F, H, C, D

So, it started with a post at Weaponsman, where he noted some ex-RAF Tornadoes for sale. (Just the thing to shorten your commute!)

One of the commenters noted that the Tornado F3 (the British name for the ADV, or air defence variant) were in use in the Falkland Islands in the 1990s.

"Tornado F3's flying over the Falkland islands. MOD 45147767" by Photo: Cpl Darren Smith /MOD. Licensed under OGL via Commons.

So I followed the link to discover that, following the Falklands War, the British government stood up a  flight of interceptors in the islands, now based at RAF Mount Pleasant, and assigned it the flight number of the old unit number given the Hal Far Fighter Flight: No. 1435 flight. Originally composed of four RAF Phantoms, the aircraft were named Faith, Hope, Charity, and Desperation. (They initially operated out of the repaired Port Stanley airfield before RAF Mount Pleasant was built.)

The Phantoms were replaced by Tornadoes, and the Tornadoes in their turn have been supplanted by Typhoons. Apparently Her Majesty's Air Force no longer puts names on the planes, but the four Typhoons bear the tail codes F, H, C, and D above the Maltese Cross emblem of the flight.

(Incidentally, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the Falklands seem to have much more relaxed gun laws than are normal for a UK possession.)
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Avaunt, miscreants!

It was when I discovered my roommate investigating a noise in the back yard with an Enfield No.2 revolver that the idea occurred to me. Taking a report from a woman in a nightgown who had just shot a bad guy through the brisket with a .38 S&W round from a 70-year-old service revolver would guarantee that Officer Friendly wouldn't have to buy his own beers for a while, sure. However, the round itself was far from ideal for self defense and generally only available with lead round-nose bullets.

We had a 4" nickeled Smith & Wesson Military & Police model at the shop that was new enough to have a heat-treated cylinder and old enough to be interesting to Bobbi, and I knew that somewhere in my ammo stores was a small stash of standard pressure .38 Special JHP loads as well as some warm-loaded 148gr HBWC, which would also do in a pinch.

Bobbifoto

Sure, it was trading one medium-bore Depression-era service revolver for another, but I think it was a step up.
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"These blast points, too accurate for Sand People..."

Saw this target propped in a hallway at work today. Couldn't resist making a little editorial comment...

"...only Imperial stormtroopers are so precise."

Tab Clearing...

• Courtesy of Weaponsman, an informative PowerPoint slide show on ISIL.


• Are the terr'rists winning? Your neighbor thinks so. 


• SECRET CODES!

Yeah, I'll probably be seeing it again...

...so it's easy to understand why it's the biggest thing in the history of ever.

It's easy to be cynical and pan it as a re-hash of the very first Star Wars movie, but the fact is, that's what a lot of fans have wanted for a long time: To plant their butts in theater seats and see the opening narrative scroll up the screen and then feel those feels as the young Nobody from Nowheresville turns out to be the badass hero who saves the day and Good triumphs over Evil and swell the music and bring up the lights and everybody cheer and go home.

Instead, we got three episodes of Jar-Jar and increasingly disjointed blatherskite revealing George Lucas's ideas about politics and economics.

It's good that a whole second generation of kids can now really grok why their parents make such a big deal about Star Wars, because now they know it's not just some incomprehensible CGI spectaculars on a dusty DVD boxed set.

The most Monday-est time of the year.

Are there any Mondays that are Monday-er than the Monday that comes after Christmas falls on a Friday?

I submit that there are not.
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Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #140...

Glock 35 Gen4 with the finger grooves removed, a stippling job, AmeriGlo I-Dot sights, and featuring a threaded LWD 9mm conversion barrel (and using a 9mm extractor and ejector, as well.)
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Further study is needed...

 AmeriGlo CAP sights...

...or the regular wide surrounds like on the I-Dots and Trijicon HDs?

I've been using the I-Dots for years, but tried the yellow/green CAP on the Glock 37 and shot it so well that I replaced the TFOs on the Robar 17 with CAPs as well.

A bunch of shooting with both setups is called for...
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Child Rescued From Abusive Parent.

Well. That was excellent. Now we can all forget the balls-up Lucas made of his own franchise and pretend things segued smoothly from ROTJ..

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) December 27, 2015

A sense of wonder...

An annual watching of Hogfather is rapidly becoming as much of a Christmas tradition at Roseholme Cottage as turducken with bacon mushroom gravy is a Thanksgiving one...

Happy Holidays! Joyeux Noël!

Every year Indy turns the Soldiers' & Sailors' Monument into a 284.5' Christmas tree.

Merry Christmas to all the people in my computer!

Hope Santa brought y'all all cool things and not lumps of coal.
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Nearing the halfway point...

After my shift yesterday, I stepped out onto the range and put a hundred rounds of Lucky Gunner's Fiocchi .380ACP through the P250. There were no malfunctions to report.

That's 920 rounds fired since the gun was last cleaned or lubricated, with one failure to go completely into battery (#447). 1,080 rounds to go.
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Well, I certainly feel safer.

New rules apparently say that even if you opt out of the TSA's porn-o-scan machine at the airport and ask for an old-fashioned hands-on probulation instead, they can still make you pose for the porn-o-scan.

They say this will make us safer, and I'm sure they'll only do it to bad people. Right?
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A New Era

Back in '94, when I first started working at the gun store full-time, I traded my Ruger P91DAO on a Glock 23. I mostly carried one of a succession of Glock 23s from then until 2000, when I switched to a Glock 29. Mostly. (I was still in that stage of my gun ownership where I thought having a "carry rotation" was a cool thing.)

I wasn't until 2003 that I made a commitment to carrying the same gun in the same place every day. Well, actually I had several 5" 1911s set up more-or-less identically, but that was what I carried and shot.

In 2011, I switched from the 1911 to an M&P9 for a host of reasons, capacity and weight foremost among them, but also a desire to stop nerding on the gun so much and concentrate on the shooting more.

I've come a long way shooting the M&P, competing with it and using it in a bunch of training classes, but I'd reached a point where I got to feeling like I'd reached a plateau with that gun. It's probably mostly psychological, but the fact remains that I feel pretty confident that I could pick up my CCA 1911, Sig P320, or that Glock 37 and shoot Dot Torture clean at three yards, yet I've never cleaned that drill with my M&P.

Since I was playing with that G37 so much, I took it as a hint. The other day I cleaned out my old Waller range bag, moved the contents to a new G.P.S. pack, added a Lasergrip to my Glock 19, and holstered it up.

Looks like 2016 is going to be the year of the Glock for me.
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Six-fitty...

At the company Christmas party Saturday night I ran a box of S&B 230gr FMJ through the Glock 37. There were no malfunctions.

The Glock 37 has now fired 650 rounds since it was last cleaned or lubed, with one parts breakage. 1,350 rounds to go.
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Oh, it's a Christmas miracle!

Ambo Driver and Squeaky joined forces to make me the most wondrous Christmas present!

Flintlocks and Flop-tops
And Number Three Russians
Black-powder Mausers
From jackbooted Prussians,
Shiny Smith PC's from limited runs
These are a few of my favorite guns.

Socketed bay'nets
On Zulu War rifles,
Engraved, iv'ried Lugers
That make quite an eyefull
Mosin tomato stakes sold by the ton
These are a few of my favorite guns.

Rusty top-breaks!
Smallbore Schuetzens!
And all of Browning's spawn
I just keep on browsing my favorite guns
Until all my money's gone.

Automotif CXIX...

A silver mid-Eighties Monte Carlo SS in the local grocery store parking lot...

...but the oddly distended rear window marks it out as a rare "Aerocoupe". This body style was sold in fairly limited numbers in '86 to homologate the car for NASCAR racing, with several thousand more being sold the following year. All 200 sold in 1986 were white with burgundy interiors, while the 6,052 1987 models, like this one, were available in four different colors.
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Fixing a G-lock...

So, I bought this used Glock in a local gun store. It's a Gen 2 Glock 17 with a serial number that dates it to 1992.

It looked like a Robar custom, or at least a gun that someone really wanted people to think was a Robar custom, so I plunked down the dough for it. Close examination showed that the finish was really NP3 and confirmation on Bookface from some folks who would know pretty much made up my mind that what I had here was indeed an early Robar Glock.

It was pretty schweet except for one thing: That goofy Siderlock trigger. I refuse to believe that anybody savvy enough to send their gun to Robar would be derpy enough to put this useless dingus in it. I have to think that the guy who had it Robar'ed then sold it and the new owner dropped in the useless trigger. 

The new owner also did a bit of a trigger job, polishing all the bearing surfaces of the cruciform so that...B-BAM!...the gun doubled on the regular. Good thing I was only loading two in the mag, or I might have put more rounds into the overhead target carrier trackway than I did...

Off to Brownells.com I went, ordering a completely new set of fire control parts in a fit of excess caution.

I'll probably wind up putting the original striker group and firing pin safety back in the gun, since they're all slick and NP3'ed and the trigger itself was the problem part.

The stuff I learned futzing around with the G37 has proved invaluable. This 17 now has the same ZEV connector/NY1 trigger spring combo that I installed in Project Whimsy. A box of Blazer Brass and a box of American Eagle later, all is well.

Let this be a reminder that if you buy someone else's gun with Bubba Dremel's action polishing job custom trigger work, function check it while unloaded and then load only two or three rounds in the mag for the first few mags to make sure everything's working as it should.
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Automotif CXVIII...

Early non-"S" Porsche 928. For record-keeping purposes, let's call it a '79, although the styling barely changed for nearly a decade on the base models.
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Excuses. Again.

Overslept. Free ice cream machine is on the fritz this AM. Check back in the evening.
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Six hundred...

After work today I ran twenty rounds of 185gr Speer GDHP through the Glock 37 to get the shot counter to a nice round number. As expected, there were no malfunctions to report.

The Glock 37 has now fired 600 rounds since it was last cleaned or lubed, with one parts breakage. 1,400 rounds to go.
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More GAP testing...

I also chrono'ed some defensive loads for the .45 GAP at the range on Tuesday.

Federal's 230gr HST turned in a chrono performance that helped explain why it was such a consistent round on paper:

LO: 865.9
HI: 903.2
AV: 887.1
ES: 37.34
SD: 9.94

That's match ammo consistency right there. Combine that with the proven 230gr HST projectile, and you can probably see why this would be the round I'd use for carry, were I to carry the GAP Glock.

Speer's 185gr Gold Dot was no slouch, either:

LO: 1052
HI: 1098
AV: 1076
ES: 45.27
SD: 14.79

The GDHP is another proven performer, and although I'm less of a fan of light-for-caliber bullets than I used to be, I'd carry it in a pinch.

On the other hand, we have the Magtech Guardian Gold 185gr JHP. When people ask why I don't recommend off-brand hollowpoints for defense usage, I'll point them to this test. Even before running the chono tests, the uneven nature of the ammo was apparent to the naked eye: Wildly varying thicknesses of the jacket plating on the projectiles, some with bare lead in the cavities and others with blobbily thick plating in there. The electronic eye of the chrono bore out what the human eye noticed:

LO: 899.7
HI: 1018
AV: 988.0
ES: 118.3
SD: 33.45

Almost a hundred and twenty feet-per-second difference between the fastest and slowest rounds of a ten-shot string. Also, that's a new record in my notebook for Standard Deviation in a centerfire round. It's only bettered by some cheap bulk rimfire. It's worse than that Sumbro 9mm Macedonian garbage.

As an added bonus, it had a bright orange-white flash that was distractingly noticeable on an overcast day. I'll bet it's spectacularly flashy at night.

After work on Wednesday, I stepped out on the range with a fifty-round box of Sellier & Bellot 230gr FMJ. The Glock continued to function with aplomb.

The Glock 37 has now fired 580 rounds since it was last cleaned or lubed, with one parts breakage. 1,420 rounds to go.
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QotD: Natural Selection Edition...

Bobbi on the electoral debates:

"I think we'd better better served by lining up all the Presidential candidates from both major parties, sawing them in half and counting the rings.  The one with most probably would have been adequate -- if he or she hadn't been sawn in half."

So that's what they mean by "presidential timber".
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Automotif CXVII...

This nearby house often has something interesting parked out front: A slightly tatty 356 coupe, a lightly-wrinkled 928S, this mid-'80s BMW 635CSi coupe...
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Weak & Weaker...

I've stated that I think that the Sig Sauer P250 Compact in .380 would make an excellent "Grandma Gun" for shooters with hand strength or arthritis issues due to how crazy easy the slide is to operate and how mild the .380 recoil is in a mid-size locked-breech auto.

The fly in the ointment, of course, is that it's a .380. While the suboptimal chambering is mitigated somewhat by the fact that it has fifteen BBs in the tank, you still want to make those BBs as effective as possible. Today I took two different .380 ACP self-defense loads to the range to see how they performed over the chronograph. Hopefully jello testing will follow.

First up was the 90gr Hornady Critical Defense load, with its slightly gimmicky squishy red plastic plug. (I have yet to see convincing evidence that these bullets perform any differently at pistol velocities and ranges with or without the plug.) They functioned the gun well, didn't exhibit any flash that was noticeable on the dim, overcast day on the covered range, and ejected consistently.

As far as measured performance went, the consistency was what I've come to expect from Hornady:

LO: 896.0
HI: 935.6
AV: 922.3
ES: 39.68
SD: 11.61

That gives an average muzzle energy of 170 foot-pounds. Hornady claims 1000fps from a 4" test barrel and we got 922 from the 3.9" barrel of the P250.

Next up was Barnes's TAC-XPD solid copper hollowpoint, stored bullets-up in its packaging, so that the customer can see the ominous black-coated projectiles through the window in the box. (While this looks sexy, it's damned near impossible to lift the slippery bullets out by the pointy end.)

The first few rounds let me know what to expect at the chrono, as case after case dribbled out of the ejection port to land on my range bag just outboard of where I was resting my right elbow. Sure enough, velocities were disappointing:

LO: 814.5
HI: 868.4
AV: 842.5
ES: 53.94
SD: 15.36

That 842.5 fps average works out to 126 foot-pounds of muzzle energy, roughly 75% of the heavier-yet-faster Hornady load. And this is out of a 3.9" tube! Imagine what the velocities would be out of a little LCP or Bodyguard! It seems that my box wasn't much of a fluke, at least if you go read the reviews at Bass Pro Shops online site:

The Barnes solid copper projectiles themselves have a good rep, but that doesn't help if they're not even loaded with enough steam to reliably cycle the gun.

Hornady was today's winner.

That's 820 rounds fired since the gun was last cleaned or lubricated, with one failure to go completely into battery (#447). 1,180 rounds to go.
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Test Pattern...

Up late last night fixing a previous owner's mistake. (See here for my thoughts on the matter.)

Today's my Saturday, so regular content will appear later.

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Interesting Times

Turkey and Russia continue to engage in posturing and chest-bumping...

Earlier this month, a Russian serviceman was filmed on the deck of a naval ship holding what appeared to be a rocket launcher as a Russian warship passed through Istanbul.

That's a MANPADS, mister reporter, and given how frisky Turkey's been lately, can you blame Ivan for keeping an additional air guard on his ships as they transit the Bosphorus?
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The .gov giveth and the .gov taketh away...

So, with the brewing industry having finally (mostly) bounced back from Prohibition, and small craft breweries having sprung up all over, you just knew there was some way the feds could screw up a good thing, didn't you?

" Small breweries will have to spend hundreds of dollars per beer to analyze the nutritional value of each type sold.

“A good analysis [will cost] probably somewhere between the $500-$1,000 range of what I’ve seen. Then multiply it across the styles that you have,” said Lawinski.

And at a thousand dollars a pop, that could keep unique and seasonal brews from making it to your favorite watering hole."

That explains it

I was puzzled at all the media buzz on both the local and national news about Will Ferrell's reprisal of his Dubya impersonation on SNL. I mean, as Bobbi mused:

"I can't believe they have the entire [GOP] clown car to make fun of and instead they trot out a retired guy who paints dogs."

And then it hit me: If you're a liberal, this hearkens you back to a time a decade and more ago, when you wore smaller jeans, had more hair, and were speaking Truth to Power in an attempt to bring down the Establishment. This was nostalgic comedy comfort food, chicken soup for the Democrat soul; the equivalent of my parents' generation lovingly dusting their Reagan commemorative collector plates.
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Out and About

Saturday morning dawned with an 8AM all-hands meeting at the shop. Shootin' Buddy met me there at 10:00 when the doors opened and we did some shooting.

From there we headed to lunch at 10-01 Food & Drink. The weather was balmy for practically the Ides of December, and we sat on the deck.

I had their Italian sausage Italian sausage, bacon, goat cheese, red chili, & basil marinara flatbread, and washed it down with a Bier Weizengoot. Shootin' Buddy had the hummus and a Bloomington 10-Speed hoppy wheat.

After lunch it was off to the theater to see In the Heart of the Sea, which I very much enjoyed.

On the way home, we stopped to check out Agrarian, which has all kinds of supplies for urban poultry, beekeeping, canning, home brewing, and other cool stuff. My friend Jenn would love it.

Since at no point did I have to use an AK, I pronounce it a good day.
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A quarter of the way...

Friday I brought the Glock 37 and a box of Magtech 230gr FMJ with me to work and backed the target out to fifteen yards. I probably could have slowed down and tightened things up a bit, but I was curious to see what results the same pace and mechanics I was using at seven and ten yards would give at fifteen.

The Glock 37 has now fired 500 rounds since it was last cleaned or lubed, with one parts breakage. 1,500 rounds to go.
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Glockity.

Fifty rounds of Remington 230gr FMJ through the Glock 37 yesterday after work. Still loving the way this gun shoots.

The Glock 37 has now fired 450 rounds since it was last cleaned or lubed, with one parts breakage. 1,550 rounds to go.
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It's called a "carry gun" for a reason.

Throwing "gun stolen from car" into the Google box rarely leaves one empty-handed:

6:58 a.m. — An man reported the theft of a black-and-silver Kel-Tec 9mm pistol and belt-clip holster from an unlocked garage on the 300 block of East Fifth Street. The pistol was taken from a vehicle, which was also unlocked. The estimated value is $300.

I'll just repeat myself here: Don't leave unsecured guns in your unsecured car. And if it's your "carry gun", then why the hell ain't you carrying it? Some dude busts up into your house and you're gonna tell him "Hang on, I have to go out to the driveway and fetch my carry gun"? You keep using that word; I do not think it means what you think it means...

"If you are reading this and can't put your hand on your defensive firearm, your training has been wasted." ~ Col. Jeff Cooper

— Sheriff Jim Wilson (@sheriffjim) December 9, 2015

(Also? Dude's pretty optimistic about the value of a used Kel-Tec that seems to spend a goodly portion of its life in a car.)

Overheard on the Phone...

During a conversation with Shootin' Buddy...

Me: "During the Clinton years, P.J. O'Rourke liked to joke that the country was being governed by a bunch of grad students in a late-night bong-fueled dorm room bull session, but this? Jesus, it's like the Northwestern Sociology Department is running the damn country."

Overheard in the Kitchen...

Getting home from work the other day...

Me: "So what've you been up to today?"

RX: "Oh, been arguing on the internet. Apparently I don't like children."

Me: "Have you tried them with BBQ sauce?"

...and Eight Hundred...

Took two boxes of Lucky Gunner's .380 to work with me today and after my shift was over, I ducked out on the range for some quick blasting.

The hundred rounds went by without a hiccup. Target was at 21 feet.

I was shooting mostly at a 1rd/sec cadence, although I tried to slow down some and see if I could correct the up-and-left drift that seems to accompany increased speeds with the gun.

I'm thinking about getting out to MCF&G with the thing and running some drills on the clock and/or from the holster instead of just dirtshooting to build the round count. It's hard to engage in serious shootery when you just want to get out of work and go home.

Anyway, that's 800 rounds fired since the gun was last cleaned or lubricated, with one failure to go completely into battery (#447). 1,200 rounds to go.
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Weird dream last night.

I was working in a high-rise office building. Huge open floorplan offices with floor-to-ceiling glass. Near our office was a lobby and skybridge connecting to the skyscraper across the way.

The windows along the far wall got dark all of a sudden and the blimp that normall docked halfway along the skybridge nudged against the windows and dragged along them for the width of the building before  sloppily docking against the skybridge.

The blimp pilot came stumbling out of the docking tunnel and over to the elevator lobby. Big guy. Obviously wasted and smelling like a Cheech & Chong concert. Wearing nothing but his BVDs.

Coworker with a Learjet asked if I'd like to spend the night at his place out in Colorado, maybe shoot an elk in the back yard. I called home to let Bobbi know not to expect me home for dinner, and then remarked I'd have to run home for a change of clothes. The guy pointed out that there was a Gap clothing store in the building on the other end of the skybridge.

I ran over there, but in this dream version of the Gap, you couldn't just grab your jeans off the shelf. Instead, you used an iPad to delve through nested menus "relaxed fit...[enter]...stone-washed...[enter]...at the waist..." and a minion would fetch the proper jeans from the storeroom.

My iPad kept crashing, hanging up on a mandatory ad video that popped up between levels of the menu tree.

"I can see the jeans I need right there through the stockroom door!"

"I'm sorry, ma'am, but we have to use the iPad and they're just not cooperating today."

"Why are you making it harder for me to give you money?"

Then I woke up.
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Seven Hundred...

Tuesday afternoon I swung by the shop on my day off, along with the P250 Compact test gun and another hundred rounds of Lucky Gunner's .380 FMJ...

The hundred rounds went by without a hitch. I'm growing increasingly curious; the light recoil spring should make the gun, theoretically at least, more touchy about going fully into battery when extremely dirty and dry, but so far it's worked fine...

That's another hundred rounds at seven yards.

That's 700 rounds fired since the gun was last cleaned or lubricated, with one failure to go completely into battery (#447). 1,300 rounds to go.
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Second Floor Bedroom

A scientist made herself chimp nests up trees in Tanzania and spent the night in them, then slept on the ground as a control. She then counted insect bites...

Sleeping up high kept the bugs away, however, with Stewart getting a median count of 28 bites a night while snoozing on the ground versus a median count of one bite on nesting nights. Nesting kept Stewart warmer, as well, especially on the coldest nights.

Six Hundred...

Saturday morning I went to the range on my day off with Bobbi and Shootin' Buddy. I had a hundred rounds of .380 to put through the P250 Compact test gun: Fifty rounds of Federal RTP I'd bought at work and fifty rounds of Lucky Gunner's Fiocchi FMJ.

This target is seventy rounds at seven yards. I fired off the whole box of Federal RTP and twenty rounds of the Fiocchi before loading up a pair of full magazines for Shootin' Buddy and Bobbi. Both of them commented on how easy it was to work the slide on the P250 Compact and how soft-shooting the pistol was.

That's 600 rounds fired since the gun was last cleaned or lubricated, with one failure to go completely into battery (#447). 1,400 rounds to go.
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Overheard in the Office...

So, Bobbi comes into the office with some new artisanal, craftsy, Elemen'tary screwdriver, all enthusiastic after using it for the first time...

RX: "Here, give this the old screwdriver grip..."

Me:

RX: "NOT LIKE THAT! Like you're trying to drive a screw, not screw something up."

I can't help it...

Sorry.

Sorry about the lack of free ice cream. Day off after a couple of busy days at work.

I'd intended to get down to MCF&G to do some chrono work in the pistol bays bright and early this morning, but decided that standing around in 40°F weather was probably not the hot ticket for helping me shake this cold.

Finally dragged my ass out of bed about 2:30 because I have errands that have to get done.
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"In Boston, we have our hats."

Well, the Gun Salesman in Chief was on the tube last night, telling Congress to fight terrorism by enacting an assault weapons ban. There's about as much chance of Congress doing that right now as there is of me flying to work by flapping my arms, but this is how panics start, because few herd animals are as easily spooked into stampeding as the American Gun Owner.

I've shared this before, but:

Unless you just started shooting in the years since the Great Panic of the Winter of '12-'13, there's no reason you shouldn't already be well-stocked on stuff, but if you aren't, Commander Zero's advice applies:

"This is *exactly* the sort of event that nudges The Powers That Be into doing stupid things like 1994 Assault Weapons Ban: The Next Generation. Even if it doesn’t, its going to push gun/mags/ammo price and availability into the red zone. So…if you still haven’t gotten around to buying everything that might not be available at a later date….this is your reminder that crap like this, as tragic as it is, will always be used to tie your hands further when it comes to buying those useful guns and accessories."

Shorter Vox...

"Well, maybe there really aren't more mass shootings, but we should ban guns anyway because suicides."

Side Note: When even Vox and Mother Jones say your books are cooked...
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Savage Wars of Peace

The peace dividend is coming around to bite us in the ass, especially with the Obama Administration's fondness for taking up the White Man's Burden in the various "Arab Spring" messes that have created a vast failed state stretching from the Pillars of Hercules to the Hindu Kush.

The latest great news? Right about the time that we're at loggerheads with Putin's Russia, the Air Force would like to point out that the long air campaign against ISIS has critically depleted our air-droppable ordnance:

The official told CNN that the Air Force has requested additional funding for Hellfire missiles and is developing plans to ramp up weapons production to replenish its stocks more quickly. But replenishing that stock can take "up to four years from time of expenditure to asset resupply," the official said.

Four Hundred

At the suggestion of a Facebook commenter, I've decided to start backing the target up incrementally on the Glock 37. Since I'd fired 370 rounds and had a fifty-round box of Federal HST on hand, I ran the target out to ten yards and loaded up thirty rounds. This would leave me ten rounds for a chrono string and enough left over for a couple five-shot benched groups at 25 yards.

So there's the thirty rounds at thirty feet, offhand. Have I mentioned that I really like how this Glock 37 shoots?

The Glock 37 has now fired 400 rounds since it was last cleaned or lubed, with one parts breakage. 1,600 rounds to go.
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Boom.

I put another fifty rounds of FMJ through the G37 yesterday after work.

I'm really liking the way this thing shoots. That's fifty rounds of Magtech 230gr FMJ at seven yards, most of it fired at about a 1 round/sec pace. Just dirtshooting, y'know?

The Glock 37 has now fired 370 rounds since it was last cleaned or lubed, with one parts breakage. 1,630 rounds to go.
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