The Threadless Nut

So this is the morning of an historic (wait, aren’t they all historic?) inauguration of President Obama in our lovely little corner of the world. I’m deep in Blue territory here in NY and the refrains of “change” and “yes we can” are everywhere. I’m almost done burying all my guns in the woods, hold on, maybe I should be digging them up?

Yet, on my way to work this morning, there’s a car stuck in a snow bank on the side of a main road. An EMS guy is alternatively trying to dig  it out with a window scraper and push it out, but he’s not having much luck. There’s a woman in the car and a kid in the back. Even if they were only there for 10 minutes, hundreds of cars would have gone by and no one, besides the EMS guy, was there helping.

After stopping, getting the tow strap and pulling her out with the truck, a whole 5 minute operation, I learn that she was making a U-turn to meet him. So the one guy that was helping was her husband. 3 or 4 people could have pushed the car out with minimal effort and time.

So maybe, if we want a better world, we shouldn’t be looking up at our new President, but back at ourselves. After all, doesn’t change come from within?

One of the greatest things about the AR15 weapons platform is its modularity. You can take a standard AR lower receiver and slap a huge variety of upper receivers onto it. With a 30 second change, you can completely change the function of the weapon. You can go from a 10″ barreled close combat carbine, to a 16″ all purpose carbine, to a 24″ sniper or varmint rifle. You can even change the caliber from a .22 long rifle plinker/trainer all the way up to a .50 BMG long range “concrete is no longer considered cover” monster.

Well at this year’s Shot Show, PSE introduced something that really breaks the paradigm of what the AR can do. They’ve announced the TAC-15 AR crossbow upper. Yes you read that right, and here’s a pic to prove it.

Much like the spray pancake batter, I’m not sure if this is incredibly awesome or incredibly stupid. It seems to be quite long compared to a normal crossbow, though with the limb design, it’s narrower. I’m just not sure there’s  much advantage to slapping a crossbow on top of an AR lower. A crossbow isn’t considered a firearm, so it’s not like you have to go through the 4473 dance to get one and given it’s relative size, it just doesn’t seem that much smaller than just having a whole crossbow ready to go. At $1299 it’s no cheaper than a standard crossbow either.

Still, it’s neat and I want one.