Today is Patriots Day. A day that is the perfect reason to go to the range and practice with your favorite freedom-securing device. As our buddy Heinlein said, the price of freedom is “the willingness to do sudden battle, anywhere, any time and with utter recklessness”. What does that mean? Let’s ask the AI:

“Robert A. Heinlein famously defined the price of freedom as “the willingness to do sudden battle, anywhere, any time and with utter recklessness”. This recurring theme in his work, notably in The Puppet Masters (1951), emphasizes that liberty requires active, often violent defense, rather than being an unalienable right.

Key aspects of this philosophy include:

• Active Defense: Freedom is not free; it is paid for with the willingness to fight.
• Individual Responsibility: True freedom involves being personally responsible for one’s actions, often requiring hard choices and vigilance.
• TANSTAAFL: Popularized in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, “There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch” implies that everything, including freedom, has a cost.
• Vigilance: It mirrors the sentiment that liberty is maintained only through constant vigilance.

Heinlein’s stories, such as Starship Troopers, often tied the right to vote to the willingness to serve and sacrifice for society.”

Sounds legit.

So, let’s hit the range today and put some metal in the air.

I used to know someone who would buy a new gun, stick it in his safe, and go for months, or even years, without shooting it. I used to tease him about it and now I have become that person. I have a small mountain of guns here that I need to take to the range and get set up. Todays range trip was a CZ .22, the Marlin .45-70, and a pair of Rugers.

The Rugers were a pair of PC 9mm guns. The first was a takedown PC Carbine I picked up a few weeks back and rehoused into a new Magpul Backpacker stock. The other gun was a factory SBR’d PC Carbine from Ruger. Just recently Ruger has started offering a few SBR’d guns that are coming straight from the factory as SBR’s.

I dropped an AR-180-style folder on it, a tri-lug adapter to allow me to drop one of my Obsidian 9 cans on it, and tried out the new Olight Osight.

For me, the attraction of these two firearms is that they can be broken down into compact packages that stow away nicely for when you need some firepower but space is limited…..bugout bags, caches, vehicles, etc.

When you take the SBR and break it down into it’s smallest configuration, it isn’t much larger than my Glock 17.

The SBR literally fits in the bottom drawer of my desk at work. No substitute for an M4 or similar carbine, but better than just a pistol.

One of the other guns I shot today was the Marlin .45-70 I picked up in an estate a few months back. The gun came with a bunch of reloaded ammo which I figured Id use to get on paper and build up a supply of empty cases to reload. I had forgotten how thumpy a rifle can be when you’re launching a 400 grain bullet. Ow.

I had removed the barrel-mounted sight, which was a Rem 700 sight someone had bolted on there, and replaced it with a receiver sight. At 25 yards it was shooting almost two feet low. Adjusting the rear sight accordingly was a bit of a stretch and left the rear sight sitting rather high above the receiver. Clearly a replacement front sight, with a lower profile, is called for. I ordered a few replacement front sights with different heights and I’ll swap them out as necessary until things are where I want them. I’d like to use some hardcast bullets for their penetrative properties, and I have some gas-checked RCBS 300- and 400-grain FN gas-checked bullets to use.

And the CZ? Shot wonderfully. I know everyone has their favorite bolt .22, but I genuinely think that you can spend a lot of money and not gain any advantage over one of the nicer CZ bolt .22’s. I have two of these guns and I really, really like them.

So…nice day to go shoot.