Yup. Here’s a video.
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Cool beans 
OH sure, they aren’t for shooting at people. He had separate guts for it, so the lighter recoil still cycled it.
That is the exact reasoning behind the death penalty, and yet it hasn’t had any measurable effect to the murder rates of states who adopted it. They even passed laws upping the automatic time served in my state if you are simply caught with a gun and are a felon. I believe it was an automatic 5 year sentence, yet that hasn’t seemed to do anything either. While I actually support that sort of law, I don’t have any delusions it stops crime.
Which is what? A school shooting a month?
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I think you may have your political spectrum tied up in knots. My understanding of the classical political spectrum is the left emphasizes “equality” and the right emphasizes “personal freedom”. Mind you, this is not a good description of what their policies actually end up doing, but it is often a good description of the ideas they use to sway voters.
This all falls apart on the right when you take into account personal freedom for minorities, like LGBT rights, voting rights for people of colour, etc, as then we have the personal freedoms of one person running up against the personal freedoms of the other. In those situations the left becomes the champion of personal freedoms, but not so much for the white male middle-aged gun owner.
I really have not seen Boing Boing as leaning either left or right. I am also one of those who has had it as my home page practically forever. I have never felt that the page promoted a philosophy of banning stuff, whether it be be books, guns, abortions or whatever. I am sure that the author of the original basement range article was writing for an audience consisting of WW2 veterans who want to practice their shooting skills by plinking in the basement with a small caliber rifle, as an alternative to setting up an outside range where the neighbors could possibly be downrange and probably do not want to hear all the noise. the size of the target tells me that the intended audience is probably already a skilled shot, and more than familiar with gun safety. I cannot understand people who criticize people from past eras for not conforming to their own modern, personal values. I am sure in another sixty years much of what is thought now to be progressive ideology will seem hopelessly dated and even immoral. this article is an emotional screed. It is preachy and childish in tone. It does not matter whether I agree or disagree with the politics of the author. I just don’t like reading rants from people with such a self righteous and narrow worldview.
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I was going to try to do some research on the article in question, but I see no information properly citing the original sources. I am not a journalist, but I would think research and proper citation would be basics for publication. Perhaps I am mistaken.
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If your problem is with school shootings, address the cause. Alleviate the bullying issues, and a great proportion of shootings won’t happen. The close spacing of the recent two can be explained with a Poisson distribution of random events (which often show “nonrandom-looking” clustering). (Though it could be interesting to see how much of the clustering is “copycat effect” and how much is true randomness.)
(And even now, in the horrible as-is state, it is a lower risk than being directly hit with a lightning. Which is apparently a risk not worth the possible countermeasures like wearing conductive strips in clothing that would deflect the current away of vital organs. Given the orders of magnitude higher daily risks we accept without blinking, this sounds to me like an acceptable value.)
(Not even counting the aspect that you can increase your survival rate significantly just by some even the most rudimentary friendliness to the ostracized weirdos (hint: start way before than they show up with weapons) - but if you instead choose to not endanger your precarious social ladder position, you get what you want.)
But we are seriously digressing here, way beyond the scope of the discussion of the at-home shooting miniranges, and the horse we’re beating is already a heap of dried and fractured bones. So let’s throw in a figurative hand grenade of an idea.
I wonder what will happen once Oculus Rift and its ilk takes off, a virtual reality with real “presence” feeling gets off-the-shelf, and the first-person-shooters will hop on the tech bandwagon. Voila, not just a target shooting but also the whole tactical simulator. Development of a gun-style peripheral, with integrated pneumatic or electromagnetic recoil simulation, is then quite inevitable; it is not even that much difficult, I saw something similar on a military-tech fair as a part of a tactical sim, aka “big boys toys”. (I also saw a fairly cool antitank missile VR sim there, quite simple as it involved just a bog-standard motion/position tracking and a display in the launcher’s sight, and even managed to score a kill. Not so trivial for an uninitiated, the thing is HEAVY.) This is guaranteed to be wildly popular, a contemporary alternative to said gun miniranges of the days past. As no firearm or other actually dangerous tech is involved, above a somewhat powerful solenoid actuating the counterweight, there is no licensing or other paperwork to be attached. Nor it should be.
I am looking forward towards the next moral panic that will inevitably follow these developments, like it did with all the previous ones, with the figurative popcorn on standby.
I’ve shot in basements before; 22cal single-shot rifle, I was 12 or 13 at the time, under adult supervision. No issues, perfectly safe.
I had a small air pistol range in my own basement, years later. Again, no issues. Very quiet. Quite legal.
I get the impression that the author of this article has never visited a gun range and doesn’t know much about firearms in general. He could take the time to learn a little before slamming something out of fear and ignorance.
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close the thread
*dons fedora*
Not all gun nuts.
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the “frivolous” hot coffee lawsuits meme is a myth just like probably everything else you believe
http://www.citizen.org/congress/article_redirect.cfm?ID=785
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Search for “maker mayhem”
I inherited a pair of parlor pistols. They’re .22 caliber single-shot pistols made in the 1890s. In those days, people who were snowed in for the winter or otherwise bored would practice shooting in the front room to break the monotony. They would pile wood in the fireplace for a backstop, put a target in front of it, and plink away at it from across the room or out in the front hall. When I was 8 my grandfather taught me to shoot using those guns in the basement of his brother’s house, next to the printing press.
What lead vapor? Please show me something other than the Navy’s experimental rail gun that will vaporize the slug on firing. Powder smoke yes, but if you think lead vapor is a product of firing a gun you obviouslyu don’t know shit about guns.
They seem to be missing their little white strings 
Naw, you have to wear a kilt and throw a piece of telephone pole at someone.
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I’ve reloaded thousands of bullets in my time, some of them unjacketed. You light a fire at the base of a lead projectile, you leave some behind, from the bore to the target.
My brother is an engineer, and some of the weapons he’s had a hand in designing are carried by military vehicles. Believe me, he has to know what melts at what temperature.
Science.
When I was in high school back in the early '80’s we had a basement shooting range in the high school for ROTC. In San Francisco (Galileo High, across the street from the Ghirardelli Chocolate Factory). I never used it but I saw it a couple of times and I think it was similar to this, with angled steel plates so the bullets would deflect down.
The illustration makes it look more dangerous than it would be for the sake of being a decent illustration. If you read the article, you will note that it recommends at least 40ft of space, making the risk of getting hit by a shattered piece of bullet pretty low.
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