Hey, look!

Everything old is new again...
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Home at last.

Now to get all the pics off both cameras and the cell phone into a "SHOT 2017" folder, and do that thing I was going to do at the airport yesterday.

Namely, I have a couple pages of scrawled notes, reminders really, just the name of a product or a random thought I had. I also have a page with three column headers to divvy those up into, which I totally meant to do while I loitered away almost ten hours in the Las Vegas airport yesterday. Those ten hours were mostly, however, spent in Facebook, sleep deprivation, and beer.

The three hours coming back east were brutal. I'm glad I don't do that often. My day started at 0545 PST yesterday on about five hours of sleep, and ended at about 0600 EST, having dozed maybe thirty minutes on the flight from LAX to IND.

I flopped down on the bed in Roomie's bedroom while the local news was on, intending to stay up long enough to watch Meet the Press. I have dim memories of waking up fully clothed atop the covers, and then waking up again in the last half of MtP, somehow having gotten myself into sweats and a t-shirt and burrowed under the covers.

So, like I was saying, I've a metric ton of emails to answer or write, and photos and notes to organize and divvy up, but all that is going to have to wait until tomorrow. Plus there are deadlines looming in the near distance, but I'm not even going to think about that until after a good night's sleep.

I'm going to try to play some World of Warcraft and do some laundry or something to keep me awake until 10:00PM or so, when I imagine I will then sleep the sleep of the just.
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Still in the rental condo...

...so I have no idea if there was a moment of silence on the show floor for the end of the Greatest Gun Salesman of All Time's administration.
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Seen at SHOT yesterday...

Guy is standing there, guarding two of those rolling RSR milk crates that people fill with all the brochures and catalogs that they could download from websites instead of check as overweight baggage, while his buddy is off taking a leak or buying a corn dog or slice of convention center pizza or whatever.

Both milk crates are stacked to the brim with the little manufacturer logo tote bags being handed out, twenty and thirty apiece of Aimpoint and Nikon and Springfield Armory...because these can be used for shopping bags back at the store, see?

Guy's shirt is unbuttoned to the xiphoid process, medallion resting in his chest pelt, thick gold bracelet, and fistfuls of rings...he's a wide collar away from looking like an extra from Saturday Night Fever.

And I'm standing there myself, waiting on someone to get back, spending the longest three minutes of my life having to bite my tongue to keep from asking "So what's the name of your pawn shop? I see. And where in Jersey did you say it was?"
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Sig Sauer VIP Range Day pics, part 2...

Sig Sauer 716

When Sig Sauer announced an in-house optics line, it was hard to escape an ingrained reflex: Generally when you see anything from pocket knives to parkas with a gun company name/logo on it, it's junky licensed merchandise where the company's trying to make a fast buck hawking their legacy to people who will pay money to advertise the company's name on a crappy Taiwanese Zippo clone.

Thus, the initial supposition when you see that Sig is going to have their name on optics is that they're going to be godawful airsoft-grade Chinesium garbage like Barska or UTG. Then you hear "No, Sig isn't licensing their name to someone, they started their own optics division."

"You mean they bought some lame brand like Tasco and...?"

"No, Sig stood up an entire new optics division and poached talent from around the industry to do it. They've designed their own scopes. Manufacture is definitely farmed out to various contractors, though."

Huh.

I remain very wary. Optics are someplace where the penalties for cheaping out can be immediate and harsh, but these do not appear to be cheap optics at all. I was proven wrong in my skepticism for the Burris MTAC, so I'm willing to be proven wrong again.

JayG is happy because he hit the thing and wants everyone to know.

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Sig Sauer VIP Range Day pics, part 1...

I finally got to put a few rounds through the new US-manufactured Sig Sauer P210 on the range yesterday afternoon.

Obviously a little bit of familiarization is not any kind of thing to base judgments on (at least if you're smart) but I'm cautiously optimistic. It has that same heft and a slide that ran like it was on greased roller bearings...

The trigger was classic target pistol. Probably slightly under three pounds and went from "Applying pressure" to "Making loud noise" with not much in the way of a perceptible transition between the two states. It would definitely take more than a couple magazines of ammunition to really get the feel for it.

I would love to put a couple cases through one of these at some point. Between being built on the right side of any tariff walls, CNC machining, and using MIM fabrication where they could, the price point looks to be in the middlin' decent 1911 range. Given that the 210 is a pistol design from the same broad generation of pistols (in other words, before stampings, castings, and polymer injection molding) there's a lower limit to the price point you can build this sort of gun to and still get a gun that functions like you want in the accuracy and reliability departments.

Purists will howl, like they do about current S&W revolvers or any gun, really, that wasn't built of parts lovingly hand-carved in a workshop in a hollow tree by forest elves, but the proof will be in the shooting.
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