#turtlegunrant

[turtlemagnum]

i think paul harrell is one of my favorite gun youtubers (and youtubers in general) because while you get very dry, informational content, you also get gems like this

[turtlemagnum]

literally me, and also hideo kojima i think. words cannot express how much i want several weapons that are illegal for most civilians to own or at least prohibitively expensive, but also i'd put them to better use than ALL the world's militaries because i'm personally anti-murder (bold stance, i know...)

war and murder are awful. killing another human being is a horrible thing to do. swords and guns are cool as fuck. these two beliefs exist simultaneously in my mind and do not conflict at all

[turtlemagnum]

there's this post on here that really rubbed me the wrong way where the OP really condescendingly and fatalistically declared that having literally any self defense implement at all is worthless because both they can fail and when they dont, they'll just give the person attacking you a weapon. and i think that they made a couple of very spurious assumptions and setting aside that it was just phrased in a very absolutist, unnuanced manner. first of all, the argument presumes that if something can fail, it must fail, not examining why something would fail. they even tried to de-legitimize pepper spray "because it can blow back in your face in the wind", which assumes very specific environmental conditions and extrapolates the fact that it's just entirely useless simply due to the fact that it's not useful in Literally Every Circumstance. and honestly with pepper spray specifically, i cannot see any reason why you wouldn't carry it if you lived in an area where self defense might be needed since even in the worst case posited where the attacker takes it from you, it's almost certainly not gonna be fatally harmful to anyone involved assuming nobody has a serious pepper allergy. i can 100% understand apprehension about carrying a gun, but with pepper spray?

the thing about a normal person's self defense is that it's very different from what most of the Capitalized Self Defense Industry likes to think of it as, since most of that industry is based in law enforcement and military shit. even with a gun, the goal isn't to kill someone, it's to prevent them from doing harm to you or those around you. having a gun can absolutely backfire, especially and particularly if you're untrained, but pepper spray is pretty much perfect for an untrained normal person because it's simple to use and has minimal risks to everyone involved and yet still acts as a sufficient deterrent to prevent real harm from being done. yes, it's not literally perfect, but it's a tool and no tool is. electric saws, as far as i'm aware, usually don't work very well in water; that doesn't mean electric saws are fucking useless y'know

i think the original post also operates on the assumption that violent people are always going to be more competent than you, which is frankly a laughable assumption given how violent people are just, y'know, people. if violent people were innately more competent with things like weapons and fighting and such, average cops, feds and soldiers wouldn't be so dogshit at actually using their weapons. there's this old military saying, "if you lock a soldier in a room with 3 ball bearings he'll have broken one with the other and lost the third". i think that's pretty relevant. the kinds of people who would do something like attempt a robbery or just start a bar fight aren't mastermind john wick badasses, they're literally just some guy who very well could be untrained, unfit or just generally incompetent. which isn't to say Literally All Of Them would be like that, i just think it's important to be realistic about how people are just people, meaning they're just as flawed as you and me, y'know?

and to further elaborate on the "self defense implements are tools like any other" thread, i think it's important to remember that that applies to guns too. i understand that a lot of people don't like guns, and in my opinion even more people are some combination of too untrained, too generally incompetent or just too much of a dickhead to be a responsible gun owner. yes, some people shouldn't have guns, in much the same way that some people shouldn't drive and some people shouldn't be allowed unchecked internet access. that doesn't mean that literally nobody should be allowed to have them, and that doesn't mean that they have no practical use. to be blunt, i wouldn't be surprised if that OP was some kind of fed trying to make the generally leftist population of tumblr less able to defend itself. yes, not everybody should have a gun. yes, if you don't think it's right for you, you probably shouldn't have a gun. but to be blunt, guns are perfectly valid tools for self defense and anyone who says otherwise is either naive or trying to sell you something. i also think it's worth noting that from what i've heard from people whose experiences i trust that've actually survived violent self defense encounters, most situations that'd require a gun are resolved simply by making any would-be aggressor aware of the fact that you're carrying.

[turtlemagnum]

last night i woke up to about 8 or so gunshots at 2 or 3 AM, and after laying in bed waiting to make sure i wasnt about to catch a stray i just went back to sleep. gotta love living in one of the biggest cities in The Gun Country!

[turtlemagnum]

i feel like NES games and earlier are much like guns before the 1900s in the sense that most of them have aged terribly and are clunky and borderline unusable by modern sensibilities, and the good ones that have stood the test of time are few and far between and are still very much of their era

[turtlemagnum]

ok so i'm one of those weirdos who've already looked at the wikipedia page for "gun", and honestly when i first looked at it a while back it fuckin blew my mind (to be fair, i was already a gun nerd). some highlights include that despite the fact that we tend to think of guns as relatively modern things, they've actually existed in some form or another since roughly 1000 CE. literally a thousand years in the past, blew my mind. iirc one of the earliest forms of a gun was just a bamboo shoot filled with gunpowder with a fuse put in it, as a pseudo barrel kinda deal. another really cool one that's definitely fallen out of favor but i think would be a really cool addition to a fantasy setting is the thunderspear, which is a spear with a firework attached so you throw the spear at someone, and the firework explodes onto them!!! that's so fucking cool!!!! iirc there's also like, early precursors to the modern hand grenade made out of like, i think ceramic? not sure when those were made, and i'm not gonna look it up because i wanna keep this post organic!!! oh, also, side note but i think it's interesting that gunpowder and the early firearm originated in china, which just strikes me as odd as an american because like, from a vibes perspective you'd expect the culture who invented guns to be the ones who'd marry a shotgun like us americans, but modern china (to the best of my knowledge) has gun laws about as strict as most non-american places. food for thought, i guess

why not

[turtlemagnum]

so, fun fact. i'm playing around with that 6.5mm BC in the ballistic calculator i drafted it in, and with an 140 grain bullet loaded up to 80k PSI with reloadswiss RS60 out of a 26 inch barrel, it's hitting up 3290 FPS! so, in other words, literally on par with a 6.5-300 weatherby. which, to be fair backcountry seems to be designed with 20ish inch barrels in mind and handy little rifles and all that, but obviously that wouldn't matter for target shooting and all that y'know? hitting full length H&H based magnum performance out of what's essentially a shortened .30-06 case, that's fucking crazy right? plus it's not like that's far off from what the 7mm BC is getting, since out of a 24 inch barrel it's about on par with a 7mm STW (i.e., more or less the same case as a 6.5-300 weatherby but 7mm instead of 6.5mm), so i completely believe these numbers (and frankly this is probably lowballing it since federal has access to powders that us peasants don't). god i'm fucking excited

[turtlemagnum]

here's my take on a theoretical 6.5mm backcountry, because let's be honest and say that if there's gonna be a 7mm backcountry, there's gonna be a 6.5mm too. has just the right amount of headheight, too! just shy of a 6.5 PRC, believe it or not. i also stole the neck tightness from the 6.5 PRC since most of these modern precision oriented cartridges have a relatively middling amount of tightness, at least relative to stuff like BR cartridges and the 6.5x47mm lapua. personally i'd make the neck a bit tighter if i were designing it to my preferences, but to be fair i already have a 6.5mm-06 improved that's more to my tastes and this is meant to get inside the head of a federal designer, so eh

[turtlemagnum]

finally tracked down cartridge dimensions for the 7mm BC. basically, take any given -06 based case like a .280 ackley, reduce the taper to right in between an ackley improved and a sherman improved (closer to a sherman, from what i can tell), increase shoulder angle to about 60 degrees, and shorten that sumbitch down to about 61ish millimeters. it's actually fairly similar to my 7mm-06 turtle improved, albeit mine gets that extra head height from just lengthening the COAL, has slightly less taper and is the same length as the .280 rem, meaning it should be able to fire .280 rem and .280 ackley, but eh. should be able to handle more or less the same length bullets, my 7mm-06 has a longer neck but in order to be able to fire .280 ackley it's my only turtle improved guy that has an 80 degree shoulder angle as opposed to the 60 that all the other ones have, so what the BC loses in neck length it makes up for in more room by the shoulder. they both actually come to just about 33.8mm from L6 to L1, so in theory they should be able to handle exactly the same bullets, with the advantage going to my design simply due to the fact that it's longer and has less taper and therefore has more powder to play around with, setting aside the inherent advantage of a tighter and longer neck gives to accuracy. though, at the same time that does make it a bit less efficient, but eh; it shouldn't be enough of a difference to make a difference

[turtlemagnum]

i think it's arguably closer to the FN F2000 but to be fair im pretty sure FN intentionally designed the F2000 to be similar in terms of form and operation to their P90 so eh. does look scaled up to an anti-materiel round, so i think it'd be less of a P90 sniper and more of a P90 anti-materiel rifle, which to be fair can fairly easily fill a similar role if designed around it (if memory serves, early long distance shooting with .50 BMG was done with M2 browning machineguns, which is actually why guns like the serbu BFG-50/BFG-50A and the more commercially successful barrett M82 got developed in the first place iirc. feel free to correct me if i got anything wrong, i didn't bother to look anything up

Getting ready! - Done for xietlied

[turtlemagnum]

y'know i will say that for as long as i've known about this whole 80k PSI thing, i've thought that it's the future of firearms. hoping that this new federal 7mm backcountry makes it big, it seems really forward thinking

[turtlemagnum]

so, was just at a new years party. got the second most drunk i've ever been, so that was mostly enjoyable until i became absolutely miserable, but eh. so, something about the party was that it was in the ghetto, and something about the ghetto here in the US is that on new years and juneteenth, it's a bit of a tradition to fire guns into the air. honestly? that shotgun wasn't as loud as i expected it to be. i didn't fire it myself, of course, growing up i was always taught that you NEVER mix alcohol and guns, or really any mind altering substance, so i politely declined on behalf of the fact that i was drunk as shit and shouldn't be handling firearms. on the inside, i also felt like it'd be wrong in the regard that this would've been the first time since i was 6 or so years old that i would've shot a gun, the first time i've shot a gun as both an adult and as a gun enthusiast. hard to believe looking back on it now, but 6 year old turtle wasn't the biggest fan of guns. they were definitely an acquired taste, and you can blame fallout: new vegas for that.

got called responsible by one of the women there when i declined. thankfully she shut down one of the dudes who tried giving me shit for it (i think he was her brother? or step brother or something). incidentally she then asked me if i wanted to set off fireworks with her and her kids, which was like. look, i'm not saying fireworks are as dangerous as guns. but they're still fucking explosives, and i don't think you should handle them while drunk. and as far as i knew everyone there had at least drank a little bit. unadvisable! also not my fucking business, and i was at a kind of drunkness where i'm having trouble finding the will to even talk, much less move around. i will admit, without thinking i agreed, but thankfully nothing ever came of that for some reason. i was pretty checked out for the entire thing, so i'm pretty sure i'm not the most reliable narrator in all this

so, we were told to bring pizza, and the woman of the house (the wife of my mom's work friend who invited us there), she was making a shitload of chicken wings. like she had this whole big fuckin bowl prepared full of wings with her breading on it, and she was frying them two pots at a time. i made sure to thank her for her hard work, i could tell she was basically carrying this whole thing, plus it's not like her shithead husband had the sense to be appreciative. drunk as shit, barely able to speak much less stand, nonetheless i'm right behind my mom at the kitchen table the majority of the group is at. guy in green, one of the two dudes i'd later find out was hitting on my mom (in front of both of their women no less!), talked a lot of shit about me "making excuses" for things like my moderately weak handshake when i'm, y'know, drunk as shit and fairly motor impaired. at one point i was back in my corner in the living room and he started with his faux intellectual preaching shit again, meanwhile the other guy who was apparently trying to cheat on his girl with my mom pulled him aside and told him to get back to where he was. which y'know, i was thankful for. i definitely could've taken another lecture, but it's still a tad annoying to have to silently nod along to stupid shit like "look, you stand up when you piss right? that means you a man, man!" kinda shit, y'know?

something about that other guy, i walked up to the table to make conversation after i heard airplanes by b.o.b. on in the background. i mentioned how the guy who made that song came out a few years back as a flat earther, and you know what this did? showed his whole flat earth believin' ass in front of everyone, had fuckin everyone dunking on him, it was funny as shit. tried to justify it with christianity? stated that i couldn't be a christian since i'm not a flat earther, and while he's not wrong on either me not being a christian nor a flat earther, i don't think those are necessarily linked either. there was one guy that was pretty consistently with me out in the living room, my mom's work friend's brother. tall fuckin dude, i'm just shy of six foot but i was only up to the dude's shoulders and he was fucking hunched over. real soft spoken for the most part, seemed like one of the only sensible people there. honestly had a hard time hearing him at times, loud fuckin TV, loud speaker blaring music, loud people playing cards a few feet next to him, plus i was on the other side of the room

for the first little bit of the party, before most of the people got there, i spent a lot of time with the house dogs, especially the big one. there was a normal size black dog, probably some kinda mutt but the closest thing i can find is a bulldog? and then there were those two little tiny white crusty guys ones, a lot less affectionate and i swear to god when one of them was staring at me while i ate i saw his eyes turn just a little bit red. was probably just the lighting, but still. big dog licked me half to death, really liked going for the mouth for some reasson. i was pretty happy until the dogs stopped paying attention to me when there were more people there. that's when the drunken misery hit in. drunkeness and rejection sensitivity dysphoria don't go well together, regretfully. such is life, i suppose

flat earther guy who tried to fuck my mom screamt out "KAKAROT" at some point. he told me to go the fuck away since they were playing spades and he didn't want me cheating, though he said it in a seemingly joking manner. i said i just came over there to talk about dragon ball (and his sister relayed what i said but even louder), but i still complied regardless. at one point he also called me fucking bartholomew, which is NOT my fucking name. according to my mom he was just fucking with us and he did it to her too, but goddamn dude.

shortly after new years dropped and most of the people were either out front or out back, i talked a bit with an older lady. also seemed to be one of the only ones with sense there. at least there were some people there not trying to fuck my mom. we didn't say much of substance to each other but it was still a charming interaction

i noticed my mom's coworker had a gun in his pocket, and i asked him about it being the resident gunfucker that i am. i asked what model it was, he told me it was a 9mm. i asked him what brand, he again told me it was a 9mm. i don't know if he just didn't hear me properly or what, but i mentioned that to my mom on the way home and she said "yeah... some people who have guns shouldn't have guns... he's one of those people." such is life!

when some of the adults were going out to shoot, i leaned over to the nearby kids and said "look, when you're their age please be more responsible with guns than they are. i'm guessing you're not dumb enough to need that advice, but you are with them so...", and i got a smile out of them with that second part.

on my mom's end, like i said she got constantly hit on by two dudes literally right in front of their women, the ones they brought to this fucking party. got called a "snowbunny" by the flat earther guy. apparently the reason they stopped playing cards was that the brother and the sister were slapping the shit out of each other over it. that was when she finally got up the nerve to leave. which, incidentally was when i was in the corner miserable with the realization of "oh my fucking god, we're really gonna be here all night aren't we". thank god we're home!

[turtlemagnum]

figuring out chambers in my ballistic calculator's cartridge designer

[turtlemagnum]

so, i'm workshopping a rimless version of the most popular shotgun rounds (and also 10 gauge) in my ballistic calculator, specifically one that uses a brass shell that uses the same 80k max PSI that all my designs do. due to how this shit's designed i can only really calculate how a slug would work, but i think that gives a good benchmark at the very least. so, the thing is that in doing 10 gauge, i decided to do a 3.5in magnum length just due to how 10 gauge is Supposed To Be The Big One, and without thinking i just plugged in the same basic dimensions and powder capacity as a normal 10 gauge 3.5 inch shell. turns out, that shit has a higher case capacity than fucking .50 BMG. so combine that with a moderately higher PSI at 65k for the normal load, my 10 gauge shotgun round would beat .50 BMG by a bit over a thousand foot/pounds of energy. well over two thousand if you load that shit up to 80k. and this is out of a 24 inch barrel, as opposed to the ballistics i looked up for the .50 being out of the 45 inch barrel of an M2 browning. which, to be fair, it'd also have a dogshit ballistic coefficient and sectional density in comparison, a .76 caliber slug of a similar weight to a .51 caliber actual bullet is just not gonna do as well from those two perspectives. buuut i think moving several hundred more feet per second from a more compact firearm that's designed to be used at short range pretty much mitigates that. god, imagine what that'd do to a fridge. imagine.......

[turtlemagnum]

y'know, a couple years back i played enough san andreas that i developed an attachment to some of the generic NPCs, since y'know they're consistently drawn from a few preset designs, each with their own specialized lines who sometimes say things to you or even other NPCs. there's this one i always thought looked like a low poly paul harrell, so i always just called him paul. this is the first time i've played san andreas, and the first time i've seen that NPC, since the real paul died. still feels weird to mourn a man i never knew, but god i guess that man did have such an oddly profound impact on my life. if i ever get the money to fully afford shooting as a hobby, i hope to make videos like paul's one day. maybe that's silly, i dunno.

[turtlemagnum]

shoutout to that time that somebody on twitter saw gun mario 64 with what i'm pretty sure is the counter strike desert eagle model in his hands and went "mario got the glock"