About correctly placing a single bullet into a certain space at a certain time in the future.

Posted by Pointman on September 22, 2017 · 13 Comments 

Colds are a nuisance, especially summer ones. You spend ages honking into a tissue or if it’s what’s called a bog roll cold, into grabbed off hunks of a handily placed roll of toilet tissue. I hate bog rollers because my nose always feels like it’s been sandpapered by the end of them. My particular relief from that situation is slightly gross, but I honk away, keep loading it up until I think it’s got enough heft, and then lauch it across the living room at the paper bin.

Everybody in the family is as usual suitably disgusted and appalled by my antics but what else is new? I always get the commentary because they’re watching, and I do ham it up a bit by taking just one or two many backwards and forwards hesitation movements of the hand before letting go of it with a certain flick of the wrist showing my complete disdain at making such an easy shot.

The contrived drama actually puts me off doing my thang. I’m so much better when I’m not showing off and just take the damn shot. Every ballistic effort becomes a miniature moment of drama in the rather small theatre of a family living room.

They have one eye on some brain cell killing television crud and one eye on me making a complete meal of a simple hand and eye thing at a static target. Will dad make it or not? There’s a nice plastic liner rustle from the bin when I hole in one, or a satisfied chorus of “missed” when I’ve not made the shot. I sometimes feel there’s a lot riding on me missing, but I still thrive on pressure like that. I always try, but nothing much of anything is riding on the shot.

If it was, there’d certainly be a death in Oklahoma as they used to say.

There’s a saying in French that every daughter dreads becoming their mother and every son suspects he’ll never quite match up to their father. As sayings go, it’s all very slick, very clever and somehow belle époque Parisian, but neither of those ideas comes anywhere near encompassing the dynamics of the average family where sons hug their dad as hard as they can without breaking any of his ribs at every farewell and they’re careful not to lift mum off the floor because they’ve once hurt her in the past doing that sort of roughty toughty boy’s stuff.

In my heart of hearts, as with all loving parents, I wish them an easier, more prosperous and a better life without some of the difficulties of your own bad or necessary life choices that left a mark you. It’s always a forlorn hope I think, but if your efforts can shave 5% off such baggage, then you have something to be proud of. You’re not perfect, but then again, neither are they.

It’s all part of the usual family tease but I notice them deliberately hanging their jacket over the back of the chair which is in direct line of sight between the dad chair and the paper bin. Buggers. Every decent family living room has a dad chair in it where the old fart reads or just nods off in the middle of the latest can’t miss reality TV show which he simply isn’t too arsed about watching or somehow misses how absolutely crucial it is for him to have absorbed its true salacious meaning and be conversationally ready to discuss it the next day with some enthusiastic fans of the show.

They’re just making the shot more difficult. I then have to loop it over the chair like a mortar shot onto a target I can no longer see. It becomes a problem called indirect or plunging fire. In other words, a mortar shot, or if you like very olde English, a bombard. More often than not, I make the shot because of what’s called spatial awareness. Once I’ve fixed in my mind the location of a static target in relation to me, I can look away in any other direction and still hit it with an over the shoulder blind throw, even though I can no longer see it.

Enough of the family tease stuff. I admit I’m using it to prevaricate around the bush, because I’d like to move this article towards its true purpose, which is kind of dark and scary, and you might not think of me as a good man after you’ve read it. I’ll take that bullet. From here on in, it all gets cold and dangerous, and the sort of stuff you can’t unread.

You stick with it at the mortal peril of your own Christian soul, because it’s a walk on not so much the wild side but the brutal one, and that’s the one that nobody appears to believe is either extant or still required in these so much more enlightened times of the twenty-first century.

They are very wrong on both of those counts. From now on, I will be talking about one man, one bullet and some of the technicalities involved in delivering death through the air.

My father used to say you’re a shooter or you’re not, and that’s got nothing to do with putting holes in some paper target hundreds of metres way down range. What that means in an immediate sense is that you not only have the aptitude to place one bullet precisely into the space someone will be occupying in a couple of seconds time, but you’ve also got the necessary mentality to pull the trigger on them.

It’s not guns that kill people, it’s a determined mind controlling that single finger on the trigger. All the rest is just the careful training you’ve received.

In a deeper sense, it means being able to put a bad guy down and not do a whole amount of soul-searching about it afterward. You popped them and if you can’t live with that afterwards, you’re in the wrong job. You either just get a kick out of the simple violence of doing that as a thing in itself, which we all did to some extent or another, or you’ve taken the time to think through well beforehand the justification for your actions and know you’ll never lose a night’s sleep over any of it.

I was never easy working with the pure kickers, because I could see their exclusive taste for the popping meant there was no side focus. Everyone has a six and unless you do that occasional nervous look behind you, you will one day find someone there you and then you’re finished. I’m alive and not one of them is, and that’s some cautionary advice from a grey bearded survivor out of an activity that traditionally chews up the world’s first, youngest, finest, greatest and most talented ever hot shots before they even get past their middle twenties. Old men in activities young men tend to die in tend to know what they’re doing.

We all use euphemisms like popping but everybody knows what it actually means.

My father sired six sons and I was the only one who’d inherited his particular talent of being able to put a bullet just where it needed to be. He once took out one hundred out of one hundred clay pigeons while shooting for his national team. It’s equivalent to what’s called skeet shooting in America. The target is flying through the air and you simply have to make the snap shot because you’ve only got a fraction of a second. If you take the time to aim never mind think about it, it’s a long gone shot John.

See it, kill it, that’s it. Simple.

But once you get away from reflex shooting and into the long-range stuff, it gets more technical, though that certain aptitude still comes into play.

The targets coming towards you are easy, it’s the lateral movers you have to do the leading thing with to really hit them good, because even a bullet takes a finite moment of time to travel to its destination. Leading means you don’t shoot directly at a moving target, but into the space you estimate they’ll be in after the second or two your bullet takes to reach them at that distance. There are a number of factors involved in doing that simple thing, which has a plethora of technical names such as doping the sight.

To name but a few; range, visibility, humidity, atmospherics, wind – always bloody unpredictable gusting wind – the load you’re using and even the compass direction because taking an extreme long distance shot east or west doesn’t involve the slight complication of the other two directions because of what’s called the Coriolis force, which is in simple terms the world rotating your target out of the way while your bullet is still travelling in the air, because your bullet isn’t being rotated in tandem. There’s a bit more to it, but you get the idea.

At such extreme distances, you have to factor in that marginal consideration of how faster the world is moving with respect to the delivery you’re making. Even with the direct East/West type of shot, you do have to add in that the world will be turning faster or effectively more slowly in respect to your bullet which will effect its drop or not at long range.

It’s largely a very technical skill but as every shooter knows, you do always have to add in that classic factor which nobody can teach you called Kentucky windage to any challenging shot, and doing that at extreme ranges is the difference between a highly trained sniper and a truly deadly one who will kill your ass dead.

The point about extreme long-range work like that, is that finally taking the shot is the last thing you do in a long sequence of tactical skills you have to master, because before you can even get anywhere near pulling that trigger on someone, you do have to get in range and a good position to take the shot. Long before you ever get near a trigger, you’ve usually studied the terrain in excruciating detail.

In field environments, it’s always a tortuous process of crawling, camouflage, concealment, cover and working your way for hours on end to get to your firing point and then on solo efforts waiting patiently for more hours on end peering down a sight using your other open eye to stay in touch with the bigger picture. Tunnel vision paired with a lack of peripheral awareness can get you ended very quickly. Having a spotter you worked with eased that workload but nowadays a whole security team deployed with a keyhole shooter in urban environments is becoming the norm.

If you draw an imaginary line between the pupils of the target and then drop a vertical from the midpoint of that line down to the base of their bottom lip, it’s called the deadly “T”. Put a round anywhere into that, and it’s lights out brudder. It’s an easy access shot because there’s not much hard bone in the way and therefore less of a risk of your bullet being deflected before it terminally impacts the brain or severs the top of the spinal column where it’s least protected as it’s just entering the base of the brain.

You can take that same effective shot from the side by aiming one inch down from the top of their ear, essentially popping one into their ear hole. It’s not optimum because you have to not only wait for them stop moving their head and be listening to someone, but is dependent on the projected seating arrangements of the parties involved with regard to your firing position. Still an easy access shot since there’s nothing in the way of whatever load you’ve decided to use. For the whole stirrup, anvil and hammer mechanism of hearing to work, it requires an open transmissible entry into the head and therefore the brain. No deflection considerations. Put one directly into there, you got a guaranteed result every time.

Using that same target area but hitting them from the back of the head is a more technical problem which is dependent on range, the firing points which are available to you given the terrain and the escape possibilities, because you surviving is always a consideration after you’ve placed that piece of lead exactly where it’s just longing to be.

Unless you sense that’s what a bullet wants, you’ll never be in that top five percent of the shooter’s club.

Back of the head work is always about punching through the protective bone which is at its thickest there and introduces a different level of complexity all in itself because of the changed physiological considerations. At the extreme range of a piece and a load, a bullet can actually glance off a human skull. That means a change of load or something heavy calibre or something just so high velocity, it’ll punch through anything because the sheer speed makes up for the smaller weight of the payload. You don’t need any of the full metal jacket bollocks since you’re in no danger of melting the slug as it goes down the barrel because you’re in the one shot business rather than the massive ammunition wastage of crowd control.

You can afford to get into the exotics such as carbon tipped, which will punch through a cast-iron engine block, never mind any type of body armour known to man. I’ve even heard of depleted uranium loads being used. Mass times velocity gives you momentum, but the slow down from muzzle velocity to the three T’s you should be trying for, gives you the exact poundage on impact. It’s known as terminal kinetic energy in the trade, or just plain impact. Bigger is obviously better.

The big plus of putting the correct type of round punching through bone and exactly into there, is something called hydrostatic shock which can very definitely work to your advantage.

To digress, you do have to have some knowledge of human anatomy to effectively wreak havoc, death and destruction on it. Your brain is essentially a soft matter thing which is the most carefully protected organ in your body and even floats in its own pool of liquid because it’s irreplaceable. You can still get by on one eye, one lung, one leg, one arm, one tit and even one bollock, but there’s no backup organ or coping mechanism if your brain has just gone home to Jesus as exploded porridge all over the wall, hence all the bone protection around it.

In a fist fight, if you can land that sideways travelling punch on the point of someone’s chin and watch their head jerk sideways, you’ve won, because their head is moving in one direction but their brain still in its protective static pool of almost amniotic fluid and there’s a sudden wrench delivered to the top of the spinal column where it attaches itself to the base of their brain. Basically, all that protection introduces a liability because of inertia.

It’s lights out time and if it happens as it does in equivalent impact careers such as boxing, you’re talking cumulative brain damage. Ain’t I a fount of bloody awful terrible knowledge? Anyway, because of the way a fluid being more dense than air will magnify any pressure wave, the result of the impact will be even greater since it also becomes an explosive pulse in the space constricted by the protective skull.

An explosion in the air has a lethal blast component on the human body, but in a far denser medium of for instance water, the transmitted shock wave is grossly magnified.

Also, it’s the confining or not of an explosion that gives it its lethal effect. Light a firecracker off in your outstretched hand and at worst you’ll get a tasty third degree burn on your palm which will give you some bragging rights with your new girlfriend, but close your hand about it before it goes off, and you’ll be getting a Dr Strangelove prosthetic for where your fingers used to be.

The combination of the correct round, hydrostatic shock and confinement will quite literally vaporise their head. There’ll be nothing left north of fragments of the lower mandible, so you’re into DNA country or dental reconstruction of the teeth for ID purposes. As a hit, it has an additional value of shocking people into paralysis because of the resultant brain and blood splatter all over everyone while you do the other end of the shoot and scoot routine.

There are also lots of things you can do with the particular load you’ve decided to use. The load is the particular mix of propellant at the base of the cartridge which propels it and the bullet tip. Let’s stay away from the detailed chemical stuff you have to be aware of if you’re one of those guys who likes to load his own shot, which I am. It gets way too technical for a blog piece and most of the recipes you’ll find on the internet are there to be followed blindly because they’ve been placed there by experts and are deliberately wrong.

The front end of whatever type of bullet you’re shooting is usually more important than the propellant.

Doing things like cutting an X into the lead front of a round to produce a dumdum round always works in the movies, and it sorta works in reality at the risk of blowing your gun up and your hand off, but you’re talking short-range, close up work because it buggers up the rifling of whatever you’re using. It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase a throw away piece, because after a few rounds of shite like that going down the barrel, the spiral grooving has been ruined and it’s been destroyed as a precision working tool.

At mid range, you can do more interesting and customised exotic stuff such as tumbler rounds which as the name suggests, go through the air spinning arse over tit, but it’s a little bit more long-range than your average improvised hand-carved dumdum, but what you lose in terms of long-range accuracy is more than made up by its impact effects which are devastating. Again, it’s own load stuff the construction of which is nearly an art form in its own right, but it’s essentially just short-range or marginally mid range stuff.

When it comes to that sort of roughly customised round, you’re basically talking handguns and something like the heavy calibre Colt Government 45 which packs such a punch, it’s debatable as to whether it actually needs any extra viciousness added. That fucker, because of the size of lead it’s slinging, will basically blow an exit wound the size of a grapefruit out of the back of whoever you’re using it on. It was never my sort of gig but its reliability is legendary for an automatic whose lineage goes all the way back to 1911.

Pros who don’t want jams always go for revolvers because it’s a simpler killing weapon with fewer moving parts to go wrong and which doesn’t suffer jams or on a misfiring dud cartridge is just another quick trigger pull away. There’s no breech clearing pause which could get you killed. It’s less tangly with your clothes and with a few quick loaders in your pocket, it more than matches the magazine replacement speed of an automatic. On the old reliable police specials, the barrel was unnecessarily long for close range but nothing which couldn’t be cured with a good metal saw, hence the appearance of all those snub-nosed revolvers which were produced by the manufacturers.

For longer range, you still can do interesting work on the payload without effecting either its range or accuracy. Drilling out a tunnel directly down the point and then half filling it with some substance which has a high specific density produces what’s commonly called an explosive round. You do have to have the requisite workshop skills to reconstruct the point of the round so as not to ruin its aerodynamics. Every round has to be perfectly symmetrical and polished, so you’re talking hours of patient work with a miniature lathe and a precision micrometer to recreate the aerodynamic flow you’ve just destroyed.

Mercury is everyone’s favourite filler although there’s other stuff which is a lot more evil. It starts for reasons of simple inertia at the back of the tunnel from the initial acceleration of the shot but the rush forward as it decelerates after hitting bone blows the head off the bullet into pieces making it in essence a long-range dumdum bullet on impact. It was never a round I was particularly fond of because of its attendant requirement which essentially needed some type of rapid deceleration on impact for it to work properly as intended. Using such ammunition, you’d always have to be trying for a bone hit for the physics of the deceleration to really work effectively to produce the magic explosion, and that was an added complication which was never really my style.

I’ve always been a one simple shot type. One shot, one pop.

I’m more a precision sort of guy, someone who knows the technicalities of grammar and writing some decent English but at the same time a lot about other stuff which is deeply out of fashion. I lived a long life before I started writing about my experiences moving through it and see no dichotomy, because one informs the other and they’re all the little bits which came together to create the blogger you’re now reading. I come with some dubious items of baggage hanging off me, even the ones you’d rather not know about and which I would rather not write about.

I’ve done both sides of the bullets business. A crack followed by a thump. You start counting the seconds. The crack is the sound of the bullet passing you at supersonic speed, the thump is the eventual report of their rifle reaching you, because sound travels a lot slower than a bullet. It gives the approximate distance between you and the shooter. Every second is roughly 300 yards, unless they happen to conceivably be using something totally bloody sci-fi like a rail gun. You might not have a direction, but you’ve at least got a rough estimate of how far it is out to target.

They missed you, and now you start to hunt them down, and you’re pretty aggressive at it. It’s an entirely different skill set more akin to stalking and killing, but one as a hunter I liked. Taking one of God’s creatures out of a pastoral landscape to be taken home and eaten has justification to it. At end of day, there isn’t anything hopping, jumping, swimming, chirping of just coming at you purposefully which doesn’t need to eat. You got to them before they got to you or something else they themselves were intent on eating.

Like it or not, it does come down to us being the most awesome apex predator this planet has ever seen. Dropping anything and then leaving it there to rot into putrefaction uneaten is the only true sin any hunter can be guilty of. The sole exception is a human being whose intention was to kill you in the first place; they can rot.

I wrote an article last week about the creation of monsters and connected it to antifa. Very quickly I got a comment in on it by someone claiming to be some representative of antifa and it was the usual vile stuff I get in and dump into the trash bin on autopilot. I’ve been blogging for approaching a decade and am used to getting threatened, but having learned through early experience to do it under pseudonym or your loved ones go into the firing line, I chose to go anonymous.

I really don’t give a damn of your opinion about my decision to go anonymous because the ones I care about are never going to take a bullet caused by me blogging. Exercising my right to speak my mind should only be something I alone can be attacked for, but in this particular case the jackals out there had no problem in using some acquired information about me to attack me indirectly by threatening to hurt those I love. Obviously, I’ve slipped up somewhere on my information security and put them into harm’s way, but there’s a couple of things the originator of the threatening comment needs to be very much aware of.

The first is that my elemental nature is to be a hunter. Whether that landscape is mountains, rivers, jungles, savanna or even the internet, I can track, follow the spoor and hunt creatures down. I did that with you and I’ve got you. I now have high position sitting above and behind you and in your six and believe you me I am watching you.

The second thing you really need to know is that I’m not going to place a piece of lead in your head. You don’t require anything so extreme to be taken off the threat board – you literally are the unemployed and unemployable equivalent of a cheese dick nobody living on their parents’ dime in a cruddy basement. Doing that sort of stuff is long behind me but what isn’t is the attitude that would enable me to do serious damage to an enemy still burns strong and undiminished in me.

I’m the cold and calculating fucker who can do that to you without even breaking stride, but just doxing you and revealing your true pathetic history and current situation will do fine enough.

By the late afternoon after I’ve put you into a wilderness of complications it’ll take you years to hack your way out of, I’ll have forgotten your name before going out that evening to my favourite restaurant with friends and be clinking a glass of German Riesling chilled to within an inch of its life before I attack an inexpensive meal of sautéed fish in a light white sauce with a small portion of potato au gratin accompanied on the side by a salad with a light and delicate vinaigrette dressing.

You made explicit threats to my loved ones by name, I’ve made none to you in this piece.

But if ever I get a sniff of you or anyone else even remotely connected to you getting within hurting distance of me, but most especially my blood kin or those people I care about, I will exercise my natural right of self-defense and visit down onto your flaccid ass a rain of Christ unforgiven grief from hell that only an old and fucking cruel warrior of an old and even more fucking cruel tribe can do. I shit you not.

That’s the first, final and only warning you’ll ever get in response to a threat from someone like me when it comes to protecting those I love from danger originating from bottom feeding pond life scum like you. Run away right now and never look back, or you will find out that in the end, there is truly no God of mercy up there.

There are no safe spaces when you’ve made an enemy of somebody like me who’s now ghosting around you somewhere out there.

©Pointman

Related articles by Pointman:

Some thoughts about monsters, antifa and the magical power of a wiggled finger.

How to hunt somebody down on the internet – Part 2.

When you go looking for trouble, you’ll find it.

Click for a list of other articles.

 

 

Filed under Article · Tagged with Antifa, Trolls