niemand said:
Joe was bit of "Techno-Phobe"
Geez, Louise! Do ya think?!?
A recovering alcoholic, recovering gunwriter, and Gawd-fearing church-goer, he was nothing if not convinced.
Yeah, he eschewed certain technological advances, but by the same token, he also accomplished things which he didn't know he wasn't supposed to be able to do.
I have enough iterations of Joe's rounds (probably dating to 1986) that I could open a
Musee de MagSafe… remember the different colored epoxy matrices to aid the ME to identify the particular round during a
post-mortem? He shouldn't've abandoned that feature… the one path report I have from an actual MagSafe anti-personnel deployment, so thoroughly confused was the ME that he had no idea what the two men had been shot with, and gave it a kinda "let's go home" call! This was the Brooklyn, NY, jeweler from ten years ago who blew up a couple of street thugs who'd tried to take down his shop… he'd shot the two of them a total of three times with a Walther PPK/s, resulting in one DRT and another DOA down the block.) I called Joe and told him that he was at last validated with a documented street shooting, and that he could now mercifully forgo the anecdotal tales of decapitated deer and alligators
in extremis. He shrugged and said, "I've told you for the past eight years… my stuff works!" (He phlegmatically accepted the path report when I obtained it, but I'm not sure he ever bally-hoo'd it any.)
But I also recall the home-made "release agent" Joe fashioned to allow his various sized pellets a greater dispersion in soft tissue so that there wouldn't be just a clump of hardened epoxy and shot, in effect a single projectile. It was a brew Joe concocted in his single-wide, of carbon tetrachloride and mineral oil, and I actually broke down one of those rounds to test the efficacy of the stuff, and it seemed to work pretty effectively.
Sometime in the not too distant future I'm going to publish the last E-mail Joe sent me several weeks prior to his terminal MVA… it will have been about five years, a suitable period, I think, and it shows a happy man, doing things he enjoyed… and, of course, in his advocation and recreation, pushing the envelope as he had in his occupation.