MacGyver

I'm in for either - or both.

I don't get up that way much. I figure you know better places to eat up there. Plus, you've made the drive to Williamson county more than once. Agreed - it's always great to get together with good folks.

Next time we'll actually go fishing and I'll be glad to buy your lunch

Enjoyed the heck out of it today, Doug. Looking forward to doing it again soon!

While I'm encouraged by the activity over the last week, I'm afraid substantial damage has been done over the last year. Put as bluntly as I can do it, blind partisan rhetoric ran a huge number of people off. I know I've said it a million times, but guns are an American thing - not simply a Republican thing. A few handfuls of voices so poisoned the air here that a lot of our members simply left. They didn't protest. They didn't whine in PM's or in threads. They just logged out. Heck, I'm the admin who likes to talk about big topics and there have been plenty of days lately where I've just not wanted to engage with some of these folks. I love a good debate - but there wasn't really any debate in that politics subforum. So we were faced with a choice - to continue to let this slowly choke out any community here - or to find some other path. We chose the latter. I'm not sure what the future will hold. I know that I can speak for David when I say that we really appreciate the core community here. The switch from vBulletin to IPB hasn't been the smoothest. I know David continues to try to tweak both the configuration of the board as well as working with the vendor. But, I think traffic is down for two reasons (especially on high end stuff like your optic.) One, Hillary isn't coming to get your guns. People have spent money they didn't have over the last 6 years - and now we're in a down period. But, two we've run a bunch of eyeballs off. It's going to take some time to build that back. I appreciate you guys in the meantime.

We aren't nearly ready for that.

Checking out SBR's site, I don't know how I missed the 375 SOCOM. I didn't know anyone was necking down 458 brass, but that looks like a fun little round.

They're still running the full gamut down in Brunswick: http://www.sbrammunition.com/458sl.html

Well this sucks... I hate losing these guys who still have such stories to tell as they get older: https://www.google.com/amp/www.billboard.com/amp/articles/columns/rock/7759662/gregg-allman-dead High price of low living as he would say, I guess.

I'm certain they appreciate the calls. On birthdays, anniversaries, etc. - it's comforting to know that someone still remembers the person you lost. Life goes on - but it's sometimes great to get a reminder that the world was a genuinely better place with that person in it.

On that Tuesday morning, I had just walked out the door of 1WTC to get a cup of coffee. There had been a holdup that morning in me being able to get up to the area I was working, so I walked outside for some reason instead of walking back down into the transit mall. I had just crossed Broadway when I saw a flash of light in a window and felt the air suddenly moving past me back towards the buildings. It couldn't have been more than a fraction of second before I heard and felt the shockwave and heat, but I distinctly remember it being long enough that 'explosion' went through my mind before I felt it. There was almost instantly a wave of people in the streets fleeing in panic - and it was hard to do anything but move along with them. One of the strange things about working in the World Trade Center was looking out a window down at the top of jumbo jets on final approach to LaGuardia. We all thought it was a terrible accident - until the second plane hit. I remember watching in absolute shock as the second plane hit - it was going so fast. I remember watching the top of 1WTC tumble end over end as it fell. I can see everything about the scene in my mind. To this day, I can see it when I close my eyes at night. And, if I think about it I can smell and taste it. The rest of the day was a blur - I worked the site from the early afternoon until around 0400EDT the next day. I'll never forget walking out of the site and out of lower Manhattan. As we reached Union Square, people were lining the streets with water and food. I was fortunate to get to spend the next 9 months on the rescue and recovery. It was a time of healing, as truthfully I should have been one of the people we never found - my office was on the 78th floor on the side of impact. Had I been at my desk, I would have been vaporized. That event certainly affected my professional trajectory for the next several years. Things like that change a person. Over the years, I've had to quit thinking about why I lived that day and 2977 others did not. It truthfully affected my faith - I've have a hard time with the word 'blessed' in the way that it's used in contemporary forms. But, I try to live each day with the memory that there were 2977 people who didn't get to come home that day. I try not to squander the fact that I'm still alive.

I like the TTSX's too. David gave me a metric ton of the 325 FTX's but I've not shot that many of them. How's the sound level on that Bower's with subsonics? SBR has been running pretty good sales on cases of .458 for anyone that doesn't reload.

I'm with you on that, Greg. While I do keep supplies set aside, and am trained in and regularly practice survival skills, the heart of the matter for me is that me holed up with my family while everyone else starves or whatever is out of sync with the way I live the rest of my life. There is a part of the Mormon ethic that's really found it's way into my planning and preparation. While they believe in having a year's worth of provisions set aside - that's as much about being able to help the community around you as taking care of your own. So, I guess for me - I still have to answer the question of "who is my neighbor?" - even when times are bad. Maybe especially when times are bad.

That's neat!

Look forward to it.

Bizarre, but yes.

I'm not, but I do prefer to reel left handed.

That's probably part of my problem. I need to go for whatever the Stradic equivalent baitcaster is. I've just not invested in one for freshwater. In saltwater I run a Penn 525 Mag that is amazing! I can't say enough good things about Penn saltwater reels.

To this day I don't know how it didn't tear a hole in my transom. I sure thought I was going to be swimming back. And the crazy thing was I never saw any indication of the car other than the red paint on the skeg on my lower unit.

I'd take the mud any day of the week over the car I hit the last time I put in on Percy Priest. Turns out nothing will tear a lower unit up quite like a submerged but not quite sunken Honda Civic.

I'd be happy to bring the boat up that way if Doug would do a clinic with us on using plastics. Truth be told I'd love to get him to teach me to really run a baitcaster, too. I can do it, but I'd be willing to bet he's forgotten more on the subject than I'll ever know.

I wish I was as comfortable with plastics as I was with live bait and other artificial lures. Maybe I've just never put the time in - or gotten someone like Doug to really teach me what I need to know. It's something I'd love to get more comfortable with.

That's something I really respect about you, Greg. And, maybe truthfully one of the things we need to get comfortable with is a much smaller community - closer to maybe 2009 numbers than 2017 numbers. We've got a lot of people who bring different life experiences to the table. Respect for those experiences is important. Using the two of us is an example - we may see Trump differently. But, that doesn't matter. That small difference of opinion is tempered by the huge number of things that I've got a great deal of respect for you for (work ethic, community involvement, the financial choices you and your wife have made, the kids you guys have raised, etc.) Community is hard. But it's worth it. That's what we're trying to figure out.

Obama's exit probably really does have something to do with it. Once people realized he wasn't going to be able to be the boogeyman they expected - well...I'm not sure the industry at large knows what to do.

Interestingly, the anti-Trump voices were not the ones complaining. Rather, the people who took vocal offense were actually the reverse. When you look at the data, a lot of our moderates simply logged out. Anecdotally, politics wasn't what interested them in the community - and as it took over the 'Unread Content' section - they just left. You might think that a gun forum would skew to the right - and you're mostly correct. But, it's not nearly the percentage of our population that you might think - nor does it skew as far to the right as you might think. In a community as large as ours, we resemble the population at large more closely than you might think. I think that's what caused us to press the pause button for a bit. It begs the question - what do you do when small segment of your population is poisoning the community at large? I have avoided booting a couple of folks that I probably shouldn't have. They bring nothing of value to our community and suck the air out of otherwise good dialog. Y'all certainly know that I like talking about big topics. But we've got to figure out a way to do it that makes sense and doesn't hurt the community at large. Feel free to discuss.