Thursday, March 31, 2016

Rebuttal

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Rah Rah Rah!

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"Doctor, it hurts when I do this."

So, thus far, the Canik has fired 1,610 rounds with 26 malfunctions. That's one malfunction every 61.92 rounds. But we know it didn't like the CCI Blazer Brass 115gr, at least that particular lot, and so what would the numbers look like if we discounted the 160 rounds of that stuff and the malfunctions it induced?

Without the Blazer Brass 115gr, the numbers are five malfunctions in 1,450 rounds, or one in 290. There were ten rounds of Blazer Brass 124gr fired for the chrono. Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of them bobbled the extraction, so if we remove all Blazer Brass numbers, the totals are 1,440 rounds with four malfunctions: 1-in-360.

Then there was that 147gr Federal HST Tactical, whose combination of long cartridge overall length (COAL) and blunt nose caused two failure-to-feeds in fifty rounds. Pull that out, too, and you're left with 1,390 rounds fired with two malfunctions. One of those two was a questionable light strike on a Fiocchi primer, and the other was a failure to eject with the also-weak-but-not-quite-as-weak-as-Blazer-Brass American Eagle 115gr.

In other words, it's entirely possible that I could have come into this test with a case-and-a-half of warm Fiocchi or Remington ammo and a few hundred rounds of 115gr and 124gr JHP, and the gun would have fired 2,000 rounds with maybe one or two malfunctions and I'd be telling you this thing was the best deal since before Springfield started marketing the Croatian Sensation and it still cost $200 from some little importer in Knoxville.

Which brings us around to the big question: What does the difference in price between a TP9v2 and a Gen 3 Glock 19 get you?

This:

Glock 19 went 2,000 rounds with one light primer strike on a round of Brown Bear, plus one bad cartridge from Sumbro that didn't count against the gun.

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Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Seriously...

...they just sent me over from central casting to play "Woman in Seat 5A" in the movie of your life, honey. Oh, I didn't mind your carry-on bag in my teeth at all. No, no! Don't let me get in your way! The director needs a good shot of you coming up the jetway.


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Canik Attack

Took the Canik TP9v2 and another two hundred rounds of Lucky Gunner's Federal American Eagle 115gr FMJ to Indy Arms Co. this morning.

That little guy? I wouldn't worry about that little guy.
There were no malfunctions of any type to report.

The Canik TP9v2 has now fired 1610 rounds without cleaning or lubing and experienced nine failures to eject and nine failures to feed in the initial fifty, as well as one failure to fire (#221), one failure to lock the slide back (#350), four more failures to eject (#323, #379, #997, #1220), and two more failures to feed (#1312, #1325). 390 rounds to go.
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...so it's got that for an upside.

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Precisely as fast as a speeding bullet.

Yesterday morning I took the Canik and some ammo to the (newly remodeled! come join!) MCF&G range to do some chrono work. Three full fifty-round boxes of ammunition, plus an additional lot of odds and sods for science. The temperature at the range was 43°F when I arrived and 49°F when I left, according to the thermometer in the Bimmer.

First up, we'll start with the full metal jacket range ammo. I was curious to see the numbers that the notorious lot of CCI Blazer Brass 115gr would put up. When I saw them, I was not surprised:
LO: 1070
HI: 1123
AV: 1090
ES: 52.37
SD: 16.94
At that altitude (~790 feet ASL) and temperature, the speed of sound is just a shade under 1100fps if I'm mathing right, and most of this ten-shot string did not crack that.  In other words, CCI Blazer Brass 115gr is a light-bullet subsonic load, or at least lot # B01W44 is.

Like I noted elsewhere, the Federal American Eagle 115gr from Lucky Gunner appeared to by marginally stouter, judging by differences in the brass ejection patterns and the sound of the report. The chrono bore out my subjective impressions:
LO: 1109
HI: 1144
AV: 1128
ES: 35.15
SD: 11.18
A small difference, an average of thirty-eight feet per second, but it made all the difference in the ability of the round to function the weapon.

I also had some 124gr CCI Blazer Brass along. It was pretty tame-feeling...
LO: 1069
HI: 1142
AV: 1103
ES: 73.78
SD: 24.93
I experienced one failure-to-eject with the Blazer Brass 124gr, on round #20 of the day (#1220 of the test).

The last FMJ range-type ammo I had with me was a box of Sellier & Bellot 124gr. It was tamer than I would have suspected, given the widely-accepted "Euro ammo is always loaded hotter" meme.
LO: 1086
HI: 1122
AV: 1099
ES: 36.18
SD: 10.29
It was also freakishly consistent for inexpensive ball ammo.
Black Hills 115gr EXP
Next up: Jacketed hollow point self-defense ammunition. I'll list it in order of projectile weights, lightest to heaviest.

First up was Black Hills' offering, a standard-pressure 115gr EXP load.
LO: 1220
HI: 1258
AV: 1239
ES: 38.13
SD: 13.03
Those are some pretty respectable numbers, especially in light of the next round in line, Remington's 115gr +P HTP ("High Terminal Performance") jacketed hollow point:
LO: 1206
HI: 1252
AV: 1223
ES: 46.60
SD: 17.08
Note that the standard pressure Black Hills is slightly hotter than the Remington, despite the latter being labeled and sold as "+P".

Now for the real "+P": Federal's legendary 115gr +P+ JHP, the 9BPLE load that everybody lusted after in the Nineties...
LO: 1276
HI: 1305
AV: 1290
ES: 29.18
AV: 8.42
Speaking of freakish consistency, that's outstanding uniformity from a light bullet driven that hard.

Now a standard-pressure 124gr loading, the Federal 124gr Hydra-Shok JHP, which claims an 1120fps muzzle velocity on the box flap...
LO: 1043
HI: 1089
AV: 1054
ES: 46.01
SD: 13.60
Not quite 1120fps, there...

Last up, Federal's P9HST2 147gr HST Tactical load, the only hollow point in this test that was both designed in this millennium and is on DocGKR's approved list.
LO: 956.3
HI: 993.6
AV: 969.7
ES: 37.29
SD: 12.36
Good, consistent numbers typical of Federal quality control on their Premium lines, but...

...the long overall length and blunt prow seemed to disagree with the feed geometry of the TP9v2. Out of a box of fifty rounds, I experienced two identical failures-to-feed, on rounds #112 and #125 of the session (#1312 and #1325 of the test.) Both fed with a simple "tap-rack", but I'd consider this round no bueno for carry in this pistol.

I may have mentioned that the rear sight is a little...busy...on this pistol. Here's a pic. It's definitely slower for me to pick up when trying to shoot at even moderate speed on tight targets.

Anyway, the Canik has now fired 1410 rounds without cleaning or lubing and experienced nine failures to eject and nine failures to feed in the initial fifty, as well as one failure to fire (#221), one failure to lock the slide back (#350), four more failures to eject (#323, #379, #997, #1220), and two more failures to feed (#1312, #1325). 590 rounds to go.
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#wheelgunwednesday? I'll play!

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Community Policing...

MattG engages in some.
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Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Magazines...

The Canik shipped with two 18-rd magazines, and I purchased a third at Indy Arms Co.

While both the mags that came with the gun and the one sold separately had identical markings indicating that they were made by Mec-Gar for Canik, the magazines themselves had subtle differences.
The magazine on the left is the one bought solo. Notice it has a polished blue finish, as opposed to the semigloss matte finish on the one that came with the gun.

The one on the left has numbered witness holes, unlike the ones that shipped with the pistol.

Lastly, the one bought individually has the company crest on the floorplate, while the one on the right does not.

Dimensionally the two types of mags seem to be identical, and the followers appear to be the same.
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Inadvertent Facebook Experiment

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Product Placement

I'm not saying I moved S.W.A.T. Magazine to the front row of the magazine rack at the local drug store, but I'm not saying as I didn't, either. The column on p.96 is awesome. Y'all should read it.
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Monday morning...

...it was back to Indy Arms Co. with the Canik TP9v2 and another two hundred rounds of Lucky Gunner's Federal American Eagle 115gr FMJ.

The UpLULA is only needed to get the eighteenth round in the magazine now, and not all the time, at that.

Started with fifty rounds in the top left. I'm still working on the new grip, and it seems a little more fatiguing. Moving counter-clockwise, you can see things deteriorate as my support hand got more tired. I decided to leave on a positive note and ran the target back in to five yards and hammered the bejeezus out of the dot while flirting with the range's speed limit. The rear sight is awful busy.

There were no malfunctions of any type to report.

The Canik has now fired 1200 rounds without cleaning or lubing and experienced nine failures to eject and nine failures to feed in the initial fifty, as well as one failure to fire (#221), one failure to lock the slide back (#350), and three more failures to eject (#323, #379, #997). 800 rounds to go.
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Monday, March 28, 2016

QotD: Euphemism edition...

I would have happily emptied Miss King's ashtrays for years to have penned this. You'll be half a sentence past it before you realize the knife's gone in, and then you have to back up a phrase and just look at it, admiringly....
"Giving one’s memoirs a title that has to be explained must be a status symbol among the leftist literati. First there was Lillian Hellman’s Pentimento; now comes Gore Vidal’s Palimpsest. Miss Hellman’s title at least sounded pretty, but Maître Vidal’s sounds like an arcane sexual practice involving an inflated condom that explodes like the Hindenburg in the tradesmen’s entrance of some hired Apollo, sending ecstasy and other things washing over Maître Vidal." -Florence King
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Tab Clearing

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They're multiplying!

I was recently gifted this lovely Nikon S. Unfortunately, it has succumbed to the vicissitudes of age and needs a new shutter curtain and a CLA (Cleaning, Lubrication, Adjustment) if ever it is going to take photos again.

Email me if you have a recommended camera gnome for these services. It's probably easier to find a farrier these days.
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Sunday, March 27, 2016

Farce.


I mean, this is comedy gold, here.
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P250 two thousand round wrapup (pic heavy)

So the P250C in .380ACP has run through its full two thousand rounds. The gun hasn't physically loosened up enough to notice, and no parts fell off. Let's field strip it and see what it looks like.

I'll note that it got vile enough that I had to wipe the front sight blade so that the white dot & tritium vial were usable.

Rear frame rails, hammer, and slide stop are all visible here. Nothing showed any unusual wear in this area.

Front frame rails and the axle that the bottom barrel lug cams against. Everything's in order here, too, but filthy.

The underside of the slide, barrel, and recoil spring assembly. Pardon the slide looking bent; that's an artifact of the fact that the Nikon P7000 can get sketchy in the focus department while in macro mode unless the lens is at the widest angle setting.

 Muzzle crown is dirty...

 ...as is the feed ramp and barrel hood.

The extractor claw was still good and the breechface was fine.

I'll clean it, lube it, and probably shoot it a little more before taking it to a class in April. Also thinking about frame stippling, and maybe a caliber exchange kit.

To recap the round count, the P250C .380 went through 2002 rounds without being cleaned or lubricated, with one failure to go completely into battery (#447) and one failure to fire (#1578). Ammo fired included the following brands of FMJ: TulAmmo, Fiocchi, Magtech, Sig Sauer, Remington, Federal, and Sellier & Bellot. Additionally, a few rounds of Hornady Critical Defense and Barnes TAC-XPD were fired, mostly for the chrono results.
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Saturday, March 26, 2016

Rabbit People

University professor sees cadets in uniform with guns, loses her $#!+, calls 911. Hilarity ensues. It got her all worked up enough to write a letter to the newspaper...
I look up from my office computer to see two figures in camo with guns outside my window. My first thought is for my students' and my safety: I grab my phone, crawl under my desk and call 911. The dispatcher keeps me on the line until someone can see if ROTC is doing maneuvers.

I can barely talk—first, with fear, and then with rage when the dispatcher reports back that yes, in fact, I've probably just seen ROTC cadets, though they're going to send an officer to check because no one has cleared it with them. They thank me for reporting it.

A few minutes later, a university officer calls me back—not to reassure me, but to scold me for calling 911. He says ROTC has permission to do this exercise. When I tell him that this was news to 911 and that they encouraged me to call whenever I see a gun on campus, he seems surprised.

He also tells me that ROTC will be doing these exercises for the next couple weeks.

So I reply that I guess I'll be calling 911 for the next couple weeks—and I will. Every time.
You have to wonder about someone so absolutely blind to irony. She swears up and down that she's going to call 911 every time she sees a gun on campus, even in the hands of ROTC. So, suppose she gets her wish and the cops do show up? Is she going to call 911 when she sees their guns, too?

You have to wonder how a quivering mass of jell-o like that works up the nerve to peer out from under her blanket fort every morning.

And bear in mind that this wasn't in some soft, toothless corner of the northeast or one of the squishier coastal enclaves on the shores of the Pacific! No, this took place in hairy-chested North Dakota, albeit in one of those ink blots of California/New York/Massachusetts that are spreading across our fair land...

(H/T to Weaponsman)
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LOL of the Day...

To quote Instapundit: "Heh."
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Still not in my world...

Puff piece on electric cars going on the TV in the next room. The newsreader is breathless about how new models will change everything, since some of them have a range of two hundred miles!

Hey that's great; that'll get me halfway to Knoxville, leaving me a sad panda somewhere around Lexington, Kentucky. I could get a hotel room and plug in, of course, turning a five-hour drive into a two-day slog.

Thing is, I gas up the Bimmer in Lexington anyway, since it's well below the half-tank mark by that point. But that full tank takes five minutes and usually covers all my driving around in Knoxville for the week I'm there, too.
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Media Bias

The biggest hurdle to researching anything about Carthage is that the bulk of surviving written history was written by Romans. This is like being in the year 4170 and trying to research the Soviet Union with only old copies of The New American as research material, or researching the Bush administration using nothing but the HuffPo archives to draw on.

The Roman republic practically invented the concept of "just war", bellum iustum,  and were very conscious of the need to make sure that the bad guys were understood to be bad guys. Also, at the time of the Punic Wars, Rome was still very much in love with its self-image as a republic of yeoman farmers, although there was hardly any farm dirt left on its citified hobnailed sandals by then. The mercantile empire of the Carthaginians, based on buying stuff one place and moving it someplace else to sell, looked effete and decadent to their eyes. If you want to know that the Romans thought of the Carthaginians, all you have to do is look at the Ferengi characters on Star Trek.
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Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #142...

From last Tuesday morning, a Brethren Arms semiauto MP-5 clone. With a GoPro picatinny mount for making your own first-person shooters...

It was a fun morning, full of this sort of thing...


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Hitting the target market...

Here in America, land of the lawsuit, our ammunition manufacturers generally adhere to the maximum chamber pressure guidelines set forth by the Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers' Institute, or SAAMI. (Its international equivalent would be the Commission Internationale Permanente pour l'Epreuve des Armes à Feu Portatives, or CIP.)

One area of difference between the two is how the 9x19mm (9mm Luger or Parabellum) cartridge is handled. SAAMI's spec is conservative by several thousand PSI, because it was adopted with an eye toward all manner of Doughboy and GI bringback guns, including guns like the Glisenti, which might not really be up to firing full-steam 9x19 loads without turning into pipe bombs.

Soft-shooting SAAMI-spec 9mm probably helped cement the reputations of many war trophy bringback pistols as unreliable jammomatics, which brings us to the current test of the Canik TP9v2. It has had issues with both CCI Blazer Brass 115gr FMJ and, now, Federal American Eagle 115gr FMJ. Both are loads that are within SAAMI spec and have functioned fine in all the pistols in which I've tried them. (The Blazer Brass is actually the standard range ammo at Indy Arms Co. and functions just fine in all the rental guns.)

So here's the thing: You're importing a gun from Turkey and are planning on selling it at a bargain price. Do you think that people who can only afford to shell out $340 or so for a pistol are going to want to shop around to find ammo that will reliably function their weapon, or are they going to expect it to run with whatever SAAMI-spec ammunition they buy?

This is reminding me of the early days of the HS2000, which eventually became the XD after Springfield Armory swooped in and snatched the import rights away from Intrac back in Knoxville. You've gotta be wondering if someone's waiting in the wings to pull the Canik away from Century and give it a flashy name, an ad campaign, a solid warranty program, and about two pounds less recoil spring.
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Friday, March 25, 2016

Halfway point reached.

Around lunch time today, I turned up at Indy Arms Co. with two hundred rounds of the Federal American Eagle 115gr FMJ provided by Lucky Gunner. I purchased a couple of targets and headed out to lane four.

Still working with the new grip. That's fifty rounds in the upper grouping and a hundred in the lower.

I had somehow never shot a Casino Drill before. I decided to play with the target off the clock for the last fifty round box.

(The Casino Drill is from Tom Givens at Rangemaster. Three magazines with seven rounds in each mag; twenty one rounds at twenty one feet. One shot on target #1, two on #2, three on #3, et cetera... reloading as necessary.)

On the 197th round of the day (#997 of the test) the pistol experienced a failure to eject. While hotter than the CCI Blazer Brass, the American Eagle is 115gr budget range fodder as well, and I figured that it would have at least some issues with running the gun. I haven't tried, but I'll bet I could limp-wrist the gun at will with the AE9DP loads.

The Canik has now fired 1000 rounds without cleaning or lubing and experienced nine failures to eject and nine failures to feed in the initial fifty, as well as one failure to fire (#221), one failure to lock the slide back (#350), and three more failures to eject (#323, #379, #997). 1,000 rounds to go.
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Grinding Away

So yesterday I took two hundred and fifty rounds of Federal American Eagle 115gr FMJ, courtesy of Lucky Gunner, to the range. On arriving there, I bought fifty additional rounds of Fiocchi 115gr FMJ, for a total of three hundred rounds of ammunition.

Does it look like I'm trying to get this test finished up?

Upper hole is fifty rounds of Fiocchi at seven yards, lower is a hundred American Eagle.
I began experimenting with my grip. Specifically, I began crushing down hard with my support hand and relaxing the grip of my strong hand just a little bit. This seemed to make it easier to concentrate on my trigger pull at any kind of speed. This is something I'll be playing around with more.

Between that and paying more attention to locking my wrists, I was actually able to track the sights some, since they weren't flying around quite so much.

...and this is all American Eagle. Fifty and a hundred again.
Anyway, the gun ran fine, eating up all three hundred rounds with no malfunctions of any type to report.

The Canik has now fired 800 rounds without cleaning or lubing and experienced nine failures to eject and nine failures to feed in the initial fifty, as well as one failure to fire (#221), one failure to lock the slide back (#350), and two more failures to eject (#323, #379). 1,200 rounds to go.
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Thursday, March 24, 2016

Overheard in the Hallway...

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Weird dream...

I'm stuck with the fragments of this dream from the other morning. It was...strange. It was like a movie version of a novel, and the novel entirely took the form of letters between two brothers in the mid- to late-Third Century BC.

The brothers were Carthaginian, sons of an extremely successful merchant and each was manning a trading outpost for the family business. One was on the western coast of Africa, somewhere just south of the Sahara and northwest of the bight of Benin...maybe the current location of Freetown in Sierra Leone? The other brother was running the family's godown in western Britain, maybe Wales or the north coast of Cornwall?

Anyway, these men grew up in a cosmopolitan setting, they'd been to Athens and Tyre as kids with their dad, seen the shiny new model city of Alexandria, their family was among the movers and shakers of their society. Now their homeland...their civilization...was being dashed from its pinnacle by the expanding Roman republic, and they're watching this happen at one remove, out at the edges of the known world, getting messages about not-quite-current affairs via merchant ship and passing letters on to each other via the family trading routes.

There's a book in here somewhere.
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Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Wednesday Part Two...

After lunch, I ran the Canik TP9v2 over to Indy Arms company for a quick function check. I had fifty rounds of American Eagle 115gr FMJ courtesy of Lucky Gunner, and bought a box of fifty rounds of Fiocchi 115gr FMJ from the store. I wanted to see if either of these commonly available loads would run the Canik reliably, unlike Blazer Brass...

I tried the Fiocchi first. It seemed pretty warm, ejecting vigorously and cycling the gun fine. Next was the American Eagle. While not as hot as the Fiochhi, it ejected more strongly than the Blazer Brass; again the gun ran fine.
Seven yards, mostly at about a 1rd/sec pace.
So, no malfunctions to report with these hundred rounds.

The Canik has now fired 500 rounds without cleaning or lubing and experienced nine failures to eject and nine failures to feed in the initial fifty, as well as one failure to fire (#221), one failure to lock the slide back (#350), and two more failures to eject (#323, #379). 1,500 rounds to go.
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Wednesday Part One...

Took the Canik TP9v2 and two hundred rounds to Atlanta Conservation Club on Wednesday morning. Fifty rounds of Fiocchi 124gr FMJ, which I was pretty sure would cycle the gun; fifty rounds of Winchester's 147gr FMJ "Train" ammo (W9MMT), which I was less sure of; and a hundred rounds of CCI Blazer Brass 115gr FMJ, which I still had very little confidence in.

The Fiocchi 124gr functioned the gun with authority. There was one failure-to-fire on round number twenty-one of the day (#221 of the test). The round fired normally on the second attempt.

I chronographed a 10-round string of the Fiocchi:
LO: 1114
HI: 1163
AV: 1140
ES: 49.60
SD: 14.14
This was about the same ballistics as the Winchester 124gr NATO load.

Next was the Winchester 147gr "Train" load. All fifty functioned fine. Ejection was reasonably vigorous, and recoil felt normal. Ten rounds over the chrono gave the following results:
LO: 947.9
HI: 1011
AV: 974.1
ES: 63.79
SD: 18.30

The top target was fifty rounds of Fiocchi at 41 feet and the bottom was fifty rounds of Winchester at 51 feet. The business of the rear sight was no aid to shooting at any sort of speed out past ten or so yards. Also, the dot does not appear to be exactly centered on the front sight blade, maybe? I need to mic that thing.

On to the CCI Blazer Brass... I let Mike Grasso run a magazine through the gun; watching him shoot, the ammo's difficulties cycling the slide strongly were evident. Brass mostly just dribbled over the right side of the ejection port to lie at his feet, except for the couple spent cases that bounced off his head and the one that decided to be a rebel and dribbled over the left side of the gun.

That lack of vigorous recoil impulse meant...

Round one hundred and twenty three of the day (#323 of the test) was a failure to eject and...

Round number one hundred and seventy nine of the day (#379 of the test) also failed to eject. Also, the weapon failed to lock the slide open on round number one hundred and fifty of the day (#350 of the test).

The Canik has now fired 400 rounds without cleaning or lubing and experienced nine failures to eject and nine failures to feed in the initial fifty, as well as one failure to fire (#221), one failure to lock the slide back (#350), and two more failures to eject (#323, #379). 1,600 rounds to go.
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More steam...

So, about the Winchester 124gr NATO that cycled fine in the Canik...

I didn't think to save a box of this stuff for chrono purposes in the Canik, but when fired out of the Ruger 9E, the NATO FMJ (product code Q4318) averaged 1145fps.

Comparatively, CCI Blazer FMJ averaged the same (well, 1144fps) out of the P320, and that's with a 115gr bullet out of half an inch more barrel. I don't see why the Blazer Brass would be loaded much hotter than the aluminum-hulled stuff. This is similar, ballistically, to Federal's RTP 115gr and Remington UMC 115gr FMJ bargain ammo.
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Doing Better

Back to Indy Arms Co. on Tuesday morning with the Canik TP9v2 and another hundred rounds of ammunition. This time I brought fifty rounds of Winchester 124gr FMJ "NATO" Q4318 that I had lying around, as well as a box of fifty Sig Sauer Elite Performance 115gr FMJ, courtesy of Sig Sauer. While not as spicy as the Federal 9BPLE, I wondered if these would have the Wheaties to function the gun properly.

I started with the Winchester and then moved to the Sig Sauer loads...

The gun functioned fine for all one hundred rounds with no stoppages of any kind to report.

The Canik has now fired 200 rounds without cleaning or lubing and has experienced nine failures to eject and nine failures to feed. 1,800 rounds to go.
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Tuesday, March 22, 2016

SAVE US!

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Inauspicious Beginning

So, Monday morning was the Canik TP9v2's inaugural trip to the range to fire the first of two thousand rounds.
I showed up at Indy Arms Co. with the cased pistol, my trusty UpLULA , and a hundred rounds of ammunition: A box of fifty CCI Blazer Brass 115gr full metal jacket rounds and a box of fifty Federal 115gr +P+ 9BPLE jacketed hollow points.

It turned out that the UpLULA was a fortuitous addition to the range gear. While made by Mec-Gar, the feed lips on the Canik's mags were sharp enough to shave with, and getting rounds 16-18 into the mags the first few times took some effort.

We opened the ball with the Blazer Brass, and immediately encountered problems...

Round #1: Failure to eject...

Round #2: Failure to eject...

Round #6: Failure to feed...

Round #15: Failure to feed...

It was shaping up to be a long day.

All told, the gun experienced eighteen total malfunctions in the first fifty rounds, nine each of FTEs and FTFs. The hot +P+ 9BPLE, on the other hand, ran through the entire box without a hitch.

Now, granted, the Blazer Brass is pretty weak tea in the recoil energy department, but I've been using ammo from this lot in my other nines for months. It's the stuff I took to the Langdon class in my M&P 9 and experienced no malfunctions and was shooting in my Glock 35 (with Lone Wolf 9mm barrel) last Tuesday, again with no issues. This is the stuff that's used at IAC as the standard range 9mm ammo. It's weak, but within SAAMI spec.

This Canik seems to come out of the box dramatically oversprung. We'll see if a couple hundred rounds settles the spring in enough to run on normal ammo...

The rear sight, with its vertical post at the bottom of the notch as well as dots on either side of it, makes for a fairly busy sight picture, but the gun shot okay despite that.

The Canik has now fired 100 rounds without cleaning or lubing and has experienced nine failures to eject and nine failures to feed. 1,900 rounds to go.
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Rabbit People.

Matt Lauer is on my television screen, warbling and emoting about the terror attack at Brussels airport. "The bomb went off in the departure area of the airport, which would have been packed with thousands of people, everyone carrying packages and bags and briefcases, and of course this is before anybody's gone through security."

One gets the feeling that this herbivore would prefer that the government station a TSA probulator just inside the front door of every residence in the nation to make sure nobody's out in public with a suspicious package that hasn't been checked to make him feel safe.
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Mencken on Democracy

"When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost... All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." -H.L. Mencken
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I guess that was technically a nightmare...

Spent my dreams last night mostly changing planes in several different airports, all of which sported bewildering architecture and half of which were under varying degrees of remodeling-related construction. Also, I was constantly getting separated from the people with whom I was traveling and trying to re-link up via a cell phone with a battery that wouldn't hold a charge worth a damn.

Ugh.
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Monday, March 21, 2016

Big Deal

Federal 147gr HST jacketed hollowpoints at $24.95/50. That's a screamin' deal on some no-kiddin' serious defensive ammo.
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And then there were nine?

Apparently a "Constitutional Carry" bill is on the governor's desk in Boise, which would make Idaho the second state this year to go to permitless carry, following West Virginia. The usual "blood in the streets" worries are being floated by the usual people, such as Boise's chief of police. Bless their hearts.
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Important Safety Tip...

If you are waving a fake gun around, people with real guns might not be in on the joke and will react accordingly.

People are not going to wait for you to shoot at them to determine that it's not a toy gun.
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Sunday, March 20, 2016

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #141...

Steyr C9-A1. Next up for the 2,000-round shoot-a-thon after the Canik.

I suppose I should be honest and admit that I think Steyrs are the skinny jeans and man-buns of the pistol world. For when someone doesn't want to go all AC/DC t-shirts and Levis and get a Springfield Armory Range Officer or Sig P229, but is still too much of a special snowflake for a Glock 19 or M&P 9...

I'll bet that if they only came in .41 Action Express and .45GAP it wouldn't hurt their sales one bit.
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Saturday, March 19, 2016

The problem with YouTube gun reviews...

From discussion elsewhere:
"For example, go watch the PT1911 video and do a shot every time he points the gun at any part of his body. When you come to tomorrow morning, post up the last thing you remember before you blacked out at about the three-minute mark of a nine-minute video..."
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Overheard in the Car...

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Decisions...

I'm wondering if it wouldn't be a good idea to stop at Mickey D's on the way to the fun show? I mean, you want to be at the fun show as shortly after 0800 as possible in order to get a non-atrocious parking place, but the food at the concession stands, even the little cafeteria, borders on inedible to my Broad Ripple-spoiled palate. How you screw up a simple sausage/egg/cheese-on-toast that badly remains a mystery to me.

That's one thing about Mickey D's breakfast; barring an unusually bad franchise, it's about as known a quantity as there is in fast food. A sausage McMuffin's a sausage McMuffin, from here to Kyoto. Well, maybe not in Kyoto...it might be something weird there.
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Quickie trip.


Ducked into Indy Arms Company with a box of fifty rounds of American Eagle 185gr FMJ on Friday morning before heading over to set up for the fun show.

The gun worked fine, and there were no malfunctions of any kind to report.

The Glock 37 has now fired 1,660 rounds since it was last cleaned or lubed, with one failure to feed on round #1,589, and one parts breakage. 340 rounds to go.
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