Brain Buckets

Danish PSA's go pretty hard.

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How very Teutonic.

"Klaus, what if we made something that resulted in the same outcome as an airbag, but it had a whole bunch of moving parts and also effectively totals the car when it goes off?"

High Grade Idiocy

So a dude here in Hoosieropolis went to the hospital after being hit by a bullet that came plummeting out of the sky on New Year's Eve, went through his hat, and injured his noggin.

All because some dumbass had to go shooting his blaster in the sky like an idiot (and, mind you, regular old fireworks are plenty legal here and sold from itinerant seasonal places that pop up like Spirit Halloween stores in any vacant retail space in the run-up to New Year's Eve and Independence Day.)

Of even more note than the "what goes up must come down" angle is the fact that the guy was on the 4300 block of S. High School Road, near the intersection with Kentucky Avenue, when he was hit.

You know what else is in that neighborhood?

It was almost inevitable...

With the discovery that the number one engine and pylon assembly had departed the aircraft just before the aircraft departed the runway, UPS grounded their MD-11 fleet, followed shortly by FedEx, who is the other big operator of the type.

The last passenger flights of the MD-11 occurred in the mid-'00s, with the remaining flying aircraft converted to cargo haulers. The USAF retired its McDonnell-Douglas KC-10 Extender fleet, also based on the DC-10, last year, replacing it with the Boeing KC-46 Pegasus.

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Tab Clearing...

• We live in a world where anti-facial recognition eyewear is a thing.


• How to get blind drunk in a foreign country without getting blinded by your drink.


• The weirdos who think that cell phones and power lines are sapping and impurifying your precious bodily fluids are at it again...and they're in charge now, because we are a fundamentally unserious people.

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Safety Dance

Federal law had long mandated that cars sold in the United States have round, sealed-beam headlamps. Originally only 7" diameter units were allowed, but beginning in 1957, smaller 5.75" lamps could be used. That's why quad-headlamp styling became popular in the late Fifties. In 1974, rectangular sealed beams were permitted.

In 1968, the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards were changed and clear covers were no longer allowed in front of running headlights, which is why the 1972 Citroen SM and the 1969 Jaguar XK-E Fixed-Head Coupe below have weirdly exposed headlights, unlike their Euro originals.

The standards were set to be updated again in the mid Eighties so as to allow aerodynamic composite headlamps like the rest of the world, but the final approval didn't come down in time, and so the 1985½ Ford Mustang SVO had to be finalized and sent to production with a very unfortunate looking snout.

Spray Tip

If you're buying defense spray, avoid CS spray or the kind that claims to mix CS in with the normal OC (oleoresin capsaicin) pepper spray.

CS takes a while to actually take effect (ask your friends who've had to go through the gas mask stuff in military basic) as the crystals dissolve and release their evil magicks, whereas OC takes effect as soon as it comes in contact with a mucous membrane.

I don't know about you, but it doesn't do me any good if a bad guy suddenly gets all teary-eyed and runny-nosed when he's thirty seconds or a minute into beating my ass.

Get Pom. Compact, good range, and an innocuous-looking dispenser that doesn't draw a lot of attention when sitting in a pocket or on a keychain.

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Busting the Myths About Car Holsters

One Ford gave its life in the name of science to make this video...

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You know the saying about smoke and fire?

The saying goes "Where there's smoke, there's fire."

That's not necessarily true. An item can smolder and produce an awful lot of smoke without ever having actual open flames appear. And, if there's enough of it, it's the smoke that kills you.

Following Global Strike Command suspending use of the SIG Sauer M18 after an Airman was killed, the use of the P320 has been disallowed at Gunsite Academy unless the student is LE or .mil and it's their issue sidearm.

Ian's got an accurate take here. If there's too much smoke, at some point it doesn't matter whether or not there's a fire.

An abundance of caution.

I'm with SLG on this one. I can't tell you how to butter your biscuits, but I personally would rather not carry a striker-fired pistol with no manual safety AIWB, other than a Glock with a Gadget. (And if it's a single action or striker-fired pistol with a manual safety, I'd only carry it in a holster designed to physically immobilize the safety while holstered.)

Tangentially related, I've been skeptical of pistols with striker-fired ignition systems and no hinge or tab on the trigger since the first popular models emerged, and despite having tried to make peace with the idea, it's just not working out well between me and them.

No one factor makes things "safe". There is no "perfectly safe". All we can do is stack slices of Safety Swiss Cheese atop each other in hopes of keeping the holes of disaster from lining up. You gotta decide how many slices you're comfortable with.

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Ammo Recall

Apparently there are three lots of Magtech 5.56mm ammunition that may have been loaded with "incorrect" powder charges and are being recalled.

You can see the affected lot numbers here.

The fingers you save may be your own!

There's a reason for that...

You'll notice a lack of threaded barrels on pistols chambered in 5.7x28mm. Some manufacturers are daring enough to try, but there's a good reason not to.

See, there are lots of suppressors out there that are constructed largely of aluminum and intended for use with .22LR ammunition. While classic deuce-deuce operates at higher pressures than most people realize, it's still a very small case capacity and doesn't produce a lot of gas. An out-of-battery discharge with a .22LR rifle is startling, but not the sort of thing that wrecks guns and removes digits*.

5.7x28mm operates at double the chamber pressures and also has better than double the powder charge of the classic rimfire round. That's a lot more gas to handle and it can make a little alloy rimfire can look like the exploding cigar from a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

*Incidentally, this is the reason for the dearth of straight blowback semiautomatic rifles chambered in .22WMR. It operates at similar pressures to .22LR but has better than double the powder charge, so an out of battery discharge is a much bigger deal. People tend to be pretty lackadaisical about cleaning rimfire rifles and fond of doing mag dumps with them and, well...

Tab Clearing...

• Why you'll never see me type "Remember to mash that Like button and subscribe!"


• If I had a bajillion dollars and built a custom home, it sure wouldn't look like a suburban municipal library circa 1998.


• It's that time of year again.

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That Time of Year

I'm on the record as preferring DST to Standard Time. I personally don't have much use for sunlight before 0745 or so, so hack that bit off and stitch it to the other end of the day where I still might be out and about doing stuff.

It's the moving the clocks that's annoying (although it's less annoying as we're down to two battery-powered wall clocks and a microwave that don't reset themselves.) If it were up to me we'd leave the clocks on DST year 'round and spare me the horror of sunset at half past lunch in the dead of winter.

Most people hate the spring time change worse because that's the one that steals an hour of sleep. I, on the other hand, prefer the spring change because...at least for the next week or so...the cats will be pleasantly surprised by the arrival of mealtime rather than driving me up the wall for thirty or forty-five minutes ahead of dinner, begging for food.

(Remember to put fresh batteries in critical safety equipment: smoke detectors, CO2 detectors, weapon-mounted lights or lasers, electro-optical sights, et cetera.)

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Safe Use of a Weapon-Mounted Light

One advantage of newer, more powerful WMLs is that there's enough bounce and spill to make them useful for searching via reflected illumination. The linked article does a good job of explaining this.

A WML is an integral part of the weapon system, providing light in critical low-light situations without hindering the ability to shoot. It frees up a hand for other tasks and ensures the light is always aligned with the weapon. While it complements a flashlight, it doesn’t replace it – your handheld light is your primary illumination tool. If you’re not justified in drawing your gun, you’re not justified in pointing a WML.

When searching with a WML is warranted, baseboard and umbrella lighting techniques can help avoid muzzling non-threats by illuminating an area without aiming the gun directly at it. These techniques also offer additional advantages.

Go and RTWT. It's worthwhile.

We've come a long way since this old 300 lumen TLR-1s, but even it can be used on baseboards and ceilings.

Freak Accident

At a baseball game fans have to be on their toes for foul balls. Once in a blue moon, a bat...or a chunk of one...makes it into the stands, too. But those are fairly benign compared to what made it into the stands at a recent track and field meet in Colorado:

A spectator at a track and field event in Colorado died when he was struck by an errant hammer throw.

The incident occurred Sunday at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, which was hosting a club sports track and field meet for high school students from across the state, according to the school. In a statement, UCCS said “a member of the attending audience was killed when a hammer thrown by a participant cleared certified barriers and struck him.”

A baseball is moving faster than a hammer, granted, but an official Major League ball weighs, like, five ounces. A hammer in the hammer throw can weigh as much as sixteen pounds...and it's made of iron.

Yikes.

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Who down wit' P.I.D.? Yeah, you know me!

Gorillafritz has an excellent post on the importance of positive target identification in averting tragic, and potentially fatal, mistakes:

"Let me start by saying that no one in this situation did anything wrong. The cop was trying to make sure a boy wasn’t going to kill himself. The homeowner was legally defending his residence from a suspicious intruder approaching the back door of his house. Some frazzled nerves, poor training, or a couple more pounds of pressure on either weapon’s trigger would have resulted in a tragic outcome.

How do we prevent situations like this from going bad?"

Go read the whole thing.

Your house is not a free-fire zone. Use a flashlight. If you don't have a flashlight... well, you're wrong ...but if you don't have a flashlight, turn on the lights. If the power's out, ask "Who's there?"

Don't just shoot at shapes and shadows.

Tab Clearing...

• Jim Grey's first impressions of the Nikon 35Ti he purchased from me. (It's a really neat camera but I have reluctantly come to accept I'm not a wide-angle street shooter and it's nice to see it go somewhere it'll get some use. I still have my Kodak S1100 XL nostalgia camera if I want to give it another try.)


• The Volvo 122S 5-door wagon.


• The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

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Sig Electro-Optics Recall...

There's a product recall for the SIG SAUER ROMEO5 electro-optical red dot sight. Apparently the button cell battery compartment is not secured in a fashion that is considered child-safe and therefore the button cells pose an ingestion hazard for small children.

Of course, if your carbine with a red dot sight is stored in a fashion where your kids can get at it and eat the batteries, you have a lot bigger problems going on in your life, my friend.

(I will point out that any battery cap that can be unscrewed by a toddler has other problems.)

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Safety First, Accidents Last

Still among my finest moments in prose:

If you’re standing in the produce section at the grocery store and some dude pops out of the cereal aisle going all mass-casualty on the place and you successfully use your AIWB-carried blaster to save the day, it’s going to take some of the shine off the moment if you forget to de-cock your P226 Legion and shoot yourself right in the meat department while putting it away.

Practice hitting that decocker or applying the safety every time you come off the sights.

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