Homeward bound...

The trip down to Atlanta, via Louisville-Nashville-Chattanooga, took about nine hours all told, including refueling stops and a sandwich in Bowling Green. On the way home, I figured I'd take it in two chunks, stopping for lunch in Chattanooga and getting a motel room in Knoxville so I could see Gunsmith Bob & staghounds on the way.

I went on the web to reserve a room at the Holiday Inn Express in Farragut, TN and discovered that all my staying at the HIX for gun school has given me enough points for a free night. Bonus!

FWIW, that Dark Star Gear IWB holster was no problem, even for nine hours at a stretch in the Zed Drei's snug, well-bolstered bucket seats.
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Memory Lane

After walking the floor on Day One, Shootin' Buddy and I took an Uber over to my old stomping grounds...

Dinner at the Virginia Highland Taco Mac. Last time I ate here, the craft beer movement had hardly started. All the cool beer was imported back then.

Then we walked over and looked at my old apartment before catching another Uber back to the hotel. This was home from '95-'99...
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It's 9:00AM somewhere...

Well, this was supposed to be hush-hush until 9AM, but apparently somebody let it loose on the Book of Face last night, and it's now live on Springfield Armory's webpage, so...

 To copypasta from my post elsewhere this morning:

"Shoots good. Didn't see any malfunctions at the range. Yes, it's made in Croatia. The only thing that interchanges with existing product is that the longer 9mm XD-S magazines will run in the gun. A decocker-only version might be available if sufficient demand seems there, but I don't know I'd worry about it; the safety is pretty positive and seems unlikely to accidentally be knocked into the "on" position. I tried to get the gun to de-cock in the middle of a string of fire, the way a USP will if you ride your thumb on the safety, but was unable to.

TheNewbie: It's almost exactly the same size as my CS9.

Since there's, as yet, no Gadget for the Glock 43 and the Shield's thumb safety is an ergonomic nightmare, I see a niche for this gun from the jump, but that's just me."

Three pieces of brass in the air and a fourth about to join them. It's plenty controllable...

I have a review gun I will be shooting a bunch. There will be a full review in Shooting Illustrated after I shoot this thing until it cries or I do.
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All The Bees...

Had both the "subcaliber" P250s at the range yesterday, .380ACP and .22LR, just to compare them side by side. The P250 shot up the last eighty rounds of Cap Arms .380 100gr FP FMJ, and I put fifty rounds of Remington Golden Bullets through the .22LR gun.

The .380 was shooting pretty quickly by my slow standards; most shots fired at a .5-.75 clip. The .22 was fired literally as fast as I could work the DAO trigger. It hardly moves under recoil, of course, so it's just a matter of waiting for the sights to align again. I was trying really hard to keep the trigger in motion the whole time.

The deuce-deuce P250 experienced a single failure to feed on round #36. It's now fired 110 rounds.
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Automotif CXXXV...

Seen while out and about: A 1967 Pontiac GTO parked in front of The Pawn Shop Pub on 54th Street.

You can tell it's a '67 and not a '66 from this angle largely by the "GTO" badges on the fenders moved down onto the chrome strip along the rocker panel. If you look at them closely, they say "6.5 Litre". The hood scoop is a purely cosmetic, non-functional thing, but the hood-mounted tachometer is for realz.

You don't need to be a weatherman...

The BATFEIEIO still doesn't have an appointed Director, with the Deputy Director filling in until one is appointed.

President Trump is speaking at the NRA's Annual Meeting in Atlanta later this week.

The BATFEIEIO has just released an opinion letter clarifying...and by "clarifying", I mean "reversing"...its opinion letter of 2015 that made shouldering a pistol with an SB Stabilizing Brace an act that effectively "manufactured" an SBR.

The extent to which these three factoids are related is an exercise left up to the reader.
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Rimfire Fun...

So the P250 .22LR arrived Friday from CDNN. (Actually, it arrived Thursday, but I waited until Friday to pick it and the Sooper Seekrit Springfield Armory review gun up on the same 4473.)

Unlike the .380 variant of the P250, the .22LR one is a straight blowback. It uses what appears to be an aluminum slide with some attractive scalloped lightening cuts at 10 and 2 o'clock running from just ahead of the ejection port to the muzzle. It has conventional three-dot sights, with the rear being adjustable and fitting in a traditional dovetail rather than the weird proprietary P250 mounting.

The Fire Control Unit is, as I noted, a standard P250 FCU and compatible with centerfire Caliber X-Change kits. It has the latest iteration of forward-swept slide stops, although they don't really matter in the rimfire variant since the 10-round magazines (of which two are provided) do not actuate the slide stop when empty.

I took the gun to Indy Arms Co. on Sunday to run a few rounds through it. I was not disappointed with the gun's trial run at all...

The gun ran fine, sixty rounds with no malfunctions other than one round of Federal bulk pack .22LR needing a second trigger pull to ignite. The Ruger Mk IV, incidentally, is now at 1,200 rounds with a lone FTE way back in the first couple hundred.

I can't say much, but...

...you can see me in the background in a few shots in this video. Springfield Armory will be unveiling a new handgun at NRAAM. I don't think that I'll get in trouble for saying that I legit thought it was cool.

Overheard at the range:

"Hey, Tam, did you shoot the dueling tree with Rob Leatham?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Dude, I've seen how this movie ends. Why do I need to sit through the whole thing?"

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Can't gather any moss...

I have commented before that I've finally reached that age where People Magazine has somehow turned into Who Are These People? Magazine. So it was a moment of relief in the checkout line the other day to realize "Hey! I recognize the dude on the cover of People!"...

...followed by the immediate bringdown of realizing the only reason I recognize the dude on the cover of People is because he's been dead ten frickin' years now.
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Today in History: Pax No More

So, people tend to confuse the Pax Romana with the period of history during which the Roman Empire existed, but that's not really how it worked.

The late days of the Republic and the period of civil wars that ended with Octavian as Augustus were anything but peaceful. The salad days stretched across most of the first two centuries AD, when transfers of power were mostly peaceful and when they weren't, they were at least brief and disrupted the life of the ordinary people of the empire very little. What wars there were happened out on the frontiers and Rome was generally victorious. The rule of law more or less functioned properly, and the aqueducts ran on time.

Omens of future problems came with the reign of emperor Joaquin Phoenix who (after going crazy and arranging for the murders of a bunch of senators) was not actually stabbed in the Coliseum by Russel Crowe, but rather was strangled in the tub by his wrestling coach and personal trainer.

There was a brief period of semi-stability under the increasingly silly and neurotic Severan Dynasty before the wheels came off in the Year of the Six Emperors, which kicked off the Crisis of the Third Century, a period when two centuries' worth of chickens came home to roost in Rome.

The crisis began when Maximinus Thrax, a "Barracks Emperor" who completely lived up to his anime villain name, got folks fed up. Some younger, well-to-do Romans in North Africa stabbed the local tax collector to death and talked the provincial governor into declaring himself emperor. Since the dude was an octogenarian, he nominated his son as his co-augustus.

Unfortunately the governor of the next province over not only remained loyal, but was a better general. The rebel army got crushed in the field at Carthage, killing the son (Gordian II), and on hearing the news, the dad pulled an Aaron Hernandez to avoid capture and execution.

On this date in 238AD, the senate then appointed a couple of elderly senators, Pupienus and Balbinus, with good military histories and prominent committee memberships (most importantly, both were ranking members of the What the Hell Do We Do About Emperor Maximinus Thrax Committee) as co-emperors.

This proved about as popular with the general populace of Rome as would the Senate suddenly appointing John McCain and Lindsey Graham as co-presidents to unseat Trump. The PR problem became apparent when the new co-emperors couldn't appear in public without people throwing stuff at them, and so the senate named the Justin Bieber-looking 13-year-old grandson of the recently-hanged Gordian I as Gordian III.

Anybody with a room temperature IQ could see that Balbinus and Pupienus were still in charge and the barely-pubescent Gordian was a figurehead, but the populace of Rome was mollified by this move, which doesn't speak much for their collective smarts.

Meanwhile, Maximinus Thrax was making his way from his home base in the Balkans toward Rome. He arrived at the city of Aquilea but, rather than welcoming him and resupplying his troops, the city shut its gates and forced a siege. With the senatorial army led by Pupienus closing in from Rome and supplies growing short, Maximinus Thrax wound up getting shanked by his own troops, along with all his family and staff.

With the guy with the anime villain name dead, McCain and Graham naturally started quarreling and plotting against each other. Before it could come to open war, the Praetorian guard killed them both and left Justin Bieber lookalike Gordian III sole emperor at the end of the year.

Hey, look!

The second half of the .38 Special story is up.

Learning to draw from concealment.
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Seeming Dichotomy...

"Tam, you're so inconsistent! Just a few weeks ago you were talking about how if someone took a basic four-hour class, stuffed an LCP in a pocket holster every day, and made it to the range quarterly to make sure they still knew how it worked, they'd be way ahead of the game. 

Then yesterday you're talking about working on speed and buying yourself a timer and shaving half a second off your concealed draw to a 3x5 card. What gives? Which is it?"

I don't think there's a dichotomy at all. I think if you do all the stuff in the first example, you have probably immunized yourself against most sorts of random crime you're ever likely to encounter.

However you probably also don't have "gun owner" or "firearms enthusiast" as part of the terms you'd use to identify yourself and you probably aren't reading this blog. If you are reading this blog, it is very likely that those are terms you use to identify yourself and shooting is probably something you do for fun and more often than once in a very great while. If that's the case, wouldn't you want to be better at it?

I see the guys come into Indy Arms Co. two and three times a week, and they've been coming in since the store opened, and they're still scattering bullet holes all over a B27. They haven't improved one bit, and that's just foreign to me.

I mean, if you're only popping off a box of ammo every three months to make sure the gun works, that's one thing, but to grind out two or three hundred rounds of ammo a week and never see any improvement in your ability to hit what you're aiming at? At what point do you ignore your ego and admit maybe you might could take some lessons?
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Such a deal!

CDNN is a gun store in Texas that is also known as a purveyor of closeout and overstock merchandise that they apparently buy from manufacturers for dimes on the dollar and sell off via catalog sales. If you're looking for one of that limited run of Millard Filmore Commemorative Grade III engraved 28ga over-and-under shotguns from two years ago, chances are that CDNN has the remainder of the lot.

 So, I haven't mentioned it because I wanted to wait until a check cleared so I could buy one, but CDNN currently has Sig Sauer P250 Compacts in .22LR for $289.99. Not only do these things make use of regular P250/P320 holsters, but the fire control unit in the rimfire gun is the same as the FCU in the centerfire guns. This means that you could buy the .22 compact for a practice/play gun and a Caliber X Change kit in, say, subcompact .45ACP format...
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Local News: Hard(ish) Target & Start Snitchin'.

Another attempted gun store burglary using carjacked vehicles as battering rams happened last night here in Indy. They knocked the little entry foyer half off the front of Bradis guns out on the southwest side of town, only to be confronted with another, inner hardened steel entry door.

Like anybody raised on Hollywood, they tried to shoot that lock off, which appears to have only put a hole in the doorknob. Stymied, they then fled in the non-battering-ram vehicle.

One supposes that a larger vehicle and a more judicious choice of ramming points on the rather large half frame building and they probably would have made entry, but if they were smart, they'd have jobs and could just buy guns.

The easiest way to prevent crooks from using carjacked cars to break into gun stores would be to shoot them when they were trying to carjack the cars, of course, but I doubt Mayor Hogwarts will stumble across such an obvious solution.

Last night Mayor Hogswatch was giving the State of the City address and proposing a gun crime snitch line. See an illegal gun, call it in, and get $750 if they bring charges against the guy. "Hello, yes, gun snitch line? I see a guy with an illegal gun. Where? Right here at 38th & Post. He's sticking it in my face and telling me to get out of the car."

4/19, Part III...

"People like the militia have a whole bunch of crazy ideas... However, they have two pieces of truth in all the craziness. One is 'Look at what happened at Waco. And the government hid its mistakes and concealed its misdeeds.' And the other piece of truth is that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms made this attack on Waco because Koresh's followers had guns. And the militias have guns. So the militias have these two kernels of truth in all their craziness about our government: Waco, and the fear that the government will come after them because they have guns." -Dr. Alan Stone

4/19, Part II...

On this day in 1943, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began...
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4/19, part I...

"By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world"

Happy Patriot's Day to each and every one of y'all. :)

Slow is slow. Fast is fast. Smooth is smooth.

So, the other day I ran across a defense of the old aphorism:

"Lately, I’ve seen a lot of criticism over “slow is smooth, smooth is fast.”  I think part of it is that a lot of folks have seen, heard, or possibly even said that line without actually knowing what it meant."

I can assure oddball that many, if not most, of the critics are well aware of the meaning. The problem is with how it gets used in the broader firearms self-defense community.

My first class with ToddG was the single biggest light bulb moment of my shooting career. You see, actual performance tracking is not something you ran into in the defensive shooting community very often back in the day, and it's still not super common.

On the one hand you have the people who hit the range every month or so and spray an even distribution of holes across a B27 target and then excitedly point out the lucky ones that "would've hurt that dude for sure!" On the other hand you have the guys who profess their martial skills with the gun fu, and can indeed keep a reasonable group on a B8 repair center, but seem to be nowhere to be found when there's a timer around.

The best contribution Gamer culture makes to shooting is the lack of fear of people finding out how much you suck. It's the main reason a lot of folks avoid action pistol shooting or metrics-heavy classes: It's easy to talk like a ninja on the internet if nobody can look up your scores. If you compete, or attend the sort of classes where metrics are involved, your ego may take a hit when you find out that you're maybe not where you thought you'd be in the standings.

And the thing about getting faster is it's not a thing that happens naturally. It's a skill that needs to be learned, the same as accuracy. In fact, it is a harder skill to learn. Shooting accurately with a pistol in slow fire is not that difficult: Line up a good sight picture and then control the trigger straight to the rear without disturbing that sight picture and your bullet will impact right where you want it to, every single time.

And you do need to be smooth! Herky-jerky movements all add up to extra time. Watch a USPSA GM draw their pistol: There's no jerking or hunching of the shoulders. When an experienced IDPA competitor is reloading from concealment, their hand only goes far enough under their fishing vest to acquire the spare magazine, rather than blowing past the mag to dramatically clear the cover garment and then come back to the reload.

But shooting fast? You only learn how to do that by shooting fast; you won't know even know what fast is unless you feel it. And to do this, you have to give yourself permission to miss in practice. (There's a reason why dropped shots on the 3x5 of the FAST are a two-second penalty while you only lose a second for each dropped shot on the 8" circle.)

So if you're sitting there doing the same reps slowly and smoothly over and over, waiting for the magic of speed to somehow come along, you are setting yourself up for disappointment. I've heard more than one trainer mention that people don't need to be encouraged to shoot fast in a gunfight; they do that all by themselves. Well, the middle of a gunfight is a lousy time to try and pick up a new skill, right?

Me? I'm slow, but I'm getting faster. I managed a personal best on a clean FAST from concealment yesterday. I think I've got at least another second I can shave off that time just in the draw and reload...

We are diminished...

RIP, WeaponsMan...

One of the smartest and most clueful writers on firearms and history on the whole of the interwebs has passed away.

Kevin and I were infrequent email correspondents, and he was always complimentary and encouraging of my work. My last trip up to New Hampshire, we'd intended to meet for a beer and to shoot the breeze about guns and history, but a combination of procrastination and a bit of feeling under the weather caused me to put it off until the next trip.

Don't put things off until the next trip.
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It is finished.

Yesterday morning saw me at Marion County Fish & Game bright and early, with three hundred rounds of 9mm ammo and a grim determination to finish up the Wilson's ordeal so I could clean it.

This is weird. I normally don't care if a gun is filthy, but for some reason I want the Wilson to be all shiny and pretty.

And soon enough it was done. There were no malfunctions of any type to report, and I'd even saved that box of 124gr HST jacketed hollow points for last, to see if they'd function in maximum filth and dryness. Of course they did.

This gun has run like a sewing machine for 950 rounds of Winchester 124gr NATO Q4318 FMJ, 950 rounds of Speer Lawman 147gr FMJ, and 100 rounds of Federal 124gr HST ammunition with no cleaning or lubrication. The only malfunction was an underpowered near-squib round of Q4318 that left the empty case in the chamber. That one doesn't count against the gun, since it would have done the same in any other pistol. Nice QC, there, Winchester.

Would I trust this gun enough to carry it? Hell yes. Sample of one, and everything, but it's as reliable as any Glock or Sig I've tested, and way more so than the Canik or the Steyr were.

I'll take it apart this afternoon and get some closeups of the filth.
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Overheard in the Office...

RX: "What's wrong?"

Me: "I can't find it!"

RX: "Can't find what?"

Me: "Mas Ayoob sent me a review copy of his book, and I can't find where I put it."

RX: "Did you open the envelope?"

Me: "I read the book! 'Did you open the envelope?' That's a little harsh, don't you think?"

RX: "Well, sometimes people send you things and you don't open the envelopes."

Me: "They could be bombs!"

RX: "From Massad Ayoob?"

Me: "Good point."

RX: "Besides, that was long enough ago that any anthrax or smallpox would have died by now."

Hey, look!

A Brief History of the .38 Special as a People-Shootin' Cartridge, Part I...
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Skiffy.

I'm currently watching The Expanse (only three episodes in) and really digging it. That's some great big classic sci fi, there.

Speaking of which, TJIC has his SF novel ready for printing. Sample chapters are available for the reading. I liked what I read enough that I'll go ahead and order a copy of both books in dead tree.
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Outdoors, on my own...

Yeah, I spent some time outdoors in Vegas, but my schedule was on rails, it was all in a group, and that desert landscape always feels a little more like a movie set than actual outdoors. I guess it's the lack of trees and grass, which are normally the two most handy indicators that you're not inside anymore.

Today, though... Today is supposed to be chamber of commerce weather here in Hoosieropolis. Sunny and seventy-something degrees. Time to drop the top on the Zed Drei and drive out to Marion County Fish & Game and see if I can't finish out the last three hundred rounds on the Wilson test, and then maybe pedal the Broad Ripple SUV up into Broad Ripple Proper and get lunch at Brugge or the Brewpub or Public Greens.

I need some Vitamin D.
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Quick range trip...

Saturday morning I went to Indy Arms Co again, wanting to put at least a few rounds through the Wilson since the 2,000-round mark was so close and I was beginning to feel the urge to clean this poor gun, which is a novel sensation for me.

A hundred rounds of 147gr Speer Lawman went through the gun in a very quick range session. I'm probably going to hold off on replacing the front sight's light pipe until I clean the gun. The front end of it is filthy.

There were no malfunctions of any type to report.

This makes 1,700 rounds fired since the Wilson was last cleaned or lubed, with one FTE not charged to the gun at round #29. 300 rounds to go.
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Two hundred more...

Took the Wilson to Indy Arms Company along with two hundred rounds of Speer Lawman 147gr FMJ on Friday morning.

The group in the 8" circle should be labeled "150 rds".

Somewhere during a long string of fire in the first box of ammo, I noticed that the dot in the front sight wasn't glowing green anymore, but was instead a sort of target-colored circle. The fiber optic rod had been spit out after some 3,000 total rounds. This happens. It's why the sights ship with extra rods.

Kept shooting without a rod in the front sight.

During one long mag dump in the last fifty round box, my grip was starting to fall apart thanks to sweaty hands and lack of good physical conditioning. As I was shifting my hands around to rebuild my grip, my trigger finger said "Oh, that's a good sight picture!" and did its job. The result would be that low left shot. A good grip is important.

There were no malfunctions of any type to report.

This makes 1,600 rounds fired since the Wilson was last cleaned or lubed, with one FTE not charged to the gun at round #29. 400 rounds to go.
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Awwww, yissss!

C'mon and tease me some more!
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Have you noticed...

...that some of the people who got all overjoyed with the Navy delivering thirty tons of high explosives to Assad in half-ton increments one night the other week are now all in a hand-wringing tizzy over the Air Force delivering nine-and-a-half tons of high explosives to guerillas in Afghanistan all at once?
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Retro Shooting

The joke has been made that IDPA's rule set doesn't really reflect actual street carry guns so much as it does actual street carry guns of the early Nineties, and so it should be called Retro Action Shooting or something in recognition of this fact.

What would be cool would be if this were formalized into a ruleset with maybe a little cosplay added, the way Cowboy Action Shooting and its Wild Bunch and Zoot Shooter spinoffs have done.

• I'm Too Old For This Shit Division: Must shoot from concealed. Style of sports coat can vary. Revolvers or subcompact single stacks that are era-appropriate. PPKs, J-frames, or you can rock a Model 29...


• Welcome To The Party, Pal Division: Unconcealed (Concealment Optional.) Large capacity autos permitted. Make sure any Wayfarers are ballistic-rated.


• Ross Seyfried Division: Single-stack "open" guns circa '80s-early '90s. Bootie shorts, tube socks, porn staches, and foam-front meshback trucker hats are mandatory. Adhesive pornstaches (or faux beards to hide "superface") are allowed for participants unable or unwilling to grow their own facial spinach.

QotD: Concise Observation Edition...

" The difference between the social media folks and bloggers is the latter owned their content and delivery system. The social media types don’t own and are dependent on the delivery system someone else owns."

Which reminds me, it's time to back this thing up again...

Well...

That was interesting.
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Super power...

Here under the yellow sun of Pacific Time, I have the super power of waking up super early with no problems.

It's cool being out of bed at 5:30AM, wide awake and feeling guiltily like you overslept.
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Viva Las Vegas

Gotta be out front of the hotel at 8AM for the shuttle to the range, so not a lot of late night Vegas-type shenanigans tonight.

Also no "On The Road" nightstand picture because everybody's seen a flashlight and a clock radio. I decided to see how the other half flies again, since Nevada doesn't hardly recognize nobody's toter's permit and I'm only here basically one day and two nights.

My trite EDC pocket dump photo right now would be Manhattan-legal, unless they have some sort of flashlight butthurt there of which I am unaware.
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Sunday Shooting

Put another hundred rounds of 147gr Speer Lawman through the Wilson on Sunday morning at Indy Arms Co.

These targets always bugged me. Dude's hand is obscuring a big chunk of his A-zone, so I shot around it, or tried to.

There were no malfunctions of any type to report.

This makes 1,400 rounds fired since the Wilson was last cleaned or lubed, with one FTE not charged to the gun at round #29. 600 rounds to go.
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Another hundred in the books...

Saturday morning I got out to Indy Arms Co. with both the Sig X-Carry and the Wilson again. Fifty rounds of American Eagle 115gr FMJ through the Sig and a hundred of Speer Lawman 147gr ball through the Wilson.

There were no malfunctions of any type to report.

This makes 1,300 rounds fired since the Wilson was last cleaned or lubed, with one FTE not charged to the gun at round #29. 700 rounds to go.
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Tab Clearing...

• Karl Rehn's excellent "Beyond the One Percent" talk from Tac-Con '17 is up on his blog as a series of posts. It's worth a post here in its own right and will get one, but for now, just go read it.


• Ten Rules for (Firearms) Collecting from Weaponsman. It's true. All of it.

Automotif CXXXIV...

A fairly rara avis, especially just out and running about as what looks to be a more-or-less daily driver. This would be an '84 Ford Mustang SVO. Developed in the early '80s when it was feared that oil embargoes and gas crises and EPA regs spelled the certain death of the V-8, the SVO was an attempt at pioneering a credible performance future with four bangers. It was as much a technology demonstrator as it was a production model, a sort of blue collar Porsche 959.

In addition to an intercooled turbo four that pumped out 175 bhp in the debut year (205 in the subsequent model year) it had new aero body styling cues that would become standard across the Mustang line. It was the first Fox-body Mustang with 5-lug wheels and featured a revamped suspension. Car and Driver testing of an '85 model turned up a zero-to-sixty time of 6.8 seconds, a top speed of 129mph, and .79 G's on the skidpad; all numbers pretty much equivalent to the contemporary carburetted V-8 model and not too far off my own 2.8L BMW Z3 from a decade and a half later.

The odd-looking headlights are because the '84 SVO was to debut flush aero headlight covers for the Mustang, but DOT approval didn't arrive in time for production. (Yes, kids, Uncle Sam used to protect us from the dangers of headlamp covers.)

Shooting proceeds apace...

More range time with the P320 X-Carry test gun for Shooting Illustrated yesterday, and another hundred rounds through the Wilson for the blog...

A total of 150 rounds fired, a hundred through the Wilson and fifty through the Sig. I'd developed a bad habit of "prairie dogging", or looking over the sights rather than through them, and had been working to correct it, since it causes shots to run low. The problem vanished with the Wilson but the X-Carry continued to shoot a little low rather than a lot. I think this is one of the range guns from SHOT, judging from the sticker on the box; I remember it having that issue there, too.

The Wilson continues to run like a sewing machine.

There were no malfunctions of any type to report.

This makes 1,200 rounds fired since the Wilson was last cleaned or lubed, with one FTE not charged to the gun at round #29. 800 rounds to go.
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Past the halfway mark...

Another two-hundred round session with the Wilson at Indy Arms Co yesterday morning...

There were no malfunctions of any type to report.

This makes 1,100 rounds fired since the Wilson was last cleaned or lubed, with one FTE not charged to the gun at round #29. 900 rounds to go.
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I've lost my scorecard.

All we have to do is re-task one or two airstrikes and we could be bombing all three sides in the Syrian civil war! Historic first!

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) April 7, 2017

I watched the news today, oh boy...

Pew Pew Pew!

Another session Wednesday morning at Indy Arms Co. with the Wilson 9mm.

Two hundred rounds over the course of about twenty minutes. Trying to move the trigger a little faster. It's a good way to diagnose grip errors, I'll give it that...

One hundred rounds of Speer Lawman 147gr at fifteen feet and one hundred of the Winchester NATO at twenty-one.

There were no malfunctions of any type to report.

This makes 900 rounds fired since the Wilson was last cleaned or lubed, with one FTE not charged to the gun at round #29. 1,100 rounds to go.
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Seriously?

Generally I prefer the sort of instructors that I would want to subpoena in the legal morass after a self-defense shooting. I try and avoid the ones that the prosecution will want to subpoena.

Put your lawyer on danger pay, Gabe.
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Well, I figured it out.

What happened to my knee, I mean.

See, part of the curse of being tall is that your feet hang off the edge of the bed rather often.

Apparently, Monday night I slept on my left side, with my left leg straightened to the point that the knee was locked out straight. And the toes of my left foot were hooked over the end of the mattress, holding the leg in place. And then just add slight downward pressure from my bent right knee to the side of my hyperextended left knee for a few hours.

Not a lot of pressure, but steady pressure pushing the joint in a direction it's not supposed to go, with the leg locked in place. While I slept.

It feels a little better today. And the aspirin this morning is a lot more effective than the aspirin yesterday morning, but I'm still going to limit my activities today to a quick range trip.
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Huh.

Things That Had Honestly Never Crossed My Mind Until This Morning: Barry Manilow's sexuality.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) April 5, 2017

Rounding up...

Yesterday morning found me back at Indy Arms Co. with the Wilson, to bump the round count up some more...

The top group was at five yards and the bottom at ten yards. I wasn't using the Shotmaxx and wasn't really rushing. Probably a pretty lazy .7-1.0 pace, just emptying the mags.

There were no malfunctions of any type to report.

This makes 700 rounds fired since the Wilson was last cleaned or lubed, with one FTE not charged to the gun at round #29. 1,300 rounds to go.
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Jeezis...

My left knee is just amazingly sore.

Thankfully it's not the stabbing pain like at SHOT, it's more of an ache with the occasional technicolor twinge.

Staying off it. About to take a long, hot Epsom salt tub soak.

Hey, look!

A thumbnail sketch of some of the training blocks from the first day of Tac-Con '17!
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Sunday Range Day

Sunday's range trip had three goals:

• Function-checking the Apex trigger in the G37.
• Checking the installation of the Trijicon HD XR sights on the G32.
• Putting some more rounds through the Wilson on the way to 2k.

The trigger on the 37 worked fine, and I experienced a light bulb moment that should have been obvious in retrospect, but which will have to wait for a later post.

The rear sight on the 32 need to be nudged slightly to the right.

There were no malfunctions of any type to report with any of the three pistols.

This makes 600 rounds fired since the Wilson was last cleaned or lubed, with one FTE not charged to the gun at round #29. 1,400 rounds to go.
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You keep using that word...

Indiana's liquor laws are pretty good. You can go to the grocery store or the Walgreen's and grab a bottle of Jack Daniels off the shelf with less drama than it takes to buy Sudafed, for which you must carry a token to the pharmacist and sign a log and stuff because meth.

About the only notable laws are the prohibition on the sale of alcohol for off-premises consumption on Sundays (with the exception of beer purchased at the craft brewery) and the somewhat unusual prohibition of the sale of cold beer at grocery stores, convenience stores, and drug stores. You can sell chilled white wine in these places, but cold malt beverages are right out. Like any time there's a weird law in Indiana, I blame John Dillinger.

There's a good run-up to repealing this law pretty much every legislative session these days, but the state liquor store association, who has the monopoly on cold beer sales, defends their iron rice bowl tenaciously with lobbying and campaign contributions.

Enter a couple convenience stores of the local chain, Ricker's.

Like a lot of convenience stores, they have a little restaurant area with a couple tables for seating. They serve made-to-order food, they're a restaurant, ergo...cold beer sales were allowed in these Ricker's.

"Oh, no, no, no!" say state legislators, with the Indiana Association of Beverage Retailers' collective hand up their poopers, opening and closing their mouths. (IABR will drink cold beer while the Senators say this. It's good ventriloquism.)

So there's a hasty scramble at the statehouse to close this loophole, with "loophole" meaning "someone doing something perfectly legal that I don't like."

Thing is, the proposed patch can't just stop Ricker's, because that would be a bill of attainder and un-American. Instead, they figure the proper American way to stifle this business competition would be to reclassify a "restaurant" for purposes of alcoholic beverage sales as someplace that derives at least eighty percent of its revenue from food and beverage sales. So, if it passes, good bye to alcohol sales in movie theaters, bowling alleys, golf course clubhouses...

Laws and sausages.

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From an away game...

I spent most of the weekend writing for work. I'm, like, 3,600 words down with another 2,800ish to go in the next couple days, plus a trip to FedEx to get the pistol winging on its way. In the meantime, here are some recycled words from a conversation elsewhere...

I stole this from Kathy Jackson. If she got it from someone else, I don't remember who it was, so I'm crediting her...

So, imagine this island. The dry land starts at the beach and gently slopes upward. The farther inland you go, the higher the ground gets, but the steeper the slope becomes. Most of it only requires a pair of shoes, but if you keep going inland and upward, the slopes get steeper and eventually you may need specialized gear and training. But the climbing is fun, and some people buy the shoes and ropes and pitons and make a hobby of it.

Just putting your shoes on and walking off the beach will probably save you from 90% of the tsunamis that are going to come along. If you're way up on the mountain, it's going to take a really rare world-ender of a tsunami to affect you. How much time and money do you feel like spending mountain climbing? If you're doing it out of a pure risk-benefit calculus as opposed to because you just like mountain climbing, probably not a ton.

Similarly, I remember when the "zombie apocalypse" thing started rearing its head among survivalists (now called "preppers") some twenty years ago as basically a shorthand joke: "If you're prepared for the dead to rise from their graves and walk the earth in search of human brains, then a week without power after a hurricane should be a doddle."

This constant assertion that if people haven't taken a refresher Tactical Disruptive Combat Pistol III every year, shoot IDPA once a month, and carry a Roland Special with a two spare mags, a handheld light, a blowout kit, and a BUG, then they just aren't serious about self-protection is actively counterproductive in the wider shooting world.

"Putting on your shoes and walking off the beach" is carrying a gun...any gun...daily, getting at least a basic half-day class in when and how it may legally be used, and getting to the range with it at least twice a year to maintain some basic level of comfort with its use. If somebody does that, they are SO FAR ahead of the curve, statistically speaking. The majority of gun owners don't have carry permits. The majority of the ones who do, don't carry on anything like a regular basis.

If somebody's debating whether or not they can work an NRA Personal Protection Outside the Home class and daily carry of a P3AT into their budget and lifestyle, and you tell them that they might as well not even bother unless they're willing to dump a few thousand dollars and so much time that they'll have to give up one of their existing hobbies, like bass fishing or golf, then guess what they're not going to do?

Now in here, it's a different story because we're all a bunch of gun dorks who think this stuff is fun and it is our hobby. But sometimes we get into a lot of ego defense in trying to make our expenditure of vast amounts of time and money seem absolutely necessary for survival. (Most of us even acknowledge this with the whole "killed on the streets" joke.)

[We] repeatedly cite Tom Givens' database (which is in fact a gold mine of data.) Ask Tom how many of those sixty-some people were what you'd call "hobbyists" and how many had been to just a basic CCW or his introductory pistol class.

Now, do I think it would be awesome if lots of people got super serious about self-defense? Hell, yes I do. But that's for the next post...
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As I suspected...

...the rear sight on the Glock 32 needs to be nudged to the right just a teeny bit.

Everything ran fine, as one would expect.

Nice enough outside to drop the top on the Zed Drei on the way home from the range.
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Gun stuff...

Ammo arrived from SGAmmo, a case of 9mm Speer Lawman 147gr, a 300rd battlepack of 115gr PMC Bronze, and another 500rd sleeve of Winchester Q4318. I'm normally a pretty loyal Lucky Gunner customer, but the blowout price on the 147gr Speer was hard to pass up.

Last night I got the Zev Fulcrum out of the Glock 37, replacing it with an Apex trigger purchased from Brownells, and installed a set of Trijicon HD XR sights on the Glock 32. Range trip tomorrow to see how everything works. Bobbi says she might come along, too.

Vroom.

Somebody in the neighborhood has obviously been working on getting their bike up and running for the season.

It's blasted around the block a couple times now and is currently idling a few houses down across the street. It's not a V-twin, nor a boxer twin, either. It's a fairly big four-cylinder, I think, although it could be an inline triple.

When the temperature and humidity are like this and it's pitch-black night outside, and I hear that noise, I will be forever cast back to that Georgia night sitting astride the GPz550 we just bump-started, blue high-beam and green neutral indicators glowing up at my helmet...

"Do I know how to ride this? Of course I do!"

Of course I didn't.

But that just made it all that much more fun.
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