10X

I've attached some small pics. One of the instructors talkin' ribs on Day 1, a couple of the competitor tents on day 2, the smoker I was using, after the ribs were wrapped for the competition and I'd added a sauce-warming pot made on the spot from a beer can (never put cold sauce on the meat), and our turn-in boxes. The wings didn't place, but they sure looked good. The ribs took the top prize.

The event wrapped up late this afternoon. The Saturday class was very educational-incredible instructors, including the guy ranked #3 in the country for ribs. I must have taken a dozen pages of notes. The host BBQ restaurant provided a great lunch, then the instructors walked us through ribs and wings on a stick burning reverse flow drum smoker. That was dinner #1, then we went to the host restaurant for a late dinner in the bar Day 2 was the competition, after the traditional starting shot of whiskey. They provided smokers of all kinds, and a few teams brought their own. I ended up using a pellet smoker for the first time. The $5,000 Fast Eddy was very nice, but electrical glitches caused it to shut off twice during the cook so temp control was erratic. Time was tight to get the ribs trimmed, rubbed (one commercial rub, one homemade) and on the smoker, followed by wings marinated, dried, and rubbed. Ribs were later foiled with liquid margarine, brown sugar, and my custom sauce, while wings were dipped in a sauce and returned to the smoker to set, about the time the ribs were removed from foil and sauced. My wife had the parsley bed turn-in boxes ready, and we made the 10 minute window for getting them to the judges table. It was a lot of work, but we ended up with a fourth place finish overall, and a first place for ribs! $300 prize money and a trophy. For the ribs, we received one perfect score (appearance, taste, texture, 9, 9, 9) and three more just one point off a perfect total.

It's ironic that the liberals suddenly do want to regulate what goes on in the privacy of the bedroom. At least if it involves a consenting adult with a biometric bedside gun locker.

Not sure why, but it kind of reminds me of the Johnny Seven OMA (one man army) toy I had as a kid. Johnny Seven OMA It was pretty cool. Just seeing one in the toy aisle would give a lot of today's parents an aneurysm.

I happened to be driving by Cabelas today, so I popped in, not really expecting to find anything. Sure enough, no primers or powder of any kind, almost no bullets or loaded ammo. No rimfire. They did have some bulk pistol bullets and some cases of ,223 (didn’t notice prices), but overall it was pretty sad To make matters worse, they restocked the ammo and component shelves with other stuff, so instead of empty shelves, one sees gun boxes, ammo boxes, and other junk. It’s almost like they never sold ammo or components.

Yes, and yes. New guns are best cleaned once before firing, and then more frequently as they break in. After that, some do fine with less frequent cleaning, others will need to be cleaned often in order to function reliably. Cleaning it yourself is easy, and the best way to become familiar with the workings, and be able to spot maintenance issues as they arise.

The bullet in the ad, and the 'jacketed semi-wadcutter HP' in the sketch above, are truncated cone bullets (there is no shoulder on the bullet). The vendor may have just gotten tired of explaining to customers what 'truncated cone' means.

The short answer is, "I don't know" The longer version is that, based on the data I'm seeing, I'm not convinced that a booster will be necessary, at least not for all of the vaccines. I'm not inside any of the companies named, so they have more recent data, but I still very much have the impression that the 'six month' figure means we don't have good data on what happens after that, not that the efficacy plunges after six months. Still, it's reasonable for the companies to be working on a booster, in case it is needed. It would be irresponsible of them not to. The EUA question is interesting, but I can only speculate. Since Covid doesn't yet show signs of disappearing entirely, the way SARS did, we'll want the vaccine(s) fully approved so that they can be used after the Public Health Emergency is declared over. I don't know how far down that path the companies have yet gone. The mRNA vaccines have enough good data to get full approval now, J&J may still need to answer some questions about the rare blood clots, and AZ, having never submitted for an EUA or an approval in the US, is unlikely to apply for an EUA and may never sell in the US under any circumstances. I'm not sure if companies are planning to include a booster in the application for full FDA approval (that will require gathering a lot more data), or if they'll get full approvals for the vaccines, and bring the booster along under an EUA. I doubt it's possible to fully approve a booster while the parent vaccine is still approved under an EUA.

I was in Idaho last week, and dropped in on the Sportsman's Warehouse. Best outdoor store I've ever seen, so I spend time there on every trip. Last October, they had a little powder, ammo (no .22), bullets, and reloading supplies, though almost no primers. They had a half-dozen or more ARs. Last week their massive wall of powder was completely empty. Same for primers--none. No bullets, except, oddly, they had a few bulk boxes of 9 mm, .40, and .45. No rifle/pistol ammo except for a few boxes of .50 BMG and .338 Lapua. No target shot shells, either, though they had a decent assortment of hunting loads. No ARs, not many guns at all on the racks. It was a very sad sight. In the local paper (of course the classifieds have a guns and ammo section there!) a guy was selling large pistol primers for $100/1000, and small pistol primers for $200/1000. No idea if folks were buying.

One never knows, but NJ does not generally grandfather anything. I wouldn’t be too optimistic about them doing so now.

Looks nice! Are those mounts made for long guns, or repurposed from something else?

Done 5 upvotes, 70 downvotes, and the video has barely gotten started.

I suspect the number is 1...or 10...depending on how one counts the Boulder incident.

Non-toxic shot is required for waterfowl hunting, most everywhere, I think, and I believe on some non-waterfowl gamelands (I paused my hunting activities when I moved to NJ, so I'm not that up on the current regulations). For busting clays, lead holds the advantage (cheaper, denser, softer).

Yep! You can dial in custom loads that make your gun happy. I'd stick within the range of published load data, but that should give you enough leeway. If anyone is working up hunting loads, I've got an assortment of non-toxic shot, steel and bismuth, plus some wads (mostly fiber) I'll sell cheap! Probably some shot shell primers, too. I can put together a list if there is interest.

I predict you'll do fine, but another practice session or two may put your mind more at ease. In addition to hitting the WMA range with your uncle, consider going to an actual trap range. Most, like the North Jersey Clay Target Club in Fairfield, will set the trap to throw only straightaways if they aren't busy...and I don't imagine they are on weekdays. That is less useful for simulating hunting, but it might help you get the hang of hitting targets when every one is thrown precisely like the one before it. You're right, it is harder to diagnose problems with a shotgun, since when you miss you don't have to immediate, visible feedback of a hole in the paper to show where the shot went. But, once it clicks, you'll find you get better really quickly. If you can bribe your uncle to not only come to a practice session with you, but also come to the live fire test, you can borrow the same shotgun for both and avoid the 'unfamiliarity' problem.

I reload for the first two reasons. It saves me a ton of money, and the ammo is tailored to be more accurate in my guns than anything I can buy. So I'd have to reload even if it cost more, but fortunately, it instead saves me a ton of money (and doesn't take much time, since it is mostly pistol ammo an a pretty fast progressive press). One nice side benefit is that it saves a lot of space. You can fit the components needed to load 2000 9 mm rounds (pound of powder, 2000 bullets and primers, and a few hundred cases you'll load repeatedly) in two shoe boxes.

Keep an eye out on this board for members announcing they are getting out of this hellhole. I know of a nice house in Morris County that will be coming on the market in just over a year.

It's hard to say who is worst. You can get a CCW in much of CA and NY, but it all depends on where you live. If you're in the wrong place, you have no more chance of getting a permit than you do in NJ. California passed the bill requiring background checks for all ammo sales while blocking mail order sales and even bringing in ammo purchased out of state. It got overturned by a judge, then re-instated on appeal, and to be honest I don't know if it is currently in effect or not. CA also has that wacky list of 'approved' handguns, so a lot of handguns that are legal here aren't legal there.

Yeah, like Chuck would have needed a horse.

Fair question, and I had to do some digging to find an answer. EUAs are temporary. An EUA doesn't have an expiration date, but the authority under which it was granted will be rescinded at some point. EUAs are pretty rare, and they can only be issued in response to certain declared Public Health Emergencies where no treatment or diagnostic test exists, or is available in sufficient quantity. So there is a regulatory trigger, without which an EUA isn't possible. You'll never see an EUA for a line extension of cosmetic botox; no emergency there. The EUA for Pfizer was approved to meet the emergency, and EUAs for J&J, and Moderna were approved because the 'sufficient quantity' test wasn't met. We'll soon be over that hump, so while AstraZeneca has indicated they intend to apply for US approval (they haven't yet), I have a hunch that they won't get an EUA-they may not even apply for one-and would have to go for full approval if they want to sell in the US. Given the missteps AZ has made previously, even that will be tough to obtain. When the regulatory trigger that allowed approval under an EUA expires, so does the EUA...so if a drug is to remain on the market after the declared emergency ends, it has to obtain full approval. A handful of EUAs were issued in response to the 2009 H1N1 outbreak (for vaccines, antivirals, and diagnostic tests), but when the Public Health Emergency for H1N1 expired in mid-2010, those EUAs all became invalid...so anything worth carrying over past that time had to go for full approval. The EUAs for MERS and Zika both expired because those diseases have largely gone underground, so they aren't needed. The EUA for the Ebola vaccine is no longer in effect, because the vaccine (two, now) went on to obtain full approval. The antiviral Remdesivir was approved under an EUA for treatment of Covid patients, but it has since gone on for full approval, so that EUA is no longer in effect. A reference on EUAs

I don't think the FDA or the medical community really cares, once the EUA is approved. Getting the vaccines in arms was, and is, the priority. 'Fully approved' vs 'Experimental Use Authorization Approved' is a distinction without a difference. The FDA has their hands full right now, but will eventually go back and dot the i's and cross the t's with full approvals...but they will do that using the same clinical trial data set they already reviewed to approve the EUA. So, no surprises are likely to crop up. It's not like a new set of clinical trials is run for approval, vs. what was run for the EUA. They will have the advantage of having some real-world data from the millions of people who have been vaccinated, and that is very reassuring, but it's neither tightly controlled nor was the population selected for statistical validity across risk factors the way the clinical trials were. It's worth remembering that any prescription medicines in your medicine cabinet were almost certainly approved based on a clinical trial with perhaps 300 to 3000 people participating in phase 3. The trials leading to the Covid vaccine EUAs included 30,000 to 40,000 for each company seeking approval. Why? There are two ways to get to a statistically-valid endpoint quickly for a vaccine clinical trial. One is to be working with a disease that spreads rapidly, so your test population hits the exposure target quickly. The other is to make the trial friggin' huge, so that you can include a lot of risk subgroups right out of the gate, and still hit statistical significance in a hurry. These trials happened to check both boxes.

I don't believe the label on the rightmost lane was the point...look one lane further to the left for the joke.