Tracers

Here is an AC-130 firing its big-ass 105mm howitzer with what appears to be a tracer round.


Here is an AC-130 firing at night...with a couple other guns.


This one is from Afghanistan. This is what it looks like at night when an AC-130 orbits a target...


Here's one from Saigon. Puff the Magic Dragon was breathing heavy that night...


Not too sure where this one comes from but you can see the flares being dropped for spotting:


Yes, those are tracers over those beautiful old Corsairs at Okinawa. Some people just don't realize how "hot" the fighting was during WWII...


A tracer from an M-16. Notice the flash from the action as it is just beginning its cycle

And here's what it looks like without the nightscope...


Anybody want to guess where the sniper is....was?


A tracer from a slightly bigger gun. A tank.


You gotta' love ordinance testing...lucky bastards.

How far away is it?

I just woke up a bit ago at 5:30am. I moved from a world out of control to one on the verge. In my dream I rode on a boat across the English channel. There in one end of the boat were magnificent firearms locked in a plexiglass case. Ostensibly the owners could "have them any time they wish" as long as they only took possession of them when they landed on a hunting island in the middle of nowhere.

Once we landed we moved off to a university class. A fellow American had made the mistake of keeping her .32 pistol for self-defence. It was only a matter of minutes before everything came apart and the police were hunting for the "dangerous person with a gun".

Then I realized that it wasn't just the gun they were after. They wanted books too. Books about guns. Books about the right to self-defense. I had one too.

We found ourselves wiping fingerprints from books and casting them into a stairwell in the hopes that we would avoid being caught.

The woman was captured. She sent a message wanting me to come to her defense. I woke up terrified knowing that I could no longer hide from the authorities. I had been found out. I was a person who supported the natural right to self-defense. I was likely to be imprisoned for it.

Maybe my dream was simply a paranoid delusion brought about through years of believing that the only benevolent government is a government too small to be effective. Maybe I was simply remembering the stories I had read out of England where even now books are being banned for being too antisocial.

Maybe I was realizing where the United States is headed.

Winston Churchill was wrong. We are not two great peoples separated by a common language. We were two great peoples separated by a deep and vast cultural ocean. That ocean seems more like a puddle in a parking lot now.