A Day That Will Live In Infamy Plus 77 Years

Today marks the 77th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. It is also marks the first time that a surviving member of the crew of the USS Arizona will not be in Hawaii to commemorate the event.

From the news reports:

No one who survived the bombing of the USS Arizona battleship will be in the audience.


“This is the very first year,” said Daniel Martinez, historian with the World War II Valor in the Pacific National Monument.


Health issues and doctor’s orders prevented Lou Conter from coming.


“She said you cannot go. You better cancel out,” he said in telephone interview from his home in California.


Conter is 97. The handful of survivors of the battleship’s sinking are all in their 90s…


About 300 USS Arizona sailors survived Japan’s surprise attack.


Only five are alive: Conter, Don Stratton, Ken Potts, Lonnie Cook and Lauren Bruner.

The hatred and enmity between the two countries is in the past. Now you have survivors who fought on each side coming together in ceremonies like the Blacked Canteen ceremony which celebrates peace and reconciliation.

What Caliber For Yeti?

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If the weather models are correct and the hyperbole from local TV and the Weather Channel is not hyperbole, Western North Carolina is about to be hit with a snow storm that will rival the Blizzard of ’93. Hospitals are implementing emergency management plans, bread is getting hard to find even as far east as Charlotte, and people have started testing their generators.

This all leads to the obvious question:  what caliber for yeti?

Can you get by with 5.56 in your AR or will you need to up your game? Does it require a purpose-built caliber like .358 Yeti from Mad Dog Weapon Systems or is that overkill?

If you have suggestions, please post them.

These 62 Had The Courage Of Their Convictions

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Do you have the courage of your convictions with regard to the Second Amendment? Would you go to the mattresses to use a term from The Godfather?  Would you put your job at risk or would you just quietly suck it up?

62 former employees of Dick’s Sporting Goods and their Field and Stream subsidiary did have the courage of their convictions. After Dick’s CEO Ed Stack not only changed the company’s policy on selling modern sporting rifles and raised the purchase age to 21 for all firearms but fully bought into the gun control agenda, these 62 resigned their jobs.

From the Pittsburgh Business Times:

According to CEO Ed Stack, 62 employees quit working for Dick’s Sporting Goods over the retailer’s decision to stop selling assault-style weapons, announced in February….



“We anticipated that there would be some people that would leave. We’ve got 40,0000 employees, and 2,500, or 2,6000 (sic) people working at our corporate headquarters,” said Stack, of the Findlay-based company. “We’re a cross-section of the country. We knew people would be upset.”

His comments came in a Wall Street Journal CEO Council interview. An excerpt of that interview is below.

Stack says it is OK to have differing views and he is correct. However, it is one thing to have differing views on whether the Steelers or the Eagles are the better team and a whole another thing to have differing views on working to suppress a right enumerated in the Bill of Rights.

What Stack did not say was who they were and what jobs they held. Some, like the clerk he mentioned, probably held low level jobs. Other I’m guessing held higher positions. While I don’t have any confirmation of it, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Jack Barnes who is the new VP for Commercial Sales for Sig Sauer was one of those 62. He had developed and implemented the concept of the Field and Stream stores for Dick’s.

These 62 former employees put skin in the game and stood for the Constitution when the head of the company they worked for decided it was politically expedient to trash it. They are to be applauded. If I owned a company in the firearms industry I’d be looking for these 62 as they would be the kind of employees I’d want.

The Evolution Of The Magazine Pull

Magazine pulls or those attachments used to facilitate pulling a magazine out of the ammo pouch have certainly undergone quite an evolution.

It started with some soldier or marine who had the idea to use flattened 550 paracord to fashion an easier way to pull their magazines out of their Alice-clipped mag pouch.

Somewhere along the line, it advanced to making “e-pulls” using three pieces of flattened paracord along with duct tape. The center section was fused together using a household iron.

I don’t know if it was the first or second iteration that gave Richard Fitzpatrick the idea to create the original MagPul or not but create it he did. An entire company and industry followed from that.

The Magpul Ranger Plate in its many variations followed about five years later. It traded out the magazine’s original floor plate for a new one which incorporated the loop or pull. They are now made for a variety of magazine styles including the original aluminum GI mags and, of course, all the variants of the PMag. Other variations include the MagPod (not made by Magpul) which turned the Ranger Plate in a “foot” providing stability when shooting.

Just like as with immigrants where the first generation worked as laborers and each succeeding generation moved further and further away from manual labor, so, too, it is with magazine pulls. A Japanese airsoft company, Echigoya Guns & Military Hobby Shop, has created an “interesting” variation on the first-gen MagPul. It is the perfect fashion accessory for your tacticool AR.

As best as I can tell – given I don’t read Japanese – these sell for ¥1,000 – ¥1,200 or about $8 to $10 US at current exchange rates. Echigoya does have a website and they do take credit cards. These might make the perfect accessory to go with your Kalashnikitty t-shirt (if you can still find one).

Well That Explains It!

If you have ever taken a firearm apart for cleaning or tried to assemble your own AR lower, you have had a part or two that flew off and was damn near impossible to find. We have all experienced it at some time or another.

Today, I read the best explanation as to why these small parts like a detent pin and detent spring are impossible to find after being launched into near space from your kitchen table or workbench. It has nothing to with their size but everything to do with Einsteinian physics.

The reason those parts that go flying are almost never found – because a
spring is causing the flying, they accelerate rapidly. In fact they reach
a very high speed, almost the speed of light. At the speed of light, time
shifting starts to occur. So those parts are time traveling. Sometime the
parts aren’t there yet when you look for them. Maybe try next week…

Brian in MI

Time traveling parts. Well that explains it. I guess I need to move my thought processes beyond that of Newtonian physics.