Lowered Expectations

The arc of my expectations for Rand over the last ten years is a saga of disappointment that's hard to go back and read.

I once thought he'd bring some libertarianish sensibilities to the Senate. Now I'm relieved that he doesn't actually fling poo in a *literal* fashion.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) December 17, 2020

The more things change...

 David Yamane has a bunch of great quotes from an older work discussing the history of guns and gun control in America.

Seeing how the arguments pro and con change so little over the years had me googling up H.L. Mencken's 1925 vintage classic in response to a proposed national ban on handguns, titled "The Uplifters Try It Again":

"The new law that it advocated, indeed, is one of the most absurd specimens of jackass legislation ever heard of, even in this paradise of legislative donkeyism. Its single and sole effect would be to exaggerate enormously all of the evils it proposes to put down. It would not take pistols out of the hands of rogues and fools; it would simply take them out of the hands of honest men. The gunman today has great advantages everywhere. He has artillery in his pocket, and he may assume that, in the large cities, at least two-thirds of his prospective victims are unarmed. But if the Nation’s proposed law (or amendment) were passed and enforced, he could assume safely that all of them were unarmed."

I recommend reading the entirety of the Mencken essay, as it's Henry Louis in top form.

Apparently America in the 1920s faced a scourge of revolvers. Here are some of them.

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Overheard in the Hallway...

Me: *whining, and apparently not enunciating well* "Ỡħ, Î ǥøⱦ ɐȵ ḙƴɛȴɑṧħ ƫūṝṋềƌ ïǹṧɨďĕ-ōůẗ!"

RX: "What?"

Me: "I said I got an eyelash turned inside-out."

RX: "Oh, I thought you said you got your eye turned inside out."

Me: "I think I would have sounded more distressed if that were the case."

*pours out a Zombie Dust for my homies*

NOOOOOOOOO!

Did you see this tragedy, @KirkFreemanLaw?https://t.co/pboXjHPVkZ

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) December 16, 2020

"I had to get it on!"

Yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the release of my favorite movie that isn't Blade Runner.

There's a fantastic retrospective of Heat here. 

My friend Michael gave me a souvenir from the set of one of the coolest shootouts in movie history:

Click on this link and you can get a great 2020-themed Heat sticker like the one below!

"Spinning Buzzsaw of Death!"

The hype the Black Talon generated back in the day was completely disproportionate to its actual utility as a bullet. They were good for the time, one of the first modern designs of the post-Miami gunfight era, but people absolutely lost their minds over the black Lubaloy coating, the pointy jacket petals, and of course that bellicose name.

Of the original loadings, 147gr 9x19mm, 180gr .40S&W, and 230gr .45AARP, the .45 is the only one that still maintains some relevance. The 9 and .40 were almost immediately eclipsed by much better performing, more modern designs in their respective chamberings, but you could still do worse than a 230gr Talon in a full-size .45. (You can do a lot better, too.)

The way that both the hysterical media and devoted fanbois of the round latched onto the "spinning buzzsaw" thing was funny. I absolutely could not convince this one dude that the bullet would barely make one complete revolution in the target. He was totally hung up on the "revolutions per minute" number and didn't want to hear how far a bullet would travel in a minute (assuming you fired it in, like, outer space or something).

"It's spinning at nearly 40,000rpm!"

"Yeah, but your barrel has a 1:16" twist rate, and dude ain't sixteen inches thick." 

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Unrealistic Expectations

Both sides are absolutely willing to shoot a hole in the raft to get the other side wet.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) December 14, 2020

Both sides have unrealistic expectations about how a Sec 230 repeal would hurt their foes while miraculously leaving them unscathed. 

This article predates the latest shouting match by a year, but it's no less true. 

I predict some of the first victims of a Sec. 230 repeal would be free blogging services. I mean, Blogspot is already Google's vermiform appendix and probably just kept running on pure inertia. If they gotta worry about getting sued for everything said by every crank with a blog, it'll be cheaper to just pull the plug on the whole shebang.

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This Current Decade...

How it started:

   

How it's going:

 

Unpossible.

"A gunman opened fire from the steps of New York City’s Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine just after an outdoor choir performance there on Sunday, and was himself shot and wounded by police, according to police and a Reuters photographer at the scene."

This must be a mistaken report, because handguns are doubleplus illegal in NYC.

EDITED TO ADD: CNN says the shooter has croaked.

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Literary Losses

This wretched year has taken John le Carre now. 

I guess I'll be doing some spy novel reading this week, as soon as I finish Flashman and the Redskins.

On a more positive note, it looks like all of the Flashman Papers are available on Kindle now, and that did not used to be the case.

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Second Fiddle

In this era when .40S&W is tied with (or sometimes ahead of) regular ol' 9x19mm ammunition in the cost and availability sweepstakes, I feel like I should be looking into .40 loadings that offer adequate terminal ballistics while being both as controllable and easy on the gun itself as possible.

I don't need all the foot pounds, just adequate penetration and reliable expansion while being fairly barrier-blind. I want more ammo options...

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Film Project...

The Twenty Tap Crew, Canon EOS-1N, EF 85mm f/1.8, Kodak 400TX

Thumbnail review...

...of Orders of Battle

Our protagonist gets put back in the saddle again. Lankies. SPACE KABLOOIE! Lankies. Spaceships. Big cliffhanger. The End? Argh.

Speed and Expansion

Four layers of denim is a challenging barrier for expansion, especially for slow projectiles and older hollow point designs. For a slow, older hollow point? Expansion actually becomes somewhat less than likely.

On the left, a 225gr .45 Colt Winchester Silvertip, and on the right is a 230gr .45ACP Remington Golden Saber. Both were fired out of a Blackhawk Convertible, one of the birdshead ones with a 4.6" tube.

The Silvertip peeled a petal back but the Golden Saber didn't deform noticeably at all. Both exited the block on the far side and were stopped by the cloth on the backside. Penetration was adequate without being excessive, but they didn't do anything a LRN projectile wouldn't have done.

A Silvertip from the same lot was fired into the block from a 16" lever-action carbine and performed rather differently...

Out of the levergun, the round had enough steam to expand violently, but still enough momentum to traverse the entire length of the block, coming to rest slightly protruding from the far side. Nearly ideal performance for a pistol bullet, it just needed to be launched from a long gun to attain it.

Incidentally, we also fired a .45 Colt Hornady Critical Defense load, using the 185gr FTX flex-tip projectile. It also expanded violently but, being on the light-for-caliber side of things, stalled out after around 12" of penetration.

This is marginal performance at best. On the upside, if fired out of a CCW revolver with a 4" or shorter barrel, it likely wouldn't have expanded at all and would have therefore penetrated just fine. Or you could have used a cheaper semiwadcutter.

Footnote from a discussion on the Bookface: 

"It's my experience that, as velocities go up, Clear Gel results get wonkier due to the difference in the shear characteristics of the two mediums, to the point that at rifle or near-rifle velocities there's no meaningful correlation to be even guessed at. I also try and avoid reading any tea leaves in Clear Gel from where or how quickly the projectile upsets. 

It's easy to draw unnecessary conclusions from the fact that duty handgun rounds that perform well in 10% ordnance gel also tend to perform well in Clear Gel."

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Busy earlier, but back home.

Range trip this morning. Got the dot sighted in on SECRET REVIEW GUN and did some jello shots for a speculative article (I've never written an article on spec before, so this is untrodden ground for me.)

Also popped a few caps through that little Bond Arms 9x19mm derringer for yuks. More later.

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Off the virtual shelf...

If you preordered Marko's latest Frontlines novel, it's just hit your Kindle. If you didn't preorder, Orders of Battle is available now.

Insomnia woke me up last night and I found both that and the latest issue of RECOIL on my iPad, which was pretty cool.

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Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #194...

I'm not going to lie, the Smith & Wesson 1066 just really rings my bells. I mean, it's basically a DA/SA Commander-sized pistol in that connoisseur's carry chambering, 10mm Auto. If those hammer-dropping safeties were converted to rebounding decockers, it'd be well-nigh irresistible.

In a world where I didn't have to worry about things like availability of spare parts & magazines, or being able to find holsters, and where ammo grew on trees, I'd be awfully tempted to holster up this blaster and just walk the earf in search of adventure.

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Weekend Writing

Over the weekend I completed a fat, feature-length gun review, a shorter quickie review, and put big dents in a couple of columns, such that I should be able to knock them both out this afternoon without much effort.

That's over three thousand words written on Saturday and Sunday and, unlike fiction, I can't pad that stuff out with dialogue. On the upside, I don't have to think of a plotline, either; just describe yet another black plastic striker-fired pistol in a way that the reader can understand the various details that distinguish it from a hundred other extremely similar pistols.

I'm not an author, just a writer. A 1500+ word day leaves my skull feeling like it's been emptied with a shop vac, even if the actual time spent writing was only a few hours. The stresses of 2020 have not made that any easier.

Apocryphally, Stephen King puts out words at a 2k/day clip, while Hemingway did 500 to 1000. Hats off to that.

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No Lie Detected

Okay but his face is all of us, 2020 https://t.co/diMIviISr5

— Scott Stephens, aka Rogue 6 (@scottjstephens) December 7, 2020

LOL Calm Down

I'd be afraid this dude would accidentally strip the threads on cylinder head bolts while listening to talk radio.

"Jesus wants you to switch to decaf, bro." https://t.co/C6Kjim3nSR

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) December 6, 2020