Month: November 2024
Some firearms trainers make me sick. I’m not talking about the good ones who train countless citizens or even ones who are awful, and we all know there are some out there. Like the ones who brag they’ve been certified for 40 years, and never got a stitch of training since then. You know the type.
Just like doctors, the firearms community has some people who need a whack upside the head. We have doctors out there who prescribe pills because the drug companies tell them to, not because the meds are needed. We have people going to doctors because Big Pharma is advertising, asking them to prescribe drugs that can do all sorts of harm because there might be some marginal benefit. That is just bass ackwards. But the doctors comply, to the tune of billions of dollars. There’s a word for that. It’s perverse.
A Sad Business Model
We see some of the same in firearms training. Some trainers are training solely because the government forces people to take prescribed classes, to get carry permission slips. It’s not that the classes are good or bad or might teach some of what needs to be known. It’s because people’s rights are denied by the same government that then requires the class, and the wallet cards. And these trainers, loyal to a fault, line up at the government feed trough to chow down on the required meals. A high school diploma ought to require one credit in marksmanship. Now, there’s a righteous requirement.
Are you the type of sycophant ward of the nanny state, incapable of running a business unless the state requires people to take your program under penalty of arrest? You’re running an “education program” that teaches what your master says to teach instead of real firearms training. Don’t get me wrong. The government CCW leash got a lot of people armed and in police criminal databases for safekeeping.
Are you an American, free-thinking, independent business leader driven by profit motive, self-interest, personal initiative and free-market capitalism? You’ve trained earnestly for long, hard hours until you excel at your craft — and you want the public educated.
Could you sell the goods you have and the talent you have, to people who can freely buy your goods? Can you step out from under the state or federal feed bag, and instead of depending on government handouts and coercive support, convince people to get your training because it’s good for them, will help them survive, will prepare them for emergencies, will make you look good and honored, make them solid citizens? This is good. Americans commend this.
Earn It
If you want to cry about inept inability to independently run classes, go tell your mama. If you want to step up to the plate and make an adult of yourself, show your stuff, do good, and be what Americans ought to be, then go out there and sell to the half of the public that has guns instead of the few percent willing to bow and scrape for voluntary taxation, expiration dates and official government-approved “carry cards.” We knew, when discreet carry started, that some gun bubbas would become the “state training industry,” dependent on government handouts, mandates and threats, coercive compulsory classes, and could never do the work on their own. Your countrymen are ashamed of you. Leave the practice, be productive or apply for a salary somewhere, be a wage slave. The savvy, market-oriented, independently motivated, self-reliant business people will rake in the money you deem too difficult to independently earn. Earn. Now, there’s a word you should ponder.
I’ve been saying training opportunities will blossom once Americans’ Second Amendment rights are restored, and the market becomes 50% of the public, the armed half, instead of the small percent the CCW government-enabled market focuses upon.
Constitutional Carry, real freedom, can’t get support from people who need the government leash. They effectively bleed out the support we need for true freedom to carry, for easy opt-in licensed permission. Real constitutional 2A only gets support from folks who understand what 2A is really about. The front end of the gun is where freedom comes from, not bowing to the dictates of the boss.
When my state, Arizona, was on the verge of obtaining this grand prize, no-papers carry and throwing off shackles of “civilized” oppression, we weren’t even sure what to call it. At the time, in 1994, people called it Vermont Carry, because Vermont never had bans, the only such state. Alaska got there next, but Alaska Carry made even less sense than Vermont Carry. So we invented the term Constitutional Carry the night before the law took effect, and the rest is history. Be part of history and teach Americans to carry and shoot safely because it’s right, not because it’s required.
Award-winning author Alan Korwin has written 14 books, 10 of them on gun law, and has advocated for gun rights for nearly three decades. His next book is Why Science May Be Wrong.
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Stocked 1860 Colt Revolver
The counterpoise trebuchet has seen military service for centuries.Public domain.
I bought my first putt-putt BB gun at age seven. I went hunting not because I liked deer meat but because I just enjoyed walking through the woods carrying a gun with my dad. I bought my first AR-15 in the 10th grade, and my favorite spud gun will pass for a 57mm recoilless rifle in dim light. Once I took physics in high school, all I wanted to do was calculate how cannonballs behaved when fired. I’ve got the gun nerd gene.
My best friend Jason and I once got on a wicked trebuchet kick. A trebuchet is a subset of the catapult. A traditional catapult is a brute force machine wherein the power of a spring, in this case a flexible shaft, is used to throw stuff. By contrast, the trebuchet is so much more elegant.
A counterpoise trebuchet is an amazingly elegant machine.
Public domain.
Technical Stuff
The counterpoise trebuchet was first used in the 12th century. This was a sort of medieval siege engine that used power stored up in a counterweight to fling a projectile. While the archetypal treb ammo was typically rough-hewn stone balls, they could also throw incendiary payloads and ghastly stuff like dead, diseased animals.
A counterpoise trebuchet is basically a big lever mounted on a frame. The shorter end supports the counterweight. The longer arm sports a rope sling on the end that is timed to deploy at just the right moment to maximize mechanical advantage.
Traditional trebuchets were most commonly constructed outside of a fortified town. In fact, once erected, the azimuth of fire was fixed. Adjusting the sling length, counterweight, mass of the projectile, and geometry of the release hook could fine-tune the range.
Ancient sieges were most typically tedious, drawn-out affairs. The attacking army would encamp around a castle or city and then build the siege engines as necessary. The machines were then dismantled or burned once the operation was complete.
Jason and I built several of these machines. The smallest sits on a desktop and throws BBs across the room. One of them is about the size of a toaster oven and chucks marbles. The waist-high version uses bricks for a counterweight and will throw a baseball about a hundred feet.
It is shockingly accurate. You can catch a baseball, keep your gloved hand in exactly the same spot, and catch the next ball without moving. The largest of the lot sported a 12-foot throwing arm and a 400-pound counterweight. That monster would fire a 5-pound bag of flour into the next time zone. That particular projectile rendered a lovely white explosion on impact. It would throw a softball even farther.
It takes a special kind of guy to climb into fake Roman armor
he made in his workshop and parade around in public with a
massive DIY medieval siege engine. Specifically, it takes the
really nerdy sort.
Showtime
It’s tough to be as weird as I am without drawing a crowd. As a result, Jason and I were invited each year by the Ole Miss School of Engineering to kick off their statewide high school trebuchet competition. Teams from across the state build trebs and then come together in the Vaught-Hemingway Football Stadium to see whose machine performs the best. As ours was hugely bigger, we were the warmup act.
In keeping with the gravitas of the moment, my buddy went as a crusader while I was a Roman legionary. My kids and I made my lorica segmentata Roman armor out of roofing flashing as a homeschool project. I have skinny legs. I looked like Big Bird out trolling for SweeTarts on Halloween, but I still just ate it up. I’ve always been cool that way.
And then, after several years of this, it all stopped. One teeny trivial close call, and my buddy and I never got invited back. Honestly, it could have happened to anybody.
The one thing the University of Mississippi reveres beyond all else has got to be the jumbotron. This gigantic monstrosity is about the size of a skyscraper and adorns one complete end of the massive football stadium. It is the holy altar employed during the pagan rituals that are SEC football games. There is literally no telling what that ghastly thing cost.
We set up the treb in the end zone, a not-insubstantial undertaking considering its size and mass, and got a couple of hundred little mini nerds all gathered around. Once we got the massive throwing arm cocked and the softball in place in the sling, we got a volunteer to snatch the lanyard. When this thing goes off, you can feel the earth move. Seismographs in Nevada record the event. Everything performed exactly as designed. Our leviathan medieval siege engine launched our softball at, conservatively, 5,000 feet per second … straight at the jumbotron on the far end of the stadium.
The crowd held its collective breath. The administrators in attendance representing the engineering school actually briefly died. And then the softball impacted the cheap seats in the student section, maybe five feet beneath the jumbotron. No harm, no foul …
All involved had a great time, though we were forbidden from firing our big treb a second time. We looked like idiots, and the kids learned some things. Inexplicably, the following year, we just didn’t get the email invitation to come back. It’s likely all just as well. I wasn’t getting any better looking in that DIY Roman legionary getup.
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