Somehow the summer is slipping by more rapidly than normal. The 1^st of September will be here soon and with it comes dove season. I consider dove hunting one of the more challenging and enjoyable of the hunting seasons. A few years ago, I went to Argentina dove hunting. I have to say it wasn’t a very good dove shot at the beginning but I was much better by the end of the trip. That trip was really a safari. A bird boy is assigned to each hunter and they tally every shot. The first day I was limping along with a 25% hit ratio. There were 23 of us in the hunting party and each night everyone ’ s hit ratio went up on a board for all to see. The good news is I wasn’t last. By the last day of the four-day trip I was at 75%. Doves are a pest in Argentina. We were in Cordoba Province and doves eat an estimated 50,000 bushels of grain a day in that province alone. The farmers were glad to see us. We ate dove every day for lunch and the bird boys took the rest to their families and villages and shared them with everyone. They are very poor there so they were glad to have the meat. At the end of four days, I was in the upper middle of the pack with 1794 doves. In all, we killed over 44,000 doves.

The doves there come fast and furious. It took two semi-auto shotguns with me, one with a wood stock and the other one with a synthetic stock. The shotguns would get so hot you had to wear gloves and switch off to let them cool. I was a much better shot with my Browning Gold than my Winchester, even though they were the same gun. The Browning was the one with the wooden stock. We were in a huge flock of doves and my bird boy tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to the wooden forend of the Browning. It was smoking. As I said, I love dove hunting. The one extra safety rule you have to remember is to keep your shotgun pointed at 40 degrees or above when you shoot. Good luck to all of you dove hunters.

The Democrat Convention, such as it was, is over. Neither Joe Biden nor Kamala Harris mentioned much about gun control. Harris’s only reference was the 1993 assault weapons ban in her acceptance speech, but that does not mean it isn’t a major part of the Biden/Harris platform. Here is what their platform contains:

* A ban on the sale and manufacturer of so called assault weapons, according to their definition of course.

*Repeal of the Lawful Commerce in Arms Act.

* Restrict the number of firearms a person can own.

* Compensated confiscation of private firearms.

* End the online sales of firearms and ammunition (remember online sales of firearms still have to go through a dealer and online ammunition sales require a FOID card).

* Punish adults for allowing children to have access to firearms. Apparently the child would not have to actually get the firearm. This would be used to make an example of someone, is my guess. The draconian gun laws of Great Britain began with something similar in the early 1900s.

*Make gun owners responsible for reporting lost or stolen firearms to law enforcement.

* Enhanced background checks and extend the waiting periods to 10 days for all firearm sales.

* Give states incentives for starting gun licensing schemes and require each state to issue a permit to purchase programs.

As you can see, all of these would choke off private ownership of firearms in time, which is their goal. Any gun owner who supports the Biden/Harris ticket needs to have their head examined. Add to this the packing of the Supreme Court of the United States and you have the recipe for a Second Amendment disaster. Only 67 days until the General Election.

Tidbits:
August 28, 1869, John Wesley Powell and two others explore Grand Canyon braving the rapids on the Colorado River. Powell, a one-armed Civil War hero, was a professor at Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, Illinois, and was a lecturer at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois. He founded the Department of Anthropology at Illinois State University and went on to become the second Director of the United States Geological Survey.

August 29, 2007, Richard Jewell dies of natural causes at age 44. Jewell was a temporary security guard at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia. He found an abandoned backpack underneath a park bench and sounded the alarm before the bomb inside it went off. Jewell was at first hailed as a hero but, because he was a bit unusual, he was soon suspected as the bomber and was excoriated by the media for several years. Eventually, the police in North Carolina captured the real bomber, Eric Rudolph. Jewell sued CNN and NBC and received an out of court settlement. Jewell’s mother states that his treatment in the media shortened his life. He was eventually got the recognition he deserved but the damage was done.

August 31, 1897, Thomas Edison patents the kinetograph, the forerunner of the modern movie camera that made motion pictures possible.

September 1, 1939, Germany invades Poland. WWII begins.

September 2, 1945, Japan signs the official instruments of surrender aboard the battleship USS Missouri, officially ending WWII.

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