So I answered some email from the University of Florida's Shooting Team, or whatever the hell it is they call the bunch of guys and gals who go rent guns and terrorize the local ranges.

Joking about the terrorize part. A little. Most of them seem to be nice upstanding young citizens, but there's always the one or two, ya know.

It's forever been a peeve of mine when people refuse to do their own, or ANY legwork when researching something, anything. 15 years ago, well okay. The web was in it's infancy and no where near the fount of information it is today. No one had personal email, yadda yadda, and face to face or snail mail was the deal.

Sure we all know that, so get to the point. The point is I never minded answering questions, when researching a relatively estoteric topic could prove difficult if not damned impossible. I remember the long library hours of frustration after frustration in attempting to pin something down.

But today, my small amount of knowledge isn't even close to a drop in the bucket compared to what's out there, and the lazy folks can get on my nerves. Sure, I know it's better to get an answer from someone you know, but I'm talking about the basics.

I enjoy helping and talking but for the love of pete can folks do SOME research on their own? And you know the type I'm referring to, the ones who can't seem to type the word GOOGLE into the search space thing, so they ask one question after another hoping someone will come along and do everything but offer to come on over and flat out do the thing for them.

Over at the old AOL blog I listed links to gun and ammunition manufacturers, and lots of other places where one could click to find anything they wished to find. Here it is hard as hell to do the same, and sure there's an awful lot of links I'm way behind in putting up, but I'll get to them. THAT ticks me off too, because Blogger can lose shit as easy as save it, I ALWAYS get an error message when trying to change something here, and sometimes I'm just not in the mood to play games with this awful service.

But I do answer maybe 75-100 emails a day, every day, and am happy to do it. But I must stop the easy stuff for a while. I tell the guys to check out the wonderful websites most manufacturers have, or to even, gasp, read an owners manual now and again. They look at me as if asking them to read means what they think it does.

Case in point; dry-firing a gun, any gun. It's the single best way to improve one's accuracy, bar none. Sure, if you live on a farm you can step outside and practice everything from your quick-draw to your dive and roll, but if you live on a farm you'll hate handguns and diving with a shotgun sucks and you can easily wind up with the barrel up your ass in no time flat. So then what guns might be dry-fired without causing harm to the gun? Read the fucking manual. BUT...most MODERN weapons, excluding rimfires, can be dryhumped to a fair thee well without damage, and as soon as I say that someone raises their hand and tells me that after the 24,634th time, his firing pin snapped, and then is all upset because he's upside down over a long and perilous fall.

Things break. All the time. Do anything with your thing and I don't care WHO makes it, your thing is eventually going to break. That's why manufacturers make new things. To replace the old and broken...following me now?

Take the Glock. I've owned them, yes. I've dry-fired them on an almost daily basis for some time now and have never had difficulties with snapping off a firing pin. But it happens. Call Glock and they'll tell you this. They'll say that as per the OWNER'S MANUAL, dry-firing is okay, but they never, ever, expected that some dweeb living in his parents basement would spend 4 consecutive days dry-firing trying to break an imaginary record he heard about on the internet. They're even thinking of changing the recommendation in the OWNER'S MANUAL to include references to OVER-DOING-IT. Easiest thing to do is to use snap-caps, but then we get into another area of contention, as all snap-caps are not born equal and some can cause more harm than good.

Work something long and hard enough, and it will break. Now, that isn't to say you shouldn't practice as often as you can, just be aware of silly things such as the laws of physics.

A really really smart guy once said, "Every action has an equal and opposite reaction."

You can look it up. And yeah, I know this means you gotta read something.