbers to report. As noted, I did get news that Communion of Dreams is going to be published, though I am still waiting to sort out all the details. As well as the psychological boost that gave me, it seemed to also have a boost in terms of downloads of the book. March saw a total of 891 downloads of the original “complete” manuscript, 224 downloads of the revised manuscript (which will be basically what is published), at least 61 downloads of the MP3 version of the book, and at least 17 downloads of all the individual chapters. That’s over 1100 downloads in one month, no matter how you slice it, and puts the total number of downloads over 23,000.
BBTI has continued to do very well, as well. Late in February we crossed 2 million hits to that site, and March saw another 155,165 hits – the fourth largest monthly total to date – to bring us to a total of 2,173,143 hits. We have been forced to delay doing the next round of testing, due to ammo shortages, but that hasn’t hurt the popularity of the site at all.
So, no foolin’ – March was a good month. And it is bright, and sunny, and wonderfully spring outside. April seems to be off to a decent start.
Jim Downey
Cross posted to the BBTI blog.
I don’t think most people here in the US understand violence. They have too little experience with it. They think violence is a schoolyard fight, or gunplay in slow motion on a screen.
It’s more visceral than that. More basic. It is the unleashing of an older part of ourselves – a genetic memory of survival.
For decades I have watched reactionary forces strut and hype, threatening violence or implying the threat of violence. You see it with the rhetoric of the Tea Party in its latest incarnation. I’ve kept an eye on it, but never paid it too much attention – people fear change, and those fears sometime manifest as that kind of low-level violence. Oh, I don’t mean to deny the damage that a few lone loons can do – our history has shown repeatedly that political violence can indeed change the course of events for the short term. But even that is limited.
What worries me much more is something I have begun to see over the last few years, and in increasing amounts recently: rhetoric from the left which is starting to match the threats of violence from the right. It is always cloaked in terms of self-defense, or of ‘standing up to the right’ – but it is there, nonetheless.
And this is much more dangerous. Because then it is not a matter of just ‘simple’ violence. It is gang-war. It is tribal. It is the madness which erases civilization for a while.
We don’t think that it can happen here. Not again. We think we are too advanced. Too educated. Too secure in our democratic structures.
Bullshit.
When one side starts using the language of violence, even to the point of flaunting guns and invoking the Civil War, they’re crazy.
When the other side decides the time has come to take the crazies seriously, to the point of talking about arming themselves or de-humanizing the Right (both of which I have seen a lot of in recent weeks), then we’re playing with fire.
It’s not like I am a pacifist, or unwilling to defend either myself or those people and values I hold dear. I understand the need for taking a threat from someone seriously. But increasingly things feel like they are starting to spin out of control.
Jim Downey
I’d had some glitches with my site stats software the last few days, but just found out that the BBTI site broke 2 million hits sometime over the weekend. The official tally is 2,017,978 hits as of 3/1/10.
Wow.
Well, at least I was right.
Two million hits.
Huh.
That’s more than twice the hits I had with the Paint The Moon project. (And yes, I do need to get that entry updated . . . ) Meaning I am twice as famous as I was before. Or something like that.
Who woulda thunk it.
More in a day or two. Fighting some kind of nasty lung virus that’s going around, and I have a thing on Friday to prepare for. *sigh*
Jim Downey
. . . how anything could go wrong with this:
PARIS (Reuters) – Thrill-seekers in France tired of the usual array of white-knuckle sports are turning to a bizarre new service to get their adrenaline rush — designer abduction.
For 900 euros ($1,226), clients of Ultime Realite (“Ultimate Reality”), a firm in eastern France, can buy a basic kidnap package where they’re bundled away, bound and gagged, and kept incarcerated for four hours.
Alternatively, they can opt for a more elaborate tailor-made psychodrama, involving an escape or helicopter chase for example, where costs can quickly escalate.
Note – this is supposed to happen at a time and a place which the client/victim does *not* know, to add to the realism of the experience.
When in college, me and a couple of college buddies came up with how much fun it would be to stage a ‘mafia hit’ in some nightclub, preparing all the special effects (guns shooting blanks, small charges in walls to simulate bullets striking them, blood packs on the victim and one of the hit men, et cetera). We thought it would be hilarious to set up such a thing and spring it on some unknowing nightclub patrons who would only be told that they were going to be attending a “special event”.
Of course, we gave up on the idea shortly after having a good laugh, because we knew that it was insane. Exposing people to that kind of traumatic event – even as just a witness – was dangerous and irresponsible. Not to mention that there could be someone (off duty cop? actual gangster?) with a real gun loaded with real bullets in the audience who would react poorly to such stimuli.
And that was under the reasonably controlled conditions of one room.
Now, these idiots want to pull this kind of stunt in public?
Dipshits.
Jim Downey
. . . by losing their guns?
Report: Officers lose 243 Homeland Security guns
Washington (CNN) — Nearly 180 Department of Homeland Security weapons were lost — some falling into the hands of criminals — after officers left them in restrooms, vehicles and other public places, according to an inspector general report.
The officers, with Customs and Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, “did not always sufficiently safeguard their firearms and, as a result, lost a significant number of firearms” between fiscal year 2006 and fiscal year 2008, the report said.
Niiiice.
And yet, one of the most common responses I hear to the idea of private citizens exercising our 2nd Amendment rights is that only law enforcement officers are trained adequately to safely handle and carry firearms.
Like this guy, no doubt:
Classic.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to the BBTI blog.)
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Ballistics, Feedback, Government, Guns, Science
I mentioned the other day that the BBTI site was closing in on 2 million hits. And, with the site chugging along with 3,500 – 4,500 hits a day, I figured we’d get there before the end of this month. But then, over the last couple of days, hits about doubled, approaching 7,000 hits a day.
Now, this happens. Usually it is due to BBTI being “discovered” and posted on a new gun/shooting forum someplace – so a bunch of people who haven’t heard about the project yet run off to check it out, and send links to their friends. And it has also happened when I’ve posted some new information to the site (such as when we added in the additional testing results last spring) or announce something new in the works (as with the cylinder gap tests).
But that wasn’t the reason why we saw the bump up this time. Instead, it was because of an announcement from the FBI.
See, the FBI has announced that they are going to go to a .40 S&W AR-15 carbine. And in discussing that decision, people started citing our numbers on the .40 S&W cartridge performance in different barrel lengths. You can see what I mean at The Firearm Blog, at Calguns, and elsewhere. This is something I have mentioned before, how BBTI has come to be increasingly used as a resource for evaluating firearm performance, but this is the first time that I’ve seen it happen in response to some newsworthy item. And I think that is really pretty cool.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to the BBTI blog.)
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Alzheimer's, Ballistics, Book Conservation, General Musings, Guns, Predictions, Publishing, RKBA, Science, Science Fiction, U of Iowa Ctr for the Book, Writing stuff
I spent most of yesterday re-reading Communion of Dreams, to make sure that all the little changes I’d made in the previous week were correct and to see if I could catch a few more typos. Once it was all checked and double checked, I created manuscript files in the format preferred by the publisher, appended an email, and zipped the whole thing off. If you would like to see the finished product, the CoD homepage has now been updated to have the final .pdf version.
So, now we wait and see what the publisher decides.
And speaking of the publisher, I have had a couple of queries about them. It’s a new enterprise, Trapdoor Books. I like their attitude and approach, though of course with something so new it is hard to judge. And if this works out, I hope that I can help them as much as they can help me. If it doesn’t work out, no hard feelings on my part – lord knows that I had to turn down a lot of talented artists in the years I had the gallery.
But it does have something of the same feeling as when I first started at the University of Iowa Center for the Book. That too was a new enterprise, and no one was really sure how it would work out. Now it is perhaps the most highly regarded book arts program in the country, and my almost 20 year career as a conservator has both benefited from the reputation and added to it in a small way.
So, we’ll see. It looks like things are moving again with Her Final Year, and that book could garner a lot of mainstream attention, since there is little in the care-giving literature from a male perspective. BBTI will cross 2 million hits later this month, and we’re currently planning another very large series of tests this spring which will once again generate a lot of interest in the gun world. It could be a very interesting year.
Jim Downey
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Ballistics, Guns, Preparedness, Survival, Terrorism, Violence
“What’s that?”
“Oh, I got it for giving a donation to the snipers.”
I looked again at the pewter skull, about the size of a silver dollar, hanging on a thin ribbon on my friend’s chest. There was a hole in the middle of the forehead, through which the ribbon ran.
A shudder ran through me.
* * * * * * *
The SHOT Show was huge. Massive. Some 50,000 attendees. I heard that if you walked all of the paths through the various booths and displays, you’d cover something like 34 miles.
Big chunks of the show were dedicated to booths catering to “Law Enforcement,” though there was more than a little para-military stuff in these areas. Not surprising, given how much police agencies deal with para-military tactics; they need para-military equipment.
I wandered through these areas, along with pretty much all the rest of the show. Not that I have any real interest in any of the stuff most of them were featuring – I don’t have a ‘wannabecop’ mindset. I was just curious. And it was . . . educational.
* * * * * * *
“Ballistics by the inch? What’s that all about?”
The man stopped next to my table in the food court, looking at my name tag. It was early evening, but I was beat from walking most of the show and dealing with the crowds. I don’t do crowds well. My ‘extrovert batteries’ were worn out, and all I wanted was just a light dinner before going to hide in my room and charge up again for the next day of the show.
But, he was smiling, and seemed nice enough. I gestured to the empty chair across from me. He set his tray down, and we introduced ourselves.
“Well, BBTI is a project myself and several friends did, testing how muzzle velocity varies according to barrel length for 16 different handgun cartridges.” I handed him a card.
“Just external ballistics, then?”
“Yeah. But we’ve put all the data online for people to use freely. We launched the site about 14 months ago, and we’re now approaching 2 million hits.” I’d given this little spiel enough times already at the SHOT Show that it pretty much rolled off my tongue automatically. “Why?”
“Well, I’m into ballistics, too. Though that isn’t my ‘day job.'”
* * * * * * *
One of the major reasons I went to the SHOT Show was to make contacts, to meet people with whom I had corresponded. One of these was Kathy Jackson, editor of Concealed Carry magazine and the person behind the excellent Cornered Cat website. I had chatted with Kathy many times over the years, and we worked with her on the great article that Concealed Carry did on the BBTI project.
Anyway, when we did finally have a chance to meet in person the last day of the show, it was a delight. There were four of us, all chatting together. In the course of the conversation, she asked “what is the silliest thing you’ve seen here?”
There was, truth be told, a *lot* of silly things at the show. There was the odd little bayonet which was supposed to affix to your pistol. There were the “mall ninja” toys and people who wore them. There were the science fiction/fantasy themed custom knives which would be useless in the real world. But I said “All the grim-faced men and women in the advertising photos and banners in the LE section of the show.”
* * * * * * *
“What’s your day job?”
“I’m a research scientist. We do a lot of work for NASA and the various aerospace industries, mostly things like orbital mechanics.”
“What brings you to SHOT?”
“Launching a new ballistics calculator, for long-range shooting. Really long range shooting. Stop by the AI booth tomorrow, and I’ll show you.”
We chatted from there, comparing notes on the show, discussing our respective backgrounds in shooting and what got us each interested in the projects we developed. Smart guy. Very smart guy.
* * * * * * *
There was a very interesting post last night on MetaFilter. I know I mention MeFi a lot, but that’s because I am frequently impressed with the quality of the discussions which take place there. This one was about Simo Häyhä, one of the most deadly snipers in history with over 800 confirmed kills during the Finnish “Winter War“. The whole thread is here, but what caught my attention was the discussion which ensued concerning the ethics of being a sniper.
Several people commented that snipers were little more than sociopaths who took some pleasure at killing. Here are two such comments:
How does it feel to have personally murdered that many people?
posted by monospace at 9:11 AM on January 28
And:
Also, the idea that “legalized killing” is really conceptually different from illegal murder would seem to imply that the people who are best at “legalized killing” are temperamentally unrelated to those who murder. I do not buy this. Häyhä’s lack of retrospective remorse is no doubt related to the fact of why he was such an effective killer in the first place: hurting others didn’t have much of a negative emotional effect on him. He probably enjoyed hurting people, which is how he was so calm and good at doing it.
It’s not a stretch to believe that the dispositions that make the best soldiers/snipers are identical to the dispositions of the worst rapists and serial killers. The only difference might be a slightly different life context. The difference between a certain person being celebrated as a war hero or reviled as a serial killer might come down to the chance event of a war happening at a certain time.
posted by dgaicun at 1:59 PM on January 28
There was a lot of push-back against this mindset. The best is from a woman who lived through the siege of Sarajevo. Here’s an excerpt from her:
Sarajevo was a city with a mixed Serb, Croat and Muslim population, as well as significant numbers of Jewish and Roma people. Probably the most obviously “multi-ethnic” city in the former Yugoslavia. It was also a peaceful, cosmopolitan place. This made it a particularly significant target for those Serbs who used ethnic hatred and “the practical impossibility of people living together” as justification for genocide and violent aggression. Sarajevo’s existence proved that to be a lie. Naively, many Sarajevans – myself included – assumed that our solidarity as a city would magically ward off any attacks. Wrong!
Because Sarajevo is in a valley surrounded by mountains which quickly were controlled by Serb forces, we were in an indefensible position. We didn’t have much to defend ourselves with in any case. We were, at first, a purely civilian population. But we were shelled and massacred anyway.
Slowly, some of the men in town who owned rifles (for hunting) realized that one of the only ways to defend themselves was by becoming snipers. These were the same guys who – only weeks or months earlier – argued that only through pacifism would we survive and show the world. We soon discovered the world didn’t care much. As many of us lost family members and started starving, we realized that if snipers would slow the numbers of civilians being killed, that’s what needed to happen. There wasn’t any other choice.
I lived frighteningly near the frontline. So much so, that in quiet moments, there would occasionally be dialogue between “our” snipers and the Serbs shooting and shelling us from the hills. Usually, it was our guys shouting at the Serbs in the hills to lay down their arms. (Most of the Serbs were “local” and frequently each side personally knew the guys on the “other” side.) These requests were quite obviously ignored. It didn’t stop our guys from trying, and they were heartfelt pleas. Our snipers were engaged in self-defense, and I’m amazed that people are so ignorant of war – even in secondhand terms – that they see no difference between self-defense and aggression.
posted by Dee Xtrovert at 4:26 PM on January 28
And another from the same comment:
I can’t idolize a sniper, no matter how tough he was. To be a sniper you have to be no more than one notch away from a psychopath. To kill 800 people, looking at each of them in the face, you have to be dead inside.
How can I say it? That’s just fucking stupid. Maybe, if you know you’re firing on civilians in an act of senseless aggression, it takes a kind of heartless person to do that. But that certainly wasn’t true for Häyhä, who was defending his country and people and likely saved many more lives than he took. Unlike probably everyone else on MetaFilter, I have been a victim of snipers twice, with scars to prove it. That’s not including a shelling that killed my parents, broke my scapula to bits and put me in a coma for weeks. Or the white-hot shrapnel. So if anyone has a right to judge snipers harshly, I am her. But I make the distinction between the people who shot me for no good reason and those who were defending a peace-loving, multi-ethnic city. Because there is a difference.
* * * * * * *
We stopped at the Accuracy International booth, and the fellow gave us a demonstration of the ballistics calculator he’d developed. I don’t want to go into a lot of detail, but suffice it to say that this hand-held device was extremely well designed and robust, capable of holding up to the worst kind of weather and, um, ‘field conditions.’ With it, a capable marksman with the right kind of gun could easily hit a moving target at the range of thousands of yards. Indeed, it is so sophisticated that it will calculate air density differentials according to elevation, and the effect that they would have on the flight of a given bullet at a given angle, because it was meant to be used for making shots up or down the sides of mountains. It’s such a powerful tool that it actually falls under the US laws concerning weapons technology transfers.
* * * * * * *
My comment about the grim-faced men and women was missed in the general chatter, and I’m glad. I meant it, because using those images was so over-the-top in many applications as to be absurd. You know, the whole ‘warrior’ images being tied to a particular flashlight or type of boot. Just . . . silly. Those I know who have been in real grim situations seldom celebrate the fact or try to draw notice to it.
But it is easy to misunderstand that. Sometimes a little black humor is entirely appropriate.
Before I left the show I stopped by the sniper’s table and quietly left a donation. They were out of the little skulls. Which was just fine by me.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to the BBTI blog.)
Communion Of Dreams 