By Phil Bourjaily

Because my kids are out of the house now, I am not as current as I used to be. Therefore I had no idea splitting Oreos was a Youtube thing. Personally, I eat Oreos whole, or, you know, twist them apart with my fingers.*

That brings us once again to Jorg Sprave of the Slingshot Channel, who has invented a pump-action Oreo splitter. And, while his pump action splitter does a terrible job of splitting Oreos if having an edible cookie at the end of the process is your goal, the pump mechanism he came up with is very clever.

By David E. Petzal

As our once-great nation continues its descent into lunacy, it behooves us gun owners to take note of the times in which we live and remember that we have New Rules, and that common sense is now as null and void as grammar. This applies to shooters and gun owners to the Nth degree, and woe unto him who is not aware of the new light in which we are seen.

In Maryland, a second-grader was suspended from school for two days for shaping his breakfast Danish into the shape of a handgun and going “Bang, bang.” In the same state, a couple of six-year-olds were suspended when, while playing cops and robbers at recess, they pointed their fingers and said “Bang, bang.” Are Maryland school administrators any nuttier than school administrators in other states? Not that I can see. It could have happened almost anywhere.

In New Jersey, a proud father who had just given his 11-year-old son a .22 LR AR-style rifle for his birthday and posted about it on Facebook was visited not only by the cops (in full SWAT regalia, dad claimed) but by representatives of the state’s child welfare agency. No one had a search warrant, but they nevertheless demanded entrance to the house to inspect how the homeowner stored his firearms. Dad got his lawyer on the phone, and the lawyer told the minions of the law to go away, which they did. Governor Christie ordered a full investigation, after which he ordered an entire roast suckling pig with sides.

By David E. Petzal

One of the questions I am most often asked is, is such and such a bullet accurate? To which I invariably reply, “Accurate enough for what?” It’s a relative term. If you want to shoot in competition, you need a different order of accuracy than is required in a hunting rifle. The easy answer is, I don’t know of any bullets, hunting or target, that aren’t accurate, except for what’s in some of the cheap military ammo, which is loaded with industrial waste and possibly a pinch of cat crap.

Competition bullets don’t have to expand or penetrate, they just have to get into the same hole as the previous bullet. Their construction, while requiring great precision and ruthless quality control, is much simpler than that of a hunting bullet, which has to expand and penetrate both, and getting a slug to do this involves complications. The Swift A-Frame, for example, has two cores, not one, and they’re bonded to the bullet’s jacket to keep everything together. Two cores doubles the chance for an error in manufacture, but since A-Frames are made in small numbers with people constantly keeping track of what’s going on, they shoot just fine. If you go to Africa and would like to see your PH smile, tell him you’re shooting A-Frames.

By Phil Bourjaily

Deadeye Dick asked an excellent question in a comment on the high velocity ping pong ball post: Do you have to relearn how to shoot when you switch to very high velocity loads?

Others will disagree but I will say no, you don’t have to learn to shoot all over again. I haven’t recalibrated my leads consciously or (as far as I know) unconsciously when I shoot high velocity ammo. Remington’s website says the difference in lead between their 1,675 fps Hypersonic and other steel is 11 percent — about eight inches at 40 yards. That would be on a true 90-degree crosser at 40 yards, and most makeable shots in the field occur at shorter distances and shallower angles. On, say, a 20-yard quartering target, the difference in lead between a super-fast shell and a normal velocity shell is negligible.