Yesterday was the annual charity match at Del Norte range an hour or so from Albuquerque.  We had fairly ridiculous amounts of water falling from the sky in the last few days and all the unpaves roads leading to the range did not take it well.  Still, it stopped rainign for a day so that we could go shoot.

This is a one gun match where you shoot some combination of paper and steel.  Steel plates are a bit further out.  Paper is all close in.  You are scored based on hits and how fast you run the stage.  I am old, fat and slow, so I am terrible at this, but the match is a lot of fun.

It does not help that I have been so focused on precision last couple of years that I have somewhat neglected the fast stuff.  I should really fix that.  There are some two gun matches at Legacy Ranch (an hour in the other direction from Albuquerque) on a fairly regular basis that I should try for practice.

This year, for shits and giggles, I decided to shoot it with an AK-74 which slowed me down even further, but it was definitely fun.

Last year's match was themed after John Wick movies.  This year, it was a Chuck Norris theme.

While some of the shooters are out to win, since it is a charity match, the atmosphere is very laid back and people do funny things here and there.

For example, one gentleman in my squad dressed as a tactical wizard (I think):

Tactical wizard next to a kilt wearing RO was, I thought, a nice scene.

He had a suppressor enclosed by a Monster can on his AR.  The whole thing was a hoot.

Another gentleman insisted on running stages with the bayonet attached to his AR.  One one of the paper targets that was really close, the ROs let hime bayonet it instead of shooting it.  It was a ncie A-Zone stab.

The carbine I brought for this was an AK74 from Palmetto State Armory https://alnk.to/bEnbIaI with AKML handguard from TDI Arms, DFCO grip, Zhukov stock and Primary Arms PLxC SFP 1-8x24 scope in an RS Regulate mount.  If you are looking for a nucelar bright SFP LPVO with a fiber dot, I will go on the record that at current discounted price, this is the best deal I have seen in a while https://alnk.to/88424vv

As shown, this rifle clocked in at 9.3lbs.  It is definitely not a lightweight, but it was not too heavy either.  I put it through several experiments with different stocks and pic rail dust covers that did not work out well enough for my purposes.  MOst annoyingly, the 1913 stock adaptor kept on getting loose, so I finally slapped Magpul's Zhukov stock on it and went back to the normal AK side mount for the scope.  It is not as slick as I wanted it, but it works.  Another experiment that failed was with getting a suppressor on it.  On this AK-74, the muzzle device is threade donto the side block.  It is not straight enough for a suppressor.  I was getting baffle strikes on a 6mm can.  I coule try a growwly oversized can, I suppose, but I decided to leave it along and put the original muzzle device on.  I still maintain that all guns should be suppressed, but they are not all designed to be suppressed.

In principle, if I wanted to shoot more matches, a longer handguard would go a long way toward helping me drive the gun, but I intentionally decided to run everything as if it has an 11" barrel and a correspondingly short handguard.  I think that muscle memory will translate optimally between different platforms I have.

I will be the first to admit that I may have overscoped this AK a little bit, but on the other hand, given that the scope is pretty light, I do not really see a problem.  At this match, the furthest plates were about 300 yards out, so I appreciated being able to zoom in a little, while on 1x with that bright fiber dot, this scope is fast.

For an AK, this gun has a decent ALG trigger, but having spent the last couple  of years with precision rifles and match triggers, it gave me fits.  It was also very hard to get myself out of the "precision" mode.  I could definitely go faster if my head was not getting in the way.  I think I will do some work on that in the next few weeks.  In the grand scheme of things, 5.56 plining ammo is now cheaper than 5.45x39, but I think I should practice this with different platforms.  I still have some AK specific muscle memory, but I was definitely rusty.

With Wolf 60gr Military Classic ammo launching at 2750fps (with 18fps StDev) the rifle shot groups in the 2MOA to 2.5MOA range standing tripod (I almost never shoot off of a bench any more, so I popped a bag on a tripod and shot off of that) which is plenty good enough for this type of a match.  Intrinsic accuracy of the gun did not get in my way.  However, managing the long spongy trigger pull for longer shots and for offhand shots was a little tricky.  Still, it is my own fault that I neglected practicing with my AKs.  

The match was originally supposed to be eight stages.   I was in quad six, so we shot 6, 7, 8, 1, 2 and 3 before we had to stop.  I have a couple of videos that I am going to look through, stitch together and post.

Just as we were about to shoot stage 4, everyone was told to stop and the range went cold.  Apparently, one of the ROs on a different stage was clearing his handgun (ROs were allowed to have handguns) and shot himself in the hand.  I did not witness it, but that is what I was told.  He was taken to the hospital and seems to be doing OK.  However, our day was done.

It is an unfortunate accident and it sounds like it was self-inflicted.  One of the board memebers from the range went and visited him in the hopsital.  He will need surgery.  Someone also mentioned that this is the second time this gentleman shot himself.  I am not sure what to make of that.  I do not know him personally.  We'll see if there are any further repercussions for the range or for the event moving forward.

There was also a night event (for stages shot with night vision), but I could not participate in that one due to various family obligations.  We are in the middle of a Jewish hoiday of sukkot and my wife already made plans for it.

Watching people bring different guns to this match was very interesting.  Some used ARs on longer stages and a PCC on close range stuff.  It never occurred to me to have multiple guns with me.  One gentleman had what looked like a suppressed PS90 SBR.  A couple of peopl had AKs.  I saw a CZ Scorpion and a B&T SBC9.  I am sure there were a few other unusual choices there, but most people were shooting AR-15s of all sorts.

I have some time to figure out what I will bring next year, but a P320 in a Flux Raider chassis could be an interesting option.

It has been raining cats and dogs here which is very unusual for Albuquerque and also very welcome.  

Between travel, weather, Jewish holidays and a new virus the kids brought from school, I have not managed to spend any real time at the range.  That is unfortunate since I have a long queue of stuff to test.

All that sitting in various airport lounges did give me a chance to browse through a couple of forums. That is a mix of amusing, educational and disheartening in roughly equal measures.

One thing that drives me up the wall is when someone makes an ironclad absolutist assessment based on a single experience or a single piece of data without applying any critical thinking to either.  Now, we all have our prejudices, but sometimes it is a good idea to step back from those and recalibrate.

For example, there is a guy on the Hide currently sticking his negative opinion on Leica in every other post based on a bad customer service experience with his older Geovid 3200.com  

I have no idea what happened with his Leica interaction, but the way he describes it sounds a bit fishy. It also does not help that I know who that guy is and take it with a little grain of salt a priori.  There might have been some poetic freedoms taken with his account of events.  On the other hand, it is entirely possible that he called Leica CS and pissed someone off there within the first three sentences with his attitude.  Some years ago, he used to say all sorts of interesting things that he later claimed were influenced by late night and alcohol (he had many interesting things to say about me when he learned that I am Jewish and an immigrant and was stupid enough to say it to people who showed me the screenshots).  Be that as it may, even if he was a royal d!ck to the CS people at Leica, they still should have taken care of him and even if he had a bad experience he should still have enough perspective to understand that there is a reason Leica has been in business this long.

Yet, that is not how the world works.  

On a different topic, Leica Geovid MAX is en route, so I'll have some impressions soon.

That diversion aside, I have seen a good number of threads recently where people were looking for crossover scopes, without quite using the term and unsure how to select one.

I figured I'll use the example of two riflescopes I am looking at currently and offer a few different scenarios of why I would choose one over the other in some situations, but not in others.  This goes far beyond a simple: the glass is better here vs there.

Let's start with the spec table.  The two scopes in question are in the second and third columns:

Vortex Razor Gen3 4-24x44 and Primary Arms PLxC 2.5-20x48.

They are within a couple of ounces of each in terms of weight.

PLxC is an inch shorter.

PLxC has a slightly larger objective.

Razor has significantly more elevation adjustment.

Both have 10mrad per turn adjustment.

Here is a question for you: which one has wider field of view?  That is not a trick question, yet the answer depends on how you define it.

If you are talking about FOV on the same magnification, Razor Gen3 is wider (larger Apparent FOV). 

If you are talking about real FOV on the lowest magnification, then PLxC is a good bit wider since it goes down to 2.5x vs the Vortex' 4x.

Here is a different way to tabulate it:

On the same magnification, Razor Gen3 has about 9.5% wider real and apparent FOV.

However, on the lowest magnification, PLxC has  49% wider real FOV.

In which situations is one preferable to the other?

Vortex Razor Gen3 4-24x44 and Primary Arms PLxC 2.5-20x48

This may be a little off topic for a “Guns & Optics” website, but I figured you’ll forgive me a few occasional small diversions.  Yom Kippur begins at sundown tonight on September 20, 2026.  It is the Day of Atonement, the most somber day in the Jewish year.  I am not an especially observant Jew.  I grew up in the Soviet Union.  I do not keep a full traditional calendar, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.  I pay attention to a few of the major holidays, but do not make a big deal out of most of them.    

Yom Kippur still matters to me though.  For a long time I could not quite say why since it always looked a little hypocritical.  Left to my own devices, I avoid going to the temple like the plague.  I do not follow most of the ritual parts of Judaism (I definitely do not keep kosher).  Yet, the Day of Atonement matters.  Here is the closest I can get to understanding why.

Yom Kippur is a yearly act of defiance against any power that thinks it sits at the top of the pyramid.  It is a reminder that we get to return to what we are, no matter what the insanity of the year behind us made us do.  The tyrants I grew up under are mostly gone (some have changed business cards, but they are not the same as what they were).  We are still here and only G-d is above us.

What most know about Yom Kippur is the ritual.  Twenty-five hours. No food, no drink, no work if you are keeping it that way.  White clothes.  Long prayers if you go to the temple. A shofar blast when it ends.

Yom means Day.  The meaning of the word kippur is about covering, ransoming, wiping clean.  In the Bible the high priest walked into the holiest Temple sanctuary once a year, offered one goat to God, and sent another into the wilderness with the people’s sins named over it.  The house had to be cleaned so Presence could stay in the middle of a people who make a mess.

The physical Temple is gone. The day is not.

There is an old Talmudic story where Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakai was smuggled out of Jerusalem besieged by the Romans around 70 CE.  He greets Roman general Vespasian outside Jerusalem and predicts that he will become emperor.  Vespasian grants him one favor.  Ben Zakkai asks him “Give me Yavneh and its sages”.  He essentially asked him for a small town and the right to teach.  That became the center of Jewish learning after the Temple was destroyed. The building was gone. Study, prayer, and return were not. No army can burn that down.

For two thousand years after that Yom Kippur has been inward and interpersonal: return, confession, prayer, charity — and the rule that God does not clear what you still owe another human being.

You do not need to be observant to feel the weight of that. You only need to have lived through a year and have the dedication to stop for a day and reflect.

Why a secular Soviet Jew would still care

The Soviet state had a very simple take on the human being. You and everything around you belonged to the Communist Party.  There was no law superior to the regime.  Religion was either backwardness or a security problem.  Jewishness was an entry in your papers and the limit of what you were allowed to do or to be in the Soviet Union: a reason you did not get the job, a university placement or the exit visa.  In the Soviet Union, your ethnicity (Jewish is both religion and ethnicity) was recorded in your identification document.

Yom Kippur refuses the premise of the primacy of the state.

Not with a manifesto, but with a day that does not belong to their calendar.  With a fast the state did not schedule. With the old idea, older than Moscow or Rome or DC, that only God is above us.  Commissars are not.  General secretaries are not.  Whatever the current thing happens to be is not.

I am not religious enough to want to try to unpack “only God is above us” in any sort of a doctrinal sense.  It is still the most accurate sentence I have for this idea that we are all made in G-d’s image and no human is above the other.  There is a limit to what any government, any psychotic year, any burst of collective insanity is allowed to make of you.

The USSR wanted all of us to be state property, yet merely remaining a Jew was already a kind of insubordination.  They did not care about anyone’s individual piety.  That 5^th line in the passport was not theological: you were Yevrei (Russian version of Hebrew) whether you kept Shabbat or not.  The state could punish us for that, but it could not quite extinguish what we are.  Tyrannies are not very good at planning for eternity.

In a very strange way, for me, Yom Kippur, in part, is the annual discovery that all the empires of history who promised to outlast us are all gone, yet we are still here.

Return, not performance

The Hebrew word everyone translates as repentance is teshuvah. The root is return.

A year of ordinary life asks you to become a lot of things you did not choose.  Some of that is ordinary adult compromise.  Some of it is moral cowardice.  Some of it is what you do to get through a system that wants everything from you: your speech, your hopes, your dreams, your life, and eventually your children.

Yom Kippur is the moment when you get to shake that year off and return to what you were.

It is not a conversation you have with another human.  Walking back toward what you are when the noise drops: a Jew, a free person, someone whose first loyalty is not to the last demand made on him is a conversation you get to have with G-d and with yourself once a year.  

Maimonides, who would not have been terribly impressed by my marginally existent piety, still defined the work in terms a secular person can use.  Name the act. Feel its weight. Say it. Resolve hard enough that you would be embarrassed to repeat it next Tuesday.  If another person has a name attached to the damage, start there.  Yom Kippur does not atone for what is between you and another person.  It is between you and G-d.

The Soviets were excellent at public confession that was just a performance.  We live in a culture inundated by peformative self-flagellation and that is fluent in other people’s sins and blind to its own.  Modern technology brought us social media that was a boon to both voyeurs and exhibitionists.   This day is the opposite of both.

Most of the people on here are not Jewish.  I assume most of you are either Christian or secular or somewhere in between.   A lot of you are secular in the ordinary American way, which is different from the Soviet way.  Here, you can be secular without buying into the religion of secularism, that is a luxury that was not afforded to us.

Whether Christian or secular, you do not need a metaphysics seminar and you most definitely do not need it from me.  Still, my point here is that once a year, it is not a bad thing to take all the dulling life anesthetics off the table: food, work, social media feed, performance and ask what the year turned you into.  Then ask what you are when that is all stripped off.  Then go figure out how to get back to what you are or what G-d wants you to be rather than what this past year made you.

The traditional greeting in these days is not “Happy Yom Kippur.” It is gmar chatima tova: a good final sealing.

That is probably why I keep this day, why I fast and turn all my electronic gadgets off. Not because I am pretending to be a model Jew.  Because I am still here, and because I refuse to let a year or a state or the feverish pace of life have the last word on what that means.

Gmar chatima tova.