And Now for Something Completely Different

The news hasn’t been good these last few days. It’s easy to get caught up in the hour-by-hour, sometimes minute-by-minute reports of quarantines, shut-downs and shelter-in-place orders and let it overwhelm you.

While that’s certainly natural and perfectly understandable, it’s important to manage your intake. Step away from the news and do something else occasionally to improve your mental hygiene.

Go for a walk. Clean a gun. Throw a ball in the back yard with your kid or your dog.

Toward that end, here are three videos we’ve come across recently that are worth a look, if for no other reason than to focus your attention elsewhere for a while.

The DU video above is like all of their videos…lavishly and beautifully produced. You don’t have to be a duck hunter to enjoy it. Being a dog lover helps. It will make you long to be in an Arkansas duck blind trying to keep warm as the sun comes up and the first ducks start to light in the rice field in front of you.

If that’s not for you, here’s one from the SHOT Show — an event that seems like it happened about 1000 years ago now.

SIG SAUER’s product manager for rifles, Patrick Hanley, took some time to show our friends at Wide Open Spaces about their new Cross bolt action rifle (which we got a chance to shoot at range day).

oembed rumble video here

Finally, SilcencerCo recently put out this video about their Omega 36M modular suppressor. It handles everything from .223 Remington to .338 Lapua in a couple of configurations.

You may not own a suppressor or even want one. But SilencerCo does a good job on their videos. The Omega 36M is almost endlessly configurable for use on everything from a GLOCK 19 to a long action precision rifle.

This one might even take you back to the good old days when a little thing like tax stamp wait times seemed somehow important.

In short, hang in there. Things may get worse before they start to get any better, but they will get better. Until then, we’ll try to bring you some content that’s less dire than the news of the day as and when we can.

And as always, thanks for reading.



  1. avatar Hoyden says:

    Take a walk
    with a sub gauge
    and (a)good friend(s)
    Who have a good brace of dogs
    and fields full of quail

    1. avatar Gadsden Flag says:

      Hayden, funny you should say that. Casey called a couple of hours ago. We can do a quail hunt at Southwind for $1000 for four guns. Dinner, breakfast and lunch. Accommodations. Open bar. No limit on birds. Setting it up for next week. Meeting Mark at the farm tomorrow. Lunch, beers and a possible Randall knife deal. What pandemic?

      1. avatar Tom in Oregon says:


        1. avatar tsbhoa.p.jr says:

          quail virus.

        2. avatar Gadsden Flag says:

          Tom, join us. Still looking for the fourth gun. Slot won’t be open long.

        3. avatar Geoff "Guns. LOTS of guns..." PR says:

          “quail virus.”

          *Snicker*… 😉

    2. avatar anonymous says:

      Hey Dan,

      When are you going to publish my rust bluing article?

  2. avatar Mack The Knife says:

    Thanks, great advice.

  3. avatar WI Patriot says:

    Loaded up some .357m, then went out and shot some of it up…seems cyclical, but the wheels on the bus go round and round…

  4. avatar Mark N. says:

    Yeah, pretty tired of the same old on the news cycle.

    I’d love a silencer, but I don’t think I would survive in a California state prison for too long.

    The good news in California is that the “nonlead ammo” bill for ALL shooting has been withdrawn. Perhaps it was the outcry, perhaps someone told the idiot who proposed it that it could mean we’d be shooting AP brass bullets, or that copper is a critical commodity in short supply….

    1. avatar Gordon in MO says:

      Nah…..logic doesn’t apply.
      They got temporarily side tracked on something else.
      They will be back.

  5. avatar jwm says:

    My wife and I went for a walk in the local park. Kids and families are out in the air and sun having fun. Life is not all bullets and toilet paper.

    Swung by Nations and picked up a chocolate creme pie and took in to my grandsons. I took them to the Marina yesterday and one day next week we’ll get into another adventure.

  6. avatar tsbhoa.p.jr says:

    nice selection.
    i’ll be restoring a 34kv line to the sanitary district.
    alone. that was a loud bang. it let ~all~ the smoke out…

    1. avatar Paul says:

      Isn’t there a direct relationship between the loudness of the bang, and the quantity of smoke lost? I’ve never found that formula though. I’ll bet you could calculate the calories per centimeter if you had it!

      1. avatar tsbhoa.p.jr says:

        makes me think of magnetti morelli italian coils and regulators. they hold more smoke than you’d think.

    2. avatar Ed Schrade says:

      When the magic smoke gets out, everything stops doesn’t it. Be safe. Knees give me trouble from years of climbing. The creosote splinters are all gone though.

      1. avatar tsbhoa.p.jr says:

        i sent video of the porcelain burning(!); 35k degress vaporizes anything on the planet (sun surface is 8k?) to a peer. he said that those were ~speed flames~ that hurry the electrons along and that we charge the customer more for the option.
        meanwhile there was no humor to be found. last contingency makes for edgy.

  7. avatar DesertDude says:

    The city closed the public gun range, but the private one across the road is still open. My wife and I are still walking dogs. We make all of our meals at home, so we don’t miss going out.

  8. avatar former water walker says:

    Gun range is out. ILL is closed. Talked to my son in Maryland. Strange bs afoot at the Pentagon. We’re OK in the short run…should I go back to all greentip in my magazine’s?!?😏

    1. avatar uncommon_sense says:

      former water walker,

      Any idea what strange B.S. is going on at the Pentagon?

      I know this much: it is AWFULLY strange that this Corona virus covid-19 exhibits a 70% fatality rate among men and only 30% among women. That just wreaks of a bio-weapon.

      And as covid-19 is exploding out of control in Europe and the United States, it is somehow dissipating in China — a nation with far greater population density and who had much less knowledge of the virus at onset and much less resources to deal with it.

      I have to wonder if China engineered this virus, along with a cure, and released it on the world without disclosing that China has a cure.

      Is the above notion consistent with the B.S. going on at the Pentagon? Or is the Pentagon simply putting in overtime in case some country decides to try their luck with the U.S. in a weakened condition?

      1. avatar M says:

        The Chinese government says it’s under control there, which means it probably isn’t. On the other hand most Western nations are more likely to dramatize their respective situation 24/7. Anyway things would go a lot smoother if the media had been semi decent about that whole thing, and if folks knew how to not freakout so easily regarding the lack of certain items in stores.

        1. avatar M says:

          @strytch, thx for the link, very informative post. You can also add France, I believe 83 or 87% of the French who died were over 70 year old.

      2. avatar strych9 says:

        One of the things to pay attention to here is what’s not being hyped as opposed to what is.

        People are freaking out about the numbers in Italy and skyscreaming that “It’s coming here just like that!”. Let’s put that to bed, shall we?

        One of the first things to note here is the average age of those who actually die in Italy/Spain and what that means. The average age is 79.5 years. IOW, old people. This isn’t surprising. Flu gets into nursing homes and wrecks havoc literally every year. On top of that the states along the Med have significantly higher populations of old folks because they’re the retirement destinations for Europeans.

        A graph of ages for these countries has an “hour glass” figure at the top but in straight numbers, since I can’t post a graph here, the median age in Italy is 46.5, the fifth highest in the world. China is #62 at 38.4 and we’re #61 at 38.5. That’s a HUGE difference. 16.85% of our population is over 65, China is at 12.34% but Italy is 22.08%. Demographics matters in this. Yesterday Italy had ~41,000 cases discovered and 4,032 deaths total but they have a population that’s >65 of 13,778,507. When you run the numbers that works out to be an actual risk of death for “old folks” the current death rate is less than ~0.0293%.

        Secondly, look at the risk factors. COPD, diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, obesity etc. They’re all cardio-pulmonary problems. Since this disease affects the lungs those things being risk large risk factors is not a shocker either. But when we look at the actual statistics that no one apparently wants to cover in the media what we find is this: the vast, vast, vast majority of the people who are dying are two things: Over 60 and already in poor health. Brutal as it is to say, they weren’t long for this world before this disease hit. COVID-19/SARS-CoV-2 just sped up the process a bit.

        This matters. The simple fact is that places like China don’t really take care of people with issues like this. In a place like China these people are already dead so they can’t be added to the CoV-2 numbers.

        Also, what’s the link between all these issues? They’re all related to taking poor care of yourself for years and years. Just look at diabetes. It’s actually not a risk factor for CoV-2 if it’s well managed over the long term because you don’t have sugar crystals shredding your capillaries. The “problem” is that the average A1C for T1’s is 9.1 and for T2’s it’s 9.7. They’re way, way above the target range of 7.0. 80% of diabetics in general NEVER hit the target range. But if you’re managing your diabetes then the risk factor essentially disappears. Fuck man, I have late onset T1 and I’ve had COVID-19. My average blood sugar jumped 32mg/dl for a few days, I had the runs and was sore and tired for a couple days. Four days later and I was back to full speed. No big deal. Of course my A1C is 5.8, not 9, 11 or 13 because I actually take care of myself.

        The third thing to keep in mind here is that millions of people we don’t have a positive test on are, in fact, infected or have been infected. Just look at Italy again. If the numbers that the media hype are true then with 41,000 cases representing about 16% of actual cases then they really have at least 256,000 cases. That drops the death toll of the disease from 9.8% to 1.56% with over 80% of those cases being people with multiple risk factors one of which is a preexisting condition. That means for most of the population the death toll is somewhere around 0.312%.

        In other words: Yes, in certain populations this is more dangerous than the flu. But those populations are specific in the fact that they are 1) old and 2) already in poor health. This really isn’t some apocalyptic event. It’s a wake up call for what could happen if something truly nasty did get loose with modern air travel, and how we can’t trust a place like China about… well anything, because their government doesn’t give a shit about it’s own people never mind the rest of the world.

        Also, it’s a wake up call to fat people to get healthy so a really rather benign lung infection doesn’t take your life early.


          “…and how we can’t trust a place like China about… well anything,…”

          Interesting things trickling out of China :

          “Latest figures released by China Mobile show that they have lost 8.116 million users in Jan and Feb. Where are these users now? Switched to other carriers? Or, they couldn’t carry their phone to the nether world?
          Chinese report at: #CCPVirus #COVID2019″

          2 days with no new infections, they say? :

        2. avatar strych9 says:

          ““Latest figures released by China Mobile show that they have lost 8.116 million users in Jan and Feb.”

          Well, it’s not like the Chinese have a problem simply shutting down the electronics of people who don’t have a high enough “social credit score”. Or shutting down the internet. Or going after anyone who happens to say something The Party doesn’t like. Or just shutting shit down so that information can’t spread because someone might talk.

          It should also be pointed out that for most of the Chinese population the healthcare system is decidedly 3rd World. Shit, they can’t even build hospitals that don’t collapse on the people inside them.

          As I said weeks ago, compare the 2009 African Flu Pandemic to the exact same disease in the US that year or any other year a few years in either direction. We’re at ~0.2% while Africa was at 1.3%, nearly seven times higher. That’s the difference between modern medicine and crap. China is crap unless you’re a moderately high ranking Party person in good standing.

        3. avatar strych9 says:

          Oh, and another thought: What did they do with 8.116 million bodies?

          The Iranians dig mass graves for a few thousand and we catch that on satellite reconnaissance but the Chinese dispose of 8.116 million corpses in a matter of months and no one sees a thing?

          With the pollution down in China we know they didn’t burn them and they sure as shit didn’t dig mass graves for that many bodies or we’d have seen the holes in the ground.

        4. avatar Dude says:


          It’s a wake up call for all sorts of things, for most people. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.

          So you had this funk? You feel better now?

        5. avatar jwm says:

          S9. Not advancing any theories. But China has massive mines. Really big pre dug holes in the ground. Which would look routine on satellite photos because they’ve been there for generations.

        6. avatar strych9 says:

          “So you had this funk? You feel better now?”

          Yeah, I’m fine. I can totally see how people “don’t know they have it”. I certainly didn’t. Just felt like a mild flu that lasted longer than expected.

        7. avatar strych9 says:


          You’d still have to move the people and gear into position to move the bodies. No way that goes unnoticed in the modern world. Moving 8 million plus corpses isn’t a trivial thing.

      3. avatar Dude says:

        “That just wreaks of a bio-weapon.”

        Sounds like female privilege to me. I’m sure the feminists will be upset about the disparity. 😉

        1. avatar CTstooge says:


  9. avatar Wally1 says:

    Went snowmobiling last Sunday and Monday. It was probably the best snow we had all year. I usually go a week at a time with no interaction with anyone but the wife, Life’s great. So not much change in my life. Working hard outside getting ready for summer fun. I was prepared long before this so called crisis hit, so not much changed for us.

  10. avatar James Campbell says:

    Almost every indoor gun range has closed in the D/FW area.
    Heading out to a friends shooting property west of Ft Worth tomorrow, should have 8 or 10 in the group. Shooting steel targets at 500 to 800 yards is always a good time.

    1. avatar Ferg in Tahoe says:

      I hate you! Not really, but yeah I do….

    2. avatar Capt. Beefcurtains says:

      So the group joke released you and your housemates?

  11. avatar The Rookie says:

    I cooked up a batch of bannock bread and am making a big pot of “Cowboy Beans” from scratch for the weekend. It’s relaxing just to putter around in the kitchen a bit.

    Oh yeah, and I had a baked potato with lots of bacon on it for dinner. I’m working on a theory that bacon prevents or cures any and all maladies known to mankind. More research (*munch munch*) is needed, however…

    1. avatar LifeSavor says:


      Big fan of Weston Price?

      Turns out, he has bee correct all along.

      1. avatar The Rookie says:

        Heh, had to look that one up. Always cool when I get to learn something new.

        Want some bacon? Don’t cost nuthin’

  12. avatar Jim Bullock says:

    Adding to Strych9’s analysis…

    Like the stats, what’s known about the bug itself is obscured, hyped, ignored, unremarkable or some combination… BUT, as sloppy as anything else out there…

    It’s killed after 2-3 hours in the air. Faster in sunlight. Faster in warm n damp.

    It attacks specific epithelial tissue. “Wash yr hands.” n “Don’t touch yr face.” is to keep it off of yr eyes, nose lips, n breathing tubes.

    It dies on surfaces … couple hours for copper, 2-3 days for plastic n stainless steel.

    The airborn particles fall.

    A number of mitigating drugs, with known safe use protocols, have already been identified. Yr sick, but die less.

    Knowing how it behaves, you can reduce your contact. Go for a walk in the fresh air, to disincect yrself a bit.

    And the big one … if this thing were the Andromeda Plague they’re acting like, nobody would have gotten off that quarantined cruise ship. The policy problem seems to be that a fraction of the folks who get it live or die depending on the supportive care they get. If there’s not enough supportive care to go around, what’s the use of that highly-managed access n delivery system? If the overlords can’t take care of all the folks who care can get through this, then maybe the grand systems are less about delivering care, n more about deciding who gets it … who lives n dies. The cultivated panic is “Wag the Dog” to distract from the treatment n manavement shenanigans.

    1. avatar Dude says:

      “Yr sick, but die less.”

      I would prefer to die less.

  13. avatar Southern Cross says:

    My son and I went to a gun shop to put a deposit on a new rifle.

    Then we went to range and while my son watched videos on the laptop I competed in a 300 meter match winning my grade and putting in a good score.

    1. avatar Dude says:

      Sounds like a great day.

  14. avatar AD of the Hinterlands says:

    Has nobody acknowledged the Monty Python reference?
    “How to not be shot: Do not stand up.”

    1. avatar tsbhoa.p.jr says:

      “a scotsman on a horse.”

  15. avatar wildrider666 says:

    Great Advice! I took a break from it and only hit the Local ndws for a few days. Didn’t miss anything in the big picture that directly impacts me.

    Mom’s and Dad’s: give the kids a break from it too including you conversations, complaints and worries. For you and the kids you need to interact with them. Be corny or out of character, make a mess WITH them. Cabin fever is harder to fix than prevent. Don’t abandon them to the Internet, bad crap never takes a day off: monitor all ages! Get some old school age appropriate board games, play, goof around and don’t forget to loose most of the time!

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