The Screaming Viking

The kid and I went to the gun range this weekend.  Originally I had figured on working on the foundation for the shed, but my knee was preventing me from doing a whole lot of anything constructive.  I got the yard mowed and it was pretty achy, so for my long term health it seemed like a better idea to stay off it.  I had been looking for a day to go out to the gun range for the past little bit and nothing really seemed to work out.  The kid was pretty excited when I mentioned it so we went with that for Saturday afternoon.

I don’t get the opportunity to shoot much around here, so when it does come up I like to take full advantage of it.  I took the three pistols I own as well as the .270 and the kid’s .22.  I was planning on taking the .30-06 but I didn’t have any shells for it.  I had to buy shells for the .270, and if I also bought for the .30-06 we could have been looking at quite a bit of money for some pissing around.  I started digging out the essential gear for going to the range…and it quickly be came obvious why this isn’t something a guy can do on just a whim.  To be fair, if I was going with a pistol or the SKS, I could just grab a gun, ammo and some ear protection and fly out the door…but I wanted to dial in the .270 and to do that it takes the weighted rest as well as a spotting scope.  It doesn’t seem like those two things really add to much to the over all gear package…but with the weighted rest you have to bring the weight bags…I needed an extra ammo can for the extra brass and the kids little spinning gopher target.  More than enough shit to be hauling around for an afternoon. Read the rest of this entry »

At a distance of 1.54 miles.  It was a British dude…better than the Canadian that held the record previously I guess.

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A BRITISH Army sniper has set a new sharpshooting distance record by killing two Taliban machinegunners in Afghanistan from more than a mile away.

Craig Harrison, a member of the Household Cavalry, killed the insurgents with consecutive shots — even though they were 3,000ft beyond the most effective range of his rifle.

“The first round hit a machinegunner in the stomach and killed him outright,” said Harrison, a Corporal of Horse. “He went straight down and didn’t move.

“The second insurgent grabbed the weapon and turned as my second shot hit him in the side. He went down, too. They were both dead.”

The shooting — which took place while Harrison’s colleagues came under attack — was at such extreme range that the 8.59mm bullets took almost three seconds to reach their target after leaving the barrel of the rifle at almost three times the speed of sound.

The distance to Harrison’s two targets was measured by a GPS system at 8,120ft, or 1.54 miles. The previous record for a sniper kill is 7,972ft, set by a Canadian soldier who shot dead an Al-Qaeda gunman in March 2002.

In a remarkable tour of duty, Harrison cheated death a few weeks later when a Taliban bullet pierced his helmet but was deflected away from his skull. He later broke both arms when his army vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb.

Harrison was sent back to the UK for treatment, but insisted on returning to the front line after making a full recovery.

“I was lucky that my physical fitness levels were very high before my arms were fractured and after six weeks in plaster I was still in pretty good shape,” he said. “It hasn’t affected my ability as a sniper.”

Harrison, from Gloucestershire, was reunited in Britain with his wife Tanya and daughter Dani, 16, last month. Recalling his shooting prowess in Helmand province, he said: “It was just unlucky for the Taliban that conditions were so good and we could see them so clearly.”

Harrison and his colleagues were in open-topped Jackal 4×4 vehicles providing cover for an Afghan national army patrol south of Musa Qala in November last year. When the Afghan soldiers and Harrison’s troop commander came under enemy fire, the sniper, whose vehicle was further back on a ridge, trained his sights on a Taliban compound in the distance. His L115A3 long-range rifle, the army’s most powerful sniper weapon, is designed to be effective at up to 4,921ft and supposedly capable of only “harassing fire” beyond that range.

“We saw two insurgents running through its courtyard, one in a black dishdasha, one in green,” he said. “They came forward carrying a PKM machinegun, set it up and opened fire on the commander’s wagon.

“Conditions were perfect, no wind, mild weather, clear visibility. I rested the bipod of my weapon on a compound wall and aimed for the gunner firing the machinegun.

“The driver of my Jackal, Trooper Cliff O’Farrell, spotted for me, providing all the information needed for the shot, which was at the extreme range of the weapon.”

Harrison killed one machinegunner with his first attempt and felled the other with his next shot. He then let off a final round to knock the enemy weapon out of action.

Harrison discovered that he had set a new record only on his return to UK barracks nine days ago. The previous record was held by Corporal Rob Furlong, of Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, who was using a 12.7mm McMillan TAC-50 rifle.

Tom Irwin, a director of Accuracy International, the British manufacturer of the L115A3 rifle, said: “It is still fairly accurate beyond 4,921ft, but at that distance luck plays as much of a part as anything.”

News of Harrison’s success comes amid concern over a rival insurgent sharpshooter who in a five-month spree has killed up to seven British soldiers, including a sniper, in and around the Taliban stronghold of Sangin.

In a later incident during the tour, Harrison’s patrol vehicle was hit 36 times during a Taliban ambush. “One round hit my helmet behind the right ear and came out of the top,” he said. “Two more rounds went through the strap across my chest. We were all very, very lucky not to get hurt.”

Two Minot bars (owned by the same dude) are installing metal detectors that will be used to scan their patrons Friday and Saturday nights.  Dae Udder Place and The Blind Duck will be using wands to run over people in a search for guns.  I know next to nothing about how the metal detectors work, but I assume they would pick up pocket knives…I wonder about body piercings though.

I don’t much care about this change from a rights perspective.  Currently, by ND law, you are not allowed to carry into an establishment that serves alcohol anyhow.  What I do wonder about though is how much hassle I might get if they scanned me and it picked up my pocket knife and my leatherman…neither of which would be classified as a dangerous weapon under ND statute.  It’s easy to see how changes that someone would look at as being not a problem really only hassles people that are not breaking laws.

I got this information from an article online from the Minot Daily.  At the end of the article it references a guy whom outside dae udder place touched off a few rounds from a .40 in the air.  The article says he had a “dispute with his girlfriend”.  Clearly a violation of law…there is no way of knowing if the guy was legally able to carry the gun, but discharging into the air in town is against the law. They never say that he carried into the bar.  I have a concealed weapons permit, I don’t carry though…it’s a bit of a hassle honestly.  Hearing stuff like this, guys touching off rounds…metal detectors at the door…I don’t have any desire to even walk in to a bar anymore.

I like shooting things, I like to hear the boom..feel the recoil and see things explode.  I like the feeling of “power” that it gives me to be able to reach out and touch something like that.  To shoot well takes a lot of practice…lots and lots of practice.  Having said that, shooting is not a sport…hunting is not a sport.  They are recreational activities.  I think people call them sports so their fat lazy no talent asses can feel “athletic” or some shit.  I love hunting, I am an outdoors-man, I am not a “sportsman”.  Shooting is not a sport…

I’m not sure how I feel about this.  One one hand, I like the idea of a school sponsering a shooting team…but on the other hand I don’t like the state coming in and telling a college what they can and cannot have as extra-curricular activities.  I believe it should be the school’s decision and we as consumers will “vote” on that decision each time we spend a dollar in favor or against that school.

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At West Virginia, the rifle team is a point of pride; Buoyed by grass-roots support, restored program is back in the championship zone

Liz Clarke

MORGANTOWN, W.VA. –More than 60,000 people jam into Milan Puskar Stadium to cheer West Virginia’s football team on Saturdays each fall. This winter, 14,000 will pack WVU Coliseum to root on a Mountaineers men’s basketball team with Final Four aspirations.But neither team is as central to this state’s hard-working identity as one that draws virtually no spectators yet is exceptional on two counts.West Virginia’s rifle team is the only Mountaineers squad to have won an NCAA championship — 14, in fact. And it’s the only team with its own line item in the state budget: a $100,000 annual appropriation that represents a none-too-subtle rebuke to a university that dropped its most decorated sport in 2003.The team’s reinstatement and subsequent reclamation of its status as the nation’s preeminent shooting power is one of the more improbable comebacks in college sports. Instead of aspiring professional athletes, the key players were rank-and-file taxpayers, disillusioned parents and students, and small businesses such as Donnie’s Citgo and Bub’s Bar and Grill that mobilized a grass-roots fundraising campaign and lobbying campaign and forced the university to change its mind. “Hunting and shooting is a big thing here,” says junior Brandi Eskew of Petersburg, W.Va., one of two women on WVU’s rifle team, who learned to hunt alongside her father as a child. “It’s something that pretty much everyone does at some point. And it’s something they can relate to more than a lot of other sports.”This past spring, West Virginia won its first NCAA title since 1998. Off to a 6-0 start this season, the No. 1-ranked Mountaineers are on track to win a 15th championship.”What was not understood was that people appreciated excellence,” said Marsha Beasley, who coached the Mountaineers to eight NCAA rifle titles. “West Virginia comes up ranked 40th or 50th on list after list of things. People had always liked that the rifle team had been on top so much.”West Virginia bills itself as a hunter’s paradise, with 1.6 million acres of public hunting ground teeming with deer, black bear and wild turkey. The two weeks of deer season alone pump $250 million into the state’s coffers, according to the governor’s office. And nearly every family has at least one member who takes part.According to one study, West Virginia ranks fifth in the nation in terms of its gun-ownership rate (55.4 percent), trailing only Wyoming, Alaska, Montana and South Dakota.So it’s little wonder that WVU was a national power from the moment the NCAA designated rifle as a scholarship sport in 1980, either winning the national title or finishing as runner-up every year until 1998.Contested in indoor shooting ranges, NCAA-style rifle is an entirely different type of marksmanship from hunting. There are two disciplines: air rifle, in which standing shooters fire lead pellets at targets 10 meters away; and smallbore, in which shooters fire .22 caliber smallbore rifles at targets 50 feet away from prone, kneeling and standing positions. While some say it’s 90 percent mental, it also represents a withering test of balance, abdominal strength and stamina.That appealed to Bryant Wallizer of Little Orleans, Md., a WVU senior who plans to start training for the 2012 Olympics after graduating in the spring.”Guns kind of have negative connotations, but for me there’s been nothing but good that’s come out of shooting,” Wallizer said. “It teaches discipline, task-performing mannerisms, a very acute sense to detail.” ‘Restore the Glory’ The university’s rifle prowess was the main reason Eskew wanted to enroll at West Virginia. Wallizer says it’s the only reason he even considered going to college. So both were stunned when they heard, while still in high school, that West Virginia was dropping its team, along with four men’s teams — tennis, cross-country and indoor and outdoor track.It wasn’t that WVU’s athletic department was running a deficit. Rather, university officials concluded that the only way WVU could become more competitive in the high-stakes world of college sports was to cut five teams and spend the savings (roughly $600,000 in what was then a $27 million budget) on better facilities and more scholarships.”[Dropping teams] was the last thing we wanted to do,” Athletic Director Ed Pastilong says today. “But unfortunately, that was the conclusion.”The backlash was immediate.Students fired off e-mails. Alumni collected 9,000 signatures on a petition demanding the team’s return. The National Rifle Association wrote letters disputing the university’s claim that the sport was too costly. (The team’s $163,000 budget accounted for less than 1 percent of the athletic department budget.) And most team members refused to stop practicing and formed a club instead, with Beasley, who was kept on the payroll until she found another job, serving as the club’s adviser.”They hung tough,” says Ron Justice, West Virginia’s director of Student Organization Services, who was then Morgantown’s mayor. “They said, ‘We’re going to do what we think we need to do to get this program reinstated.’ “Armed with the slogan “Restore the Glory,” Justice helped the students mount a fundraising campaign to bankroll their club and prove to WVU’s administration just how much statewide support they had.(Though the university had stripped the team of its budget, which meant no money for travel, the students’ scholarships were honored until they graduated or transferred.)An outpouring of goodwill followed, from $2 checks on up. A local Harley-Davidson shop donated an Orange County Chopper as the grand prize for a raffle. A vineyard owner hosted a wild-game dinner. Meantime, phones rang off the hook at the state legislature. ‘I guess we misjudged’ The political maneuvering that followed was tricky. The university chafed at overt attempts to micromanage its athletic department. So with scant debate, West Virginia lawmakers appropriated $100,000 for the disbanded rifle team.Soon after, in March 2004, WVU President David C. Hardesty, a former Mountaineers student body president and Rhodes scholar, announced he was reinstating the team. Today, he insists that politics played no role in the decision.”I guess we misjudged the civic pride and passion West Virginians have in their national championship team,” Hardesty says. “We bear the state’s name. We’re almost as old as the state. We’re the flagship university, and they want us to fly their flag. And we all got back together on what the nature of that flag was.”While the $100,000 appropriation was critical in restarting the team, it still left a $63,000 shortfall, so fundraising efforts continued. Two years into the rebuilding effort, Beasley resigned, feeling the enmity of the fight had undercut her ability to advocate for the team.”The reason we have sports in college is that athletics provides a learning experience that you can’t get in a classroom,” Beasley says. “What the university did in that decision is [say] they didn’t care about the students’ learning experience but said, ‘We want to be in the entertainment business.’ No one would admit it, but there is a certain faction that would like to have just football and nothing else. Or maybe basketball.”One of her graduate students — Jon Hammond, a former world junior rifle champion from Scotland — took the reins with a five-year plan for restoring the team’s prominence.Hammond, 29, who represented Great Britain in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, is well ahead of schedule, having sold promising recruits (including Eskew and Wallizer, who transferred to WVU) on the opportunity to help reclaim that glory. They did that in dramatic, come-from-behind fashion at the NCAA championships this past March.While the rifle team continues to receive its unique annual state appropriation, fundraising efforts haven’t stopped. Since 2003, boosters have raised nearly $1 million on the team’s behalf, with much of that going toward an endowment to ensure its stability.”The good thing that happened in this whole thing was a lot of people are connected to West Virginia University through the rifle team,” says Justice, the university official and former Morgantown mayor. “They might not have a child in school or didn’t attend themselves. But it’s almost like it has been adopted as West Virginia’s team.”

IMAGE; Rifle boots, outfitted with form-fitting leather and flat bottoms, provide stability and traction for rifle team members. IMAGE; Photos By Lois Raimondo For The Washington Post; West Virginia rifleman Bryant Wallizer lines up his shot during practice at the team’s indoor shooting range. He’s gunning for the 2012 Olympics. IMAGE; Range monitors provide shooters with detailed data on their target accuracy. That accuracy has produced 14 NCAA titles at West Virginia. IMAGE; Lois Raimondo For The Washington Post; Brandi Eskew with Michael Kulbacki at practice. “Hunting and shooting is a big thing here,” said Askew, who learned to hunt from her father.

December 15, 2009