.22LR- ammo is cheaper than any other, likely won’t wake the neighbors, and H.P. Rounds will leave very little if any ballistic evidence for the forensics team. Just saying.
scottAugust 17, 2020, 11:26 AM
.22 caliber is fine for close proximity assassinations by trained killers, but for home protection you will probably just make the drug crazed intruder mad with a .22cal. You need a 9mm or better to stop the intruder, you might just want to get a pump shotgun with home defense rounds in it. The sound of your racking a shell in the chamber will make the intruder’ sphincter tighten, and the home defense round will probably not kill people in the next room if you miss.
MissyAugust 17, 2020, 12:41 PM
Shotgun all the way. A former NJ cop who lives down the road made this decision for me, even though I have been shooting a 38 at a range of late. I prefer the 38 but if I am shaking, and I would be shaking at the prospect of a home invasion, I can’t hit squat.
Bill in TennesseeAugust 17, 2020, 12:51 PM
Live in the country….5.56 for long range deterent, 12-ga for intermediate deterrent, and 9mm for up close and personal. And yes, all three are at my bedsidee.
ghostsniperAugust 17, 2020, 12:57 PM
Ignore the naysayers flexing their dix.
A .22 can be a decent gun and far better than any knife or club or nothing at all. Besides, ammo is so rare and expensive now .22 may be all you can find. I just had another 2000 rds delivered on Fri.
One suggestion, get a high capacity semiautomatic.
Oh yeah, all that nonsense about the “racking sound” illustrates the writers naivete.
A shotgun “unracked” is just a club and almost useless.
Anyway, when you pull the shotgun out it is to go to work, not scare people that are wanting to kill you.
Now, the web is inundated with little gurlz.
ghostsniperAugust 17, 2020, 1:00 PM
Bill in Tennessee is talking about the “professional’s choice” and a fine choice it is, in fact, it is my choice. Notice I said professional. That’s not the same thing as a single gun owner with a recent acquisition.
JackAugust 17, 2020, 1:40 PM
I love pistols and shoot them regularly, from .22 through my .45s. People might laugh at the diminutive .22 but my little 10 shot Browning 1911-22, stoked with CCI-HP MiniMags, is a bad piece of news and those little pills will chew through a lot of hide. I can shoot 10 rounds in as many seconds and cover most of them with a baseball at 9-10 yards. That means that I can dump those things into a perps head and face with no problem. I also own that model in .380 and with good defensive ammunition it is the cat’s whacker. I carry it all of the time and never feel undergunned.
May I add a suggestion. There seems to be a missing piece of equipment (at least for any White Blue Stater), a shovel. I wouldn’t plan for any involvement by the authorities.
Dig the hole in advance. At Halloween time buy a few bales of straw, for ‘decoration’, and after digging a suitable hole in the back forty then throw the bales of straw in to hold the shape. Cover the top with a thin sheet of plywood and the mound of dirt with a tarp.
If used, after filling the hole with the dirt, cover with the tarp and pile the bales of hay on top. The hay you are ‘saving’ for next Halloween.
Auntie AnalogueAugust 17, 2020, 3:28 PM
Burr’s “Ooo-ooooo” from unprotected natural hearing of a .38 fired outdoors doesn’t happen to every shooter.
I learned to shoot before ear protection was a thing, long before it became de rigueur, and after discharging one, two, three, or even and hundred or two hundred rounds of centerfire pistol and rifle ammo I never had that “Ooo-ooooo” thing happen.
In navy boot camp they let us shoot indoors nothing more than single-shot bolt action Mossberg .22 rifles. To me these were already small potatoes, so they sounded like cap pistols fired in a echo-ey stairwell.
Later, on a 12-degree day while I was bundled in a sweater beneath service dress overcoat, my unit qualified on the M-16, and if it hadn’t been for feeling bitterly cold to the marrow after waiting for an hour on the range for the Gunners Mates to show up with the rifles & ammo, and for having been clad in service dress coat, I’d have shot better than I did (I shot Marksman, missed Sharpshooter by two points, and those M-16’s had seen better days, they were pretty well clapped out). Up and down the range the unit fired constantly, and I never had that “Ooo-ooooo.”
Same on plenty of other ranges with shooters loosing off rounds from .22’s to .44’s, from 12 ga. shotguns to big belted magnums: no hearing protection, indoor and outdoor ranges, and I never had that “Ooo-ooooo.” Even at machine gun shoots, right beside a Ma Deuce hammering away, I never got that “Ooo-ooooo.” I’m pushing seventy now and have no hearing trouble, although for the last two decades I’ve worn “ears” when shooting.
Some people get that “Ooo-ooooo,” others don’t. Hearing intensity and hearing damage seem to vary among people.
AnonymousAugust 17, 2020, 3:40 PM
Racking a shotgun is dumb. My 12 gauge is loaded and the safety is off. I don’t care what the safety nazis say. I am ready and I sleep with the bedroom door locked.
Teri PittmanAugust 17, 2020, 5:34 PM
Jim Brady was shot in the head with a .22. The gun I have is a .22 revolver. It’s not the best gun for self defense but better than no gun at all.
JamesAugust 17, 2020, 6:46 PM
Teri, Robert Kennedy was assassinated, and five others wounded, by a guy with an eight shot 22LR revolver.
BlogDogAugust 18, 2020, 9:05 AM
No love for a .40 S&W? I like the idea, for home defense of a hollowpoint round that has enough power to hit but not blow through the target. In fact, I’d say any home defense weapon should be loaded with hollowppoints.
Talking about bear, which I don’t hunt (Look too much like a person when you field dress them & hang them.) but I try to be ready for: I like my Winchester model 12 best as a cabin or canoe gun but a wee bit unhandy when fly fishing. My Desert Eagle .41 mag. in a shoulder holster tain’t bad when waist deep in a steam or a couple of miles from camp on a river bank. My little Judge is comfortable around the property, in the taiga. Not accurate much beyond 10 feet but twice that’s about as far as you can see in the brush anyway, and 410 shot or .45 cal rounds pack a lot of stopping power at short range. If I were to carry in town (One should always be ready for bear, anywhere.) a nice 95 grain .380 auto container is a paddle holster doesn’t print badly (Not obvious under a long shirt or a jacket.) and can be moved to the left side, cross draw, readily when driving, hence not obstructed by a seat belt.
Like Auntie Analogue, I learned to shoot long before ear protection. I’ll put the muffs on for 40-50 round target practice but wouldn’t even think of carrying them hunting or fishing.
Whatever, practice is important so the little thingies comin’ out the barrel go where you want them when you pull the trigger. During our long winters I, inside my house, toss a lot of pellets out of two air pistols, one with iron sights, the other red dot, at 20 to 40 feet. My target/stop is around 8 by 10 inches, no problem keeping all the pellets well within that space, hence my windows, walls , etc. are still intact.
.22 cal.? Hey great for anything smaller than a beaver and at least a wee bit better than a blunt stick if you gotta deal with anything bigger.
Eric BlairAugust 18, 2020, 2:39 PM
9-shot Taurus .22 revolver
Aguila SSS 64 grain loads
Crimson Trace grip panels
Shoot someone 9 times in the ‘Golden Triangle’ ( base of nose out to nipples, line across )
use to work in Chicago suburban ER … nites … Good Samaritan Downers Grove
one .22 round, let alone 9, can mess you up; nothing in that zone is not very very ungood
FrogdaddyAugust 18, 2020, 5:09 PM
Why rack a shotgun when you can have the Mossberg 930 SPX semi-auto by your bed? The only sound they might hear is when the safety comes off.
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
– – WH Auden
from “1054 AD”
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
“Where to? what next?”
— Carl Sandberg
Camouflage
Sourdough Mountain Lookout
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
BY GARY SNYDER
Chimes of Freedom
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
“From a student radical/hippie/leftist of the Free Speech Movement/Vietnam Day Commitee era and a full-on Democratic Liberal in the decades after, I think I’ve evolved a politics that is neither right nor left but is, in its elemental nature, draconian. In the last 20 years, I’ve taken apart my beliefs with a sledgehammer. Now I’ve got to put the surviving parts back together with tweezers and other ‘shabby equipment, always deteriorating’.”
Byzantium
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
– – W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939
De Breanski
VAN GOGH
Hillegas
To the Stonecutters
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
Gerard Van der Leun
1692 MANGROVE AVE
APT 379
Chico, Ca 95926
from “1054 AD”
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
![That Was the Whopper Weekend That Was [Illustrated]](https://americandigest.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/welcometohell-150x150.jpg "That Was the Whopper Weekend That Was [Illustrated]")
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Comments on this entry are closed.
.22LR- ammo is cheaper than any other, likely won’t wake the neighbors, and H.P. Rounds will leave very little if any ballistic evidence for the forensics team. Just saying.
.22 caliber is fine for close proximity assassinations by trained killers, but for home protection you will probably just make the drug crazed intruder mad with a .22cal. You need a 9mm or better to stop the intruder, you might just want to get a pump shotgun with home defense rounds in it. The sound of your racking a shell in the chamber will make the intruder’ sphincter tighten, and the home defense round will probably not kill people in the next room if you miss.
Shotgun all the way. A former NJ cop who lives down the road made this decision for me, even though I have been shooting a 38 at a range of late. I prefer the 38 but if I am shaking, and I would be shaking at the prospect of a home invasion, I can’t hit squat.
Live in the country….5.56 for long range deterent, 12-ga for intermediate deterrent, and 9mm for up close and personal. And yes, all three are at my bedsidee.
Ignore the naysayers flexing their dix.
A .22 can be a decent gun and far better than any knife or club or nothing at all. Besides, ammo is so rare and expensive now .22 may be all you can find. I just had another 2000 rds delivered on Fri.
One suggestion, get a high capacity semiautomatic.
Oh yeah, all that nonsense about the “racking sound” illustrates the writers naivete.
A shotgun “unracked” is just a club and almost useless.
Anyway, when you pull the shotgun out it is to go to work, not scare people that are wanting to kill you.
Now, the web is inundated with little gurlz.
Bill in Tennessee is talking about the “professional’s choice” and a fine choice it is, in fact, it is my choice. Notice I said professional. That’s not the same thing as a single gun owner with a recent acquisition.
I love pistols and shoot them regularly, from .22 through my .45s. People might laugh at the diminutive .22 but my little 10 shot Browning 1911-22, stoked with CCI-HP MiniMags, is a bad piece of news and those little pills will chew through a lot of hide. I can shoot 10 rounds in as many seconds and cover most of them with a baseball at 9-10 yards. That means that I can dump those things into a perps head and face with no problem. I also own that model in .380 and with good defensive ammunition it is the cat’s whacker. I carry it all of the time and never feel undergunned.
May I add a suggestion. There seems to be a missing piece of equipment (at least for any White Blue Stater), a shovel. I wouldn’t plan for any involvement by the authorities.
Dig the hole in advance. At Halloween time buy a few bales of straw, for ‘decoration’, and after digging a suitable hole in the back forty then throw the bales of straw in to hold the shape. Cover the top with a thin sheet of plywood and the mound of dirt with a tarp.
If used, after filling the hole with the dirt, cover with the tarp and pile the bales of hay on top. The hay you are ‘saving’ for next Halloween.
Burr’s “Ooo-ooooo” from unprotected natural hearing of a .38 fired outdoors doesn’t happen to every shooter.
I learned to shoot before ear protection was a thing, long before it became de rigueur, and after discharging one, two, three, or even and hundred or two hundred rounds of centerfire pistol and rifle ammo I never had that “Ooo-ooooo” thing happen.
In navy boot camp they let us shoot indoors nothing more than single-shot bolt action Mossberg .22 rifles. To me these were already small potatoes, so they sounded like cap pistols fired in a echo-ey stairwell.
Later, on a 12-degree day while I was bundled in a sweater beneath service dress overcoat, my unit qualified on the M-16, and if it hadn’t been for feeling bitterly cold to the marrow after waiting for an hour on the range for the Gunners Mates to show up with the rifles & ammo, and for having been clad in service dress coat, I’d have shot better than I did (I shot Marksman, missed Sharpshooter by two points, and those M-16’s had seen better days, they were pretty well clapped out). Up and down the range the unit fired constantly, and I never had that “Ooo-ooooo.”
Same on plenty of other ranges with shooters loosing off rounds from .22’s to .44’s, from 12 ga. shotguns to big belted magnums: no hearing protection, indoor and outdoor ranges, and I never had that “Ooo-ooooo.” Even at machine gun shoots, right beside a Ma Deuce hammering away, I never got that “Ooo-ooooo.” I’m pushing seventy now and have no hearing trouble, although for the last two decades I’ve worn “ears” when shooting.
Some people get that “Ooo-ooooo,” others don’t. Hearing intensity and hearing damage seem to vary among people.
Racking a shotgun is dumb. My 12 gauge is loaded and the safety is off. I don’t care what the safety nazis say. I am ready and I sleep with the bedroom door locked.
Jim Brady was shot in the head with a .22. The gun I have is a .22 revolver. It’s not the best gun for self defense but better than no gun at all.
Teri, Robert Kennedy was assassinated, and five others wounded, by a guy with an eight shot 22LR revolver.
No love for a .40 S&W? I like the idea, for home defense of a hollowpoint round that has enough power to hit but not blow through the target. In fact, I’d say any home defense weapon should be loaded with hollowppoints.
Talking about bear, which I don’t hunt (Look too much like a person when you field dress them & hang them.) but I try to be ready for: I like my Winchester model 12 best as a cabin or canoe gun but a wee bit unhandy when fly fishing. My Desert Eagle .41 mag. in a shoulder holster tain’t bad when waist deep in a steam or a couple of miles from camp on a river bank. My little Judge is comfortable around the property, in the taiga. Not accurate much beyond 10 feet but twice that’s about as far as you can see in the brush anyway, and 410 shot or .45 cal rounds pack a lot of stopping power at short range. If I were to carry in town (One should always be ready for bear, anywhere.) a nice 95 grain .380 auto container is a paddle holster doesn’t print badly (Not obvious under a long shirt or a jacket.) and can be moved to the left side, cross draw, readily when driving, hence not obstructed by a seat belt.
Like Auntie Analogue, I learned to shoot long before ear protection. I’ll put the muffs on for 40-50 round target practice but wouldn’t even think of carrying them hunting or fishing.
Whatever, practice is important so the little thingies comin’ out the barrel go where you want them when you pull the trigger. During our long winters I, inside my house, toss a lot of pellets out of two air pistols, one with iron sights, the other red dot, at 20 to 40 feet. My target/stop is around 8 by 10 inches, no problem keeping all the pellets well within that space, hence my windows, walls , etc. are still intact.
.22 cal.? Hey great for anything smaller than a beaver and at least a wee bit better than a blunt stick if you gotta deal with anything bigger.
9-shot Taurus .22 revolver
Aguila SSS 64 grain loads
Crimson Trace grip panels
Shoot someone 9 times in the ‘Golden Triangle’ ( base of nose out to nipples, line across )
use to work in Chicago suburban ER … nites … Good Samaritan Downers Grove
one .22 round, let alone 9, can mess you up; nothing in that zone is not very very ungood
Why rack a shotgun when you can have the Mossberg 930 SPX semi-auto by your bed? The only sound they might hear is when the safety comes off.