Snark

Jack O’Connor Would Have Loved the 6.5 Creedmoor

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Jack O’Connor died in 1978, nearly 30 years before the 6.5 Creedmoor appeared, but judged by the standards he championed in The Hunting Rifle and decades of Outdoor Life writing, he probably would have loved it—even if it never displaced his beloved .270 Winchester. O’Connor valued accuracy, moderate recoil, flat-enough trajectory, high sectional density, efficient bullets, penetration, and above all the hunter’s ability to put a bullet precisely where it belonged. The Creedmoor checks virtually every box: a 140-grain 6.5mm bullet has excellent sectional density, modern high-BC bullets retain velocity remarkably well, recoil is lighter than the .270, and the cartridge is famously easy to shoot accurately. Where O’Connor would still favor the .270 is raw velocity and its flatter trajectory at ordinary hunting distances—especially important in his era, when hunters estimated range rather than pushing a button on a laser rangefinder. Ironically, O’Connor also admired cartridges such as the mild-mannered 7×57 Mauser and repeatedly argued that shot placement mattered more than horsepower. The funniest conclusion, then, is that the old-school hunters who dismiss the 6.5 Creedmoor as some newfangled fad might be surprised by their own patron saint: the Creedmoor is essentially an O’Connor hunting cartridge designed 30 years too late—accurate, efficient, mild to shoot, and powerful enough to kill what you’re hunting if you quit arguing about caliber and put the damned bullet where it belongs.

MOA vs. Mils: No, Mils Aren’t More Accurate

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MOA vs. mils: no, mils aren’t “more accurate.” Math is math. They’re just beautifully idiot-resistant.

Tell Private Snuffy to add ½ and ¼ and you can smell the electrical fire. Tell him to add .3 and .5 and he can probably do it on his fingers. Suddenly the military’s love affair with mils makes perfect sense.

PRS speaks decimals. Traditional American riflemen speak fractions. Different dialects, same X-ring.

5th Generation War, 1462: Vlad the Impaler Understood the Human Domain

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History remembers Vlad the Impaler as a blood-soaked medieval psychopath. But what happens if we assume Vlad was a rational actor? Suddenly the stakes, the terror, and the infamous Forest of the Impaled start looking less like random savagery and more like calculated deterrence. Vlad couldn’t outspend or outfight the Ottoman Empire, so he weaponized the one battlefield where a small power could compete with a giant: the human mind. Five hundred years before “fifth-generation warfare” became fashionable, Dracula was already playing game theory—with sharpened stakes.

5th Generation War, Part 1: Don’t Capture the Capitol—Just Convince Half of the People it’s Corrupt and Illegitimate

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You don’t have to invade a nation to defeat it. You may only have to convince its citizens that their elections are rigged, their courts are corrupt, their institutions are illegitimate, and their neighbors are the enemy. As early as 2012, the U.S. military was wrestling with the Human Dimension and emerging ideas about the Human Domain—the recognition that wars ultimately turn on human behavior and human will. Add smartphones, algorithms, information warfare, color-revolution dynamics, and fifth-generation warfare, and the battlefield starts looking considerably different. The Capitol can still be standing, the flag can still be flying, and elections can still happen right on schedule. But if nobody believes any of it anymore, an enemy may never have to conquer us. We may eventually do the job ourselves.

No Green Vomit Required — The Spiritual War Hiding in Plain Sight

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What if the greatest victories of evil don’t involve possession, spinning heads, or levitating furniture? What if they’re much simpler—pride, lust, greed, deception, hatred, and division? Ephesians 6 reminds Christians that our struggle is not ultimately against flesh and blood. Maybe we’ve become so busy identifying the enemy in everyone else that we’ve forgotten where the real battlefield is—and which weapons Paul actually told us to carry.

Bambi Is an Insurance Company Actuarial Liability

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My dad, Tom, always had a theory that automobile insurance companies would eventually destroy deer hunting. Not because they hated hunters or because a shadowy cabal of claims adjusters met beneath Lansing every full moon, but because Dad understood basic economics: deer hit cars, insurance companies pay for cars, and insurance companies don’t enjoy paying for cars. To a hunter, a big Michigan whitetail is November tradition. To an insurance actuary, he’s a hood, grille, radiator, two airbags and a rental vehicle standing beside the highway eating grass. Dad didn’t need a conspiracy theory. He understood something far more powerful—incentives. Eventually, somebody was going to put Bambi into MS Excel.

The Infantry: The Guys Who Get the Dust While Everyone Else Gets the Glory

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The cavalry gets the glory. The infantry gets the dust. For thousands of years, warfare has invented faster horses, bigger guns, tanks, aircraft, drones, and now cyber warriors—but eventually somebody still has to walk onto the objective with a rifle and take the ground. Call them ground pounders, earth pigs, grunts, soldiers, or Marines: they are the infantry. Not everyone should be one, and thank God for that. But every army needs them, because wars may be shaped by technology, artillery, armor, and airpower—but ground is still won by the poor bastard standing on it.

Before You Mock the 6.5 Creedmoor, Learn What “Creedmoor” Means

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The 6.5 Creedmoor has been around for 19 years, and apparently that still hasn’t been enough time for some gun enthusiasts to learn what the word Creedmoor actually means.

Before you utter “6.5 Man Bun” again, try Google.

The Army Is Apolitical. And DFAC Coffee Is Gourmet.

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The Army Chief of Staff is fired. Senior generals depart. The Secretary of the Army resigns. Meanwhile, the Iran war escalates and even tactical nuclear options reportedly enter Pentagon discussions.

Maybe it’s personalities and “woke generals.” Maybe it’s something much deeper happening behind classified doors.

What the hell is going on inside the Pentagon?

Sure, You Can Keep the Rifle. We’ll Just Regulate Everything That Makes It Work.

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“Shall not be infringed” apparently comes with an asterisk. Sure, you can keep the rifle—we’ll just regulate the powder, primers, ammunition, and everything else required to make it go bang. Maryland’s five-pound smokeless-powder limit raises a much bigger constitutional question: Can government regulate around the Second Amendment by controlling what makes an arm functional?

America’s Rifle: The 26 Million People You Didn’t See on the Evening News

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The evening news shows you the criminal with an AR-15. It rarely shows you the millions of Americans who own one, go to work, raise families, shoot matches, hunt, protect their homes—and never hurt anybody. The 2026 National Firearms Survey estimates 26.4 million Americans own an AR-15 or similar semiautomatic rifle. At that point, perhaps we should stop pretending it’s some exotic fringe firearm and call it what it has become: America’s Rifle. Behind every blade of grass? Maybe not—but we’re certainly working on it. God bless America. Shall not be infringed.

Beware the Fudd: He’s Not Extinct—And Kids, You’re Using the Word Wrong

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The Fudd isn’t simply an old guy with a walnut-stocked deer rifle. He’s the gun owner who says, “I support the Second Amendment, but nobody needs *that*.” From $20,000 shotguns to $500 AR-15s—and even the infamous “full semi-automatic”—America’s gun culture has spent decades learning that somebody else’s firearm doesn’t become less protected just because you don’t like it. Beware: the Fudd isn’t extinct. He’s evolved. And kids, you’re using the word wrong.

Dad’s Permanent Trailer Plate Has Entered the Surveillance State

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Dad thought “permanent trailer plate” meant permanent. Government apparently meant, “until you buy another trailer, peasant.” For generations, recycling an old trailer plate was the kind of technically-wrong rural economics nobody noticed unless a cop had an actual reason to look. Today, cameras, databases, and algorithms potentially can notice—and remember—things no human officer ever would have bothered with.

That raises a bigger question than Dad’s Great Trailer Plate Crime Spree: **When technology makes it possible for government to notice nearly everything, should it?**

The FOBbit: How the Army Turns Warriors Into PowerPoint-Slinging Indoor Cats

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The Army has a remarkable ability to take a perfectly functional warrior, promote him a few times, hand him three computer monitors, and turn him into a PowerPoint-slinging indoor cat. Thus begins the evolution of the FOBbit: that mysterious creature who once went outside the wire but now survives on RFIs, synchronization meetings, Green Beans coffee, and Baskin-Robbins. The real horror comes when you finally look down at your ice cream, look at your clean uniform, hit “Send” on another 1600 suspense, and realize the terrible truth: Oh, $h!tt! I’m the FOBbit.

I Don’t Believe in Miracles, Says the Miracle

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Modern man says he doesn’t believe in miracles while standing on a wet rock hurtling through space, made of stardust, possessing consciousness nobody can fully explain, pondering a universe nobody can explain why exists. God? Ridiculous. Ancient aliens? Now you have his attention. Maybe we didn’t stop believing—we just changed the vocabulary and became selectively skeptical about which mysteries are socially acceptable. Watch for AFNN next week as we ask the uncomfortable question: “I Don’t Believe in Miracles,” Says the Miracle.

Welcome to the Pentagon Wars: The National Guard Still Hates Me

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The Pentagon doesn’t fight just one kind of war. Some are fought with tanks and rifles; others with spreadsheets, PowerPoint, and somebody quietly asking, “Where haven’t they spent their money yet?” Born from Robert McNamara’s 1960s-era attempt to bring rational analysis to defense spending, the POM process evolved into an institutionalized food fight where the Active Army, National Guard, and Army Reserve defend their rice bowls while hunting for everyone else’s leftovers. I happened to be pretty good at looking under the fiscal seat cushions—and somewhere, I suspect, a retired National Guard programmer still mutters my name. Welcome to the Pentagon Wars.

The Greatest Generation Didn’t Have A Port Call Scheduled

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The Greatest Generation didn’t have Wi-Fi, DoorDash, FaceTime, scheduled port calls—or an expected return date. They had a war to win. Today’s sailors aren’t the problem; they’re products of a culture that has become extraordinarily good at eliminating discomfort. The question isn’t whether young Americans are “soft.” It’s whether America still teaches resilience before history demands it the hard way.

The Pacific Ocean doesn’t have an HR department, and the enemy doesn’t care about your deployment schedule.

Flock You: The Fourth Amendment Would Like a Word

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America has built a surveillance network King George III could only dream about. License-plate cameras may help catch criminals, but when government can potentially turn millions of innocent motorists into searchable dots on a map, the Fourth Amendment deserves a seat at the table. Catch the car thief. Find the missing child. But when the government wants to reconstruct where ordinary citizens have been, Americans should remember two beautiful words our Founders would appreciate: Flock you.