Snowflakes in Hell

One of the drawbacks of gun owners being a generally helpful bunch is that some try to offer up advice even when they shouldn’t. Yes, shockingly, some gun owners hold themselves out as experts when they don’t know squat. I know this is news to you, especially those of you who regularly chat others up at the range or those of you have spent more than 5 minutes at a gun club.

Snark aside, there are times when it can do serious financial damage. And it makes it worse when such bad advice is found in an official newsletter of an organization that, unjustly, may be seen as an authoritative source.

Yesterday’s mail included the Pennsylvania Rifle & Pistol Association newsletter, the source of the offending advice. One of their directors wrote an article on guns and insurance based on his experience with a devastating home fire. Filing a claim does not make one an expert in insurance. In fact, in Pennsylvania, I couldn’t even get past “Hello” and “please hold” when I got the receptionist at one insurance agency. She said their rules about even discussing insurance when it comes to quotes and advice are crazy strict, so she was not allowed to do anything more than transfer calls, take messages, and assist with non-insurance business needs since she was not licensed.

What follows is when someone who doesn’t seemingly have a background in insurance starts giving advice. (Reproduced as is, including grammatical errors.)

Last January we had a house fire resulting in 15 guns damaged by fire and smoke. I had very good Homeowners Insurance (Allstate “Deluxe” Policy) , and also the supplemental NRA sponsored (Arms Care) Firearms Insurance against fire and theft loss. I hope what follows may be useful information should any fellow members have the same misfortune.

I contacted NRA and told them I was submitting a claim. Their response was that my Homeowners Policy was the first resort and that my NRA policy was residual or secondary coverage in the event that Allstate failed to cover the loss.

Let’s stop here. I don’t have the insurance offered to NRA members for their guns, but my understanding is that the policy is secondary – that it covers above and beyond what your homeowners insurance covers depending on the policy you have with them. I never bothered getting it because my small collection was always under the amount that my renter’s policy covered. So why he would call the insurance company that NRA works with first is beyond me. (At least I’m hoping he called the actual insurance company and not NRA proper. Lord help him if he got caught in that phone menu.)

Allstate, like most other insurance companies, has limited firearms coverage for theft, but will cover all losses due to fire, flood, etc.

Hold up here! What?

All of my life, I have heard that if you live in a flood zone or want flood damage protection, you had to buy separate flood insurance. Google tells me this. More importantly, Allstate even verifies it with this statement:

A flood can be one of the worst disasters that can devastate your neighborhood. It’s such a big deal that the Federal Government runs a National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). That’s why Home and Property Insurance typically doesn’t cover flooding. (emphasis added)

Now, this guy’s so-called “‘Deluxe’ Policy” may include flood insurance that was recommended because of his community or because he had a salesman who talked him into it. That does not mean that most policies cover damage to your guns from floods. In fact, it means the exact opposite. Fire, yes, but not floods.

Over the course of the next few months I found that Allstate was much more reasonable to deal with, relative to proof of firearms ownership, valuation, etc. than NRA and it’s Insurance carrier.

I’m guessing this guy has a bone to pick with NRA to have thrown that statement in there. At this point, he has already established that

• the supplemental insurance is just that – supplemental to what the home & property insurance does not cover;
• the primary insurance provider is going to cover the guns fully so he will not need to tap into the supplemental plan; and
• hopefully by now he has figured out to call the insurance company and not general NRA staffers.

So beyond just a shot across the bow at NRA, I can’t really figure out why he would be complaining about an insurance policy that he didn’t need to cash in on. Sebastian said that he thought he had heard that the insurance offered to NRA members was a bit of a pain, but that’s not really relevant for this article since the policy didn’t apply in this case.

After advice about safes and suggesting that members go through ADT for all of their home security monitoring needs, he then jumps into the area that just made me want to cringe – handing out insurance purchase advice.

Last but not least, and information well worth repeating, get out your Home Owners Insurance policy, call your agent, and get the maximum coverage, especially on personal contents, temporary housing, structure coverage, that is allowed. If you add up your total cash outlay for Home Owner Insurance coverage over however many years, you will find that it is a fraction of the cost of just one “catastrophic loss” due to fire, flood, or other natural disasters.

If he hadn’t had the absolutely horribly wrong comment about most home policies covering flood damage, then I would believe that he was an insurance agent deliberately trying to oversell folks for things they don’t need.

Now, I am not an insurance expert, but I have purchased enough to know that most people simply do not need a platinum-coated policy for most things covered. I’m also humble enough to admit that I don’t know enough about insurance to say much more.

I will add that if this has made you think about what your gun coverage really is for different types of losses, call your agent. Or, even better, call around until you find an agent who owns guns. I bought my car insurance from an agent who is not only a gun owner who shoots at our club, but his family is full of competitive shooters who hold state records. I know if I had questions, I could call him up and pick his brain to get an honest assessment.

It is very important to make sure you have the trigger guard pin extensions on your lower receiver properly support when you drive in the trigger guard pin. Don’t ask me how I learned I did not have it well enough supported.

TD has a new Lyman reloading press, and offers a review of the equipment. No doubt people will tell him he’s nuts for not just getting a Dillon. I started off with a Lee kit, which worked decently enough. A reader was kind enough to send a Lee progressive press, which I’ve used to reload .44 Magnum. Lee reloading equipment works, but it definitely has its design flaws, especially their progressive presses which have a bit of a Rube Goldberg feel to them, and tend to have minor hiccups which interfere with the reloading process.

Lately I’m pondering getting a rock tumbler so I can handle very significant amounts of brass, and something that will be a little quieter than a vibratory tumbler. Probably not something I’m going to get until I start getting serious about reloading again. But I have been collecting a lot of used brass. Limiting factor for me has been powder, primer, and time.

Cemetery comes across a problem we’ve all dealt with at one time or another.  Rust.  There’s three ways you can deal with rust.  One is to keep a coat of oil on your guns, and make sure you wipe them down before you put them away.  The other is to keep moisture away from the gun. There are a few ways to do that.

Even thought I love the fact that, as a cowboy shooter that goes by the name of Cemetery, his pistol case is a little coffin, the first piece of advice is not to keep them in the case unless you’re transporting them.  This is a surefire way to promote rust.  Cases are magnets for moisture.

The second way to prevent rust is to decrease relative humidity.  One way you can do that is to increase the temperature within a confined space, thus reducing the relative humidity.  This is how a Golden Rod works within the confines of a safe or gun cabinet.  Generally speaking, a Golden Rod is the easiest and most maintenance free way to combat rust.

The third way is to actually remove water from air within a confined, largely airtight space.  This is what dessicants do.  This is the solution I use, because the safe I got a good deal on didn’t have the electrical hookup, and I didn’t have an outlet near where I wanted to put it.  Desiccants are effective, but you have to watch them, and they need to be reactivated.  Get one that had an indicator compound in them, usually cobalt chloride, which is deep blue when dry, but turns pink as it becomes saturated with water.  You can reactivate desiccants by increasing their temperature to 250 degrees.  I do my two canisters in the toaster oven at 325 degrees for a few hours.  You typically have to recharge once a month in the winter, and once every two weeks or so in the summer.  The great thing about desiccants is that you don’t even really need a safe.  Any closed, airtight container with a desiccant thrown in will put a stop to rust.

There are still some “Kitchen Table Dealers” left, but he’s right about it being a dying breed.  An Easton man is in the news for seeking a variance to operate an FFL for a gunsmithing business in a residential area.  If his plan is a gunsmithing operation, it’s not like there will be a parade of customers coming in and out of the residence.  Most of his business will likely be from people sending stuff through common carrier, which is why you need the FFL.  If I were his neighbor, I would speak on his behalf to the zoning board, and advocate granting the variance.  Well, as long as he agreed to do transfers for me for free :)

I once took my S&W 629 apart to clean out the lockwork, and re-oil everything.  Tam isn’t kidding about it being a complicated mechanism.  I was rather frightened I wasn’t getting it back together on my own, and I would have hated to go to a gunsmith with a baggie of parts and a frame and had to sheepishly ask him to put it back together for me.  I did manage to get it back together, and it works as it did before, but it took a bit of research on Al Gore’s internets to figure it all out.

SayUncle would appear to not be the only one over-lubricating his Glock.  I did mine roughly the same way he did.  Now I know.

The Firearms Blogs has an interesting video on reloading your own primers, using the ignition compound from matches.

Dave Markowitz has some advice.  I have to deal with this sometimes with the Nagant, and I’ve been the victim of shooting other Soviet Bloc ammo I didn’t realize was corrosive, but was.  It can rust a rifle pretty quickly if you don’t deal with it.

I think it’s good advice.  He recognizes that it’s the surfactants in Windex that make it a good cleaner, not the ammonia.  When I shoot my AK-74 with the corrosive 5.45×39 ammo (you can shoot all day with that stuff for a good price) I just take the gas tube, flash suppressor, bolt carrier, and bolt, and give it a bath in soapy water.  Then run some patches down the barrel with soapy water, clean the surrounding areas, and then go over everything with gunzilla once it’s dried out.  That seems to do a good job of keeping the rust away.

I spent some time at the three gun match Saturday scrounging brass off the range between relays.  Got a whole crapload of .223 off the ground, but was happy to find someone was shooting .308, which I could use to make up a load so I could finally try the FAL I bought from TD.  I was happy, until I saw what condition it was in:

I was puzzled by what kind of rifle would do this kind of damage to brass. Surely there was something wrong with this guy’s gun. Did the chamber actually have those stripes in it? In the name of John Moses Browning, what kid of crazy gun designer would create a rifle that tortures brass so?

After doing a bit of research, I discovered that this striping was likely caused by the fluted chamber of an HK91 rifle.  The idea of fluting the chamber is to allow some gas to flow around the cartridge to ease in extraction.  Apparently early versions of the G3 rifles were ripping the heads off the casing during extraction, so this was the solution to that problem. You can see that in a cutout of the G3 chamber here.  The roller delayed blowback design of the G3 is just very hard on brass, from both the fluting, and violent extraction. Consensus on cases fired from G3s and its relatives seems to be that they shouldn’t be reloaded.  The big dents definitely seals the deal. Into the scrap brass bucket they will go.

H&K — Because you suck, and we hate you, especially if you’re a filthy brass scrounging reloader.

I spent a good deal of time last night playing with their AR builder, and I have to say, it’s a great idea.  Brownells should really take time to make a better web site too, which has been one of the reasons I’m not a more loyal customer.  MidwayUSA’s web site is just a lot easier to use, and more useful.  Nonetheless, Brownells will end up getting some of my money for this, maybe a lot of my money.  Here’s what I configured last night:

You can click to get a bigger picture. This assumes I can either buy through an FFL, or make my own AR-15 Lower Receiver. I didn’t include that in the price, though I put a lower on there just to make it look OK. It’s not included in the price tally. My only complaint about the configurator, other than the fact that it will quickly drain my wallet, is that when choosing a barrel band for the front sight, it won’t put itself in the right spot, and I think the picture showing on there is upside down. I also wish you had links in the inventory list, so you could easily review your list to make sure you know what you are getting. Other than that, this is a highly innovative idea on the part of Brownells, and I have to commend them for it.

Via SayUncle, is look as if Brownells is looking to cash in on the built-it-yourself market.  There’s even an option for building your own from a partially completed lower.  I consider it your patriotic duty as a concerned American to learn how to build your own lowers.  If the new administration has designs on outlawing certain semi-automatic rifles, or outlawing private sales, we owe it to future generations to create as many off-paper guns as possible.

It is lawful to build your own rifle for your own use, you just can’t build it for commercial gain (i.e. you can’t build it sell it, that requires an FFL).  So make yourself an AR, AK or two.  You’ll learn something, and create something you can pass on to the kids.

JR reminds everyone of the importance of cleaning your rifle after firing corrosively primed ammunition.   I can personally attest to this.  I bought some corrosive 5.45×39 before I realized it was corrosive.   I found out the hard way.  Didn’t take long either.   Fortunatly, no lasting damage, but yeah — corrosive ammo is nasty stuff if you don’t clean.

Makes me glad I got a Liberty Safe.

My understanding is that one of the common failure modes in the otherwise pretty reliable Bersa Thunder .380 is the disconnector spring breaking.  This happened to me when I was on the range one time, and after I got back, I tore the gun apart and stored the parts at the bottom of the safe for 6 years.  I didn’t feel like I could trust it for carry anymore.

When the disconnector spring breaks, there’s nothing to force the disconnector up to engage the hammer release, and the pistol behaves as if the magazine is out.  It’s one more reason why extraneous safeties don’t belong on a carry gun.  But have no fear Bersa carriers, I have found a means for getting around this particular failure:

So you know what this means right?  Now you have to practice shooting sideways.  When someone at the range gives you the evil eye because he thinks you’re fooling around shooting gansta style, you can explain to him that you’re practicing a failure drill.

UPDATE: Tam notes that this is technically an “immediate action” or “malf” drill :)

The Arizona Rifleman talks about problematic reloads, namely loads made from demiled components.   You see, the United States government is forbidden from surplussing ammunition these days, thanks to our last gun hating Commander-in-Chief, Bill Clinton.  But it’s not illegal to dismantle surplus into their components and sell those.  I’ve been using such lake city brass for a while now.  You have to be careful, because as he mentions, the components can get damaged or deformed as they are demiled.

UPDATE: Fixed the link.  But the article on Depression Porn by Virginia Postrel was pretty good.

Personally, I would never buy reloads.  I’ll shoot my own, but that’s about it.  This is why.  Looks to me like someone got rifle powder mixed up with pistol powder.  He’s lucky to not be seriously injured.

Finally got the safe delivered on Wednesday.  Bought it at The Sportsmen’s Center over in New Jersey, which is the closest Liberty Safe Dealer to my house.  It’s a Franklin 35, with brass hardware.  Picked it up for $1799, and they delivered it for $225.

I also got the progressive press a reader sent me all set up and running, which I have nicknamed “The Contraption” because of its mechanical complexity.  It took a good bit of work, and a few botched reloads to get everything set up correctly.  It’s a Lee Pro 1000.  It took a bit of tinkering and finagling to get it to work.  Mainly the primer system didn’t want to feed reliably.  That problem was solved by applying car wax to the feed ramp to slippery it up a bit.  That seems to have done the trick.  You still have to watch the tray like a hawk though, because if it’s not full, it won’t feed. Did a small run of about 50 .44 Special cases through, went to the range and shot them all, and will reload again.  It seems to work fine once you get it set up, clean the feed ramp, and know what to watch out for.

I have purchased a gun safe, with delivery scheduled for tomorrow.  It is a Liberty Franklin 35 in black marble finish.  I got a pretty good price on it.  I have a fair amount of work to do to prepare for its arrival.  I’m hoping that a quality safe will keep my guns safe from theft and fire, but equally important will help deal with the problem of moisture rusting my guns.

SayUncle had a negligent discharge of his Walther P22 over the weekend, but because the four rules were being followed, no one was hurt.  One thing I need to get, and I would say anyone who handles firearms a lot needs to get, is a clearing barrel.  Every time you load a gun, there is a small chance that the round could slamfire, either from a problem with the gun, a misseated primer, or what have you.  There’s also the chance of human error.  A clearing barrel makes sure no one gets hurt, and you don’t end up having a hole of shame in your floorboards.  It’s one of those things that over time, statistics will catch up with you, as they did with Uncle, so it’s best to be prepared.

It’ll save you money, and confuse hippies.

These guys show you how you can make jacketed bullets for .223 out of fired .22LR cases.  This is pretty damned cool, but I’m not sure I want to go that far down the reloading rabbit hole.

So I have decided that I am in need of a progressive press.  The main thing keeping me from practicing my shooting more is the fact that for guns other than .22LR, I’m either stuck paying in limbs for ammo, or spending hours at the reloading press.  I can reload about 50 to 60 rounds per hours with the single stage press.  What takes me an hour to load, I can shoot in 10 minutes.  This has to change, especially if I get into action shooting sports.

I know there will be myriads of folks who will say “You just need a Dillon.” but Dillons are expensive, and while I like the idea of a no-nonsense warranty, for all practical purposes, I’m not likely to need unusual warranty service.  I’ve had a reader who has graciously offered to send me his Lee Pro 1000 that he’s no longer using, and it’s a tempting offer, since I’m already using their stuff, and it’s working fine for me.  But if I choose Lee, and make an investment in caliber kits, I could be sinking money into something I might just decide to upgrade later.  Should I go whole hog, and just get a quality press?  If I go that route, I’m torn between the Hornady Lock-N-Load AP, and the Dillon XL 650

Here’s what I want to reload, in order of volume:

1. .45ACP
2. 9mm
3. .44 Spl/Magnum
4. .223 Remington
5. 6.8 SPC Remington
6. 30-06

Now if I have to do 6.8 and 30-06 on the single stage, I’m not going to be all that broken up.  Though, the 6.8 would be nice to do on the progressive, if only because I would shoot it more if reloading speed weren’t an issue.  I’ve been considering this review of all three progressive presses, which says good things about the LNL AP.  I’ve also been looking at Chris’ review, and also here and here, which is largely favorable to the Hornady.

What to do, what to do.

Well, the old bench of evil turned out to be too small, too unstable, and I hated the fact that the only way I could mount the press was on the side.  I decided to go to Sam’s Club and get myself a new bench of evil, where I could mount the press the right way.   Now every time I decap and resize a piece of brass, it’s like I’m playing a slot machine, only with this slot machine, I win every time!

Now I’m thinking about upping the ante toward a progressive press.

Robb has a concern I have been all too familiar with.  One reason I switched from Hoppes No. 9 to using Gunzilla as my gun cleaner of choice, is that I don’t have to worry about some burly gun owner coming up to me, giving a sniff, and saying “My my, is that amazing fragerance Hoppes No. 9?  Enchanting!” and giving me a wink.  Gunzilla, if it has an odor, I think sorta smells like olive oil.  It’s that mild.  In fact, I’m pretty sure the stuff is basically biodiesel, or maybe biokereosene.