Practical Popguns

It's no secret that I'm a fan of a flyweight deuce-deuce for an "around the house" gun. A Smith & Wesson 43C or Ruger LCP II .22 stuffed with eight or ten rounds of Federal Punch or CCI Velocitor is light enough to not drag down pajama bottoms or sweatpants, as well as being cheap and easy to shoot.

Putting a few into a dude's snotbox at three to five yards is bound to have an effect, rimfire or not.

Don't take my word for it, listen to Hsoi. He's smart.

September 5, 2022 I was dumbbell bench pressing the 95s. I start going down for rep 7 and something felt weird in my left wrist. I immediately stopped. I don’t know how to describe it, but… something… shifted? All those little bones in your wrist (carpal bones); if you know what the carpal bones look like, just imagine something… shifting, getting compacted by 95# of steel. Yeah. Makes you wince, doesn’t it?

I went shooting soon thereafter. Shot my P365XL with the Wilson grip and inserts. After 100 rounds I couldn’t stand it – the pain was too much.

I’ve been hangin’ with a few guys into revolvers (GuG, Hizzie). I mean, “the underwear gun” is a thing. And with the stuff Rhett‘s been doing. Well… I figured now’s a good time detour and play with this concept.

Yes, the LCR is hard to shoot it because it’s lightweight with a heavy-ass trigger, craptacular snub-sights. But I can shoot it… a lot. I can even shoot Federal Punch (my defensive load) and not feel bad about the money.

Go read the whole thing and give it some thought.

But remember, to really get the best use out of a revolver, especially a subcaliber one, it's important to remember the revolver's U-shaped utility curve. Practice, practice, practice...

Caleb explains the curve.

That reminds me, I should get some speed strips and put in some serious dedicated .22 wheelyboi practice myself.

Building Credibility is Important

A former USAF cryptological language analyst writing at The Atlantic opens his piece on the ethical qualms of drone strikes thusly:

Hunting wasn’t a part of my childhood. The closest I got was the time my uncle taught my brother and me to shoot a .22 at the windows of some decrepit building on his land in Georgia. He showed us how to put the stock in the crook of our shoulder so the kick wouldn’t surprise us (though it still did; I’d have sworn my shoulder was dislocated); how to focus on the front sight, not the target; and how to softly squeeze the trigger to shoot.

Bro, seriously. A .22 made you feel like your shoulder was dislocated? 

I don't doubt that any uncle who let some kids shoot out windows on an old shed for target practice was maybe slack about ear protection and, okay, maybe the noise was startling and painful, but there's not a .22 rifle made that recoils enough to distress a toddler. 

Making me curl my lip in involuntary disdain in the opening paragraph does not help me take you seriously for the rest of the column.

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On newsstands now...

The current issue of RECOIL's Concealment quarterly has a couple pieces from me. One is a review of Federal's new rimfire personal defense round, the .22LR Punch...

...and the other is a feature length takeaway on the annual Rangemaster Tactical Conference, and why you should register. (Although I think next year's is already filled. While they usually fill up by October, the 2022 event filled with record speed.)

There are also pieces in there by my friends Chris Cypert and Annette Evans.

It's a good enough mag that I paid out-of-pocket for a dead tree subscription on my dime, and it was through Amazon, so I didn't get a discount or anything. Although if you have a good tablet, the Kindle subscription is a cheap alternative. If I do say so myself, the photography standards in the RECOIL mags make them worth looking at on a Retina display if you're not gonna get it on paper.

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Blogging Has Occurred...

Over at the other blog...

"So the above photo has two Smith & Wesson rimfire revolvers, built probably about thirty years or so apart. The top one is a .22/.32 Heavy Frame Target, an I-frame revolver built probably sometime in the late 1920s. The lower one is a Model 34 Kit Gun, dating to the late '50s and built on the Improved I-frame.

If you look at the cylinders...specifically the rear of the cylinders...you will notice a difference. If you pop open the .22/.32 Heavy Frame, the rear of the cylinder looks strange to anyone accustomed to Smith & Wesson rimfire revolvers, because the charge holes are not recessed to accommodate the rims of the cartridges."

Click on the excerpt above to read the rest.

Incidentally, that copy of Hatcher's Textbook of Pistols and Revolvers I have is something of a prized possession. It's a nice leather-bound, gilt-edged reprint from '85. I stumbled across it while browsing at Powell's in Portland with Farmer Frank back in 2012. When I told him I didn't have a copy, he looked surprised and fronted me the dough for this one on the spot.

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #197...

I'm working on a blog post, so in the interim, have a picture of a .22/.32 Heavy Frame Target and a no-dash Model 34 Kit Gun. They're about thirty years apart, chronologically; one's an I-frame and the other's an Improved I-frame. This is tangentially related to the upcoming post.

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Hey, look!

The latest issue of RECOIL: CONCEALMENT is on newsstands! I have a digital subscription on Kindle, but I snagged a dead tree copy from Walgreens yesterday because I have two pieces in this issue.

The first is the regular "Crap Shoot" column, which is a look at guns in the $200-or-less price bracket for personal defense. I think I picked a winner, but you may want to read for yourself...

Ruger P89 shot by available light with a ten-year-old Nikon D700*, using the secret technique of setting it on the clean white lid of a  Rubbermaid tub in indirect light in the garage with the overhead door open on a cloudy day. 

The second is a feature-length review of the Ruger LCP II in .22LR. Is it a plinker? A subcaliber trainer? A CCW gat in its own right? All of the above?


*Yeah, the D700 is "only" 12.1MP. So? We're only printing in a magazine; you can do a two-page spread easily with 10MP.
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Plink, Plank, Plunk

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Shooting for the fun of it @indyarmscompany Saturday morning with my @smithandwessoninc #smithandwesson2206 #indyarmsco #phlster #pewpewlife #igmilitia #cciminimags

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Easy Rider

Smith & Wesson 43C: It weighs only twelve ounces with a full cylinder of eight CCI Mini Mags and a set of DeSantis Clip Grips. As an experiment, I installed the clip grips yesterday evening to see if the setup was light enough to work in the waistband of my pyjama bottoms.

I was surprised to discover that it works peachy keen. This setup, then would seem to be a great solution for the person who wants to lounge around the house in gym shorts or sweatpants but not be one of those people who keeps guns stashed all over their home. I dunno that it'd work for any activity more strenuous than typical around the house chores, but I took out the trash, loaded the dishwasher, fetched stuff from the basement, and never felt like the gun was in the way or likely to dislodge itself.

Props to Claude, Mark, and John for the idea.
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Live and Learn

So, 'way back in 2012, this meme from Robb Allen gave me the giggles...

"Great, I just had my pajamas pressed and now this midget comes charging down my hallway!"

Back in those days I expended a lot of keystrokes saying that .22WMR was almost as good as 5.7mm, at least as far as private citizen self-defense use went.

I've changed mind since then. These days I think that, given the right loads and circumstances, .22WMR can be rather better.

Shooting jello with John Johnston of Ballistic Radio

There's an aphorism regarding defensive handgun ammunition that states "Shot placement is king, penetration is queen, and everything else is just angels dancing on pinheads."

The wounding mechanism of pistol bullets is entirely based on poking holes in things. There's no magical "hydrostatic shock" at these velocities. The bullet has to penetrate deep enough to go through something vital.

The block of clear gel below was shot without any layers of denim or anything. Bare gel is generally easy work for a good bullet. Hollow points will often expand with catalog picture perfection. In fact, that's the problem with the .380, there.

That .380 bullet expanded, and the round just doesn't have enough steam to expand like that and still wind up down there where the adequate service calibers are. It stopped nine or ten inches in.

Here's where I digress to point out that that fourteen to sixteen inches of penetration in gel is not a direct correlation to fourteen to sixteen inches of penetration in bad guy. Bullets that penetrate fourteen to sixteen inches in gel are the ones that are found in the bad guy's clothes on the far side. Bullets that penetrate nine inches in gel are the ones that don't get all the way to the spine.

Anyway, you'll note that the service calibers all went deep and expanded. (The .38 just went deep, but that's a discussion for another time.)

See what else is there next to the .380? That's right, the SOOPER PENETRATOR 5.7x28mm.

See, the pointy spitzer bullet gives the bullet a rapid yaw cycle. Now, if you're a 5.56mm rifle bullet traveling at rifle velocities, that rapid yaw cycle is what causes you to break in half at the cannelure and cause massive internal injuries as two big chunks of bullet and bunches of smaller ones go all over the place.

If you're a little FiveSeveN bullet traveling at pistol velocities, turning through 180 degrees really puts the brakes on penetration. The SS198LF is not going to the spinal column today.

You know what bullets aren't radically spitzer-shaped and therefore tend to penetrate pretty okay? .22 Winchester Magnum Rimfire. Note the table at the end of that article. And remember that .22WMR is in that ballistic category where trading penetration for expansion is not necessarily a good thing. Solids penetrate real good.4

Oleg's CMR-30 at the Lucky Gunner Blogger Shoot back in the day.

Unless you're facing zombies wearing body armor, I'd generally prefer the .22WMR over the 5.7x28. In fact, I know some pretty clueful individuals who use small-frame .22WMR J-frames and LCRs as "gym shorts guns".

So, hey, I learned new things! I wonder what I believe right now that will have me looking back in 2024 and shaking my head?
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Ruger Mk.IV recall...

So, apparently there's a hitch with the operation of the safety on the Mk.IV pistols...



...and Ruger is issuing a recall. Ruger tends to be pretty proactive with things like this, and doesn't mess around with "voluntary upgrades" and suchlike.

It's buried in the corporate DNA, dating back to the guy who offed hisself dropping an "Old Model" three-screw Ruger Blackhawk and the resulting lawsuit that resulted in the New Model Blackhawk and its transfer bar operation that is safe to carry with six beans in the wheel. (This is also the genesis of the paragraph of safety arglebargle rollmarked on Ruger handguns. That's mandated by a court settlement, not because Ruger just loves adding an extra rollmarking step to the manufacturing process.)

Fun Show Report...

Flintlocks and Flop-tops
And Number Three Russians
Black-powder Mausers
From jackbooted Prussians,
Shiny Smith PC's from limited runs
These are a few of my favorite guns.

Socketed bay'nets
On Zulu War rifles,
Engraved, iv'ried Lugers
That make quite an eyefull
Mosin tomato stakes sold by the ton
These are a few of my favorite guns.

Rusty top-breaks!
Smallbore Schuetzens!
And all of Browning's spawn
I just keep on browsing my favorite guns
Until all my money's gone.

Little show at the Marion County Fairgrounds today.  Lots of vendors obviously still clearing stocks of panic-hoarded AR mags and suchlike. It was a buyer's market for little pocket self defense guns, too. Shields are a hair under three bills when you factor in the rebate, and there were tables of Elsie Peas for two-fitty.

Rimfire ammo is starting to show up in quantity again. I picked up a 500-round brick of Aguila plated hollow points for 6½¢/round, as well as fifty rounds of Velocitor and fifty of the CCI Copper .22 stuff. This stuff has a date with the chronograph and some jello in its future, both from a normal-size handgun, a rifle, and the little NAA Mini...
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All The Bees...

Had both the "subcaliber" P250s at the range yesterday, .380ACP and .22LR, just to compare them side by side. The P250 shot up the last eighty rounds of Cap Arms .380 100gr FP FMJ, and I put fifty rounds of Remington Golden Bullets through the .22LR gun.

The .380 was shooting pretty quickly by my slow standards; most shots fired at a .5-.75 clip. The .22 was fired literally as fast as I could work the DAO trigger. It hardly moves under recoil, of course, so it's just a matter of waiting for the sights to align again. I was trying really hard to keep the trigger in motion the whole time.

The deuce-deuce P250 experienced a single failure to feed on round #36. It's now fired 110 rounds.
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Rimfire Fun...

So the P250 .22LR arrived Friday from CDNN. (Actually, it arrived Thursday, but I waited until Friday to pick it and the Sooper Seekrit Springfield Armory review gun up on the same 4473.)

Unlike the .380 variant of the P250, the .22LR one is a straight blowback. It uses what appears to be an aluminum slide with some attractive scalloped lightening cuts at 10 and 2 o'clock running from just ahead of the ejection port to the muzzle. It has conventional three-dot sights, with the rear being adjustable and fitting in a traditional dovetail rather than the weird proprietary P250 mounting.

The Fire Control Unit is, as I noted, a standard P250 FCU and compatible with centerfire Caliber X-Change kits. It has the latest iteration of forward-swept slide stops, although they don't really matter in the rimfire variant since the 10-round magazines (of which two are provided) do not actuate the slide stop when empty.

I took the gun to Indy Arms Co. on Sunday to run a few rounds through it. I was not disappointed with the gun's trial run at all...

The gun ran fine, sixty rounds with no malfunctions other than one round of Federal bulk pack .22LR needing a second trigger pull to ignite. The Ruger Mk IV, incidentally, is now at 1,200 rounds with a lone FTE way back in the first couple hundred.

Tuesday morning at the range...

So, like I wrote in the previous post, I decided to bring the Sistema along to the range on a lark. I had work to do putting rounds through the Mk.IV, and I figured why not see if the Sistema would run? So I grabbed a couple 1911 magazines from my Box o' 1911 Stuff...

...and forgot them on the kitchen counter.

When I got to Indy Arms Co., I asked if I could borrow the magazine from the rental 1911.

It turned out to be a tired factory Metalform whose feed lips were so badly spread that if more than five rounds were loaded, you couldn't get it into the Sistema's magwell.

Still, it managed to fire ten rounds without any malfunctions, even with the godawful mag. ("You guys need to pull a 47D off the shelf for that rental gun, dudes; this thing's shot," I informed them on returning it.)

I need to get some sights on that gun and Cerakote it.

The Loctite has cured the sight screw problems on the Mark IV, and there were no issues in the hundred rounds of mixed .22LR I fired yesterday.

The gun now has 1,100 rounds through it with one failure to eject (#714).
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Imperfect world...

The Ruger Mk.IV and the Honor Defense Honor Guard 9 went along to Indy Arms Co. yesterday morning, the latter for a forthcoming Shooting Illustrated piece. Before I started shooting, I secured the rear sight set screw on the Ruger Mk.IV with some Loctite.

The HG9 had been shooting to the left for me, and the reason became apparent yesterday...

One of the nicer points about the HG9 is that it uses Glock 43 sights, piggybacking on that gun's popularity for a wider range of aftermarket sight availability. But Glock front sights have a threaded post for a base, secured by a little nut inside the slide.

If not adequately provided with threadlocker compound, this nut will work loose and allow the front sight to wiggle. If the front sight gets too wiggly, it'll shear off under recoil. Fortunately I caught this one before it got that bad, and a little blue Loctite will fix it right up.

 Neither handgun experienced any malfunctions. The rear sight held steady on the Ruger. This makes 1,000 total rounds through the gun with one failure to eject (#714).

I did notice that the pivot at the front of the frame had started to walk. We'll just be tightening this down.
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Deuce Deuce

Dropped in at Indy Arms Saturday about lunchtime to pop off some more .22LR Remington Golden Bullets through the Ruger Mk.IV.

It was as boringly reliable as you'd expect a rimfire Ruger autoloader to be. This is probably the most popular and successful line of .22 self-loaders, and for good reason.

This example had screws that wanted to back out securing the front and rear sights. We Loctited the front one at Blogorado and it held. I tightened the rear set screw yesterday before heading to the range, but by the time I'd fired off a hundred rounds of ammunition, the rear sight assembly was drifting in its channel again and could be slid back to center with thumb and forefinger alone. Time for Loctite there, too.

This makes 900 total rounds through the gun with one failure to eject (#714).

Rimfire Relaxation...

The Ruger Mark IV test gun had languished, unloved, for pretty much the whole of November, and so yesterday I took it to Indy Arms Company with the intention of putting a reasonably significant number of rounds through the gun.

The .22LR ammo can is mostly full of Remington Golden Bullets from one of those "Bucket o' Bullets" bulk pack affairs. I determined to put 200 through the gun to get the barrel warm enough to see if the Loctite on the retaining screw for the front sight was holding.

During the range session, I had one failure to eject on round #114 of the day (#714 through the gun). This was the first malfunction that the gun has experienced. I also noticed that one of the magazines had fuzzed up with a bit of surface rust.

Frankly, I was surprised that 200 rounds of bulk Remington Golden Bullets went through the gun with only the one malf. The stuff does not have the quality control of yore and is generally looked down on these days.

The Loctite on the front sight held fine. Two hundred rounds with no loosening of the screw. Howver the rear sight assembly kept drifting left and had to be manually shoved over in its dovetail with my thumb three times over the course of the range session. I need to tighten and Loctite the set screw on the rear sight as well.
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Sight Insights

Commenting on Facebook the other day, I mentioned the totally impractical fixation I had on the idea of the Glock 35 with a .357SIG conversion barrel. My head knows that my chrono testing showed that most carry loads only picked up about a fifty foot-per-second velocity boost over the compact Glock 32. My head also know that there's very little that .357SIG offers over good Gold Dot or HST 9mm ammo other than reduced magazine capacity. The heart, however, wants what it wants.

Chuck Haggard is one of the most clueful folks I know, and so when he remarked that a friend of his had reported finding serious point-of-aim/point-of-impact differences with the factory sights when he'd dropped a .357SIG barrel into a G35, I figured I'd better check for myself on my gun.

I bought a box of Sig Sauer Elite Performance 125gr FMJ and fired off a few rounds at 5, 7, 10, and 15 yards, holding the center of the dot on the Ameriglo I-Dot Pro so it covered the bullseye at each distance. POA/POI seems fine with these sights, at least out to fifteen. I'll make a followup trip and use the other bay to bench it at 20 and 25. (IAC's pistol range is 50 feet and the rifle range is 75 feet.)

With the NAA Mini, it was time to try something spicier than the CCI Standard Velocity fodder. CCI Mini-Mag 34gr hollow points and Winchester Super-X Hyper-Velocity 40gr hollow points were ordered from Lucky Gunner.

My initial attempts were foiled by the fact that the schmutz on the laser lens was diffusing the beam enough that it was impossible to see on the target only nine feet away. I fired two cylinders each of the CCI and the Winchester trying to use the iron sights. Not only do the sights seem to be off, but they're hard to pick up since the rear sight is notional at best and the size and shape of the gun makes consistency in grip and trigger press very problematical.

I went and borrowed some paper towels and twisted one into a fine point, squirted it with Windex, and used it to clean the emitter lens more thoroughly.

Having cleaned the lens, I fired one more group each of the CCI and the Winchester, now using the laser to aim. These were fired one-handed, bringing the gun up to roughly eye-level, cocking it on the way, and firing as soon as I saw the dot in the desired spot. The top and bottom five shot groups with the laser are circled.

I don't think it's a stretch to say that the Laserlyte grip makes a big difference in shootability.

More shooting to follow.
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More testing...

To Indy Arms Co. again yesterday morning with the Laserlyte-equipped NAA Mini and the ETS Glock magazines.

The ETS magazines continue to function without any problems.

Twenty rounds of CCI Standard Velocity .22LR were fired strong-hand-only through the NAA Mini by bringing the gun up one-handed to roughly eye-level, thumb-cocking on the way up, and firing as soon as the dot was visible in the upper A-zone.

The dot got harder to pick up on the last couple cylinders, and that last shot, a miss high and left and labeled "WTF", was just point-shooting blindly when I couldn't find the dot fast enough. Maybe a better shooter than me could point-shoot this gun better at nine feet.

The problem seems to stem from schmutz on the laser's lens. Firing unplated, outside-lubricated .22LR ammo through a revolver tends to deposit a fine coating of lead, lube, and powder residue all over everything near the barrel-cylinder gap. The thing with the NAA Mini is that the whole gun is near the barrel-cylinder gap, including the emitter on the Laserlyte Grip Laser.

Of course, this residue is from fifty whole rounds; an amount of ammo that might apply on the range, but not in any conceivable use of the gun. I'm going to wipe it down, clean the lens, and order some plated bullet ammo from Lucky Gunner. Then we'll do some chrono testing and maybe shoot some jello!
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Day at the Office...with a SECRET RUGER!

Went to the range today to do some plinking with a Ruger .22 pistol.

Not a Standard Model/Mark I, not a Mark II, and not a Mark III, but...

...a Ruger Mark IV!

The Mark IV is the biggest redesign since the original Ruger rimfire was made in 1949. The gripframe, formerly welded together from two stampings, is now a single piece, CNC machined from a forging. On the stainless guns it's a stainless steel forging, and on the blued ones, an aluminum one.

The Mark III magazines will still work in the Mark IV, but they will pop out with amazing vigor, thanks to a spring-loaded plunger. Additionally, the loaded chamber indicator is gone away from the Mark IV.

The thumb safety is a more conventional pivoting one, and the right-hand side of the ambi safety (if you aren't one of those people whose right hands are on the wrong side) can be removed with household tools, if so desired.

I started with some warmup shots in the center and then shot each dot at the indicated distance with two mags of junky Remington "Bucket o' Bullets" stuff at about a 1/rd-per-second pace. Gun shoots fine and no malfunctions (other than one dud Remington round. This is my shocked face.)

Here's the biggest deal of them all: Lock the slide to the rear, drop the mag, ensure the pistol is on safe, and then the push of one button on the rear of the frame allows the upper to tip forward like on an AR or break-open shotgun.

Then the upper assembly lifts off the gun, the bolt group is pulled out the back, and you're done. The gun can be disassembled for cleaning and put back together again in less time than it took me to type this paragraph.

They had three versions for us to shoot this past weekend: blued and stainless target models and stainless hunters with wood grips, fiber-optic sights, and fluted barrels.

There were a bunch of them on hand and I didn't personally see any malfunctions, but you expect that with Ruger deuce-deuce pistols.
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