Fixes...

Two guns to the range yesterday, one to diagnose ammo and the other to diagnose the gun.

The P320C was to test the CCI Blazer, which had caused multiple failures to extract in the Ruger American Compact on Saturday's range trip with Shootin' Buddy. The ammo ran in the Sig, but the way rounds dribbled out of the ejection port and rolled down my forearm, or flipped weakly back just far enough to bounce off my eye pro and land in my shirt pocket, tells me that this is a weaksauce batch of CCI's budget load. They skimped on the powder and passed the savings along to the customer. Won't hold that against the Ruger.

The Glock 39 had been detail stripped and the slide flushed out with Slip2000 Cleaner/Degreaser and scrubbed of all the sticky residue, and then the striker assembly, extractor claw, and firing pin safety plunger were scrubbed with the cleaner until they were slippery to the touch instead of tacky. I reassembled it with yet a different trigger bar and took it to the range where it fired off the Magtech just fine. I think I have it pretty well de-bugged, but we'll see how it does with S&B.
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New Ruger pistol...

Tonight Ruger officially announced the pistol I used to shoot Dave Spaulding's Handgun Combatives "Essential Pistol" class out at FTW Ranch the other weekend: The Compact American 9mm.

Several of us ran the pistols through the class, as well as in informal range sessions and competitions before and after and, despite a rough round count between 400-700 rounds per gun (thank you, Hornady!) I only recollect two malfunctions.

You'll note the dual captive recoil spring. The gun ships with small, medium, and large backstraps, as well as both flush and pinkie-rest floorplates for the 12-rd mag and a grip adapter for the 17-rd mag. States behind enemy lines get two 10-rounders.

The guns are available both with ambi thumb safeties and in a "Pro" variant with only the trigger safety. The thumb safety locks the slide when on, like on a 1911. Kinda wish it didn't.

As you can see, the American Compact splits the difference, size-wise, between the G19 and G26, much like the Smith & Wesson M&P9C does.

The one I used at FTW Ranch was a non-thumb-safety gun, so I'm looking forward to getting more trigger time in on this thumb safety model.
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Overheard in the Hallway...

RX: "I can't really put this up because it's juvenile and I'm trying to refrain from that, but I'd pay $20 for the person who could slip a 'No Fat Chicks' bumper sticker on Trump's limo."

Me: "..."

RX: "You don't think that's funny."

Me: "I think it's hilarious. I'm trying to think how to do it."

Maddening...

So, I took the remainder of the CapArms FMJ Target/Match ammo, as well as a box of the Duty/Carry, to the range yesterday to shoot some benched groups at 25 yards with the P320C. For each group, I loaded five rounds into the magazine, chambered the top round, shot the group, brought the target back, recorded the group size, and sent the target back out.

I'm thinking that the hand-chambered top round was opening up the groups, because each and every one had four pretty reasonably clustered rounds with a fifth shot hell and gone from the other four.

For instance, the first group of the 147gr FMJ, fired at the bottom right bull, had a cluster of four rounds in 3.6" just below the bull, and the fifth must have gone clear off the bottom of the paper.

And so it went for all the FMJ:

• four rounds into 5" with the fifth opening the group to 10.25"*
• four rounds into 3.5" with the fifth opening the group to 6"
• four rounds into 5.5" with the fifth opening the group to 6.5"
• four rounds into 5.6" with the fifth opening the group to 9.8"**

*That one was a called flier.
**This fifth group I shot freehand unsupported.

After the FMJ, I cracked open a container of the Duty/Carry ammo with its XTP JHP projectiles, and tried again, using the same method. There was still the fifth-round phenomenon, but not as pronounced.

• four rounds into 5.25" with the fifth opening the group to 8"
• four rounds into 4.4" with the fifth opening the group to 6.2"
• four rounds into 3.25" with the fifth opening the group to 3.8"

I fired the last five shot group of the XTP freehand, standing, just to see if it would give me any better results.

The first shot, unfortunately, is that one high and slightly right, not the one at six o'clock on the bull below the one I was aiming at. That one was cranked off toward the end of the string before I'd cleaned up my sight picture. I might have cussed some, because even with the first round being high-right, those four went into 2.2", which is about as good a freehand standing group as I've fired at 25 yards, and then I blew it.

Boresight Solutions frame would look cool in an a-ha video.

Now I feel like I have something to avenge.
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Musings of a Formerly Cigarette Smoking Woman

From a thread discussing new media gun and gear reviews that morphed into a gun media thread in general...

If I get asked "So, what do you think of the Blastomatic 2000?" when I'm only three or four hundred rounds into my time with the gun, I get cranky.

Some things are easy to form an opinion of pretty quick: "The sights on this gun blow goats and whoever thought they were a good idea needs to die in a crotch fire."

Others take at least a little bit of familiarity: "This magazine release works great if you run it with your trigger finger, but that takes some getting used to."

And still others might require a largish data set to suss out: "Every single malfunction this gun had over the last 3,200 rounds was with standard-velocity 115gr JHPs using Sierra bullets."

Someone wrote that they feel like they know their gun well enough to review it after firing 50k rounds through it...

While I appreciate that level of dedication, I'm usually feeling pretty comfortable with my opinions on an individual gun after a case or two of ammo and a couple months of dry practice and poking around in the innards.

Speaking of which, a good class where you shoot five hundred or a thousand in various drills, from the leather, sometimes on the move, at differing ranges and types of targets, will tell an observant user a lot more about the gun than 2,000 rounds standing flat-footed on Joe Youtuber's backyard plinkin' range.

EDIT: And if at all possible, let other people shoot the damn thing! Recruit 5'2" friends and 6'7" friends and novice friends and your USPSA B-class buddy...get feedback from folks with differing grip strngths and hand sizes and skill levels.

There's a difference between a long-term test, a review, and some initial impressions. Some people have a hard time making that distinction. "Here's a review of the gun I got to fam-fire at a manufacturer's dog & pony show" is not a review, while "2,000 rounds through the Blastomatic in a month and a half" is not a long-term (or torture) test.

Oh, and my pet peeve crops up:

My personal pet peeve is the little ammo manufacturers or distributors who reach out to bloggers/YouTubers/whatever by email and ask "We'd like you to evaluate our ammo and do a review of it on your site. We're not asking for a favorable review, just an honest writeup. We're willing to send you a box of..."

I'm tempted to print these out for the added tactile satisfaction of balling them up and tossing them in the trash can when I get to that line. It would be so much more rewarding than just clicking "delete".

Seriously. The idea that you can "review" ammo with a box or two is silly. Further, if it doesn't involve chrono data and shooting benched groups (and, in the case of defense-oriented ammo, terminal ballistics testing against some consistent standard) then it's not a review, it's just "initial impressions". I appreciate that some companies want to get their name out there and that some people are willing to do it for a box of BBs, but it's just tawdry...

On the O.G. Dead Tree industry back in the day versus Digital Intertubecasts & Bloggery today:

I will say that the barrier for entry is oddly both lower and higher now.

Lower, since you don't have to even convince an editor or publisher that you have the faintest clue what you're talking about; you just need to be able to set up a WordPress site, FaceBook page, or YouTube channel and spread your links around. If you get the eyeballs coming, desperate vendors will start sleazing up to you via email with enticing offers of free stuff. And some New Media types don't look at this free stuff and think "You know, I'd throw that away if it fell out of a gumball machine I hadn't put a quarter in." At least someone writing for another entity can claim they were doing it for a paycheck and not for a free $10 Chinese pocket knife.

Higher, because you have to get the eyeballs, and a lot of savvier industry entities are a whole lot more gun-shy of raw FaceBook likes, pageviews, or Instagram followers, since all that stuff is easy to game for the unscrupulous. Some now have their own social media people to counsel them on how much reach and buzz a person generates. This has no correlation, positive or negative, with the person's actual level of clue; just how much exposure they can give the manufacturer's product. 

Critical Defense and Critical Duty

Got to see Hornady's 135gr +P Critical Duty fired into ballistic gel while we were out at FTW Ranch...

The +P stuff did dandy out of a small auto, even through the panoply of barriers dictated by the FBI's ammunition testing protocol.

Penetration was 12"-14" across the board. No jackets stripped off by sheet metal or auto glass.

It was my first chance to see the .44 Special 165gr FTX bullet fired into anything more scientific than a water tank, too. Through denim, shirt, & tee shirt, the bullet expanded just dandily...

 ...but the penetration was less impressive. Intellectually, I was prepared for this, since the bullet has the sectional density of a dime, but it was still a little sad-making to see with my eyes.
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Will we have an endless surge/drawdown/surge cycle?

They will all be wearing sneakers in order to keep from putting any American boots on the ground. https://t.co/JuEaRNa9Jd

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) September 28, 2016

Gun School Thoughts...

D.W. Drang of The Clue Meter went to a MAG-40 class this summer. He's written a post sharing some of what he learned and why you might want to look into going yourself.
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Apparently we are all entitled to our own facts.

Tonight at 8PM...

...on the Outdoor Channel, Michael Bane's Best Defense show will be airing a special on mass casualty attacks that looks to be interesting from the previews.
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Same Planet, Different Worlds...

So, as half the planet knows by now, Glenn Reynolds got his Twitter account briefly yanked for this tweet the other day:

In one parallel universe, it's a cold-blooded exhortation to run over people peacefully protesting the cold-blooded, racist extrajudicial murder of an innocent man armed only with a book.

In the other parallel universe, Glenn was blurting out what to do when bonfire-setting, truck-looting rioters were blocking the interstate ahead of you and converging on you and your loved ones in your car.

In that first universe, George Zimmerman chased down and shot an innocent teenager while playing wannabe cop, Michael Brown was gunned down like a dog in the middle of the street while his hands were raised in surrender, and Alton Sterling was murdered for selling CDs.

In that universe, people who've never been punched in the nose and wouldn't know use-of-force policy from a hole in the ground sit in cool judgment of actions taken under pressure in the blink of an eye while discounting any physical evidence that doesn't fit their narrative.

The problem is plainly obvious to anybody with two functioning brain cells to rub together, but I have no clue what the answer is, here.
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Overheard in Front of the TV Last Night...

One or another of the candidates is talking over the moderator, again...

RX: "Lester Holt needs switches."

Me: "Damn skippy. I'd cut them for him myself and bring him fresh ones when they broke."

RX: "I meant microphone switches."

Me: "I meant letting him hit the candidates with a stick. Imagine how much people would pay to watch that shit on Pay-Per-View. You could pay down the national debt."

Tale of the Tape...

So, CapArms had sent me some ammo for evaluation purposes. Five hundred rounds of their 9mm 147gr RNCB Match/Target ammo packed loose and a hundred rounds of their 147gr XTP Duty/Carry load in the retail 20-round blister packs.

I ran three hundred and some-odd through the Glock 17 at the Citizens Defense Research class in Ohio with no malfunctions. When I got home, I put the remainder of the Match/Target ammo, save fifty, through the Gen3 G19 during a range trip before leaving for Texas. There were no malfunctions on that outing, either.

The remaining fifty were saved for the purpose of chrono testing and shooting some benched groups. To that end, I went to MCF&G and set up the chrono yesterday morning...

The first shot of the day, shooting off the bench, was the very first shot through the brand-new P320C, and a reminder about what powder-puff match loads require:

With the loose grip on the benched pistol, the first round failed to eject properly. The remaining nine, with a firmer grip on the gun, dribbled out of the ejection port, with most of the rounds landing on the table by my elbows.

The consistency was outstanding. Frankly, most small ammo companies don't have outstanding consistency in the velocity of their loads. I've seen multiple lots of Nosler Match, for example, turn in velocity spreads that looked more like East Bloc steel-cased fodder. Generally, for consistency in factory ammo you wanted Hornady, or premium ammo from Federal or Speer.

The numbers on the CapArms Match/Target, however...

LO: 814.7
HI: 839.3
AV: 826.5
ES: 24.68
SD: 7.74

And as good as the ball ammo was, the Duty/Carry XTP hollowpoints turned in an even better performance:

LO: 896.2
HI: 914.2
AV: 905.4
ES: 18.00
SD: 5.74

Ejection was firm and consistent, dropping all the brass neatly over the shooter's right shoulder.

The only downside to these is that the XTP bullet is a little behind the state of the art and not as insensitive to intermediate barriers or heavy clothing as more modern designs like the HST or Hornady's newer Critical Duty.

While there, I also chrono'ed a string of 230gr Federal HST through the Hipster Bulldog Glock 39:

LO: 842.3
HI: 867.0
AV: 854.7
ES: 24.73
SD: 8.88

So that's a 30 foot-per-second drop in velocity moving from the full-size Glock 37 and its 4.48" barrel to the stubby 3.42" tube of the little Glock 39. Jello testing to follow...
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As usual...

...we are very late in throwing the official VFTP endorsement in Kilted to Kick Cancer month to a worthy underdog. Go support Team Guns & Coffee for that warm, plucky-underdog-supporting glow.

If you're in it for a chance to win some swag while kicking cancer's ass, Team Dragon (if KTKC had dynasties, they'd be one) has gone out and gotten some of Dennis's excellent holsters autographed by some luminaries:

"For every $10 donated you get one entry towards a holster that you want to try to win. Multiples of $10 can all go to one rig, or be split out among several. The holsters are my signature line of Valkyrie paddle rigs, as follows:

Tanburst, 1911 5", autographed by Dean Cain (actor who played Superman in the 1990's TV show Lois and Clark.)

Tanburst, 1911 5", autographed by Jesse James of Monster Garage and West Coast Choppers fame.

Greenburst with lime gren Ostrich Skin and embossed with the MHI logo, autographed by Larry Corriea.

Greenburst with green Kangaroo skin ALONG WITH Mahogany-trimmed Saddle Brown Crocodile skin, autographed by the Motor City Madman himself, Ted Nugent. He signed TWO!

Folks can see the holsters on my website here: https://www.dlwtn.com/kilted.

At the bottom of said page is a link to the KtKC donation page, with instructions on how to forward they PayPal receipt to me so I can enter them in a drawing."

Missed Opportunity...

Hillary went on at length about the dangers of state-sponsored cyber-encroachment on our nation's computer infrastructure and how it was a bad thing...

...and Trump did not immediately lead off his rebuttal with "Well, maybe if we didn't keep our vital national security servers in our bathrooms at home..."

Seriously, that was a hanging curve ball belt-high across the plate and he didn't swing at it. Mediocre!
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False Start.

So, before the FTW Ranch trip, I tried to get a start on putting the Glock 39 through the whole 2,000 round rigamarole. The gun seemed pretty clean, with only the soot from the first fifty rounds I'd fired in it. I put a new recoil spring assembly in the gun prophylactically, added a drop of Lucas Oil to all the factory-specified lube points, and went to the range with fifty rounds of S&B 230gr FMJ and fifty of Speer Lawman 185gr FMJ.

Something was definitely off. The gun experienced one failure-to-feed and three failures to fire, the latter all showing a light, off-center primer strike. Normally this would be the sign of an extremely filthy gun with an old recoil spring, but the gun was clean and sported a brand new RSA. Another possibility would be a too-tight extractor, so I scrubbed the area between the claw and the breechface with a toothbrush and then checked extractor travel and tension. It looked good.

I went back the next day with a hundred rounds of the Sellier & Bellot and experienced ten of the light, off-center FTFs over the course of the range session: One round in ten. Something was definitely wrong.

I PM'ed a Facebook friend who works at Glock and asked for some suggestions. In addition to the Armorer's Manual suggestions of "Clean Gun, Replace Recoil Spring", he noted that I might want to detail strip the slide and make sure everything looked good in there, and try a different trigger bar as well.

I just so happened to have the complete trigger assembly from my Glock 37 handy, since it was currently sporting a ZEV trigger, so I tore the little 39 down to have a look inside and swap the trigger while I was in there.
 

The tar-like sludge in the striker channel can't be helping. Did the previous owner not know to not lube that shit?

Me: "Jesus, all the small parts are tacky...the slide lock, the firing pin safety, the striker spring...feel like they've been lubricated with the Pepsi and popcorn butter from a theater floor. I mean, look at this trigger bar... Here's the trigger bar that came out of my G37 after the 2,000 round test. It's kinda gray and sooty, but it hasn't been cleaned. Now here's the trigger bar from the G39. It's covered in a sticky layer of black cack, and I guarantee it hasn't fired no 2,000 rounds. It's like the gun's been lubricated with..."

RX: "Crisco. Congealed vegetable oil."

Me: *eyes widening* "Holy shit you're right." *spins chair to keyboard*

It was exactly like you see on guns that have been stored a long time with the plant-based oils on them, and they'd gotten that stuff on every small part in the gun. They would hardly be tackier to the touch if someone had spilled a Coke in there. In the picture above, the trigger bar I'm holding is the one that came out of the 39: That buildup of soot and cack is from ~250 rounds of shooting. The gray trigger bar in the gun now is the one that came out of my G37 after 2,000 rounds. It hasn't been cleaned, other than whatever fingers have knocked off it from handling.

I'm going to hit the gun with some synthetic-safe Gun Scrubber to degrease it good, re-lube it properly, and then we'll start shooting it for realz, yo.
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Post-Racial America

So, as I surmised, the initial identification of the at-large suspect in the Cascade Mall shooting as "Hispanic" was incorrect. We've had hoofbeats all over the place lately, and guessing horses is more often right than guessing zebras.

"Some questioned how describing a suspect as “Hispanic” could be meaningful, when it’s a linguistic, rather than racial, distinction."

Well, the suspect was at large, and they needed a descriptor for folks to be on the lookout for, and people would have lost their tiny little minds at "swarthy", "dark-skinned", "olive-complected", "dusky" or dozens of other quaint descriptors for "dark haired and not pasty white, but not a black dude, either". None of those are neutral terms for people's Pantone hues anymore; they've all been loaded with a full charge of powder in this era of racial healing.

"More than 15 percent of the population of Skagit County describes itself as Latino or Hispanic.

Most major news outlets, including The Seattle Times, mention race or ethnicity in relation to crimes only if the crime is considered racially motivated or if an armed, dangerous suspect is on the loose."

See? They couldn't describe the gunman who'd just fled the mall as "He looka like a man."

Overheard in the Hallway...

RX: "I had the strangest dream. I'd won one of every Stanley screwdriver ever made."

Me: *laughing* "That is the Bobbi-est dream ever. You could fix all the things!"

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #149...

The Sig Sauer P320C 9mm I won at the Friends of the NRA banquet, now sporting a Boresight Solutions frame. (Which I had on hand and was the reason I picked the P320 off the Wall of Guns.)

I need to decide on some sights and get a Gray Guns Carry Action Package, just because. Come 2018 or 2020, when I move away from the Glock, this is probably the direction I'll head.
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Late Start...

I rode the snooze button express for nearly an hour this morning.

Going out for a Broad Ripple breakfast with Shootin' Buddy and then to the range to bust some caps with the new Ruger. I'm trying to get it into a bunch of different hands.

More later.
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Morning Thoughts...

• Number of YouTube followers does not equate to competence. There is no correlation, inverse or otherwise. There are some squared-away trainers who have a handle on social media, but there are a ton more who don't use it, or are even actively bad at it. Conversely there are some who border on household names on the gunternet who are so completely devoid of clue as to be cringeworthy. Facebook likes or YouTube followers shouldn't be a factor, positive or negative, when you seek training.


• "Lad" is an English slang term roughly equivalent to "Dudebro". Except apparently a more nancy, big girl's blouse version of "Dudebro" that completely loses its shit at the sight of a lockback pocket knife of the variety usually given to Texans on their eighth birthday.


• EVEN THE BUILDINGS ARE AGAINST ME!

Day at the Office...with a SECRET RUGER!

Went to the range today to do some plinking with a Ruger .22 pistol.

Not a Standard Model/Mark I, not a Mark II, and not a Mark III, but...

...a Ruger Mark IV!

The Mark IV is the biggest redesign since the original Ruger rimfire was made in 1949. The gripframe, formerly welded together from two stampings, is now a single piece, CNC machined from a forging. On the stainless guns it's a stainless steel forging, and on the blued ones, an aluminum one.

The Mark III magazines will still work in the Mark IV, but they will pop out with amazing vigor, thanks to a spring-loaded plunger. Additionally, the loaded chamber indicator is gone away from the Mark IV.

The thumb safety is a more conventional pivoting one, and the right-hand side of the ambi safety (if you aren't one of those people whose right hands are on the wrong side) can be removed with household tools, if so desired.

I started with some warmup shots in the center and then shot each dot at the indicated distance with two mags of junky Remington "Bucket o' Bullets" stuff at about a 1/rd-per-second pace. Gun shoots fine and no malfunctions (other than one dud Remington round. This is my shocked face.)

Here's the biggest deal of them all: Lock the slide to the rear, drop the mag, ensure the pistol is on safe, and then the push of one button on the rear of the frame allows the upper to tip forward like on an AR or break-open shotgun.

Then the upper assembly lifts off the gun, the bolt group is pulled out the back, and you're done. The gun can be disassembled for cleaning and put back together again in less time than it took me to type this paragraph.

They had three versions for us to shoot this past weekend: blued and stainless target models and stainless hunters with wood grips, fiber-optic sights, and fluted barrels.

There were a bunch of them on hand and I didn't personally see any malfunctions, but you expect that with Ruger deuce-deuce pistols.
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Thanks a lot, Facebook...

I'd been in a pretty chipper mood, and then...

I think I'll go to the range.
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Ding!

There's nothing like a little head-to-head shooting exercise to liven things up.

Jeff Hoskinson of MGM Targets sets up the targets...

...and explains the course of fire.

Head-to-head, the shooter had to knock down the three falling plates, execute a reload (reload with retention the first go-'round and a speed reload the second run-through) and drop their popper first. The stop poppers, of course, are set so they fall down overlapped, so there's no doubt about whose went down first.

I was up against Gail Pepin my first run, and not only was my reload an abysmally slow soup sandwich, but I did a speed reload instead of a tactical reload. My opponent sped ahead of me by the expedient of not reloading at all, so we both took our procedurals on that stage and moved on to the next one...

 Round Two had some good matchups...

Gail is shooting here against Denny Hansen, my boss at S.W.A.T. Magazine. Michael Bane and Massad Ayoob look on in the background.

The Ruger 9mm Commanders ran well, and shot really flat with that 10# recoil spring. A 9mm 1911 is pretty much shooting in "Easy Mode".

Mas goes up against Rich Nance in a tight race. Between these two and Jim Tarr, most of the rest of us were looking at fighting over fourth place.

There was a bowling pin event with those weird guns with round things in the middle, though, and your humble correspondent managed a second place overall finish in that, and seeing as the winner was the guy who literally wrote the book on bowling pin shooting, I'll take it.
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Home again, home again...

Yesterday started with a 2½-hour ride from FTW Ranch to the airport in San Antonio at 7:30 AM and finished with a taxi depositing me at Roseholme Cottage at 7:30 PM.

I'm pretty exhausted and suffering the inevitable letdown of a fantastic weekend. It was my first big press event wearing my shiny new Handgun Editor title from Shooting Illustrated, and getting a chance to see Massad Ayoob, Michael Bane, and Denny Hansen again was a lot of fun. Made new friends, shot a bunch of other people's ammo, saw some breathtaking scenery and exotic species of deer. If heaven ain't a lot like this past weekend, I don't wanna go.

I have a bajillion photos...well, six hundred and something, actually...to sort through and I'll post some up, but first I have to drive up to Lafayette to pick up the gun I won at the Greater Lafayette Friends of the NRA banquet last week. That's right, after all the little tickets I've bought in all those corny little games at all those banquets, I finally won a gat: A Sig Sauer P320 Carry in 9mm.

I'll write more when I get back.
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It could catch on...

I'm thinking about starting a new religion where the payoff for a good life is you die and go to FTW Ranch.
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Thank you for calling booksbikesboomsticks.blogspot.com...

...your call is very important to us, but right now we're at FTW Ranch in Texas shooting Rugers and getting schooled by Dave Spaulding, so you're just gonna have to hold your water for another couple days until we get back into cell phone range of civilization.

Thank you!
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Gotta shoot and do some other stuff...

...breakfast was a hasty donut.

Donuts! #thedancingdonut #yum

A photo posted by Tamara Keel (@tamarakeel) on Sep 15, 2016 at 6:06am PDT

Will post more after I knock out some chores.
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Okay, I'm going in...

I'm going to make sure the G39 is clean and lubed, with a fresh recoil spring assembly, and do the 2,000 round thing with it. It's going to be a little bit 'spensive in the ammo department, but I'm legit curious to see how it holds up.

My only real experience with the teeny Glocks, other than with diagnosing customer or range rental guns, has been with a pair of .357SIG Glock 33s I owned in succession back around the turn of the millennium. Being honest with myself, they probably saw a couple hundred rounds, tops, in those days of weekly range visits with two or three pistols randomly selected from the dozen or so I owned... Well, I meant to get to the range weekly, but sometimes it was more like bi-weekly. Or monthly. But I shot a lot, you betcha, and my guns were all flawless over, I dunno, like a thousand rounds! Or more!

You can see why I'm skeptical of Internet gun claims; I have been as guilty of them as anybody, and it's why I try and document the bejeezus out of things now. You think I've never been standing there with a gun I like, with the slide hung up just slightly out of battery, and nobody on the range but me and my conscience...and my self-respect? There's often an audible sigh as I pull the pen out of my pocket and scribble "#72 OOB" on a piece of torn-off cartridge box flap.

Every five hundred rounds I'll do the recoil spring test, too. Rule of thumb on the compact & midsize Gen 3 guns is replacing the RSA somewhere in the 2,500-3,000 round area, but I'm unsure of the subcompacts.
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From discussion elsewhere...

A conversation about Mosins generated this musing...

"On the bright side, at least we weren't buried under a deluge of $49 Mle.1886 rifles and crates of nickel-a-round corrosive 8mm Lebel. I can only imagine the contortions neckbeards would be going through to justify the awesomeness of those.

Although, now that it's in my head, the idea of a Tapco'ed-out Lebel has a sort of perverse attraction."

Two Is One...

So I reached the point where I had enough 9mm Glock mags, of the G17 and G19 varieties, to completely fill my GPS Magazine Caddy. While I was at Indy Arms Co. today, I picked up a second one that will be for all the oddball caliber Glock magazines, like 10mm Auto, .357 SIG, .45 GAP, and .40 S&W.

Fried.

I got home from class, sunburned and tired, a little before 9PM. Bobbi was asleep because she was working the 0MG30-Noon shift. I stayed awake 'til her alarm went off, and evidence would dictate that I stayed awake a little past that, but I woke up sprawled atop the covers, fully clothed and in my shoes still, at 3:20AM.

I had intended to walk her out to her car and retrieve my suitcase full of laundry and stuff from my car in the garage at the same time, but that didn't work out as planned.

Half-awake, I shucked out of the grimy range clothes and into PJs, flopped back down atop the comforter, and didn't move again 'til the TV in Bobbi's bedroom turned on of its own accord at 6AM, which is coincidentally the same time that Huck was frantically mewing in my ear to let me know he was likely to starve to death in the next 37 seconds if I didn't do something about it.

I dozed fitfully for another hour or so before getting up and heading to the range to pop some caps, mostly so I could sort out the round count on some gun logbooks:

Count the ammo left in the bag, plus what's left in loaded mags, and...whoops, don't forget there's a round of FMJ in the chamber of the gun on my hip...and subtract that from 500, now add seventeen for the carry ammo that was in the gun at the start of the class, and that will tell me how much ammo I fired in the class. (355 rounds, but I sat out some drills to photograph stuff.)

I'd write more stuff today, but frankly I'm too in need of a good night's sleep to write well.
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Day Two.

First day of class went okay for me yesterday. Didn't set myself on fire. Learned a thing.

Ready for day two. Gonna be on the range all day.
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Race To The Bottom...

"That tightening has frustrated many Clinton allies and operatives, who are astonished that she isn’t running away with this race, given Trump’s deep unpopularity and his continuing stream of controversial comments."

Democrats seem baffled that their candidate isn't galloping away with this thing.

So, my Democrat friends, you know how you're all "Jesus, how could the Republicans pick someone so incredibly loathsome? Are they stupid?" Pretty much that right back at you.

Just like the Republican primaries managed to select the only candidate who could possibly get beaten by the Lizard Queen from Zeta Reticuli, your unDemocratic Superdelegate Logrolling Festival managed to turn up the one candidate in your party who might lose to Cheeto Jesus.

Both major parties are, ironically, in a place where the best thing that could happen to their electoral chances is for the headliner on their ticket to suffer a sudden heart attack.
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Overheard on I-70 Eastbound...

Driving toward Dayton this afternoon, I gradually hove out of sight of the shoreline of Indianapolis's NPR broadcast island and hadn't gotten within reach of Dayton's. Rather than wade through the assortment of unknown classic rock, country, and He Who Walks Behind The Rows-type religious stations out in eastern Indiana, I tried to power up the Bluetooth speakers I have for listening to podcasts on my phone as an interim solution until I replace the Zed Drei's head unit.

Unfortunately, the battery in the speakers was flatter than the soybean fields I was droning past, and so I just turned the audio off to leave myself listening to the thoughts in my head and the wind noise in the convertible top...

...jerking my head upright from what was certainly only a blink's worth of sleep, my eyes flew open and I shouted "The SMERSH powder is all he had on him!"

I have no idea what it means, either, and it's amazing that I got enough dream detail to yell that in what was not even enough of an eyeblink for the car to wander in its lane.

Needless to say, I was wide awake for the rest of the way to my destination.
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Overheard in the Kitchen...

Me: "It gets her attention, but what if she doesn't recognize 'Rannie' as being a sound-symbol for her, but rather a sound that means 'O Bastet, this monkey humbly requests your attention'?"

21st Century Hipster Bulldog...

Of the guns that I've put through the whole 2,000 round thing here on the blog, I've come away with unqualified admiration for four of them: The full-size Sig Sauer P320 in 9mm, the Sig P250C in .380, the Glock 19, and the Glock 37. The 37 is the oddball of the bunch, being chambered for Glock's peculiar and almost proprietary .45 GAP cartridge (Springfield Armory cataloged XDs in the chambering for a year or so, but other than that, GAP has pretty much been an all-Glock show.)

After the good experience with the 37, I wondered how well a certain other gun in .45 GAP would work...

Keeping consistent with the rest of their catalog, Glock had followed up 2004's duty-sized Glock 37 with a 2005 introduction of a compact Glock 38 and subcompact Glock 39. The 39 was on the same frame as the 9mm G26, .40 G27, and .357SIG G33, but with a slightly wider, more massive slide to address reliability and durability concerns.

The Glock 26-size magazine would hold ten rounds of 9x19mm or nine of .40/.357. In .45 GAP it holds six, and the "Plus 2" extension is only a "Plus 1".

This is still a combination of size, weight, bore diameter, and magazine capacity that is pretty unique on the market. It scratches the same not-entirely-logical itch for me that the small/medium-frame big-bore revolvers like the Charter Arms Bulldog or Smith & Wesson 696 do...

Recoil is surprisingly mild, even with Sellier & Bellot's 230gr FMJ offering. I would rather shoot this thing than the .40 S&W Glock 27 any day of the week and twice on Sunday. The more massive slide brings it down to a recoil level that is subjectively hard to distinguish from that of the 9mm Glock 26.

The best part is that the hipster Glocks are generally pretty cheap on the used market when you can find them. This one, complete with night sights and the mag extension, was won for $375 shipped on Gunbroker.

Reliability testing will commence soon.
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Hermit Crabby Kingdom

My blog is now apparently blocked on all five computers in the DPRK. https://t.co/MB7aHePxnF

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) September 9, 2016

Gang Signs

The best part of today being the fiftieth anniversary of the Star Trek franchise was watching the decidedly non-nerdy anchors on the local morning news program try to show how un-with-it they were by doing what they called the "Vulcan grip".

Bobbi muttered "Someone should run out there and give them the Vulcan grip..."

It was hilariously funny at 0615.
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The 'Hood?

So I'm driving home from the monthly club meeting at Marion County Fish & Game last Tuesday night, and I decided to take the more northerly of the two major routes, since the southern one runs in on 38th Street and generally if something bad happens in Indianapolis at night, it will happen at the corner of Thirty-somethingth Street and Something Avenue.

The alternate route is to zip one more exit up I-465 and come home via 56th Street instead.

At the intersection of 56th & Georgetown, the convenience store parking lot was full of flashing lights. Looked like four cop cars had one car pulled over. Probably not just a speeding ticket...

While I was trying to reach in with as much zoom as the Lunar's 18-55mm lens had, an ambulance came running code up Georgetown from the south, turning west on 56th... Busy night.

So the next morning I crank up Google to see if there was any news, and there wasn't. At least, not from Tuesday night. But the corner of 56th & Georgetown itself? It made the news plenty...

• "Following the first shooting, Tyson made another U-turn and continued southbound on Georgetown before heading west on 56th Street..."


• "Man injured in shooting near 56th and Georgetown Road"


• "According to Indianapolis Metropolitan police, officers tried to pull the SUV over near 56th Street and Georgetown Road, but the vehicle didn’t stop."


• "Police said the victim was shot at The Woods at Eagle Creek apartments, near West 56th Street and Georgetown Road. There was a report of shots fired at that location at 6:36 p.m."


• "It happened at a clothing store called Hang Time at 56th Street and Georgetown Road early Saturday morning."

...and that's just from the first page of Google news hits on "Georgetown and 56th".

Mind you, if you follow that street just another mile or two east and it becomes Kessler Boulevard and passes through some of the most exclusive neighborhoods in Indianapolis.

The trip in on 38th Street takes you through neighborhoods that signal their roughness in typical inner city ways: Boarded-up homes and businesses, graffiti, generic urban blight. But to look around with a casual glance at the corner of 56th & Georgetown, you'd just see convenience stores and strip malls, subdivisions of single-family houses, garden apartement complexes, and fairly conventional suburbia. You'd need to notice the tenants of the strip malls...the payroll cashing places, pre-paid phone stores, bottle shops, and other indicators...to realize that you were in a neighborhood where things could suddenly get every bit as sporty as they could down in the more obvious 'hood.
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#StayInYourLane

Well, @NRA, don't forget that pontificating on things he doesn't understand is pretty much @piersmorgan's job description.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) September 7, 2016

Literally

From discussion here...

Due process of law is literally what separates civilization from barbarism. And yes, Lana, I know what "literally" means.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) September 7, 2016

Bought the T-Shirts...

The other day I wrote:

"You cannot on the one hand spout this sort of "Oopsie! Hah-ha! What a faux pas!" claim of ignorance in one moment and then turn around and claim that you are the hard-nosed, experienced, understands-how-government-works alternative to Cheeto Jesus in the next.

Only you can, apparently, because we're voting for teams now, and it doesn't matter what the Turd Sandwich or Big Giant Douche say; people are going to vote for them based on the color of the box they come in."

I give you Exhibit A.

The simple fact that you can find a fault...any fault at all...with [$MESSIAH] indicates possible signs of heresy and perhaps profound mental deficits.
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Rumble in the 12 Items or Less Lane

When people envision self-defense scenarios, it's usually something they consider themselves being well-prepared to handle: The obvious robber who announces his intentions from ten paces away in the Walmart parking lot, or the masked robber forcing entry somewhere between dinner and bedtime, while our hero is still mostly dressed and within arm's reach of his trusty heater.

Nobody's envisioned self-defense scenario starts out with their back against their loved one, hemmed in by a grocery store checkout on one side and a rack of Juicy Fruit and The National Enquirer on the other, and with the bad guy on top of them having just drawn a pistol...

From discussion elsewhere:

There's a chance that Mr. Seedy wasn't even trying to get her PIN but just looked like he was and, when confronted about it, bowed up and "Stood muh ground!"

You just need a clean criminal record to get a permit, you don't need any intelligence or social skills.

EDIT: Followup article...

Harryman, who did not testify at his trial, said he told Young that he was armed. It was a warning, not a threat, Harryman said.

Young responded, "I don't give a (expletive). I'm gonna (expletive) you up," Harryman said.

Harryman said he had seconds to deal with an unprovoked attack.

Young punched him and Harryman said he did not punch back. "I got beat up so bad I had a stroke," Harryman said.

The gun was his last resort.

Next self-defense scenario: You're standing in line at the grocery store when the husband of the woman in front of you in line decides you've been trying to read his wife's PIN and circles the register, shouting obscenities, to physically assault you... 
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Grime Will Tell...

Friday morning at the range, I fired off the last box of the Sellier & Bellot 180gr FMJ from Lucky Gunner through the Glock 20. I also had most of a box of 9mm and decided to run it through one of the 22rd ETS magazines I'd recently bought but hadn't used yet.

I had forty rounds of nine and loaded them into the mag twenty at a time. Although forty rounds isn't indicative of anything, I was pleased that there were no hitches whatsoever. (I put another sixty-eight rounds through it yesterday morning as well. I'll try and keep a running tally...)

The Glock 20 on the other hand...

The griminess seems to have affected the big 10mm more than any of the other Glocks I've done this with. There was a small amount of drama with the Glock 32 test, while the 19 and 37 were pretty near trouble free, but the light, off-center primer strikes are really beginning to plague the G20 now.

There were three on Friday, on rounds #3, #5, and #47 of the day (#1,683, #1,685, and #1,727 of the test).

Page 84 of my Glock Armorer's Manual says the fix is either a good cleaning...or possibly it's a too-tight extractor. (Which might explain the intermittent and odd failures-to-feed, as well.) When I tear this thing down for a cleaning at the end, the extractor (and extractor spring) will be getting prophylactically replaced. I'll be keeping an eye on this one in the future to see how that affects things. Another good reason for keeping log books on guns...

This makes 1,730 rounds since the Glock 20 was cleaned or lubricated, with six failures to feed (#401, #454, #1,213, #1,297, #1,413, #1,593) and eleven failures to fire (#598, #1,016, #1,029, #1,376, #1,595, #1,628, #1,633, #1,640, #1,683, #1,685, #1,727). 270 rounds to go.
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Yesterday as viewed through Prisma...

Shootin' Buddy arrived at 9:00AM and we saddled up the bikes and headed northward. Our Zero Point was roughly 54th street. Bear in mind that Indianapolis blocks are a tenth of a mile.

We stopped for a late breakfast at  Public Greens in Broad Ripple (64th Street). Shootin' Buddy had scrambled eggs and a cup of yogurt, while I had the chilaquiles. They put feta cheese in their chilaquiles. Too few dishes on this planet have both feta and salsa verde.

We stopped at the Kroger on 86th Street for some bottled water. There's a little bicycle maintenance station, with cabled tools and a tire pump, out by the bike rack at the Kroger.

This is the Palladium concert venue in Carmel. Just south of 126th Street.

We got all the way north to Grand Junction Brewing Co. just south of 176th Street in Westfield, where we enjoyed a One With Nature APA before turning around and heading back south. The exercise doohicky in the iPhone indicated we'd done about fifteen miles at this point.

While pedaling north through Carmel, I'd noticed Union Brewing Company just off the trail to the east. On the way back south, we stopped in for a pint of their Preacher Pale Ale, never having sampled the place or its offerings before. We will be back for sure.

 Arriving back at 86th Street, it was time for lunch at Big Lug Canteen. I had the Hans Grubeer, a "German IPA" with Hallertau and Mandarina Bavarian hops, and a charcuterie plate with their delicious bacon jam.

By the time we pulled back up to the garage at Roseholme Cottage, the iThingy indicated we'd ridden as close to thirty miles as makes no nevermind. And my backside is feeling it today.
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