Sipsey Street Irregulars: Highs and lows. The Tall Creek Shooting Range & I'll be at the Birmingham Gun Show this weekend.

Friday, March 14, 2014

Highs and lows. The Tall Creek Shooting Range & I'll be at the Birmingham Gun Show this weekend.

Well, I'm back from that spate of family business and I am exhausted in about as many ways as you can be exhausted. Anybody who tells you that the business we're in isn't spiritual warfare with an evil enemy that will use any means to get to you doesn't understand the battlefield. Keep me in your prayers.

On a more pleasant note, one of the highs of the trip was a stop at the Tall Creek Shooting Range run by Tommy Easterling at 139 Long Branch Loop in Ellisville, MS. Mr. Easterling has an excellent rifle and pistol range as well as a sporting clays facility and my daughter and I spent some wonderful range time there familiarizing her with her Star PD .45. (I've always liked the Star, and this is a stainless copy built early, circa 1976 or so. The trigger is particularly sweet.) To arrange to use the facility, you have but to call Mr. Easterling on his cell at 601-520-8831, or at 601-5682-4012. Day shooting is $10.00 each. To give you an idea of Mr. Easterling's commitment, he opened up the range the same day he was called away to a funeral in the morning because of a death in the family. While we waited with no one else there, and for lack of anything better to do, I pulled out my trusty little magnet from my coat pocket and sorted his brass for him into ferrous and non-ferrous, looking for just a couple of calibers that we're going to be loading shortly -- .45-70, 7.62x39 and the ever-scarce .44 Special. My score was 34 .45-70, a half dozen 7.62x39 and one .44 Special. (Silly, I know, but you have to take your relaxation where you can find it. Some people golf. Go figure.) When he arrived, I offered to buy the brass I was interested in and he just traded me for the labor of the sorting. Anyway, we had a great time shooting, it was a wonderful stress reliever, and I recommend this range to anyone in the Pine Belt who wants to do some recreational shooting.

I will be working a table at the AGCA's Birmingham gun show this weekend if anybody wants to drop by and chat. Unless my health erupts again, I will be working all day long both Saturday and Sunday. Sorry, no firearms of my own for sale -- I long-ago formally transferred all but a couple to my family members. Look for the white haired old man wearing the black "Arms Smuggler" hat. Of course I report to the hospital on Monday morning early for the next surgery. Again, keep me in your prayers.

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"Progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress."

I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave. -- H.L. Mencken

"The Fate of Unborn Millions. . ."

"The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their Houses, and Farms, are to be pillaged and destroyed, and they consigned to a State of Wretchedness from which no human efforts will probably deliver them. The fate of unborn Millions will now depend, under God, on the Courage and Conduct of this army-Our cruel and unrelenting Enemy leaves us no choice but a brave resistance, or the most abject submission; that is all we can expect-We have therefore to resolve to conquer or die." -- George Washington to his troops before the Battle of Long Island.

"We will not go gently . . ."

This is no small thing, to restore a republic after it has fallen into corruption. I have studied history for years and I cannot recall it ever happening. It may be that our task is impossible. Yet, if we do not try then how will we know it can't be done? And if we do not try, it most certainly won't be done. The Founders' Republic, and the larger war for western civilization, will be lost.

But I tell you this: We will not go gently into that bloody collectivist good night. Indeed, we will make with our defiance such a sound as ALL history from that day forward will be forced to note, even if they despise us in the writing of it.

And when we are gone, the scattered, free survivors hiding in the ruins of our once-great republic will sing of our deeds in forbidden songs, tending the flickering flame of individual liberty until it bursts forth again, as it must, generations later. We will live forever, like the Spartans at Thermopylae, in sacred memory.

-- Mike Vanderboegh, The Lessons of Mumbai:Death Cults, the "Socialism of Imbeciles" and Refusing to Submit, 1 December 2008

"A common language of resistance . . ."

"Colonial rebellions throughout the modern world have been acts of shared political imagination. Unless unhappy people develop the capacity to trust other unhappy people, protest remains a local affair easily silenced by traditional authority. Usually, however, a moment arrives when large numbers of men and women realize for the first time that they enjoy the support of strangers, ordinary people much like themselves who happen to live in distant places and whom under normal circumstances they would never meet. It is an intoxicating discovery. A common language of resistance suddenly opens to those who are most vulnerable to painful retribution the possibility of creating a new community. As the conviction of solidarity grows, parochial issues and aspirations merge imperceptibly with a compelling national agenda which only a short time before may have been the dream of only a few. For many Americans colonists this moment occurred late in the spring of 1774." -- T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence, Oxford University Press, 2004, p.1.

Sipsey Street Irregulars

Friday, March 14, 2014

Highs and lows. The Tall Creek Shooting Range & I'll be at the Birmingham Gun Show this weekend.

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