Whom the gods would destroy, they must first make ironic.

So, Patrick Sweeney apparently did a little video piece for Guns & Ammo TV intended to rebut those who dis ¡BLACKHAWK‼'s Serpa holster as potentially dangerous. Among the claims were that people were just not internalizing the proper practice of keeping the trigger finger indexed straight along the frame.

Someone, however, thought to do a slow-mo excerpt from the video...



Ouch.

Now, before anybody pipes up that he muzzled his hand, I don't think he did; that's an artifact of the angle and the lens focal length. He did, however, provide a splendid illustration of why we keep our off-side paw centered high on our sternum on the draw, though.

Let me quote from Karl Rehn's excellent breakdown of this video:

From 0:07 to 0:22 you’ll see the entire holster lift as he pulls up on the gun, because he’s using 2″ belt loops with a 1.5″ wide belt.  You can see the whole holster move up, the belt ride up in the belt loops, and even see the pants rise a little.  The belt is too loose, and the belt attachment on the holster needs spacers to close up the slots, or a different belt attachment entirely.  “One size fits all” means “fits none properly”.   You don’t want your holster to move at all when you draw.  That’s bad.

Karl's a smart dude. Y'all should listen to him.

...and here's the thing. I've met Pat Sweeney. Had a couple beers with him and Farmer Frank and Bryce Towsley after the first CTC Midnight 3 Gun match, as a matter of fact. He's a pretty squared-away dude and I wouldn't mind sharing a range with him any time. Now, if this happens to somebody who literally handles guns for a living, how much worse is it for Jasper T. Cletus who doesn't dry-practice, only gets to the indoor range once a month, and even then isn't allowed to run the gun from the holster?

Of course, the baying of the hounds has started on Facebook...

"The military issues the Serpa!"

If you have to make do with crap gear because your employer made you, I guess you just have to make do. But why drop your own coin on it? And dropping coin is what it really comes down to, I think. 

The lengths people will go to in defending a dumb $29 holster purchase decision is a great indicator of how much ego people tie up in their gear. It's no wonder that they'll go that much further to defend the $450 they dropped on, say, an idiotic pistol purchase decision... 
. 

Derp sells well, especially if it has velcro on it.

So somebody comes up with some inventive new specialized way to carry a gun in situation X. It doesn't matter what the situation is, somebody's come up with some special gear solution for it.

Sometimes it makes sense, such as pistol harnesses designed to be strapped to the outside of cold weather gear in bear country. Sometimes it's of dubious utility, like "car holsters". Sometimes it's downright dangerous, like that holster that straps around your upper arm so that you can carry a pocket pistol upside down, pointed at your brachial artery for no reason that is ever adequately explained.

Regardless of the type of strange carry, if you criticize it on the internet you will inevitably encounter some dude who comes along and explains to you that he has spent dozens of hours running drills and scenarios with video and stopwatches and bunches of different shooters that totally justify his use of this system.

Heck, I've apparently spent fewer hours at the range in all of 2013 than some of these guys have perfecting their technique of drawing left-handed against left-handed carjackers approaching from the passenger side rear, and that's even if my range time total includes the hours I spent sleeping on the Crimson Trace bus at the Midnight 3 Gun match because I went out to walk the stages on media night and couldn't find a ride back to the hotel.

(Apparently I should have had a special "Sleeping On The Bus" holster to do that, so I was doing it wrong anyway.)
.

Fall cleaning...

So, there I was, in the blowing desert sands of the second to last stage at the Crimson Trace 3 Gun match and my M&P doesn't go back into battery. I clear it and keep shooting and think to myself, "Self, when was the last time you really cleaned this thing?" And the answer, which I do not like, was that the last time I could honestly remember taking it apart and really cleaning it was... ...late October of '11?

I mean, I usually pull a bore snake through it after shooting, and I keep it lubed, but it doesn't really get torn down and, you know, clean-type cleaned very often. See, I have the second M&P 9 that I do most of my range shooting with, and now the M&P 357, so my carry gun doesn't get shot that much. Except for classes. And matches. And those times at Blogorado. And...

Checking my records, this is apparently one Blogorado, one AFHF, one MAG-40, and two Crimson Trace Midnight 3 Gun matches worth of cack. I've seen cleaner rental guns.

When I got home from Oregon, I moved the Lasergrip and Lightguard to the M&P357 for the time being, holstered it up, and SWORE A MIGHTY OATH that I would clean my M&P 9 ASAP.

ASAP, apparently, being two months later...

Anyhow, the .357SIG is all put away and the 9 is cleaned and back on my hip, and all is right with the world. Now I've got to remember to order a .40 barrel for the .357 from Brownells.

I am never letting that thing get that dirty again. And this time I mean it.

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #75...

Actually, with the Mark 6 3-18X Loopie, this is more "optics pr0n" than "gun pr0n", but whatever...

(And yes, the scope was as amazing as the price tag would indicate.)

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #67...

WHAT? I CAN'T HEAR YOU.

The stage gun from Stage 6, a teeny little PWS piston SBR with da switch. Basically you went running around a plywood shoothouse with this thing, while wearing a pair of PVS-14s. The gun had a laser on it and there were two 30-round mags in the gun; there were fifteen targets, so I left it on "semi" and saved myself a mag change on the clock.

Let me tell you, crawl up on the stock of an unsuppressed ~7" AR and the muzzle blast is... noticeable.

Truth in advertising...

I'd never fired a grenade launcher before.

I mean, I've fired a bunch of 37mm "grenade launchers", usually just popping a flare into the sky over the lake or what-have-you, but actually launching a grenade with the intent to hit something? That was completely outside of my skillset.

The FN40GL has a true DAO trigger so that Pvt. Snuffy can give a recalcitrant primer as many do-overs as he wants* without having to re-cock the weapon. When mounted on its stand-alone shoulder-stock doohickey, it is strange to fire because this long, light, vague trigger is most easily accessed by the traffic finger rather than the more usual digit.  Combine that with uncertainty over what recoil will be like and it makes one hesitate to snug up a good cheek weld on that metal rod of a stock to use the irons.

I was supposed to hit a car some distance downrange. Fifty yards? Seventy-five? With an orange practice marker grenade.

Fortunately there was a green Crimson Trace RailMaster laser clamped to one of the acres of Picatinny rail on the thing. "Just hold it where the trim strip on the door is... er, where it used to be... and be smooth on the trigger and you'll hit it, no problem," said the helpful RO.

The range officers on Stage 9 were so helpful because even on the second night of the match, they still got the giggles every time a marker grenade hit the car. It really is the simple things in life that are the most fun.

I held my head up like a prairie dog watching the green dot on the derelict Subie's door panel rather than snugged down watching the front sight like a good shooter, partly because of recoil paranoia and partly because, hey, I wanted to see the grenade hit, too.

FOOP!

pause...

POOF! Direct hit! Orange marker dust spattered everywhere. w00t!

You can see the orange on the berm from people who didn't listen to instructions.

Recoil was negligible, especially considering that I'd just lobbed a several ounce projectile out of something that felt about as substantial as a Nerf gun. And the laser? The laser made it stupid easy. If you could hold the dot still and pull a DA trigger properly, all you had to do was hold the dot where they told you and you literally couldn't miss.

In this case, the laser was practically cheating. If I'd realized the laser was that dialed in, I'd have shot it from the hip, just because.


*I don't know the exact logic behind this, but I think I'd treat the possibility of a 40mm hangfire differently than a 5.56mm one, too.

I'm not really shotgun people but...

I had so much fun at the first Crimson Trace Midnight 3 Gun match shooting Iain Harrison's FN SLP that when I ran across a New-Old-Stock Remington 870 smoothbore slug gun earlier this year for a reasonable price, I snatched it up.

Once I got the bugs ironed out (or filed off, as the case may be) I had a tremendous amount of fun running it at this year's match, too. I had forgotten just how... kinesthesiologically satisfying it is to run a pump gauge at speed. Boom! shalakalak Boom!

See the shells in the sidesaddle there? I'm doing it wrong.

 Love the Magpul stock, and I say that as someone who, when she first saw the Magpul shotgun furniture, thought "Okay, the guys at Magpul have jumped the shark now, because that looks flimsy and ghey." Despite my treatment of the 870 which, like most of my guns intended as range toys and sporting goods rather than collectibles, varies between neglect and mild abuse, nothing on the stock has broken or fallen off yet.

Surprisingly, I haven't injured myself with the (optional) rear sling loop. If a klutz like me didn't hurt herself, it's probably safe for normal people.

One of the advantages of a pistol grip on a shotgun is that it allows people without superhuman forearm strength to hold the gauge comfortable shouldered with one hand. Unfortunately, the downsides are that it pokes out awkwardly when the weapon is slung, makes operating the 870 safety a pain, and some don't like what it does to the handling of the gun. The Magpul stock gives the advantage of the pistol grip, in that even my wimpy wrist can keep the shotgun shouldered with just my strong hand, and hasn't any of the disadvantages. (Well, maybe it wouldn't handle as well as an English stock if I took this thing hunting for upland birds...)

The Mesa sidesaddle holds the shells with a death grip. Now that it's a little worn in, you no longer need to beat the rounds in with a rubber mallet*, but they're still awful snug. Even given how tight it holds them, though, you probably want to keep the shells brass-up; even the mild recoil of low-brass bird shot was causing reloads in the side-saddle to "walk" downward, so why tempt gravity?

In the lighting department, my experimenting has left me convinced that the SureFire forend is the industry standard for a reason. If you want a light on your gauge, this is probably the way to go unless you have a technique- or situation-specific reason to use something else.

I have a Magpul forward sling attachment doohickey en route, and that will probably finish the shotgun project from the hardware side of things for the foreseeable future.

Whether or not I install ghost rings and/or a red dot remains an open question. I haven't had any real difficulty with the factory rifle sights, but then I haven't had any really challenging shooting problems with it yet. We'll see.

When it comes to shotguns, I can't recommend this thread at p-f.com highly enough. There's more hands-on, real-world experience with running a gauge in those five pages than there is in some whole fora. It should be stickied, if not made into an e-book.


*Only moderate exaggeration.

Tab Clearing...

• Bearded axe? I have one of those! I hope I'm showing it the proper respect. (I think it's on top of the fridge in the basement.)


• Metrocon Fortnightly* covered the Crimson Trace M3GI, too. (They sent someone who seems to have confused a SAW with a SCAR, though, despite apparently having penned a tome on manliness. Apparently being able to tell your automatic weapons is no longer a vital skill for dudes.)


• Via Firehand by way of Og, an awesome piece from Mike Rowe. My favorite line: "The world is full of well-intended people who believe that prices, wages and rents should should have nothing to do with pesky things like supply and demand. While I applaud their intentions, I’m afraid the Common Sense Clause of the DJCC does not allow my name or likeness to be associated with any views or expressions that could be interpreted as “unrealistic or childlike.”"

*Thanks, NJT!

Where there's smoke...

For the first night of the Midnight 3 Gun match I was running Federal bulk-pack 115gr FMJ. After the first stage on the second night of the match, I had to break into a box of WWB ball ammo and...

Holy smoke!

That was stage two, which involved a stroll downrange on a roped off path that started out with the shotgun and finished with some cardboard pistol targets. In between were some steel plates and a triple plate rack that were optional pistol/shotgun targets.

I'd been slow but accurate with the pistol and reloading the shotgun on the clock could be timed with an hourglass, so once I broke all the clays, I ditched the gauge and drew my pistol and on the first target noticed I had a problem: My smokeless powder wasn't.

Gray steel and brown cardboard against beige desert dust, the whole thing obscured by a floating cloud of smoke lit bright white with my CTC LightGuard. Without the light the targets blended almost perfectly with the background. With the light the smoke was like fog lit by high beams.

Here is my question, internets: Was it the switch to the WWB that produced more smoke? Or was it some trick of the weather (the air had gotten distinctly colder and clammier as we neared the dew point)?

Gear list...

This week I mean to get around to a full-on "lessons learned" recap from the Crimson Trace M3GI match...

Some gear ho' stuff for my own future reference before I forget...

• Pistol: Smith & Wesson M&P 9, Ameriglo I-Dot Pro sights, CTC LG-660 Lasergrip and LG-760 Lightguard, Dark Star Gear OWB holster and ¡BLACKHAWK! mag carrier. Federal and WWB 115gr FMJ ammo.


• Rifle: MGI QCB upper in 5.56 w/M4-profile Stag Arms bbl, CTC MVF-515 light/green laser foregrip, Vltor stock, Hogue grip, YHM Phantom flash hider, Aimpoint Comp ML2 in LaRue LT150 mount, Magpul MBUS, Magpul 30rd PMags, Raven Concealment Moduloader mag carrier, Armscor 62gr 5.56 ammo.


• Shotgun: Remington 870 Express 20" smoothbore slug gun w/ rifle sights, @%$& Remington 870P machined extractor, Mesa Tactical 4-shell sidesaddle, Magpul buttstock and rear sling loop, SureFire 618LM forend, Scattergun Technologies 2-round mag tube extension, Estate 2 3/4" #7.5 target loads, extra shells in the pocket of Lee Jeans purchased at Gander Mountain.

Improvise, overcome, adapt...

Pretty clever setup on one of the Team FN guns for getting the bipod down in a hurry.

True devotees of Max Wins will make sure that their string is the same color. (Actually, I suppose that any highly-visible color will do the trick.)

*sigh*

Other than a dud primer experienced while shooting the qual at MAG-40 back in June, my carry gun has not failed to go through its complete cycle of operation since the TulAmmo fiasco in Colorado last October...

...until shooting the plate rack* on Stage One at M3GI, where I experienced a... well, let's be honest, you don't stand there and diagnose the malfunction while you're on the clock, but whatever it was, a tap-rack didn't fix it and I had to rip the mag out of the gun and stuff in a fresh one to finish dropping plates. This will affect your score, in much the same way as will missing the pool from the ten meter platform†.

I guess it's time to give the gun a real bath. Maybe even wipe out the inside of some mag tubes while I'm at it.


*And a fiendish plate rack it was, too. Rather than nice circles, the plates were cut so they spelled out the logo of the stage sponsor: *FLIR*. The asterisk-like blobs on either end were pretty straightforward but if you held dead center on, say, the "R", your bullet would go right through the hole. Thanks to FarmDad's "bastard plates", I was ready for this and didn't have any problems with hitting the actual metal part.
†As a bonus, I finished the stage and the guys on my squad were all like "Did you see that film crew?" What film crew? "The film crew that was following you through that stage! You're totally going to be on TV!" I wish I could have found out who they were filming for so I could warn people to look away from the screen at the appropriate time.

Another Crimson Trace Midnight 3 Gun in the books...

I'll write plenty more on all the cool stuff that happened and things I learned and people I met and suchlike, but for now, I've ordered a pizza, packed my bags for tomorrow morning, and plan on getting my first normal night's sleep since last Monday...

As the sun sets slowly in the west... we get ready to rock and roll.

Mrrfllgh...

I returned to the motel room at about 0200, consumed three cans of a local witbier like I was at a frat party, and went toes up in the bed in short order.

Now I'm shuffling over to the awards banquet, fortified by Diet Pepsi, vitamin I, and a cup of hotel room coffee-like substance. I traveled completely across the country and got my ass handed to me by the best shooters in the industry in return for free chow, brochures 'n' product literature, and a hat with my name on it.

I feel like a real gun writer.
.

Fixed it.

Shotgun ran fine all night.

I knocked the burrs off the extractor with the file on a pair of nail clippers. I'm kinda stoked about that. :)

What have you been up to today?

Me? I've been repairing a shotgun with a nail file, using the hotel room floor as my work bench.

The Good: Two Leatherman tools. The Bad: Neither has a file. The Ugly: My nail clippers do.

Stupid rookie mistake.

I need to do some emergency shotgun work here in the hotel room and also catch a nap between now and when the bus leaves for the range at 5:00 local.

Let's just say that if it wouldn't have gotten me DQ'ed for breaking the 180, I might very well have busted the last several clays on stage five by flinging the 870 downrange at them. Instead, I just said "That's it. Call it." to the RO and ate the ton of Failure To Engages, then muttered "For you, ze var iz over," at my gauge.

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #64:

Very specialized sporting goods: An Open Class FN SLP shotgun...

"You're gonna need a bigger boat faster lens."

Not going to be a lot of dramatic match photography from me. Here's why:

Shooting is happening. Honest.

You can see the green laser in this one, which is kinda cool.

 Some carbine shooting is happening there, and then the dude takes off into the darkness and scoops up his shotgun downrange someplace and there're some more flickers of light and clouds of dust...

It looks a lot cooler to the eye than it does at f5-point-something. With a max ISO of 1600 and a not-very-fast lens, I'm a little limited. At any rate, I won't be dragging the big girl camera along tonight; I have enough gear to schlep as it is...
.

Try to learn something new every day.

For instance today I learned that assembling a Raven Concealment Moduloader would be a lot more fun at home, sitting at my desk with proper tools and a beer and time on my hands than it is on the morning of the big game, in a hotel room, with a Leatherman and a Mountain Dew.

It's not very racegun, even though I've adjusted the tension on the mag holders down as far as it will go, but it'll still beat fishing a spare AR mag out of a Royal Robbins vest pocket like last year. I don't recollect there being any stages here where a blazing fast rifle reload is going to be important, but I'm trying to correct each specific gear-related deficiency I had at that previous match.