In my continuing quest to find something to post and to be considered mentally defective for posting pictures of vampires with guns, I present this recent find.

Just a note that if you haven't been reading the essays by Mike Vanderboegh at The War On Guns, you should be.

And seriously, if you read this blog regularly and you don't read The War On Guns, then...well, in my opinion, your time is better spent there than here.

I gave the e-postal match a whirl this morning, and am completely hopeless on those tiny red circles.  I could hit all around them, but actually hitting the red was obviously going to happen only by accident.  At 15 feet I nailed them quite handily, but at 25 it was a futile endeavor.

I shot up about 2 1/2 CO2 powerlets worth of pellets anyway, both at the golf target and some standard targets.  I think that with regular practice I could get pretty good.

This is my air pistol.

It's just a cheap Crosman 1008, and it seems generally accurate up to 25 feet, but occasionally there were fliers that were not my fault.  When you can see the pellet skew sideways through the air you know something's not right.  I easily chewed out the 10-ring of an 8" shoot-n-see target at 25 feet with it.  The 10-ring of those targets is about twice as big as those little bitty red circles on the golf target, and this is a rare case when I think that I am more accurate than the gun.  The pellets were Crosman Premium wadcutters.

I think a good quality air pistol would really help in my staying in shooting practice.  I've never really investigated air pistols.  If anyone has any recommendations, leave a comment.

ADDENDUM:  Or should I be looking at some Airsoft guns instead of typical BB/pellet guns?  I'm more interested in getting an air gun that is a close replica of a real gun that I'm likely to be using than in pinpoint accuracy, so that I can use it to practice drawing and point-shooting at close range.  Later I might also consider something like a Beeman for actual target shooting.  If only gunfire didn't spook the peasantry so.

I don't remember how it happened, but I somehow got on the SigArms email list.  They have a monthly gun-giveaway sweepstakes.

Here's the one for May, in case you were not aware of it and you feel like entering.  It's for a P239 in 9mm with "Contrast Sights," whatever that is.

I don't own a single Sig, therefore can't comment on them.  But a free gun is never a bad thing, now is it?

Montebello, California:

A circus trapeze artist working without a net fell 40 feet to his death during a performance, authorities said.

Roberto Valenzuela, 35, of Brownsville, Texas, fell headfirst and died Monday night, said Sgt. Jacqueline Gonzalez of the Los Angeles County Police Department.

He was performing with Circo Hermanos Vazquez (Vazquez Brothers Circus.) The troupe had traveled from Mexico for the show at the Whittier Narrows Recreation Area, Gonzalez said.

County firefighters happened to be at the show to monitor the act following Valenzuela's, which involved fire, Gonzalez said.

The firefighters tried to help Valenzuela, but he died at the scene, she said. The sheriff's department was investigating.

On the one hand, he was probably an experienced trapeze artist (I would hope so, anyway), who thought he knew what he was doing.

On the other hand, I think the Darwin effect may have been at work here.