Clownshoes

Trump's cabinet picks started off normal enough. Marco Rubio as SecState? Sure, dude's been a senator for over a decade, with most of that time on the Senate Committee for Foreign Relations and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (he's currently the ranking member on the latter), and that's as solid a resume for the job as you can want. 

Things got progressively sillier from there, though. I'd make fun of RFK, Jr. for Secretary of Health and Human Services, but that's been thoroughly covered elsewhere.

The proposed Director of National Intelligence, though, is a huge yikes. You know who's excited about her? Komsomolskaya Pravda.

“The C.I.A. and the F.B.I. are trembling,” Komsomolskaya Pravda, a Russian newspaper, wrote on Friday in a glowing profile of Ms. Gabbard, noting, positively, that Ukrainians consider her “an agent of the Russian state.” Rossiya-1, a state television channel, called her a Russian “comrade” in Mr. Trump’s emerging cabinet.

Jesus wept.

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Great Moments in Bad Ideas

On this day in 1995, Robert Overacker rode a jet ski off the brink of Niagara Falls and into history...and eternity.

One of the globe's historically bad neighborhoods.

The AP news headline reads thusly:

At least 13 people have died after a boat carrying migrants sunk off Yemen’s coast, UN says

It says something about how messed up that part of the world is that, not having read the story yet, I'm not 100% sure which direction the boat was going.

Odds are that it was full of people fleeing the Sudan and/or the Horn of Africa and hoping to get to the Gulf States, but given Saudi atrocities at the Yemeni border and the hot mess Yemen's been for years now, maybe they were going the other way and hoping to get to, I dunno, someplace reasonably stable like Egypt or Kenya.

*goes and reads story*

Yup, it was the former. Ethiopians hoping to get work in the Gulf States.

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What in the wide, wide world of sports?

So, a little after seven AM on Saturday morning, a dude here in Indianapolis wanders out to his truck with three kids in tow. He unlocks the truck, retrieves the pistol that he'd had in the cab, cranks a round off into the air, and then hands it to one of the kids, who proceeds to do likewise. The kids then pass it around, each of them popping a few rounds into the sky... at a 45 degree angle, you know, ensuring the bullet will travel as far as possible ...before handing the pistol back to its owner who then empties most of the rest of the mag into the clouds.

It's all on video.

The dude got arrested and, you know what? Good. Lock his ass up for a bit. And he better have to forfeit the blaster, too. Clip a corner off my lolbertarian card or whatever, but maybe gun ownership isn't for him.

Does this look like there's a safe direction in any direction?

Tab Clearing...

• Being a social media clout goblin is a fraught choice for a career path.


• Home vet tips for the prepper cat owner.


• 94 year-old man finds and restores his dad's car.

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Myths and Legends

Harrington & Richardson's little .25 Auto, based on a Webley design, is entirely devoid of sights. The smooth curve of the slide's upper surface is unmarred by any notch, groove, or bump.

Bring this up on a gun forum or at the neighborhood gun shop and you will undoubtedly hear the reply "Oh, it's a belly gun!" Longtime readers of this space will know that this is my bête noire because how do you know it's going to be a belly fight? A dude sticks you up from a dozen or more feet away and you're gonna what? Say "Oh whoopsie! Hey, dude, I only brought my belly gun today. Wait right here while I run home and get something with some sights"?

Carrying a gun with not even the most rudimentary sights is like showing up at the golf course with a whole bag full of putters. It displays a failure to grasp the potential requirements. It's not like it conveys any advantage, either. What, does it make this thing faster to draw or something? As if!

Then we have some classic Winchester .25ACP ammunition, the 45 grain "Expanding Point" round, catalogued as the X25AXP. Sometimes referred to as the "Pellet Nose" round, this is a .25 caliber jacketed hollow point with a #4 steel shot pellet seated in the cavity. The idea being that it made the projectile more feed-friendly in older or jankier pocket pistols, but the pellet would push back into the bullet to initiate expansion on impact.

On the downside, it didn't work that way. On the upside, that's a good thing, because the last thing you want your .25ACP bullet to do is expand. The .25 Auto is one of the few handgun rounds that's almost as miserable a performer as popular myth suggests. It's a marginal penetrator under the best of circumstances and doesn't have any oomph to waste on expansion. If you're stuck with a deuce-five, stick with ball.

Testing my sympathies.

Some guy in Indy got shot by the cops, and when the video of the incident was released, it's pretty clear why they popped him.

Look, if you point a gun at the po-po, especially if they're already pointing guns at you... let alone if you actually start shooting at them ...I have a real hard time mustering up a ton of sympathy, if only from a sort of Darwin Awards standpoint.

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"You're not here for the hunting, are you?"

So a teenager here in Indy got busted for ordering seven machine gun conversion devices (six Glock switches and a DIAS) from Hong Kong.

For bonus points, at the time of his arrest he was currently on probation... for illegally possessing a machine gun.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess homie wasn't a MENSA member.

Tab Clearing...

• The Connoisseur's Glock.


• The pitfalls of using blanks in scenario training.


• Marko is giving away ten signed copies of Descent. (Or you could preorder a regular old un-signed copy here.)

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Today in "People Are Dumb"...

From the Associated Press:

Federal auto safety regulators are warning people not to stick decals on their steering wheels because they can be hurled at drivers if the air bags inflate in a crash.

The warning from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration comes after another driver was severely hurt by a flying emblem during a crash. The air bag inflated and sent two pieces of metal from an aftermarket decal into the driver’s face and neck.

The agency said it couldn’t say where or when the injury occurred. But it said the injury was the second it is aware of involving an aftermarket decal. In the previous case the driver lost sight in one eye after being hit by a rhinestone-adorned decal that hit them in the face, NHTSA said in a statement Tuesday.

Apparently bling-encrusted vehicle logo stickers are a thing that people stick in the center of their steering wheel hub, right over the airbag cover. You know, the airbag that deploys via an explosive charge. Essentially this means you can buy fragmentation sleeves for your safety grenade from Amazon!

From Reddit, where someone hot-glued a homemade claymore.

Imagine if someone did this in a car that had un-replaced Takata airbags!

"Yo, dawg, I heard you like fragments so I put some fragments on your fragments..."

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Tab Clearing...

• The easiest way to be a rich and famous author is to be a rich and famous person who gets offered a book deal.


• "Fully Self Driving" has been a scam. Perhaps in the legal sense, even.


• Stop pointing guns at people you shouldn't be pointing guns at.

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Negligent Discharge

So one of the NYPD cops, an ESU* officer at that, cranked off a round in the Columbia building that was temporarily occupied by student protestors. He was using the weapon-mounted light to find a way to navigate barriers in the dark. Fortunately the bullet didn't hit anyone.

There was absolutely no reason to have an unholstered firearm in the middle of that Punch & Judy Show. That was a job for a handheld light, not the SureFire U-Boat screwed to your Glock. 

People act like just having a light on a pistol turns it into some sort of dual-purpose tool and next thing you know they're using it to direct traffic or look for stuff they dropped under their squad car in the dark. I swear to gawd, it's only a matter of time before we hear about some Officer Fife using it to check for horizontal gaze nystagmus.

*NYPD Emergency Services Unit contains their equivalent of SWAT, but not all ESU officers are SWAT dudes.

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Don't Just Do Something, Stand There

Contrary to popular belief, NYC is not a particularly high-crime city. It's certainly no Memphis or St. Louis, and the borough of Manhattan in particular is actually unusually low-crime for its size. The majority of the crime that happens between the Hudson and East rivers is likely of the white collar variety; it's too expensive for normie criminals. The era of "The Bronx is burning" and Escape From New York is decades in the rearview mirror.

But low crime is not no crime, and a couple high profile incidents in the subways have caused the powers that be in New York to decide that Something Must Be Done... and that "something" is a doozy, let me tell you.

You can tell from the way the dude in the center is wearing his Safariland dropleg rig that we're not exactly dealing with operators here. I suppose it's too much to expect for them to at least be deploying MPs? There's a whole frickin' battalion of them based right there in the city, after all. Hopefully they're using those local dudes. I'd hate to picture SPC Jablonski, a 91B from Binghamton, getting excited and cutting loose with an M4 amongst the theater rush.

Just because you can...

Just because you can carry something in Condition One doesn't make it a good idea.

The Walther PD380 is an extreme example, sure, but most DA/SA guns that can be carried "cocked & locked" really aren't optimized for it. Safeties are often less than ideally ergonomic for the task (heck, the original GI M1911A1 thumb safety ain't that hot; the giant aftermarket for improved ones wasn't just for cosmetics.)

Further, they are often lacking in a serious detent to keep them in the on-safe position. Few things are as puckering as discovering a cocked and unlocked pistol in your holster. It's not like a modern striker-fired pistol intended to be carried that way. Many pistols of this type, especially older ones, have hardly anything in the way of passive safeties when cocked.

Learn to shoot double action for the first shot. De-cock between strings at the range. It's not a difficult skill.

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Still a bad idea...

Ugh, the low-IQ garbage that washes ashore in my inbox is so tedious. 

Check this ad out. I like how they get so close to the truth here and then still manage to miss completely.

"It's truly one of the best places to keep your gun whenever it isn't either locked up or on your person" burbles the ad copy.

Look, here is a complete and exhaustive list of the best places to keep your gun, especially in your car:

1. Locked up securely.
2. In a holster on your person.

That's it. That's the whole list.

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Good plan, GOP.

I was trying to think of something that would poll worse among the general population than "hating Taylor Swift and football", and here comes the Heritage Foundation with "ending recreational sex".

On the Left, their Extremely Online weirdos may have taken over the faculty lounges, but over on the Right, the "Needs to Turn Off Their Computer and Touch Some Frickin' Grass" demographic has hijacked the think tanks and is about to finish conquering the party machinery.

I got news for the Heritage Foundation: The guy who wanted to ban dancing was not the hero of Footloose. It's like these guys are running around finding every 80/20 issue they can and jumping on the 20% side of it with both feet. The problem with segregating yourself into little social media agreeing bubbles is that you end up thinking that the percentage of the voting public made up of Terminally Online dorks with Roman statue profile pics is a lot bigger than it really is.

It's one thing to accidentally step on the occasional rake. It's another thing to go to the store, buy a bunch of rakes, scatter them across your lawn, and run around stomping on them on purpose.

Man, I remember when I took the Heritage Foundation seriously...

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Automotif CDLXVIII...

Dating this Azure Blue Firemist Cadillac Coupe DeVille (EDIT: Looking more closely at the trim, this appears to actually be a ritzier Fleetwood Brougham Coupe) is made easy by the fender badge, which denotes that it had Caddy's V-4-6-8 engine.

While cylinder deactivation isn't especially uncommon now, it was pretty radical back in the days when really powerful computers still had their memory measured in kilobytes.

The 1980 Caddies had been using the 368 cubic inch L61 V-8, which was the older 425 cube motor with the bore reduced to 3.8 inches. The stroke was left at 4.06", which made for an undersquare tractor motor that got better gas mileage. It was fuel-injected on the front wheel drive Eldos and Sevilles, but the RWD bodies still used Rochester Quadrajet carbs.

For 1981, Cadillac added a complicated cylinder deactivation system that would use solenoids to lock the rocker arms on the deactivated cylinders, creating the 140bhp L62 V4-6-8. Now using throttle body injection on all models, it would theoretically use all eight cylinders for accelerating, six for normal around-town driving, and only fire on four cylinders for interstate cruising.

It was a public relations nightmare, received thirteen programming upgrades in its sole model year of retail sales, and would probably be remembered as the crappiest artifact of the Malaise Era if it weren't for the fact that Oldsmobile's 350 Rocket Diesel hadn't been an even bigger disaster.

Fortunately, the whole system could be disabled by disconnecting a single wire, which this one has almost certainly had done since the driver does not appear to be shedding tears of impotent rage.

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Great Moments in Bad Gun Ideas

This photo just popped up in my Microsoft OneDrive memories for the day...

I mean, the trigger was nice, and it shot okay, but the more and more I thought about it, the lessless  I dug the whole basic concept behind it...

"Hey, guys, let's make a pistol that adds a bunch of extra mechanical complexity while negating one of the principle advantages of 9x19mm, namely dirt cheap training ammo, all for the dubious benefit of adding a possible 25-to-50 feet per second of muzzle velocity!"

I mean, if you want one as a range toy-slash-safe queen simply for the mechanical curiosity because you're an absolute gun nerd, that's understandable, but I'm pretty much of the opinion that it's a fundamentally unserious choice as an actual life-saving tool.

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A Jog Around the Blogs...

• Tailfins and Dagmars


• Match safes


• Your house... and property ...is not a free-fire zone.

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A reminder...

Openly carrying a sidearm isn't a "deterrent". It's just letting everyone who sees it know that you have a handgun. They get to decide how deterred that makes them feel.

If Sumdood is willing to go hands-on with a young, fit, athletic cop and rip his Glock out of a Level III duty holster with enough force that it breaks the retention device, why is he going to be "deterred" by some guy who looks like 300 pounds of chewed bubble gum and isn't even aware of his surroundings?

Not deterring anybody.