It's true...

For good or ill, revolvers are on the wane. They were replaced as duty/service guns wholesale in the 1980s, and their strongest holdout niche, the 5-shot concealable snubby, is being eclipsed by the tiny pocket .380 pistol.

And it's not like Millennials are going to develop a sudden affection for revolvers (or 1911s) when they turn 40, either, any more than they're likely to suddenly develop an interest in Harleys with their first gray hair.

Elsewhere I predicted that in ten years the shrunken revolver market would be mostly big hunting magnums, weirdo .410 shot pistols, cowboy repros for SASS, and maybe a tiny niche holdout remnant of small and medium frame wheelguns.

Photo editing...

Squirrel shot with EOS 40D and EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM

Homicide

Last night before bed, I finished reading Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America.

I cannot recommend the book highly enough if you're interested in the mechanics and root causes of the freakishly high homicide rates in America's inner cities. The author spent most of a decade practically embedded with LAPD homicide detectives in South LA and obviously cares about the subject.
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Cats & Dogs

Me, from discussion elsewhere on the topic of cats & dogs: "I mean, I like dogs and all, but that's a lot of commitment. At that point you're basically only 'saving for college' away from having kids."

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) February 12, 2019

Photography is not a crime...

...except when it is.

One such case would be if you are a foreign student found wandering around snapping pictures of the antenna farms of an interagency intelligence facility located on a Naval Air Station. Especially if you'd walked past a bunch of fences and "KEEP OUT: THIS MEANS YOU" signs to get there.

That's the sort of behavior that tends to get teh feds a little bit spun up.

Obligatory "Reefer Madness"-grade video about the facility's main gig, supporting the War on (Some) Drugs, below. Presumably they're also making sure those tricksy Cubans aren't fixin' to invade or anything.


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Spoiler Alert: It's the latter...

It amazes me how many people responded to my @ShootingIllustr column on WMLs with "Well, they don't substitute for a handheld!" or "Only with training in proper use!"

It's like I wrote the 4th & 5th paragraphs in vain. Or maybe they didn't actually read it.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) February 11, 2019

Icy Night

Rebel T1i

Bobbi got home from her writing class just before seven last night, which meant we just had time to duck over to Next Door American Eatery for dinner.

Having had a pretty substantial brunch with Shootin' Buddy, I just had the Buffalo chicken bites appetizer and a gin gimlet for dessert.

iPhone 7 Plus

The night was thinking about icing up as we left...

Rebel T1i

Yesterday was the last day of spending a week with the Rebel T1i. Starting today, it's a week with the EOS 40D.

The 40D is actually older than the T1i, with a 10.1mp APS-C sensor using the DIGIC III processor versus the Rebel's 15mp/DIGIC 4 setup. However it's also a prosumer body, which is more rugged and weather-resistant and features a number of other features, like a top-panel LCD and the distinctive Canon control wheel on the rear of the body.

They're available used from Amazon sellers as cheap as $99 right now, and I actually got this one for $79 shipped from KEH back in November with a Black Friday sales code.
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It's true.

People downloaded ASCII porn unironically. https://t.co/68eDJUQeDI

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) February 10, 2019

Battleground State

Illinois gun owners had fought hard for years and made hellacious headway in the battle to get CCW and at least a measure of preemption passed, so it's especially painful to see all that hard work threatened by their new Future License Plate Craftsman in Springfield, J.B. Pritzker.

The war never ends.
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I feel like this was a William Gibson plot...

Just think: You lived to see the era where supermarket tabloids pick fights with dudes who have their own space programs!#BezosBlackmail #CyberpunkisNow

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) February 9, 2019

"Publish and be damned!"

The post title is the famous retort of the Duke of Wellington when a publisher offered to leave him out of the salacious memoirs of a courtesan in exchange for a healthy sum of cash.

Similarly, Jeff Bezos seems to have correctly divined that the average American in 2018 has a lot less of a problem with the idea of consenting adults texting each other dick pics or bobs and vagene than they do about a tabloid surreptitiously getting ahold of said communications and attempting to use them for blackmail purposes.
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Serious Blasphemy

"Through the grapevine has come a hint that the designated hitter may become a universal reality in Major League Baseball in the not-too-distant future.

Hurry up. Oh, for the love of David Ortiz, Edgar Martinez and Frank Thomas, please hurry up."

As of right now, the National League is the only remaining holdout of Real Baseball, which clearly states in Rule 1.01 that "Baseball is a game between two teams of nine players each", not "nine players plus a designated hitter".

Once the Designated Hitter appears in the National League, can the final gasps of the republic be far behind?
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19°F on the banks of Eagle Creek...

Cold enough at the range that I was loading a mag in the car, hopping out & shooting a 10rd chrono string, recording data, and hopping back in car to reload the mag for the next string.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) February 8, 2019

Trying different glass...

While inexpensive for a full frame zoom lens with that range, the 28-200mm f/3.5-5.6 USM was disappointing. Not very sharp, lots of chromatic aberration.

Yesterday I swapped another old lens onto the T1i, the EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM. While nominally the same aperture range, the better glass and Image Stabilization make a big difference in sharpness.

Straw Gun Training

From an older post at Gun Culture 2.0:

"...Keller argues for a combat proven approach to training that focuses on the constants of gunfighting. The post-9/11 essence of gun training is spending time on a square range mastering the basic techniques that apply in every gunfight: getting the gun up, getting sight picture, and pulling the trigger.
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[Y]et, he observes, many of his peers who have the same operational experience do not train in this manner. Instead, they are “getting wrapped up in the whole wooing the customer thing, with the fancy drills and the running around doing the GI Joe stuff. Some of the guys that do have experience are teaching that stuff but it’s because they know that’s what sells.”"

Now, I'll readily admit that I've avoided a couple of the more... notorious? internet famous? ...trainers, but at this point my training resume is pretty varied. Since this stuff is usually for work (and could quite possibly come up if I ever actually have to defend myself), I keep a spreadsheet documenting my training hours.

Looking over that list and discarding all the various legal and medical and other classroom stuff and limiting it to only life-fire range classes, I count fifteen different trainers/schools since 2008. And those fifteen come from a wide variety of backgrounds: LE, .mil, private citizens...

I have yet to encounter anything I'd describe as "fancy drills" or "running around doing GI Joe stuff". I've certainly never attended a class where the basics of marksmanship were not stressed. In fact, in most classes I've taken, marksmanship was not just stressed but scored and graded and the best shooters were usually recognized in some way.

Maybe I'm attending the wrong classes?
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