Discrimination...

"Well, that'll certainly teach Muffy not to get kidnapped by her skeezy dope dealer boyfriend and his buddies."

Over in a great big RTWT sort of post at Mountain Guerrilla, JM wrote:

"More importantly, don’t be deluded into thinking the gun is a magical talisman of protection. Your CCW certification class is NOT a defensive handgun course. Take a practical shooting course with pistols. Here’s the catch though, not all defensive handgun courses are created equal.

It’s cool to take a course that focuses on shooting fast, accurately. In fact, that’s probably the first pistol course you should take. It helps start developing the fundamental skill sets. In the real world though, it’s entirely possible that you’ll end up shooting TOO fast, and TOO accurately.
WTF?

Too many shooting courses focus any “decision-making” on simple, binary decisions. “Gun or no gun?” is NOT a valid decision-making matrix for shoot-or-no shoot in the real world. It’s more complicated than that. Hell, even “that dude is pointing a gun at me” may not be adequate grounds to drop the hammer.

A solid, practical, real-world shooting course MUST include practical, complex decision-making processes in the course work. You’ve got to learn to SEE and PROCESS information FASTER, so you can shoot SOONER. A sub-one second shot is great…right up until it takes you two seconds to determine that the apparent target is your wife/best friend/father-in-law, coming to help."

Muffy, in the photo above, was a no-shoot* target slightly occluded by the bad guy, in front of and overlapping her. The pair were situated such that you came upon them pretty abruptly on rolling through a doorway, and you can see the result of poor trigger control under surprise. I think only two teams did not put any holes in Muffy, and I'm kinda happy that none of those bullet holes are mine.  I almost tried a body shot on the bad guy by reflex, and only a last-second realization of what that meant made me shoot him in the grape instead.

However, that's just basic marksmanship under pressure, which is not the same as target discrimination and decision-making in the same circumstances.

One early run we went into the shoot house with a briefing that the guy who'd called 911 was in there with his cell phone. A couple of people shot him.

Our most frequent antagonists in these shoot house runs were the hardened terrorists of the Mongolian-Irish Liberation Front. One late-night run had you exit the first room and into a hallway and there, right in front of you, was a guy in a red MILF t-shirt. He got tagged by a couple people, too, despite being unarmed, and despite the briefing mentioning that the MILF leader was in there, probably not packing heat himself, and should be taken into custody if possible.

These were obviously artificial scenarios, structured to induce thinking on your feet, and everybody improved in that respect over the course of the weekend. But...

* I clarified that from "hostage", which is too often used as slang for a no-shoot target placed near a shoot target. I just casually used it that way myself, and it really wasn't correct. In the shoot house we had good guys (yourself and your partner), threats (which you shoot until they stop being threats), and "unknowns", which is everybody else.

Versatile Light

When SureFire unveiled the Guardian at the shoot house event last year, I didn't really pay it much attention. The dual lamp setup seemed gimmicky, and it wasn't tacticool at all. The sample light arrived at the house and got set aside and ignored...until I decided to bring it along on my house-sitting trip to New Hampshire earlier this year.

Spending a week or so alone in a big house on a few acres way out in the woods completely changed my opinion of this light. Between the two lamps, each with three brightness settings, there wasn't a lighting chore it couldn't handle.

The larger lamp assembly is the traditional SureFire reflector you've come to know and love. It outputs 900, 250, or 15 lumens, depending on how many times you push the activation button in quick succession. The nine hundred lumen beam easily illuminated even the farthest corners of the property without stepping off the porch; it has a lot of throw.

The smaller lamp assembly uses SureFire's newer MaxVision reflector. This throws a wider, more even beam that lacks the intensely bright center hot spot. Again, it has three illumination levels that you step through by poking the button one, two, or three times. The brightest is a full 1000 lumens, stepping down through 300 to a minimum 15 lumen setting excellent for nighttime navigating to the loo without using full aircraft landing light power.

Between the lenses is the photocell that controls SureFire's "Intellibeam" technology, that dims the light based on reflection, so that if you hit a reflective surface with the full 900 or 1000 lumens, the light will throttle itself back.

The body is a solid-feeling polycarbonate shell, the halves of which are welded together for water resistance. There's a metal inset panel on the the side opposite the buttons that serves as a radiator. Between the buttons is a tiny LED that serves as a "gas gauge" for the rechargeable batteries.

The shape of the light makes it easy to turn on to the desired setting and then set it down to use as a work light.

It charges via a USB-C port, which features a rubber cover for weather resistance. It can also be used as a battery pack to charge small devices, if necessary.

It's right on the outside limit of what I'd want to carry in my jeans pocket, but really not any more difficult than my usual EDCL2-T.

If I could change anything, it would be to put a different shape or texture to the two buttons. It's hard to put your thumb on the wrong one, but a little added insurance wouldn't hurt.

Anyway, my opinion on the thing has changed from "gimmicky" to "actually rather versatile and useful". It's better than my EDCL2-T at pretty much any flashlight chore that doesn't involve simultaneously holding a pistol.
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Rules of Engagement

There's an article up at SI right now to which I feel the need to offer a counterpoint.

It opens thusly:

"Precious few of the tactical-training courses I’ve taken devoted any amount of time to the art of stealth while defending the home. That’s mostly because being quiet and hiding doesn’t do much for participants who paid to shoot hundreds of rounds downrange while moving, reloading, diving for cover and yelling “Clear!” as they pie a room and take out a cardboard army of bad guys (not that there’s anything wrong with that)."

The entire article is about the need for stealth with one's home defense shotgun, and not making any noise as one moves about one's domicile while looking for intruders.

I'm going to totally avoid discussing the advisability of actively clearing one's house in search of a bad guy, as well as whether a long gun is the right firearm to use while doing so, and focus on the "stealth/don't give away your position" thing that is such a recurring subject in general home-defense advice.

To very loosely paraphrase a big city major crimes detective of my acquaintance who has investigated more than a few of these sorts of incidents, most of the time someone is in your house, it's because they think you aren't. (I mean, unless you live the sort of life where you have targeted assassination squads after you, and I'm afraid that that sort of thing is way, way outside of my lane.)

Lying silently in wait in the dark for someone to shoot is often a recipe for a Negative Outcome.

Alternatively, you could ask "Who's there?"

Even if it is a bad guy and not a family member, pet, or drunk neighbor, ensconcing oneself in a safe position, dialing 911, and loudly announcing that you have a gun and have called the cops is likely to save money for carpet cleaning bills and legal fees.

A friend quipped "What, and no advice to drag the body inside?", which was funny, but...y’know what? I got to thinking about that, and this is more pernicious than that.

“Jes’ drag ‘em inna house” is something that most non-dumb people who have watched some TV police procedurals can suss out for themselves as bad advice. It trips the BS detectors of all but the most clueless.

But this? This feels right exactly because it sounds like how ‘bad guy in the house’ scenarios play out in Hollywood. The bad guy is never a tweaker who’s after a watch and some jewelry and who bolts when they realize the homeowner is there and armed. (It’s also never the homeowner’s husband home a day early from a business trip.) It’s always some elite killer team or serial murderer who’s there specifically to get the homeowner. And why wouldn’t you want to hide and ambush those guys?

Darryl Bolke preaching the gospel of the gauge at Tac-Con '18. No running, diving, or cardboard armies of bad guys involved.

UPDATE: A clarification has been posted, which I am reproducing below.

"Editor’s Note: This column, running in the April 2019 Shooting Illustrated as “Stealthy Scatterguns,” spurred a few comments from readers who seem to have skimmed over the larger point of the article. At no point does this article suggest or intimate that homeowners ought to seek out criminals inside a home. At no point does this article suggest that homeowners ought to sneak up and shoot potential criminals unaware. At no point does the article say that stealth attacks are preferable to calling the police and holing up in a defensive position. It doesn’t say these things, because homeowners ought to call the police and retreat to a designated safe room. However, there are time when stealth and investigation remain prudent.

Unknown noises are a fact of life, and not every unknown noise will (or should) drive people to immediately retreat to a safe room while dialing 911. Law-enforcement officers will not be happy arriving to a suspected home invasion only to find that your storage bins in the garage fell over, particularly if this happens on a regular basis.

Additionally, even if a homeowner suspects a burglary or home invasion is taking place, children and other family members may be in other parts of the home. Getting children to a safe location is paramount before settling into a defensible location and announcing you are armed. Anyone who’s gathering information about an unknown noise or getting family to a safe spot inside the home would do well to move quietly.

We regret leaving room for incorrect inferences to be made, and that is entirely the fault of the editors."

Decline of the Republic Day.

On April 8th in 1913, the 17th Amendment to the Constitution went into effect. To anybody concerned with checks and balances and separation of powers who had actually read the Constitution, it's hard to see how this could be considered a good idea. As a matter of fact, it's hard to see how it could not be seen as undermining the very concept of a federal republic.

I know some of you are clicking for Wikipedia right now, muttering to yourselves "Seventeenth? Is that income tax, or when they let y'all chicks vote? No, it's Prohibition, right?" No, the Seventeenth Amendment is the one that calls for direct election of Senators. What's so bad about that, you ask? (Go on, ask.) Well, let me tell you...

Understand this first: I'm not one of those people who think the Constitution is divinely inspired and the perfect governmental document. However, for setting up a limited federal government with strictly enumerated powers rigidly separated among different branches that acted as brakes on each other, it's really pretty clever. There was a lot of thought put into a careful system of counterweights and oversights, and if you change one bit of it, you can throw something completely unexpected out of kilter. And boy howdy, did the Seventeenth Amendment ever do that in spades.

Firstly, our bicameral legislature originally copied one redeeming feature from the English Parliament. The lower house was composed of representatives directly elected, one per every X number of the population. Because of their (relatively) small constituencies and their two-year terms, representatives had to be very aware of the popular sentiment of "John Q. Public" and respond to it, lest they be replaced. In the English system, the upper house was the House of Lords, with noble members who had a lifetime tenure. Although they couldn't permanently shoot down legislation, they could apply a temporary veto which could be overturned by a determined lower house.

Our upper house was the Senate, whose members served terms three times as long as those of the lower house. Since we had no hereditary nobility (and were prohibited one by the Constitution) each state's two senators were elected by the state government itself. Thus insulated from the constant pressure of needing to worry about re-election and the public whim of the moment, the Senate would serve as a brake against the spasms of popular fads, and prevent asshattery like legislation proclaiming the theme song from Friends as the national anthem or Britney Spears being voted Dictator-for-Life.

The second, even more important, function served by senators, was as representatives of their state or commonwealth government to the federal government in Washington. Whereas a representative from Dubuque or Des Moines would be voting the whims of their respective constituencies, the senator from Iowa was expected to represent the sovereign interests of the Hawkeye State. This has very specific effects on the separation of powers in the U.S. Constitution.

One of the most telling effects comes from the fact that the Constitution specifically delegates the power to ratify treaties to the Senate. This is important both in the nature of our federal system of government and in the nature of foreign treaties at the time the Constitution was written. In the late 18th Century there were no treaties designating United Nations World Heritage Sites or allowable levels of CFC emissions. Treaties involved war and peace, mutual defense, and the setting of national boundaries. By giving the Senate the power to ratify treaties, this was implicitly acknowledging the sovereignty of the individual states. A mutual defense pact with Absurdistan could not be entered into without at least a majority of the states feeling that they had sufficient ties to Absurdistan to make it worth defending. Likewise for treaties setting borders or ending wars; approval by the Senate was the de facto shorthand means of gaining the approval of every statehouse in the federation.

Once senators became directly elected, it effectively demolished the reasons for a bicameral legislature and the division of powers enumerated in the Constitution. The senator was now removed from his or her lofty perch and made as much a weathervane of the public whim as the representative. Further, the senator from certain states, those dominated by a single large city, no longer represented the interests of the state, but rather those of the small portion of the state in which the majority of the populace was concentrated. The Senate, originally a legislative buffer against the popular whim of the moment and the inexorable demographics of urban centers that dominate the House of Representatives, now became the very same thing it was meant to counterbalance, but with a six-year term instead of a two-year one.

In the years since 1913, the effect has become all too obvious. Treaties are ratified based on pressure from the media, not their agreeability to the sovereign states that are bound by them. There is no longer a legislative brake on popular fads or the whim of the moment. We've bounced from New Deal to New Frontier to Great Society to everything short of the Great Leap Forward. Commentators can make mouth noises about "We're not a democracy, we're a Federal Republic" all they want, wingnuts and moonbats can natter about wimmen voters and the Electoral College 'til the cows come home, but this nation became a democracy, for good or ill, with the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment. And we all know what the apocryphal quote says about democracies:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury.

Recycling a ten-year-old post...

On April 8th in 1913, the 17th Amendment to the Constitution went into effect. To anybody concerned with checks and balances and separation of powers who had actually read the Constitution, it's hard to see how this could be considered a good idea. As a matter of fact, it's hard to see how it could not be seen as undermining the very concept of a federal republic.

I know some of you are clicking for Wikipedia right now, muttering to yourselves "Seventeenth? Is that income tax, or when they let y'all chicks vote? No, it's Prohibition, right?" No, the Seventeenth Amendment is the one that calls for direct election of Senators. What's so bad about that, you ask? (Go on, ask.) Well, let me tell you...

Understand this first: I'm not one of those people who think the Constitution is divinely inspired and the perfect governmental document. However, for setting up a limited federal government with strictly enumerated powers rigidly separated among different branches that acted as brakes on each other, it's really pretty clever. There was a lot of thought put into a careful system of counterweights and oversights, and if you change one bit of it, you can throw something completely unexpected out of kilter. And boy howdy, did the Seventeenth Amendment ever do that in spades.

Firstly, our bicameral legislature originally copied one redeeming feature from the English Parliament. The lower house was composed of representatives directly elected, one per every X number of the population. Because of their (relatively) small constituencies and their two-year terms, representatives had to be very aware of the popular sentiment of "John Q. Public" and respond to it, lest they be replaced. In the English system, the upper house was the House of Lords, with noble members who had a lifetime tenure. Although they couldn't permanently shoot down legislation, they could apply a temporary veto which could be overturned by a determined lower house.

Our upper house was the Senate, whose members served terms three times as long as those of the lower house. Since we had no hereditary nobility (and were prohibited one by the Constitution) each state's two senators were elected by the state government itself. Thus insulated from the constant pressure of needing to worry about re-election and the public whim of the moment, the Senate would serve as a brake against the spasms of popular fads, and prevent asshattery like legislation proclaiming the theme song from Friends as the national anthem or Britney Spears being voted Dictator-for-Life.

The second, even more important, function served by senators, was as representatives of their state or commonwealth government to the federal government in Washington. Whereas a representative from Dubuque or Des Moines would be voting the whims of their respective constituencies, the senator from Iowa was expected to represent the sovereign interests of the Hawkeye State. This has very specific effects on the separation of powers in the U.S. Constitution.

One of the most telling effects comes from the fact that the Constitution specifically delegates the power to ratify treaties to the Senate. This is important both in the nature of our federal system of government and in the nature of foreign treaties at the time the Constitution was written. In the late 18th Century there were no treaties designating United Nations World Heritage Sites or allowable levels of CFC emissions. Treaties involved war and peace, mutual defense, and the setting of national boundaries. By giving the Senate the power to ratify treaties, this was implicitly acknowledging the sovereignty of the individual states. A mutual defense pact with Absurdistan could not be entered into without at least a majority of the states feeling that they had sufficient ties to Absurdistan to make it worth defending. Likewise for treaties setting borders or ending wars; approval by the Senate was the de facto shorthand means of gaining the approval of every statehouse in the federation.

Once senators became directly elected, it effectively demolished the reasons for a bicameral legislature and the division of powers enumerated in the Constitution. The senator was now removed from his or her lofty perch and made as much a weathervane of the public whim as the representative. Further, the senator from certain states, those dominated by a single large city, no longer represented the interests of the state, but rather those of the small portion of the state in which the majority of the populace was concentrated. The Senate, originally a legislative buffer against the popular whim of the moment and the inexorable demographics of urban centers that dominate the House of Representatives, now became the very same thing it was meant to counterbalance, but with a six-year term instead of a two-year one.

In the years since 1913, the effect has become all too obvious. Treaties are ratified based on pressure from the media, not their agreeability to the sovereign states that are bound by them. There is no longer a legislative brake on popular fads or the whim of the moment. We've bounced from New Deal to New Frontier to Great Society to everything short of the Great Leap Forward. Commentators can make mouth noises about "We're not a democracy, we're a Federal Republic" all they want, wingnuts and moonbats can natter about wimmen voters and the Electoral College 'til the cows come home, but this nation became a democracy, for good or ill, with the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment. And we all know what the apocryphal quote says about democracies:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury.

"What's the best gun for a _______?"

Breda kicked over a hornet's nest with a recent post dissecting the tired old saw that goes "This here Airweight snub-nosed revolver is the perfect gun for you, li'l lady!"

An Airweight revolver is a handy little gun. I've kept one in a coat or Shoot-Me vest pocket for years. It's light enough to not drag one side of the coat down noticeably, and I shoot it a lot more accurately than I do any of the dinky "credit card with a trigger" .32/.380 double-action autos. There are other advantages that I'm not going to bother with here, because they're immaterial to the point of this post which is that I shoot it well because I've done a lot of double-action revolver shooting.

And I do very little of that revolver shooting with that dinky Airweight snubbie. It hurts. The old-style hard plastic LaserGrips leave the backstrap exposed; the corner of the hump-back frame barks against the knuckle at the base of my thumb because I choke my grip up for better recoil control, so that after twenty-five or thirty rounds of full-house loads, I'm sporting a bruised knuckle.

"Put better grips on it! I put Hogues on mine, and..." I can hear someone typing it now. No, what's important about the gun is that it fits in my pocket and doesn't bind on the fabric inside, not whether or not it hurts my hand during long range sessions. I have an all-steel .22 Kit Gun that I can shoot for hours and get all the double-action J-frame trigger time I need; it's actually fun to shoot.

Why do people recommend Airweight J-frames to people, women or men, as a first, and possibly only, gun? It's about as narrow-purpose as a handgun can be, and tricky to shoot well: the sights are hard to see, not to mention the basic physics problem of trying to hold a sub-1lb. object steady with two fingers while pulling a 10+ lb. trigger, all the while knowing it's going to smack your hand like a ball bat when it does go off? I mean, if you were trying to frustrate a new shooter and turn them off on shooting as a pastime, could there be a better gun to give him or her?

I'm sure we've covered this before...

Your house is not a free-fire zone. It is important to positively identify anything you are pointing your weapon at. If you're not willing to shoot it, you shouldn't be pointing a gun at it; that's right there in the basic safety rules. And if you don't know what (or who) it is, then how do you know if you're willing to shoot it or not?

Yes, you can search* and PID indoors quite adequately with a modern weapon-mounted light, one with good output and adequate spill, using good technique. If you do not know how to do that, use a handheld to avoid waving your blaster around and muzzling things... and people ...you shouldn't.

You don't even really need any special gear, though. Your house does have built-in room illumination, right?

Alternatively, you can use your Tactical Audible Target Identification Friend-or-Foe System, or T.A.T.I.F.F.S.

You know, the one where you say "Who's there?" with your mouth.

*Although, really, why are you searching? If you're that sure that someone's in the house, why not just fort up and call the po-po and let whoever's in the house know that you've done so?

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Tactical Buzzwording and Practical Pistols

A reader of Greg Ellifritz's wrote to him to inquire whether he should use the P365 he actually carries or the larger P320 he uses as a bedside gun in an upcoming class. The instructor had recommended using the P320.

Fundamentals: On a square range.

Of note was how he described the class: "[A] two day Defensive Pistol 1 Course where we will be firing at least 500rds per day."

Like the class instructor, Greg recommended going with the larger pistol.

"In a weekend shooting class that involves firing more than 500 rounds a day, you will get incredibly fatigued. You will get blisters on your hands. You will be sore from the recoil (even from a 9mm). Shooting 500 rounds in a day while actually concentrating on learning new skills is a demanding endeavor both mentally and physically. Recognize that most gun owners will never fire 500 rounds out of a single handgun in the course of an average lifespan."

While instructors will often hang a label like "tactical" or "defensive" off a class like this for marketing purposes, the fact of the matter is that a good quality 500-rd/day class is generally going to be a pure shooting mechanics class because there won't be time for anything else. The closest thing you might get to tactics is if the instructor encourages a sidestep on the draw.

To put this in perspective, compare the round counts for some classic classes. A forty hour MAG-40 class is spread over four to five days, and twenty of those hours will be in live fire, with a round count of approximately five hundred rounds, total. A classic Gunsite 250 is five days of training, some of it in shoot houses and other moving, "tactical" type situations, and the round count for the whole week is about a thousand rounds.

Tactics: In a shoot house.

By comparison, I've taken two-day mechanics-focused classes with trainers like Todd Green, Ernest Langdon, and Scott Jedlinski that burned up that much ammo in a weekend. Part of it is that every drill needs to be repeated as many times as there are shooters in a relay, so that the instructor can give each student direct observation and coaching feedback. 

Some of those gunhandling skills are going to port over to pretty much any pistol you use, and for those that don't, there are instructors who teach classes specifically geared toward smaller pistols and/or working from deep concealment. The round counts and the pace of those classes will also be adjusted accordingly, to allow you to, e.g., tuck your shirt back in over your PHLster Enigma between drills or properly re-holster a pocket-carried J-frame.

Interactive: Force on force against an opposing will.

Relatedly, Dave Spaulding has a good piece in G&A where he breaks down the different types of training. He arranges them in a hierarchy, but you could easily look at them as a three-legged stool. 

"Over time, I’ve come to look at firearms training as a three-tiered pyramid I call the Hierarchy of Combative Firearms Training. The tiers are: 1) Essentials (I prefer this term to “fundamentals”); 2) Combative Aspects; and 3) Interactive Aspects. You must properly train and anchor skills through each level before you attempt the next. For example, would you take a counter-terror driving course before you take basic driver’s training? Of course not. Along these same lines, you should not try to fight with a pistol until you’ve learned how to shoot and manipulate it. Some think they are one in the same but that is not the case. If you throw a punch before you’ve learned how to make a fist, your punch won’t be effective and will likely result in injury and failure."

Seriously? Seriously?

Re: The Sonny Puzikas incident in Texas... (That's the one where the tactical instructor and alleged Spetznaz vet rolled into a dark shoothouse, guns hot and no flashlight, and treated one of his assistant instructors like he was made out of brown cardboard. The guy is expected to live but has several extra holes for the nonce.)

In comments at Caleb's blog some people, whom I have to assume are some variety of Puzikas nuthuggers and therefore can't believe anything bad of the guy, are trying to hang the blame on someone other than the dude who pulled the trigger; in this case, on some fictional "RSO". Says one commenter who signs himself 'Sid':

Some of the comments upstream get my blood boiling. The shooter cannot know what he does not know. He was a shooter, not the RSO. He obviously did not know that 2 individuals had entered a hot range. The individuals walked into a hot range without clearing with RSO.
...
Prayers go out to the injured person. Yes. But stop with the 4 Rules sermon.

"Four Rules Sermon"?

Brethren and Sistern, there is an obvious lack of sufficient sermonizing here, so let me turn to the Book of Armaments, Chapter Four, Verse One: "Be Sure Of Your Target And What Is Beyond It." There is no codicil that says "Unless you're in a shoot house," or "Unless you're going really fast."

It’s not okay to shoot your fellow range patrons EVEN… and I’d like to make this perfectly clear… EVEN IF THE RSO SAYS IT’S COOL.
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I'm not sure how I feel about this...

So, somebody or another had a link up to a provocatively-titled hit piece called "The Startling Paranoia of the Gun-Loving 'Armed Mommy'", and I followed the link, expecting to point and laugh at the anti-rights types getting the vapors over a woman daring to think her children were worth protecting.

The article is chock-a-block with Facebook internet "posters" of women holding guns variously captioned

• "Don't be fooled by that sweet smile... She'll shoot you dead if you mess with her family"


• "I don't call 911so there won't be anyone to save you if you break into my house."


• "My gun is loaded with Christmas cheer... in case you had plans to break in this year."

Okay, anybody could go cherry pick a few posters to make it sound like these people spend an inordinate amount of time coming up with new daily variations on clever ways to talk about shooting home invaders. Let's go check the Facebook page for ourselves.

Let's see... Pictures of people with guns, political stuff, abortion and global warming, the usual background noise of the parts of the web I'm most often on... and... again:

• "How do I feel about gun control? Break into my house one night and find out!" 

Pictures of people posing with targets, NFL playoff chatter, anti-Obama immigration jokes, and... again:

• "Why a handgun that shoots shotgun shells? Because wrong house motherf***er". 

And... again:

Jesus wept.

Did George Zimmerman get horsewhipped through the public square in vain?

I mean, look... I own a pistol and have a carry permit. I carry that pistol with me everywhere I go. I have spent a not-inconsiderable amount of time and money learning how and when to use it, and I've spent a fair amount of thought on why. I would like to think that implicit in these facts is what I would do with it should someone threaten my life and/or limb. But I do have one or two other topics of conversation I sometimes touch lightly on, you know?

Conversely, well... Gosh, where could that liberal writer have gotten the idea that the author of that FB page was a little obsessed with the idea of shooting people breaking into her house?

In the end, I'm torn. I'm always glad to see more people taking their Second Amendment rights seriously and getting hip to the idea of taking responsibility for their own safety, but at the same time, I'm vaguely squicked, and I can't put my finger on exactly why...

Someone buy the AP a clue.

"Exchange student's death tests 'stand your ground'" trumpets the AP headline, except I looked all through the story and there was nobody standing any ground anyplace. While the defendant is claiming "Stand Your Ground" as his defense, his case seems weak in regards to the "He's Coming Right For Us" prerequisite.

The version of the events alleged in both the news story* and the charges being brought against the shooter is that Homeowner Dude, tired of a string of burglaries and petty thefts from his garage, put a purse in the garage, left the door partially open, and gunned down the little miscreant that came along and grabbed it.

Wyoming Montana law is pretty clear about a homeowner having the right to use lethal force to defend him- or herself from an intruder, but this is a tough case to paint in a self-defense light, especially when the prosecution claims that "(d)ays before, Kaarma had told a woman that his house had been burglarized twice and he had been waiting up nights to shoot an intruder." Wyoming won't even let you do that to deer unless you're legally blind, in a wheelchair, or have a special license as enumerated in W.S. § 23-3-304(d)(iv). Montana won't even let you do what he did to a deer:

Baiting
• It is illegal for anyone to hunt or attempt to hunt by the aid of or with the use of any bait, salt lick, trap, snare or set gun.
• Baiting shall mean the placing, exposing, depositing, distributing, or scattering of food sources or salt so as to constitute a lure or attraction.

So far, this case is shaping up to illustrate a couple of important points:

• Your property is not a free-fire zone, Stand Your Castle or whatever to the contrary. You're going to be buying whatever that bullet hits, so you'd better make sure it's something you can afford to shoot.


• If you run around telling everybody how eager you are to shoot those so-and-sos, you can't get all butthurt when a prosecutor is standing there telling a jury that you're a bloodthirsty kook who was just itching to shoot those so-and-sos.

[EDIT: I have no idea where the Wyoming stuff came from when this case took place in Missoula, MT. Sorry. Total brain fart on my part.)

*For the purposes of this editorial commentary, we'll pretend they bear at least a tangential relationship to the facts.

How many lumens?

On the left, some of the lumens. On the right, all of the lumens. Photo courtesy of Pat Rogers/EAG Tactical.

When I got to gun school, I was reminded that EAG Tactical's rules for the pistol shoot house class specified no IWB holsters. Pat probably would have let me run mine, but since I had learned my lesson from June's class and brought the whole range bag, I just did a little bit of swapping around frames and slides to get a more rules-compliant setup...

Since the OWB holster I had was a Raven Phantom for the TLR-1S, I moved the slide from the Tactical Dirt Color gun onto that frame (no backup irons on the DeltaPoint gun yet, and I didn't want to tempt fate). I moved the CTC Lasergrip onto it, too, because I've become a big believer in lasers in the dark. So the gun I used in class was the setup you see in the photo below.

I'm glad I switched.

See, the CTC Lightguard on my day-to-day carry gun is a pretty specialized tool. At ~100 lumens on a fresh CR2 battery, it's not up to much more than illuminating something at which you've already decided you probably need to shoot. And that's fine! It's not for searching dark corners and hunting for bad guys, which are activities I don't plan on doing anyway.

If I'm pulling my gun out and pointing it at something, it's generally because I've already identified it as a threat. Sure, it's possible to dream up scenarios where a light on a CCW handgun, especially one with a grip-activated switch, could be a detriment ("Suppose you're in a store and terrorists cut the power and you want to pull out your gun but not give away your position? And maybe ninjas!") but most of them are so far outside the likely uses of my CCW gun that I have yet to be persuaded that being able to better see my target is a bad thing.

Proper use of a pistol-mounted light is something very few non-cops (and too few LEOs) ever get taught. I certainly don't have much knowledge of it, and what I have is mostly theoretical, gleaned from keeping my ears open when smarter people are talking.

One thing I do know is that for that application, more lumens are generally better lumens. In the picture at the top of this post, that's my gun light on the left: A TLR-1s with less-than-fresh batteries, and so putting out less than its full rated 300 lumen output.You can imagine how swallowed up the LightGuard would have been, with less than a third the output and a generally more diffuse pattern at that.

That pattern part is important. See the light on the right in that top picture? That's the current industry standard, the "U-Boat", a Surefire X300U . With 500 lumens on tap, it has enough light output for a very bright center and a nice corona that helps illuminate the periphery of your vision. The spill from my partner's light was pretty useful to me a few times, since my light didn't give off near as much.

The picture at the top illustrates another point: How long an "indoors" shot can be. That one looks close to twenty yards right there, and if you look around hallways at work, down the aisles at the store, and corridors at your church or other public buildings, you'll quickly come to realize that "Indoors" does not equal "In the same broom closet."

More on this class to come...

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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.

The zoo's my blues muse.

So, the first time I went to the Indianapolis zoo, we were there for a company picnic with Bobbi's employer. It was late summer of 2011, and I had the Kodak EasyShare V1073 that I'd bought to photograph the LuckyGunner blogger shoot along with me. I had a lot of fun shooting pictures at the zoo.

The next time I was there was again with Bobbi, on a lark on one of her vacation days in 2013. Two years later, I had a more formidable camera. The Canon PowerShot SX500IS was all ate up with megapixels (16!) and zoom-X's (30!) relative to the Kodak, and I did indeed manage to get some better pictures with it.

In the summer of 2014, Kirk and I bicycled down to the zoo, and I schlepped along my then-current camera, a Canon 20D with an 18-135mm travel zoom lens fitted. I was super happy with a few of my shots. I was more patient on the shutter, and had at least some eye toward composition.

Fast forward to yesterday:

The Winter That Won't End has not been kind to my SADS. I've been struggling with enough give-a-damn to get out of the house on plenty of days, and have had too many that saw me stay in pyjamas, sitting at my keyboard until well in the afternoon before I could yank myself out of a mope long enough to run errands.

Tuesday's weather was forecast to be sunny by lunchtime, with a temp that might flirt with fifty degrees in the afternoon. "You know what?" I thought to myself on Monday afternoon, "I'll bet a trip to the zoo tomorrow, just by myself, with no schedule to worry about, would be just the thing to snap me out of my funk. I'll bring good cameras, and it will be awesome."

So I drove down and pulled into the zoo parking lot and the signs were good. I'd tried doing this last Friday only to abort at the last minute when I saw that the parking lot was jammed full and half of it was school buses. Tuesday at lunchtime, though, there were only a half dozen school buses and the parking lot was barely a quarter full.

The weather, though, had probably something to do with it. It was 34°F and gusting as I walked across the parking lot. There were more kids running around screaming than I thought there would be, and my hands were getting a little cold as I stood looking down into the walrus tank...

But, oh what I was seeing through the viewfinder! I had the full-frame Sony A7 with me, fitted with the 24-240mm zoom that my friends had pooled their dough and surprised me with. Oh, you could see the walruses' vibrissae glistening and the water droplets frozen in space as they surfaced and spun and dove... These pictures were going to be great!

After about ten minutes of shooting, I noticed the kids were thinning out, and I decided to duck into the desert biome to warm my hands while I shot pictures of lizards.

There in the indoor display, shooting from an awkward angle, I was composing the shot using the screen on the back of the camera instead of the viewfinder and... what were those orange letters blinking in the top right corner of the screen?

NO CARD

Oh. Fudge. Except, much like that more famous Hoosier, I didn't say "fudge".

I fumbled in the little pocket of the Event Messenger 100 intended to hold spare memory cards. There was no card in there, either.

Oh. Fudge.

Wait, the zoo gift shop! They used to sell film in those back in the day! Maybe they had some cheap SanDisk 8GB cards for three times what they were worth?

I half-ran across the zoo to the gift shop, but no dice. Oh, they had some emergency battery chargers for smart phones, which is how half everyone records images these days. If you were perverse enough to be schlepping actual camera gear around the zoo, you were obviously expected to be squared away enough to have remembered to check your cameras before you left the house.

Walking dejectedly from the gift shop, I took a few deep breaths and centered myself.

I'd learned one lesson from that long ago trip to Tennessee: Anyplace worth bringing one camera is worth bringing two. The camera bag over my shoulder is the one I take with me everywhere. It holds my iPad Mini and its type cover, an Olympus PEN E-P5, and three lenses, with the 14-150mm zoom mounted on the camera. It's a good little rig and the one I used to do almost all my picture-taking at Tac-Con.

Determined not to waste the trip, I decided to just walk it off and shoot the zoo with the PEN.

Meanwhile, the sun came out, the temp rose into the 40's, and along about one o'clock or so, the zoo largely emptied out. I was glad I stayed.

The Olympus did just fine, by the way, and I had a fantastic time.

You know, the zoo is only about a twenty minute drive from the house, and annual memberships aren't terribly expensive. This is some cheap therapy, when you think about it.
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Reruns...

Here, while I'm trying to get something together, have a re-run. It's a post from 2011 on the fascinating topic of inner-city violence, intravenous opiates, and the virtue of running:

'Way back in the summer of aught-aught, when I was recovering from all the surgery they had to do to stick me together after my motorcycle accident, I had a double occupancy room at the Big City Public Hospital.

My roommate was an African-American woman who I thought of as "middle aged" at the time, but looking back, she seems to have gotten much younger; I mean, she probably wasn't much over thirty-five. Funny how that works. Anyhow, she was recovering from a gunshot wound in the arm.

She had friends and relatives in and out of the room nearly constantly, which should have annoyed me, except that I was curled up with an on-demand morphine drip and was consequently pretty much out of my head on opiates for most of our joint tenancy. During one of my more lucid periods, I asked her story, and received the following amazing tale in response...

Our heroine was standing at the bus stop, minding her own business. (This, as everyone knows, is one of the most dangerous things you can do in the 'hood.) The bus stop was slightly elevated from street level by a low stone retaining wall. All of a sudden and for no reason, as these things so often go down, the man in the house across the street emerged with his girlfriend, started shouting death threats at her, and the pair proceeded to hop in his car and try to run her down.

They were unable to reach her with the car due to the retaining wall, so the crazy guy leapt out of the car, leaving his girlfriend at the helm to continue playing Death Race 2000, while he shouted that he was going back across the street to fetch his gun and come back and shoot her.

"...and so he did," said my hospital roommate.

"Wait," I replied, confused, "you saw him run into his house, come back out with a gun, come back across the street, and shoot you, and you just stood there?"

"If I'd'a ran, he'd'a shot me!" she retorted, looking at me as though I had a screw loose.

"Looks like standing still didn't work so hot, either," I said, returning to the joys of the electrically-dispensed poppy. 

"I'll shoot anybody I find in my house!"

Really?

"As an EMT I have responded to at least one call where a woman called 911 believing she was having a heart attack. We responded to the home and entered it and the husband was standing in the kitchen completely unaware that his wife had called for our services. If he’d been armed and under the premise that he would shoot any stranger who was in his home he would have shot the very people responding to his wife’s call for help."

Too many people get a gun and then look at it as some sort of universal problem-solving tool instead of a fairly narrow-focus bullet launcher.

Everybody expects it's going to be nazi zombie bikers come to rape their TV and steal their dogs. Nobody expects it's going to be the developmentally disabled adult child of the previous owners of your house coming "home" to make himself a sandwich. Further, there are places where you might be legally justified in shooting someone but, well, "Hey, it's okay, you didn't know he was a 70-y.o. Alzheimer's patient" probably doesn't help the Ambien work any better at 3:30 in the morning...

EDIT: This ties in with stuff talked about here, too.
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Speaking of caps busted in asses...

'Way back in the summer of aught-aught, when I was recovering from all the surgery they had to do to stick me together after my motorcycle accident, I had a double occupancy room at the Big City Public Hospital.

My roommate was an African-American woman who I thought of as "middle aged" at the time, but looking back, she seems to have gotten much younger; I mean, she probably wasn't much over thirty-five. Funny how that works. Anyhow, she was recovering from a gunshot wound in the arm.

She had friends and relatives in and out of the room nearly constantly, which should have annoyed me, except that I was curled up with an on-demand morphine drip and was consequently pretty much out of my head on opiates for most of our joint tenancy. During one of my more lucid periods, I asked her story, and received the following amazing tale in response...

Our heroine was standing at the bus stop, minding her own business. (This, as everyone knows, is one of the most dangerous things you can do in the 'hood.) The bus stop was slightly elevated from street level by a low stone retaining wall. All of a sudden and for no reason, as these things so often go down, the man in the house across the street emerged with his girlfriend, started shouting death threats at her, and the pair proceeded to hop in his car and try to run her down.

They were unable to reach her with the car due to the retaining wall, so the crazy guy leapt out of the car, leaving his girlfriend at the helm to continue playing Death Race 2000, while he shouted that he was going back across the street to fetch his gun and come back and shoot her.

"...and so he did," said my hospital roommate.

"Wait," I replied, confused, "you saw him run into his house, come back out with a gun, come back across the street, and shoot you, and you just stood there?"

"If I'd'a ran, he'd'a shot me!" she retorted, looking at me as though I had a screw loose.

"Looks like standing still didn't work so hot, either," I said, returning to the joys of the electrically-dispensed poppy.

Bargain Bin Shootout

If the end of the beginning for serious digital photography was the 1999 launch of the Nikon D1, the first all in-house digital single lens reflex camera from one of the Big Two Japanese camera makers, then the beginning of the end for film SLRs was in 2003. It was triggered by a digital SLR price war caused by Canon's launch of the EOS 300D.

Known in the U.S. as the Digital Rebel, the 300D sported the 7-point autofocus system and 6.1MP sensor like that on Canon's semi-pro EOS 10D, but where the 10D sold as a body only for a $1,999 MSRP, the Rebel could be had for $999 complete with an 18-55mm zoom lens.

How was this done? Well, firstly some features were deleted (and some disabled). Also, the bright, but heavy and expensive, glass pentaprism viewfinder was replaced with a lighter, dimmer, cheaper pentamirror. Finally, the rugged magnesium shell of the 10D got binned in exchange for a thinner plastic body.

The launch of the Digital Rebel brought DSLR cameras in range of the casual photographer and kicked off a price war between Nikon and Canon that reached its apogee... or perigee? ...in 2008-2009, the years that arguably saw the final maturing of the DSLR market. Since then changes in DSLR cameras have been mostly evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

The five years between the introduction of the Rebel and '08-'09 saw furious competition between Nikon and Canon as each tried to grab a bigger share of the entry-level DSLR market by packing ever-cheaper beginner cameras with ever-better features until something had to give.

So Canon and Nikon each peeled off an even cheaper model to serve as an enticing price leader in boxed kits sold in big box stores, leaving the original entry model to continue accruing more advanced features without as much of an eye toward absolute minimum MSRP.

Canon followed the original 300D/Rebel with the 350D/Rebel XT (8MP, same $999 kit price), then the 400D/Rebel XTi (10MP, $899 kit), and then the 450D/Rebel XSi (12MP, $899 kit). Then in 2008, while the Rebel XSi was still fresh on the market, Canon slid an entirely new camera beneath it in the lineup: The Rebel XS, called the 1000D overseas; in Canon's numerical marketing, the fewer the digits, the higher-zoot the camera, with the ultimate pro DSLR body being the 1D series.

Relative to the Rebel XSi, the Rebel XS lost the "i" suffix, as well as a handful of features. It recycled the 10MP sensor from the XTi, and the 7-point autofocus system from the XT. While the XSi had moved to a higher resolution 3" rear LCD display, the XS used the same 2.5" screen as the XTi. These and other shortcuts allowed Canon to drop the price of the basic kit with an 18-55mm zoom lens to only $699, a price point starting to put the squeeze on higher end point-'n'-shoot "bridge cameras".

From this point on, Canon designated their better US-market Rebels with a "T" prefix and an "i" suffix: T1i, T2i, et cetera. The cheaper entry-level models lost the "i", like the T3 below.

Canon didn't iterate these bargain-bin models as frequently, so the 2011 T3 is the direct successor to the XS. It picked up the 12MP sensor and 9-point autofocus system from the XSi, the DIGIC 4 processor (then-current across the Canon DSLR line, but long in the tooth and about to be replaced in the higher-end models), and added the ability to shoot 720p video.

So in 2011 the customer who went looking for a DSLR at Best Buy or in the camera aisle at Walmart or Target (hard to believe now that just ten years ago Wally World and Tahr-jay had a whole aisle of cameras) had their choice of two boxed Canon kits: the 18MP T3i with an 18-55mm lens for $899, or the 12MP T3 with the same lens for only $599.

The price-conscious shopper wasn't going to care about details like a body shell of smoother, thinner plastic, the lack of a separate door for the memory card (it shared the compartment on the bottom with the battery, which was cheaper, but precluded swapping cards while mounted on a tripod), or the fact that the T3 was built in Taiwan rather than Japan. The T3i also had a bigger, articulated LCD screen on the back, the ability to shoot 1080p HD video, and other details... but three hundred bucks is three hundred bucks.

In 2009, Canon's biggest competitor reorganized their entry level line as well. The big box store DSLR shopper would find a pair of kits from Nikon: There was the D5000, which competed head-to head with Canon's T1i. It had 12MP, an articulated LCD, could shoot 720P video, and came with an 18-55mm lens for $850.

Competing with the cheaper Canon Rebel XS was the new Nikon D3000. It was extremely stripped down relative to the D5000, and much smaller. It lacked video recording and an articulated screen, but this wee little DSLR came with a wee little price tag; with the kit lens included, the tariff was only $449. 

Essentially, Nikon was using the 10MP CCD sensor and 11-point autofocus sensor from its old D200 semi-professional camera, hooked to the new EXPEED processor.

The D3000 had a built-in tutoring "Guide Mode" for novices, and had a minimum set of physical controls, with fewer buttons and most settings controlled via a menu on the rear LCD screen.

Comparing the extreme entry-level cameras from the two companies (and it's a generalized comparison as the T3 is an iteration newer than the D3000), the Nikon feels more solid in the hands. It combines beginner friendliness in its minimal buttons and "Guide Mode" with features of more expensive cameras that the budget Canon lacks, like the soft textured rubber on the handgrip and the separate side-mounted door for the memory card. The viewfinder on the Nikon is noticeably brighter, although that's relative; both are cramped and dim compared to the pentaprism finders on pro cameras.

The kit lenses both have pretty much identical specs, including "VR" Vibration Reduction on the Nikon and "IS" Image Stabilization on the Canon, as well as the same range of focal lengths and apertures, and are (other than the lens elements themselves) constructed of plastic from the filter ring to the mounting flange. However the Nikkor DX AF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G VR feels much more upmarket compared to its rival; once mounted on the camera where you can't see its plastic flange, you could be forgiven for thinking it cost a good bit more than it did, while Canon's EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS II never stops letting you know it came in the box with the camera like a prize with some Cracker Jacks. 

Literally the only place the Nikon feels chintzier is in the diopter adjustment for the viewfinder, which is a fiddly sliding bar arrangement instead of the normal dial on the Rebel T3.

When I'm done with this DSLR project, I'm going to sell or give away the Rebel T3, but I'm keeping the Nikon D3000. When you get done with Guide Mode and don't need the beginner's training wheels, you can do like I did and go into the menus and switch the status display on the rear LCD screen from its cartoon-like simplified graphic look to the normal white-on-black status display other Nikons use. While in the menu you can also correct the only real physical control shortcoming by reassigning the "Fn" function button on the front of the camera, which comes from the factory set to start the self-timer, and switch it to be the ISO control button.

The basic 10MP CCD sensor and 11-point CAM-1000 autofocus core of the D3000 is still plenty adequate for solid work if you don't need to shoot video; after all, it's the same guts as the Nikon D200 I used as my main camera for years, just in a smaller and lighter package.

These entry level cameras were key to Canon & Nikon's marketing plans for over a dozen years, intended to bring in new buyers and entice them to move up inside their respective manufacturer's ecosystems to bigger and better things. The Nikon entices you by feeling like a real camera, while the Canon makes you maybe wish you'd spent the extra money for the next level camera from the start...or perhaps bought the Nikon in the showcase next to it.

(Crossposted at Digital Fossils)

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Bad faith discussion.

So a campus carry bill is wending its way through the legislature of the Gem State and the New York Times, obviously concerned with the goings-on of colleges 2,400 miles from Planet Manhattan, published a guest op-ed from Boise State professor Greg Hampikian:

In light of the bill permitting guns on our state’s college and university campuses, which is likely to be approved by the state House of Representatives in the coming days, I have a matter of practical concern that I hope you can help with: When may I shoot a student?

Ignoring the fact that the professor went on in the same vein, trying hard to be arch for another several paragraphs, my first impulse was to take his opener at face value.

Well, professor, since the whole point of campus carry is that you have the same rights on a college campus as you do elsewhere in the state of Idaho, understand that the Idaho Code lays out when you may shoot a student in Title 18, Chapter 40, under "Justifiable Homicide", 18-4009:

18-4009. Justifiable homicide by any person. Homicide is also justifiable when committed by any person in either of the following cases:
1.  When resisting any attempt to murder any person, or to commit a felony, or to do some great bodily injury upon any person; or,
2.  When committed in defense of habitation, property or person, against one who manifestly intends or endeavors, by violence or surprise, to commit a felony, or against one who manifestly intends and endeavors, in a violent, riotous or tumultuous manner, to enter the habitation of another for the purpose of offering violence to any person therein; or,
3.  When committed in the lawful defense of such person, or of a wife or husband, parent, child, master, mistress or servant of such person, when there is reasonable ground to apprehend a design to commit a felony or to do some great bodily injury, and imminent danger of such design being accomplished; but such person, or the person in whose behalf the defense was made, if he was the assailant or engaged in mortal combat, must really and in good faith have endeavored to decline any further struggle before the homicide was committed; or,
4.  When necessarily committed in attempting, by lawful ways and means, to apprehend any person for any felony committed, or in lawfully suppressing any riot, or in lawfully keeping and preserving the peace. 

Seems pretty clear.

Then I Googled up the good professor who, as it turns out, is not only a professor of biology but also of criminal justice, working with DNA evidence on the Innocence Project. Now, I'm generally in favor of seeing innocent people not incarcerated for crimes they didn't commit, but this guy has the earmarks of a crusader.

If you read some of his other opinion pieces on firearms, you begin to hope that he approaches biology with more rigor and logic than he does gun control, because his opinions on the latter are definitely shaped entirely by his widdwe fee-fees.

In other words, his whole "when may I shoot a student" thing is schtick. He knows damned good and well what Idaho law is on the subject, but he fears his own emotional incontinence and projects it onto everybody else, and that is why he refuses to engage in a good faith discussion on the topic.
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Well, that's embarrassing...

Some of the most fun I have on my annual New Mexico trip is taking photos of roller derby. I don't get to do much sports photography, so this is my yearly chance.

Last night I tried making do with the cameras and bodies at hand, putting the Sony 50mm f/1.8 on the NEX-5T and then getting daring and mounting the old Leitz Elmar 9cm f/4 on the Ricoh GXR body to shoot some fully manually in B&W. If there's anything more hipster than using 1955-vintage German glass on a Japanese digital camera to shoot pictures of roller derby, you'd need to be drinking PBR ironically to find out what it is.

Shooting with the NEX-5T was a breeze. Put it in aperture priority and crank it open enough to where you're still getting ~1/200th shutter speeds, and then trust auto focus and mash the button at the start of each jam, keeping the pack centered in the frame and know that the shutter whirring away at up to 10 frames per second would grab something good.

Using the manual focus lens on the Ricoh GXR was a whole different experience. Having to shoot wide open or at f/5.6 meant that at all but the longest shots across the rink, depth of field issues were a constant worry. I lost plenty of shots to "almost-but-not-quite-in-focus". The lighting was perfect for B&W shooting, though, and even though I had to press the shutter button for each one, I think I wound up shooting more frames with the manual Ricoh than either of the automated cameras.

We got back to the Nerd Ranch and I started throwing stuff from one Compact Flash (the yeoman Nikon D200) and two SD cards onto my laptop.

As I started sharing pics around, everybody was noting that the internet in the house was lagging something fierce. It was noted again when we were binge-watching a few episodes of Rick and Morty later that evening.

It wasn't until I sat down at the computer and checked my email this morning that I realized what had happened, since that's when I got the email cheerily informing me that all my photos had been uploaded to my One Drive account. Yes, I had failed to disable automatic photo uploading for this roadtrip...

It's something I never notice at home, because auto uploading five or ten pictures happens seamlessly in the background. Nearly two gigs of derby pics dumped on the hard drive all at once? That's a bandwidth hog.

D'oh!
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