Tucson Rifle Club, Inc.

HC 2 Box 7128

Tucson, AZ 85735-9729

Newsletter- Tucson Rifle Club - January 2000

MONTHLY MATCH SCHEDULES:

1^st Saturday - Blackpowder Cartridge Rifle Silhouette 9AM and Tucson Action Shooters

1^st Sunday - Hi-Power Rifle Silhouette and The Old Pueblo Cowboy Single Action 9AM

2^nd Saturday - Black Powder Cartridge Rifle Mid-Range Bullseye at 9 AM (#)

2^nd Sunday - 1000 yd. Saguaro Bench Rest 7AM and IHMSA Small-Bore Pistol Silhouette (9AM Summer; 10 AM Winter); Southern Arizona Wildlife Callers (SAWC) Prairie Dog Silhouette(*) 9AM

3^rd Saturday - TASC

3^rd Sunday - NRA Small-Bore Rifle Silhouette (10AM); The Altar Valley Pistoleros Cowboy Single Action (9AM) and NBRSA Bench Rest (Light & Heavy) (7AM)

NOTE: NBRSA moves to the 2^nd Saturday's in February

4^th Saturday - High Power Rifle - National Match Course

4^th Sunday - International Handgun Metallic Handgun Silhouette Association (IHMSA) Big-Bore w/Field Pistol (9AM Summer&10AM Winter); Old Pueblo Muzzle Loaders (OPML); The President's Practical/Tactical Multi-Gun Action Match (starts afternoon ~12:30)

* “Even” months only. (e.g. Feb., April, June, ... etc.)
# This match day is dependent on regional activities - call the range for conformation.

· RANGE HOURS 7:00 AM to 5:00 PM Daily

Call the Range 822-5189 for information & conformation of match dates and times.

Note: TRC monthly meetings are held at the Range in the Alibi Inn (next to the range office) on the third Sunday of the month.

The next regular monthly meeting will be January 16^th

at ~ 3 PM.

Welcome new members: Steve Plevel, Wayne Batteiger, William Spanburg, Norm Clark, Oscar Fruge, Eden Dare Mailboux, Richard Hiller, Jeffery Blohm, Kim Baker, E.N.Gordon, Mark Richards, Richard Hoffman, George & Pat Mitcham, Chris Martinez, Robert Russ, Ken King, James Mosley, Fred Sloan, Steve & Laura Parker, John Edwards.

Match information:

Black Powder Cartridge Rifle Silhouette matches for 2000

Dates: Feb.5; Mar.4; Apr.1; May 6; Jun.3; Jul.1; Sep.2; Oct.7; Nov.4&5; and Dec2, 2000. NRA Approved.

Entry fee: $10 each shooter. Registration 8 to 8:45 AM, first shot down range at 9:00 AM.

Equipment: Single shot rifle with external hammer, originally made for black powder cartridges, of U.S. manufacture prior to 1896. Replicas are permitted. No Schuetzen-style rifles are permitted. Maximum weight 12 pounds 2 ounces. Barrel or tang mounted vernier or ladder type sights typical of the era are permitted.

Ammunition: Black Powder or Pyrodex with CAST or Swaged bullets. Jacketed or gas checked bullets are not allowed. No duplex loads of any kind.

Targets: Full size High Power Rifle Silhouette steel targets. Ten chickens at 200 meters OFFHAND, ten pigs at 300 meters, ten turkeys at 385 meters and ten rams at 500 meters. Pigs, turkeys and rams may be fired from any position using cross-sticks as per NRA rules.

Course of Fire: Relays will be fired in order of chickens, pigs, turkeys and rams from the starting position assigned. Total of seven minutes for sighters and first five targets. A two-minute rest period, then five minutes of the second five targets. Targets must be shot in order Left to Right. Shooters will reset their own targets. For information contact Gordon at 682-8894 or e-mail: hipoint45@aol.com

^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^

MATCH RESULTS:

Sahuaro 1000 yard Benchrest Dec. 12, 1999

Shooter	Group [in]	Score
Bill Berta	15 1/2	88** w/1x
Jim Musegades	20 3/8	86 w/1x
Joe Yarina	29 3/8	77
Jeff Green	3 shots
Mike Chapdelain	35	61

Small Group Shoot-Off

James Musegades 13 5/8*

Bill Berta 17 1/2

*Small Group Winner **High Score Winner

NBRSA Light & Heavy 1000 yd Benchrest match schedule:

Jan.16, Feb.12; Mar.11, Apr.8, May 13, Jun.10; Jul.8; Aug.12; Sep.9; Oct.14; Nov.11; Dec.9. Note: all matches start at 7 AM.

Match results from December 19, 1999 #130

Light gun group aggregate

1^st	Karl Hustiger	10.77
2^nd	Glen Pearce	11.96
3^rd	Jerry Reisdorff	14.29

Winner - Karl Hunstiger 6.75

Light gun total score

1^st	Jerry Reisdorff	112/150
2^nd	Glen Pearce	101/150
3^rd	Mike Cox	95/150

High Score - Dick Davis 47

Heavy gun group aggregate

1^st	Glen Pearce	10.06
2^nd	Karl Hunstiger	18.60
3^rd	Jerry Reisdorff	26.46

Small group - Glen Pearce 12.37

Heavy gun total score

1^st	Glen Pearce	234/300
2^nd	Karl Hunstiger	220/300
3^rd	Jerry Reisdorff	173/300

High score - Glen Pearce 92

Sahuaro 1000 yard Benchrest Jan. 8, 2000

Shooter	Group [in]	Score
Ed Brooks	16 1/2	65*
Jim Musegades	36 1/2	57
Mike Chapdelain	26 1/2	61
Bill Berta (Mary's husband)	25	51
Mary Berta (Bill's Wife)	17	61
Rob Robinson	44 7/8	60
Rylee Robinson	41 1/8	44

Small Group Shoot-off

Ed Brooks 13"

Mary Berta 23 1/2"

High score winner was also Ed Brooks.Ed shoots a .22-6mm with a 69 grn bullet. Pretty impressive at 1000 yds. with a .22

Next Match: Feb. 13 7:00a.m

Small Bore Rifle Silhouette 12/19/99 (not NRA approved)

Class/Place	Name	Score
AAA/MW	Mike Aiello	52
AAA/1^st	Ron A Calderone	48
AA/1^st	Carl Bower	42
AA/2^nd	Jim Bertrand	38
A/1^st	Tim Faras	34
B/1^st	Ray Salgado	27 (?)

15 shooters participated on a wonderful December day.

Canned hams were awarded to all 1^st place winners.

Carl Bower was the only one to hit the exploding pig but he neglected to throw in his $2 so he was not eligible for the $pot.

The faithful remained after the match to help move the storage unit from the south side of the drive to the old concrete pad that used to position the old storage building. Thanks to everyone and special thanks to Ed for running the tractor. Those storage units are really heavy!

= = = = = = =

OK It's my turn.

· I saw this in the Arizona Daily Star in the first issue of the New Year.

To our readers

As time goes by, the environments in which we live and work changes. That is just as true for newspapers as it is for each of us personally. Periodically, we need to adjust to the world as we find it.

In the last year, laws regarding the purchase of firearms have changed. The law now requires that those who buy guns at retailers undergo a background check before the gun is sold.

For some time, it has concerned us at The Arizona Daily Star that people who buy guns from individuals selling them through our classified ads circumvent the requirement for background checks. In an age of increasing gun violence, it is difficult to defend our part in the transaction.

As a result, The Arizona Daily Star will no longer allow individuals to sell firearms through our classified ads. Ads already placed will run, but no new ads will be taken. We will still run ads from dealers.

We hope the community will understand that we do this because we care about the city in which we live. Refusing the ads will not stop the unsupervised sale of guns in Tucson, unfortunately. But we hope it will help.

- Jane Amari, editor and publisher

A tempered response is in order:

Dear Jane,

The environment, in which we live and work, is indeed changing. You and others at the Arizona Daily Star might need to adjust to the new world.

I hope that you will take your position seriously. In order to make a difference in society you as an editor and publisher must take measures to reduce the carnage that we witness every day in this country. Thousands of men, women and children are injured, mangled, maimed and killed each day by the most dangerous and deadly invention of man in our society, the automobile. (The costs due to cars in our society are several orders of magnitude greater than those of guns.)

Your newspaper is a source for the advertisements that promote these killing machines. They are sold to hundreds of innocents each day and none of them are given the slightest scrutiny or background checks to see if the buyers are suitable or sane to operate these monsters of death.

So do the right thing. Stop advertising these destroyers of worlds. While your at it, why not eliminate your shameless promotion and advertising of alcohol, strip clubs & topless bars that culturally degrade the community in which we live.

Do it for the children.

Thank you,

s/ Jim Bertrand

PS. Cancel my subscription, immediately.

+ + + + + + +

If any of you TRC'ers wish to make an impact in this regard I have a contact (thanks to Kerry Woo) that you should make immediately: Get your paper and pens out and get writing. Write to the OWNER of the Arizona Daily Star and the Citizen (and he also owns the Washington Post):

Bob Woodworth

Pulitzer, Inc.

900 N. Tucker

St. Louis, MO 63101

And if you wish to hurry the contact you can FAX him at:

(314)-340-3127 Do it NOW!

- - - - - - -

Sen. Bob Smith succeeded in amending an appropriations bill to beat back the latest wave of Clinton administration disrespect for two key elements of a free citizenry -- privacy and the right to keep and bear arms. Smith's amendment to the Justice-State-Commerce appropriations bill would foil FBI plans to keep records of private identifying information on law-abiding citizens who buy guns. The amendment also forbids a proposed tax on gun purchases, and authorizes citizens to sue if the FBI doesn't observe these restrictions. Sadly, Sen. John McCain foiled the intentions of Sen. Smith.

Senator Smith is to be praised for keeping his eye on some balls that might have been lost in the smoke of scandal and misinformation that the Clinton Administration seems endlessly to emit. Actually, few things could make the need for vigorous defense of 2nd Amendment rights clearer than the ongoing spectacle of Clinton contempt for the citizens he is supposed to serve. For the 2nd Amendment is really in the Constitution to give men like Bill Clinton something to think about when their ambition gets particularly over-inflated.

The Second Amendment was not put into the Constitution by the Founders merely to allow us to intimidate burglars, or hunt rabbits to our hearts' content. This is not to say that hunting game for the family dinner, or defending against personal dangers, were not anticipated uses for firearms, particularly on the frontier. But these things are not the real purpose of the Amendment.

The Founders added the 2nd Amendment so that when, after a long train of abuses, a government evinces a methodical design upon our natural rights, we will have the means to protect and recover our rights. That is why the right to keep and bear arms was included in the Bill of Rights.

In fact, if we make the judgment that our rights are being systematically violated, we have not merely the right, but the duty, to resist and overthrow the power responsible. That duty requires that we always maintain the material capacity to resist tyranny, if necessary, something that it is very hard to do if the government has all the weapons. A strong case can be made, therefore, that it is a fundamental DUTY of the free citizen to keep and bear arms.

In our time there have been many folks who don't like to be reminded of all this. And they try, in their painful way, to pretend that the word "people" in the 2nd Amendment means something there that it doesn't mean in any one of the other nine amendments in the Bill of Rights. They say that, for some odd reason, the Founders had a lapse, and instead of putting in "states" they put in "people." And so it refers to a right inherent in the state government.

This position is incoherent, and has been disproved by every piece of legitimate historical evidence. At one point in Jefferson's letters, for example, he is talking about the militia, and he writes, "militia -- every able-bodied man in the state. ..." The militia was every able-bodied man in the state. It had nothing to do with the state government. The words "well-regulated" had to do with organizing that militia and drilling it in the style of the 19th century, but "militia" itself referred to the able-bodied citizens of the state or commonwealth -- not to the state government.

It would make no sense whatsoever to restrict the right to keep and bear arms to state governments, since the principle on which our polity is based, as stated in the Declaration, recognizes that any government, at any level, can become oppressive of our rights. And we must be prepared to defend ourselves against its abuses.

But the movement against 2nd Amendment rights is not just a threat to our capacity to defend ourselves physically against tyranny. It is also part of the much more general assault on the very notion that human beings are capable of moral responsibility. This is a second and deeper reason that the defense of the 2nd Amendment is essential to the defense of liberty.

Advocates of banning guns think we can substitute material things for human self-control, but this approach won't wash. It is the human moral will that saves us from violence, not the presence or absence of weapons. We should reject utterly the absurd theory that weapons are the cause of violence.

Consider, for example, the phony assertion that certain weapons should be banned because "they have no purpose except to kill people." It is people that kill people, and they can use countless kinds of weapons to do so, if killing is in their hearts where love of justice should be. A short while ago, 7-year old boy in Chicago apparently used a pair of underwear to commit murder, because he wanted a bike.

So let's get down to the real issue: are we moral adults, or are we moral children? If we are adults, then we have the capacity to control our will even in the face of passion, and to be responsible for the exercise of our natural rights. If we are only children, then the government must control all the particularly dangerous toys. But this "solution" implies that we can trust government with a monopoly on guns, even though we cannot trust ourselves with them. This is not a "solution" I trust.

Anyone who is serious about controlling violence must recognize that it can only be done by rooting violence out of the human heart. That's why I don't understand those who say "save us from guns," even while they cling to the coldly violent doctrine that human life has no worth except what they "choose" to assign to it.

If we want to end violence in our land, we must warm the hearts of all Americans with a renewed dedication to the God-given equality of all human beings. We must recapture the noble view of man as capable of moral responsibility and self-restraint -- of assuming responsibility for governing himself. This is the real meaning of the 2nd Amendment, and indeed

of the entire American project of ordered liberty.

It is the business of every citizen to preserve justice in his heart, and the material capacity, including arms, to resist tyranny. These things constitute our character as a free people, which it is our duty to maintain. And to fulfill our duty to be such a people we shall have to return to the humble subjection to the authority of true moral principle that characterized our Founders, and that characterized every generation of Americans, until now. We must regain control of ourselves.

Most deeply, then, the assertion of 2nd Amendment rights is the assertion that we intend to control ourselves, and submit to the moral order that God has decreed must govern our lives. And just as we have no right to shirk our duty to submit to that moral order, so we have no right to shirk our duty to preserve unto ourselves the material means to discipline our government, if necessary, so that it remains a fit instrument for the self-government of a free people. The preservation of 2nd Amendment rights, for the right reasons, is a moral and public duty of every citizen.

The Clinton Administration's flirtations with executive tyranny should remind us that we have a duty to remain capable of disciplining our government if necessary. Bill Clinton's comprehensive avoidance of personal responsibility for his own actions, and our revulsion at the kind of character which that avoidance has produced in him, should be a kind of horrific preview of the kind of people we will all become if we continue to let our government treat us as though we were incapable of moral self-control. And Senator Smith's successful effort to defeat several policies that treat us that way is precisely the kind of principled defense of our liberty -- and of the premises of our liberty -- that make him so worthy to be a representative of a free people.

· Can you imagine working at the following Company?

It has a little over 500 employees with the following statistics:

· 29 have been accused of spousal abuse

· 7 have been arrested for fraud

· 19 have been accused of writing bad checks

· 117 have bankrupted at least two businesses

· 3 have been arrested for assault

· 71 cannot get a credit card due to bad credit

· 14 have been arrested on drug-related charges

· 8 have been arrested for shoplifting

· 21 are current defendants in lawsuits

· In 1998 alone, 84 were stopped for drunk driving

Can you guess which organization this is? ... Give up?

It's the 535 members of your United States Congress.

The same group that perpetually cranks out hundreds upon hundreds of new laws designed to keep the rest of us in line.

= = = = = = =

If Hillary is smart enough to be a senator, how is it that she did not know that her husband was a philanderer?

If she did know that Bill was such a bounder, why did she lie about it? Which is it, a liar or a fool? ... Take your pick, N.Y. voters and don't let the rest of us down or have reason to think that you're idiots.

Someone once said that guns are as much the problem for violence in society as spoons are for Rosie O'Donnell being obese.

In a long-sought move that will help identify guns used in crimes when only their shell casings are left at a crime scene, the Clinton administration said that it was tripling the budget for the development of a unified national database of shell casings and bullets, and that one major handgun maker had agreed to start providing the federal government with information when new guns are test-fired. "This system is very exciting and has the potential to do for gun crime what fingerprints have done for forensics," Bruce Reed, the White House domestic policy adviser, said.

The new system, to be run by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, will work toward creating a virtual fingerprint for newly manufactured handguns by using a computer analysis of the unique markings a gun leaves on shell casings when it is fired, another administration official said.

The gun maker that will cooperate with the government is the United States unit of the Austrian company Glock GmbH. Paul Januzzo, Glock's general counsel, said, "As long as this is aimed at crime control, not gun control, we will support it."

Giving the firearms agency gun fingerprints "will speed up the gun tracing process incredibly," said Mr. Januzzo, a former prosecutor. He added that giving the government the information could also help the firearms industry in a complex set of lawsuits filed against it by 28 cities and counties as well as by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and in parallel negotiations between lawyers for the cities and the gun companies. Mr. Reed joined those negotiations last week on behalf of the White House.

The cities have demanded that the firearms manufacturers develop a serial number that would be harder to obliterate. "If you have a system with gun fingerprints, it is better than serial numbers that can be tampered with," Mr.Januzzo said. "It may also do away with another demand by the people who want to put us out of business, registration of all gun owners, because you already have the gun registered."

The new system relies on the computer analysis of marks made on shell casings, including those caused by firing pins and those pressed on the breach face of the casing during an explosion, as well as another unique signature left when the casing is ejected.

Glock will begin feeding information on all its newly manufactured nine-millimeter handguns into a machine provided by the firearms agency that was developed by a Montreal company, Forensic Technology. Mr. Reed said he hoped that the agency would eventually get test-fire information on all Glock's guns, as well as those made by other leading manufacturers, including Smith & Wesson and Colt's Manufacturing, which are now monitoring the pilot project in cooperation with the government and Glock.

The new system has another important effect: it will put an end to a long-running feud between the BATF and the FBI, which had developed two competing, incompatible technologies to obtain ballistic information on guns, bullets and shell casings. The system, to be known as the National Integrated Ballistics Information Network, was developed by representatives of the two federal agencies and the Boston Police Department. Police officials in Boston had found that to obtain complete ballistics information, they had to spend money to acquire technology from both agencies. To create the new system, Mr. Reed said, the White House will increase the budget for ballistics work from just under $10 million a year to more than $30 million, with 230 local and state law enforcement agencies expected to have access to the new system within two years.

The new ballistics identification system and the program to enter test-fire information from Glock are part of a quiet effort by the Clinton administration to develop more effective ways to combat gun crime despite a political impasse in Congress and several state legislatures over new gun control bills.

Now, as you members know, anyone can destroy this traceability with the simple application of some rouge paper to the face of the slide and replace the extractor and what do they propose to do about revolvers? ... And you though your tax dollars were being wasted. Shame on you! I'm done for now. Thanks for your indulgence. Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati & Keep your stick on the ice I'll see you at the Range. -jim_b