About the Blog

Educating fellow Jews about the sporting and defensive use of firearms. Especially Jews in North America, too many of whom are instilled with the belief that guns aren't for nice Jewish boys and girls.

If you know of notable Jewish shooters that should be documented on the blog, even if it is only at the local club level, I am happy to report and profile them. And don't be shy if that person to be documented is you! Please drop me a line at jewishmarksman at gmail dot com. Also follow me on twitter @JMarksmanship.

Monday, June 9, 2014

Exposing Dan Slott - Jewish Marksman's Thoughts

This blog continues to serve as a Hall of Fame for Jews involved in shooting sports, 2nd Amendment advocacy, and other firearms-related activities.  However, on rare occasions when a Jewish public figure deserves it, I induct them into Jewish Marksman's Hall of Shame.  Today's inductee is Dan Slott, a comic book author, currently working on several titles for Marvel, including Spider-man.

Slott frequently espouses his distaste for guns and gun owners on Twitter.  Like most opponents of the Second Amendment, Slott's arguments are purely emotional and devoid of logic.  Recently he expressed his displeasure with Americans' rights to own more than one firearm, thereby amassing an "arsenal".  Specifically, Slott argued that the danger presented by a mentally ill person is proportionate to the number of his/her accessible firearms.  Slott mentioned Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook school shooter, as an example.

Yours truly responded on Twitter directly to Slott by pointing out the logical and practical fallacy of this argument, to wit, that a human being can only simultaneously fire so many weapons at once, proportionate to the number of hands he/she has.  By way of analogy, is an alcoholic owning only one car any more of a DUI risk than an alcoholic owning 100 cars?  I also pointed out that Lanza only used two firearms during his rampage, a rifle to kill others (requiring 2 handed operation) and a single shot from a pistol to kill himself.  I am no expert on mass shootings, but I cannot recall an incident where a single crazed gunman utilized more than 2 or at most 3 firearms.  Considering a single firearm can be reloaded with a fresh magazine almost instantly (as fast or faster than switching to another firearm), I fail to see why a crazy person with two or three guns is any more or less dangerous than the same person with one gun and two or three loaded magazines.  In short, logic suggests that laws limiting the number of guns a person can own have no potential to save lives should that person become criminally insane and rampage.

Slott, like most anti-gun activists, can't tolerate logic and reason.  He wrongly accused me of lying about the number of firearms Lanza fired, made outlandish caricatures of my arguments, and banned me from his Twitter feed.  I have attempted to piece together the twitter conversation below (it seems it did not all occur in one Twitter thread so I have done my best to piece it together from a couple threads...you get the gist):

Uninformed, irrational and divisive people like Slott do nothing to advance the society's dialogue about firearms.  There are plenty of other comics creators out there, so I'll be avoiding anything written by this schmuck.  

Thursday, June 5, 2014

Jewish Marksmanship Update and Scatt Analysis

Thanks to all those that have asked about my well being.  All is well.  As I mentioned in previous posts, work has been a bear, making weekend free time precious.  So for the time being matches take a back seat to daddy-daughter time.

However, I'm still training several times a week with the Scatt, focusing on the standing position.  I'm using a new laptop that has wifi (my old laptop died) so I can share screen captures now.   Here is a recent model shot, simulating 200 yards standing:
Time is represented by color, from Green->Yellow->Blue->Pink Shot->Red

If you follow the green line from the top left, you see I approach and actually first cross through the 10 ring but don't fire.  Should I have fired then?  The rifle looped up in the 9 ring (yellow line) and and crossed through the X ring (blue line).  As you can see, either the rifle was moving fast or my release wasn't early enough, so the shot hit just on the edge of the 10 (the pink dot).

I'm happy with the hold (more or less), but clearly I need to work on being more aggressive and get comfortable with firing as I see the rifle just cross the 9 ring.  By the time I see that 10 it's too late, the rifle is going to move out of the 10 if I can't find the courage and confidence to know it will be in the 10 when the shot goes.  From reading David Tubb's book, this is an especially important skill to develop for shooting standing in windy conditions.