So, me an’ my buddy Jon-Boy was sittin’ on the back porch, cleanin’ our shotguns, talkin’ ‘bout the politics of the week.

“Them TV commentators seem like they’s more interested in Hillary wearin’ that there bright orange pantsuit at the Convention, than what she was speechifyin’ whilst she was wearin’ it,” I said.

“Hell,” said Jon-Boy, “I thought it looked real good on her. Always figured she shoulda been wearin’ orange ever since that Whitewater thang, anyhow.”

“Good thang Obama picked Biden fer Vice-President,” I says. “Oughta put paid to anybody believin’ that Obama really supports the Second Amendment like he said. Weren’t it Joe Biden that said, ‘Banning guns is an idea whose time has come?’”

“Yep, back around ’93,” says Jon-Boy. “Prob’ly plagiarized it off somebody, like he did the Neil Kinnock speech.”

I tried to look on the bright side. “McCain just named that there Sarah Palin, the Governor of Alaska, for his Veep,” I says.

That brought a smile to Jon-Boy’s face. “Yup. NRA Life Member, too. She’s younger’n Obama, an’ it looks like she’s done a whole lot more for folks in her time than he has. Didn’t ride no husband’s coat-tails to get herself elected, neither. Them folks in Alaska is practical, self-sufficient, an’ independent-like. When they vote somebody into office, it really says somethin’.”

“Dang,” I says, “when it gets around to the debates, I bet the Vice-Presidential one’s gonna be more interestin’ than the Presidential.”

“Could be, Cooter,” says Jon-Boy. “Bet ya a box o’ shells that if the Veep debate gets aroun’ to gun control, Biden’s gonna trot out some tired ol’ quote from Sarah Brady.” He looked down his shiny clean shotgun barrel an’ added, “Wonder if he’ll remember to attribute the quote this time?”

OK. That’s it. Enough is enough.

So Barack Obama wants to place “a heartbeat away from the Presidency” the guy who said circa 1993, “Banning firearms is an idea whose time has come”?

That’s it. I’m throwing my hat in the ring.

Actually, the above is yet another manifestation of my significant other’s evil sense of humor. This neat little Internet ditty comes from: http://www.thelopezfamilyonline.com/aol4pres.php

Bless those people for giving us some humor to share with our friends and family. Just go to the link, plug in the name of your chosen victim/candidate (as the cruel significant other did to me, sniff sniff), and email it right to ‘em.

I have a feeling that as the campaign goes on, we’ll need more of this welcome light-heartedness to keep us going.

There’s something yellow and vaguely familiar outside. It’s…it’s…sunshine! Yes, I remember now.

Tropical Storm Fay didn’t do much damage where I live. Bunch of branches down on my property, a tree down on my neighbor’s, some flood damage elsewhere in the area. The phrase I keep hearing is, “We dodged the bullet.”

That’s technically incorrect. We didn’t dodge nothin’. Basically, we were awfully lucky and it just missed. The worst part of the storm unexpectedly veered away from this particular county. Others were not so lucky: Fay killed a dozen or so people in the Caribbean and seven to eleven in Florida, depending on which source you believe. One city to the east of us saw 70,000 people without power and dealt with a lot of severe flooding, and another 12,000 people were without electricity in a community about equidistant to the west. And, as Dan predicted in a letter to this blog, there were indeed alligators in the streets, at least in Melbourne, Florida according to reports.

Folks are accusing the Governor and other officials of having overreacted in opening shelters, evacuating some communities, and all the rest. It’s easy to call it overreaction, after it’s over. However, the folks who needed evacuation and shelter were damn glad it was there, and that help appeared Johnny-on-the-spot when they needed it.

After something like this, you feel a little like the guy who got a terminal cancer diagnosis and feverishly put his affairs in order. Then the doctor calls and says, “We got your diagnosis wrong and you’re fine.” “What,” shouts the patient, “I went through all that for nothing!?!?”

It’s something on which we need to maintain perspective. I see it as having an excellent drill to prepare for the next such crisis that does hit full force. At my place, the power only went out briefly and intermittently. Didn’t mean a generator ain’t worth its price for peace of mind. I didn’t get a flat this week, either, but it doesn’t mean I’m gonna throw the spare tires and the jacks out of the vehicles.

Today, we just relaxed and looked at the bright side. It’s helped the drought conditions. The waters have receded quickly here. Last night, on the way to the Policeman’s Ball in the last of the driving rain (yes, policemen do have balls), we noticed that the water was up to Smokey Bear’s knees, on the fire danger sign, and look how low it is already.

So here I am in North Florida right now, battening down the hatches as Tropical Storm Fay makes her approach. According to the Weather Service predictions, the small community where I am is right in Fay’s crosshairs. They’re speculating that she might have achieved Hurricane status by the time she arrives.

Most folks are preparing as usual. The last of these storms that hit this part of the state was more of an adventure than a disaster for me and those I hang with. Generators, food, chainsaws et al were in place and ready to go. They are this time, too.

Some folks overlook less common preparations until it’s too late. Have extra cash and keep it on your person. I like it folded into secure ZipLoc bags in a money belt. When power goes out, so do credit card machines, and many of today’s generation of moneychangers don’t seem to know how to process a charge card other than electronically. Stock up on bleach. Yes, it can be used to purify water in a pinch (retch!) but mainly, there are cleanup issues. Floods tend to accompany hurricanes, and floods float sewage everywhere. Friends who were in New Orleans for weeks after Katrina reported sometimes being chest-high in water that was brown with feces. Bleach is a most effective field decontaminant. Stock up on pre-moistened towelettes, a.k.a. “baby wipes.” They’ll seem worth their weight in gold when the water stops running.

My corner of the Backwoods Home bailiwick is the gun room. When emergency services are stretched to the breaking point by natural disaster, the Bad Guys know they are more likely to be able to literally get away with murder. Ask Miamians about the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew, or New Orleans survivors about what happened after Katrina. In such situations, I would be keeping a semiautomatic .223 carbine close to hand at all times. Where I’m posting from right now, that sort of thing is low on my list of concerns. In time of disaster, the back-country folks here come out in force, but to help others, not to plunder.

Greater concerns are suddenly-homeless dogs that go desperately feral…large livestock maddened by terror sufficiently to attack humans after escaping from blown-down fencing…and, here, venomous water moccasins that get very temperamental when flood waters move them unwillingly from their swamp to your front yard.

Every piece of equipment you deploy is going to face a ruinous hostile weather environment. My fancier sporting guns with their deep blue finishes and Circassian walnut stocks will stay in their (dessicant-filled) gun safes. On my hip will be a Glock 31 pistol with polymer frame and Tenifer finish. The cops who worked Katrina told me that the Glocks were the only firearms among them that didn’t rust in constant exposure to that environment. It will be in a synthetic holster on a synthetic belt: the septic environment you face in floods will ruin leather, but the pathogenic filth can be wiped off plastic and machine-washed out of heavy duty nylon. The G31 holds 16 .357 SIG cartridges – powerful, likely to penetrate deeply enough into large animals, flat-shooting enough for long shots – and will be backed up with its subcompact 10-shot baby brother in the same caliber, a Glock 33, where my other hand can reach it. The smaller gun will take the 15-shot spare magazine for the larger.

For any serious shooting needs, my “hurricane gun” is an old beater 12-gauge pump shotgun, a Remington 870 traded in by a police department on AR15 rifles. Mechanically perfect on the inside, it has enough pitting on the outside that I no longer worry about what will happen to it in the rain or the muck. One-ounce 12-gauge rifled slugs at about 1400 feet per second should take care of any large, “hard target” that requires emergency shooting.

As they like to say at the police Street Survival© Seminars, it’s about “preparation, not paranoia.” The longer I’m alive, the more experience confirms for me that bad things are most likely to happen to the people least prepared for them.

Mas loads a well-worn Remington pump gun with Remington 12-gauge rifled slugs, with spare shells attached to the stock in a butt cuff. Glock .357 pistol rides in Kydex holster by FIN on nylon mountaineer belt by Jack DeShong.

Next year will make three decades that I’ve been involved in shooting cases as an expert witness in the courts. I took my first case in New York City in 1979. It’s been an instructive part of my life.

One thing I’ve learned is that most private citizens who go through legal ordeals after they’ve had to use a gun in self-defense find themselves feeling terribly, terribly alone. They’re being demonized by the anti-gun media locally, and find themselves shunned by neighbors, friends, co-workers, and customers. Their identity as the good person, the good neighbor, the competent professional at whatever they do, has been subsumed by the new identity given them by the press: He Who Kills.

It’s easier for cops. They have unions and fraternal organizations to stand up for them, and to stand with them. They’re surrounded by peers who think, “That could have been me who had to shoot that dirtbag and bring down this crapstorm. There, but for the grace of God, go I.” The private citizen forced to do the same thing generally doesn’t have much of that peer support.

One guy who understands is my old friend and colleague Marty Hayes. He’s an ex-full time cop who went from patrolman to chief law enforcement officer, and who for the last several years has worked full time to bring responsible armed self-defense training to law-abiding private citizens as well as to law enforcement. First as Director of the famous Firearms Academy of Seattle, and now also as the founder of the Armed Citizens’ Legal Defense Network, he understands that people who’ve defended themselves and their families may need support in many ways in the aftermath of the incident.

Gail Pepin recently did an interview with Marty for the ProArms Podcast. It’s on Episode 005. The interview explains what the organization is about and what it does. I’m on board with the Network as an advisor. So are John Farnam, Dennis Tueller, Jim Cirillo, Jr., and some other folks who’ve spent decades dealing with violent encounter survival at both the street level and the court level. I for one think the Armed Citizens’ Legal Defense Network is an idea whose time has come. You can go to the Network’s website, which has lots of good info. As my old friend Farnam would say, “Strongly recommended!”

I apologize for being kind of in and out on the blog lately. In the eight weeks of June and July, I was on the road for six. Internet, etc. was not always accessible.

It was fun, though, to read some headlines on the ground where the news was taking place. I was driving through Virginia and DC when the Washington Post front page headlined the story of the city’s resistance to the Supreme Court itself. Sure enough, when Dick Heller, the eponymous plaintiff in the landmark Heller v. DC SCOTUS decision went to register his Colt Government Model .45 pistol, he was turned down. Even though he had only seven-shot magazines for it, the District told him it was unacceptable. Don’t you know, they have a separate law in the city banning as “assault weapons” any firearm that can possibly take a larger than twelve-round magazine. They lump them in with prohibited “machine guns.”

Will Dick Heller take them to court again over this? Well, do bears go potty in the woods? And do winos do the same on the streets of the District, for that matter?

The aftershocks of Heller are even more amusing in the Chicago area, where Mayor Daley (aka King Richard the Second) is not handling it well and promises to fight. Uh, yeah. The vehemently anti-gun Chicago Tribune first responded to the Heller decision with the editorial suggestion that the Second Amendment be repealed. Shortly thereafter, the Trib’s editorial board apparently got smacked with the clue bat and publicly suggested that it would be unwise for the mayor to whiz away millions of taxpayers dollars fighting an unbeatable reality.

Chicago, like DC, banned handgun possession long ago within the city limits. There isn’t even a firearms retailer in the city proper, though a ring of fine gun shops surrounds Chicago in the suburbs. The satellite community of Morton Grove became notorious as the first municipality to ban handgun possession. It was followed by Wilmette, Winnetka, Oak Park, and Evanston.

Morton Grove has given up and surrendered the ordnance. Ditto, I’m told, Wilmette. Didn’t want to explain to the voters why they urinated away millions of dollars fighting the law. I’m reasonably well connected in Chicagoland for someone who doesn’t live there, and my sources tell me that while Oak Park wants to fight, Winnetka will probably cave. Evanston has reportedly been asked by the Brady Center to wait to throw in the towel until they’ve looked at the anti-gunners’ “alternate” legal proposal that they’re feverishly drawing up now.

It’s good to have the enemies of our rights on the defensive for a change. Morton Grove is where they used to manufacture those hideously kitschy plastic pink flamingoes. A few years ago, SWAT Magazine did a hilarious spoof on “Hunting the Morton Grove Pink Flamingo.” If I can lure one of those plastic pink posers onto my range, maybe I can shoot it with one of my Colt .45 auto pistols, in tribute to Dick Heller and the SCOTUS approved demise of a pathetic exercise in politically correct stupidity.

All this cyber-stuff is scary to old people like me. I could be perfectly comfortable with a ’55 Chevy, a dial telephone, a typewriter, and some postage stamps. (And a good revolver, bolt action rifle, and double barrel shotgun, I suppose.)

If someone had told me a couple of years ago, “Hey, Mas, let’s go podcasting,” I would have been dumbfounded. My reply would probably have been, “Uh, pods? Dude, whales travel in pods. You think you’ve got tackle big enough to go casting for them?”

Time goes by fast. Now I’m on a podcast, and I wanted to share it with you folks. It was founded by Jon and Terri Strayer, rural-dwelling shooting champs who just opened a small gun shop and are in the process of building a big one, called Pro Arms. The producer is Gail Pepin, who has held the Florida/Georgia Regional Woman’s Championship in IDPA (International Defensive Pistol Shooting) since 2005. The host is Steve Denney, a retired public safety professional whose experience includes police supervision and SWAT. Also on board are gun writer/outdoor writer Chris Christian, Class III firearms dealer Herman Gunter III, retired NYPD street cop Mike Larney, me, and assorted guest experts. We do it in a round-table format, with inserted interviews with industry firearms professionals.

So far, it’s been a ball. We may not all take the same positions, but we’ve found we can “disagree without being disagreeable.” The topics tend less toward hunting than subjects such as why we’re armed; how to legally, comfortably, discreetly and competently carry a gun, whether male or female; the inside skinny on IDPA competition shooting (we have two of the seven five-gun Masters of the sport on board); and straight up, no BS gun tests. Downloadable now (or soon, when editing is complete), we have some Ruger and Smith & Wesson no-holds-barred reviews “in the can.” Guest lecturers include top instructors, and among those I’m happy to say are some of the best female instructors in the country, such as Gila Hayes of Firearms Academy of Seattle, Kathy Jackson of the outstanding Cornered Cat website, and Vicki Farnam.

You can take the Pro Arms Podcast for a test drive on your computer or download it to your MP3 player, at http://proarms.podbean.com. For more good info, check out the Gun Rights Radio Network at http://gunrightsradio.com. This will link you to some great folks whose podcast topics range from Second Amendment civil rights advocacy to self-defense issues to pure gun fun. They also have a forum for good folks who appreciate freedom and fine firearms alike.

I hope you enjoy it all as much as we do. It’s so much fun, I’m thinking of doing a podcast of my own. If I make it snide and snarky, maybe I can call it…a sarcast.

A while back, I posted about “grail guns,” items collectors have a particular yen for. Mine was the full-size Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver in the iconic 3.5” barrel configuration. We got lots of good, nostalgic comments from readers about their particular “grails.”

Well, after a lot of false starts, I can quote Hagar the Horrible and happily say, “I got mine!” I just had one of those landmark birthdays with a “0” at the end, and my sweetie and some friends chipped in and got me one from an Internet gun auction source.

Marked with a little bit of honest wear that just gives it more character, this sculpture of finely finished blue steel and well-worn checkered walnut is a five-screw (read: “Old World detail and craftsmanship) revolver whose serial number indicates it was produced in late 1954 or early 1955. In the name of production economy, Smith & Wesson eliminated the upper sideplate screw about a year after this one left the factory, and decided it could do without the one in front of the trigger guard circa 1961-62. Smith & Wesson introduced this gun and its cartridge in 1935, calling both simply “.357 Magnum.” Along about 1957, S&W went with numeric model designations, dubbing this one the Model 27. Thus, earlier specimens such as this one are known to collectors as “pre-27s.”

This one is as tight and functional as the day it left the factory. This deluxe series was always famous for its smooth action, but this one is particularly slick and light of pull, in both double action and single action modes.

As I sit here fondling this long awaited masterpiece of the gunmaker’s art, my significant other sighs and mutters, “Men…they’re so easily satisfied.”

I don’t understand why she says it as if it was a bad thing…

Below, the “birthday gun,” a pre-Model 27 with 3 .5″ barrel. Gorgeous finish has wear that “shows character.”

“5th screw,” below rear sight on sideplate, and “4th screw,” at front of trigger guard, have long been gone from modern Smith & Wessons.

The barrel configuration of this particular model is unique and distinctive.