Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #129...

Sorry for the dearth of free ice cream today. I had an excursion downtown, plus I was writing stuff elsewhere...

Here, the internet likes gun pictures, right?

The rare threaded-barrel, 12-round-mag version of the M&P22 CA.

Remington Golden Bullet

Numbered magazines know you're keeping an eye on them and are less likely to act up. #SympatheticMagic

A little perspective...

@instapundit The America I grew up in had wage and price controls and it was illegal to own gold coins.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) July 9, 2015

While the internet thrives on "OMG the end of the world! This is as bad as it's ever been!" a little perspective is sometimes in order.

Things have been much worse in this country on just about any front you could think of: Ferguson was not Watts, ISIS is not Nazi Germany, and the arguments with your Wingnut/Pinko cousin on Facebook are not the Sunken Road at Antietam.

Get out of the bunker for a bit. Do something fun today.

Three-quarters there...

Went out to MCF&G to shoot in the piss-pouring rain today. Put a hundred more rounds of that WPA Polyformance through the P320.

On round number ninety-five of the day (#1495 of the test) there was another failure to ignite. The primer fired normally when reloaded back into the P320's magazine for a second try.

It was a well-dimpled primer that should have gone off. Only a hundred more rounds left of this particular lot number, although I'm hearing other tales of woe on Facebook from people using Wolf primers both as components and in factory ammo. This is from hammer-fired guns as well as striker-fired ones. We shall see what we shall see.

Three-quarters of the way to its cleaning and lubing: 1500 down, 500 to go.
.

Logos...

Shades of the NASCAR-15...

MS-2 Sling

Magpul SGA shotgun stock

Magpul forward sling attachment point

The rear sling attachment point

I could live without the logos on everything, but if everyone from Saigon to Shanghai is making unlicensed copies of your stuff, every little bit helps, I guess.
.

Incidentally...

Happy Birthday, Robert A. Heinlein! Thank you for all the wonderful stories.
.

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #128...

Sig P320 grip texture

不知彼，不知己，每戰必殆

I keep getting told what "The Liberal Media" is ignoring and what "The Liberal Media" is talking about by people whose only knowledge of "The Liberal Media" comes from what Rush Limbaugh tells them.

Dudes, it's not like they broadcast in code. You can go find out for yourself.
.

The News From Nerf World

The AP story reads:

"The mother of a man who tried to launch a firework off the top of his head for July Fourth and was killed instantly said Monday she's advocating for stricter controls about who can use the explosives.

Devon Staples, 22, and his friends had been drinking and setting off fireworks Saturday night in a backyard in Staples' eastern Maine hometown, Calais, when the accident happened with a reloadable fireworks mortar tube, police have said."

Did you catch the sleight-of hand, there? The dude put the mortar on his head, lit it, and "the accident happened". What accident? The lighter worked, the mortar worked, it was sitting right where he wanted it. Every thing about the whole affair was as on purpose as it gets. Dude killed himself as surely as if he'd stepped in front of a train or suck-started a twelve gauge.

Lady, I'm sorry your kid was an idiot and paid for his idiocy with his life, but just because your kid thought he could breathe water is no reason to make the other kids get out of the pool. Normally I would not speak so to a grieving parent, but you are trying to use the force of law to inflict your grief on everybody else, and that is most uncool.
.

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #127...

Remington 870 with Mesa Tactical sidesaddle and Surefire forend Weaponlight

It was a very relaxing day at the range. Although keeping the gun fed through the ejection port from the sidesaddle is a lot more perishable a skill than you'd think it is. This time last year I could have done it blindfolded at a jog, now I'm back to fumbling after taking the winter and spring off from gauge practice. I need to get some full weight proving rounds for practice.
.

...and 1400.

 

Another one hundred rounds through the Sig P320 today. Fifty rounds of 115gr FMJ from WPA Polyformance and fifty of Federal's 115gr "Range, Target, Practice" RTP9115 FMJ.

The 23rd round of the day (#1323 through the gun) produced a click rather than a bang. At first I thought I'd not been keeping track of the rounds and had prevented the slide from locking back with my thumb, but yanking the slide to the rear resulted in an unfired round popping out of the ejection port.

The primer was pretty well dimpled; that primer should have popped, and did in fact pop when I dropped it in the spare M&P 9 FS I had along. Below is the box flap showing what I believe to be the lot number in question. Remember that a previous round from this lot (round #903 of the test) also had a dud primer. You may want to check your ammo to see if you have this lot number, because two defective primers in 250 rounds fired is pretty suspect.

There were no other malfunctions of any type to report, not even any of the kind where I put my thumb in the wrong place and keep the slide from locking back. This is now fourteen hundred rounds through the gun; six hundred rounds to go before dirty gun pics are taken and cleaning and lubrication occurs.
.

Uh-huh. Sure it did.

Francisco Sanchez, 45, told KGO-TV Sunday in a mix of Spanish and English that he found a gun wrapped inside a shirt while he was sitting on a bench at the pier and smoking a cigarette.

"So I picked it up and ... it started to fire on its own," Sanchez said, adding that he heard three shots go off.

Guns don't work that way, dude. Lemme guess: It aimed itself at your victim, too?

I'd even buy the whole "I didn't know what I was doing or how light the trigger was and fired accidentally!" if you'd shot her once and dropped the gun in horror. That'd be what those dudes on Law & Order call "depraved indifference", sure, because normal people don't point guns at other people and mess with the trigger, but it wouldn't be like you'd set out maliciously to kill somebody.

It was shots number two and three that tell me it wasn't an accident, sport.
.

You know what'll cheer me up?

Shootin' some gauge. Shotguns make everything happier.

Shotgun photo for illustration purposes only. Shooter has since resumed using the slower but surer and less fumble-prone brass-up positioning in the sidesaddle.

Automotif XCV...

1984 Chrysler LeBaron Town & Country convertible

To someone growing up in 6th or 7th Century England, the world must have seemed overshadowed by a glorious past. Like Tolkein's Gondor, the reminders of a previous lost level of civilization were all around: in grand villas with no-longer-functional plumbing; huge, decrepit public buildings looted for stone to make pasture fences; and ruler-straight, board-flat paved roads, with weeds and trees growing between the frost-heaved pavers.

How similar the life of the auto enthusiast on these shores in the late Seventies and early Eighties. Performance was a thing of the past, strangled by emissions and fuel economy needs and gun-shy insurers. When the last '76 Eldorado rolled off the line, it was marketed as "The Last American Convertible"*. By 1980, the base Camaro and Mustang each came with a 4-cylinder engine and Corvette buyers in California had one powertrain option: A low-tune 305c.i.d. mill with a slushbox and fake dual exhausts.

Enjoyable cars were slow to return and the early steps were halting, as witnessed by the '84 LeBaron above. Chrysler brought domestic convertibles back to the U.S. market by giving roofectomies to its highest-zoot K-Car variants in 1982. Initially only available with the 2.6L Mitsubishi "Silent Shaft" 4-cylinder, they soon offered a turbocharged 142bhp 2.2L motor, distinguished by hood louvers as seen on the car in the photo. The incongruous woodgrain vinyl siding on the top-of-the-line Town & Country models was by order of Lido Iaccoca hisownself. The self-consciously retro-themed packaging wasn't a very big hit on the FWD cars, consistently comprising less than 10% of the annual sales total.

Don't see many survivors from that era. Rust-resistance wasn't really a thing yet, and build quality was wildly varying, but the dude in the picture seems to have a pretty well-maintained ride. Bets he's the original owner?

*There was a lawsuit when Caddy reintroduced convertibles to their lineup in 1984, of course. Because 'Murrica!
.

Fun Facts

Astound and amaze your friends at cocktail parties with the following bits of triviata from teh Feds:

"The most frequently noted location in wiretap applications was “portable device.” In recent years, the use of mobile communications, including text messaging and application software (‘apps’) from cellular telephones, have become increasingly widespread. In 2014, a total of 96 percent (3,409 wiretaps) of all authorized wiretaps were designated as portable devices."

...and...

"Drug offenses were the most prevalent type of criminal offense investigated using wiretaps. Table 3 indicates that 89 percent of all applications for intercepts (3,170 wiretaps) in 2014 cited illegal drugs as the most serious offense under investigation. Homicide, the second-most frequently cited crime, was specified in approximately 4 percent of applications. “Other major offenses,” a category that includes smuggling and money laundering, was the third-largest category and was specified as the most serious offense in less than 3 percent of applications. Many applications for court orders revealed that multiple criminal offenses were under investigation, but Table 3 includes only the most serious criminal offense listed on an application."

Modern Phenomena

The Taxiway Toccata: This is when everybody turns their phones on or takes them out of airplane mode as the plane is taxiing to the gate and the whole cabin is filled with the blingles and bleeps of four hours of accumulated text messages times one hundred passengers...

Surprise Tuesday: This is the day when the UPS truck brings the mystery presents that drunk weekend you bought for sober weekday you while surfing Amazon at 0130 on Saturday morning.
.

It's too early to feel this cynical...

Oh, beautiful for drone-filled skies
A tax code so arcane!
A voting class on their fat ass
From Houston to Fort Wayne!
America! America!
You voted stuff for free
You made your bed, ye overfed
Go watch some more TV!

I need to go get some fireworks. That usually cheers me right up.
.

Overheard in the Convention Center Parking Lot...

RX: "How do you know that's the entrance over there?"

Me: "Because that's where the chubby bearded white dude in the kilt is headed. That's generally a pretty good sign."

Go go Gadget... er, Gadget!

The Gadget is Go. Click here.

ETA: Great description and further pictures here.
.

QotD: Deft Aside Edition

From a learned post on heat management in automatic weapons, Weaponsman deftly drops an aside:

"Our copy is the German language version, because we read po-nyemetskiy, and Amazon.com wants $300-400 for an English copy, when there is one to be had, but Amazon.de has copies of this out of print classic for about €100. (Which is going to be lunch money if they keep letting Greece set continental fiscal policy)."

Oh, well-played, sir!
.

Blink... blink... blink...

"It's July in Indiana and the fireflies are out."

.

Fear and Self-Loathing on the Editorial Page

The defining characteristic of late-stage Western democracies is an almost reflexive self-loathing. For instance, we have this guy bemoaning the fact that, since the Magna Carta is not actually a legally-binding document containing all the provisions of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it's somehow just a sham that allows Rubert Murdoch and the Koch Brothers to boil us all for soap, rather than representing the first time anybody north of the Alps put pen to paper to state that the king can't just up and do whatever he wants whenever he wants:

"Governments and the illiberal cherish Magna Carta not despite its lack of legal significance, but because of it. It is a means through which those who do not want their legal powers to be challenged or checked by any court can still pay lip service to the great constitutional tradition."

There is irony in this, as we are gearing up to celebrate the 239th anniversary of another document with no legal weight whatsoever, and yet which bears significance apparently too abstract for that guy to wrap his head 'round.

Meanwhile, confronted with the fact that all the hashtags in the world aren't going to make ISIS go anywhere, a Harvard prof claims that we should just learn to live with them. He draws the (seemingly reflexive) comparison between them and the fact that we did bad things in the past and uses it to bolster his argument that eventually it will just be business as usual when they have a seat at the UN.

"Those oh-so-posh and civilized Brits we enjoy watching on Downton Abbey? Their ancestors created the United Kingdom through violent and brutal acts of coercion and conquest (as any knowledgeable Welshman or Scot could tell you). Those heroic Americans who expanded the “Empire of Liberty” across North America? They massacred, raped, and starved Native Americans to get there — and collected plenty of scalps along the way. The Bolsheviks and Maoists who created the USSR and People’s Republic of China? They didn’t consolidate power via gentle persuasion, and neither did the Wahhabis under Ibn Saud or the Zionists who founded Israel. As the now-deceased Charles Tilly made abundantly clear in his landmark Coercion, Capital, and European States, state-building has been a brutal enterprise for centuries, and the movements that built new states in the past did many things that we would now condemn as utterly barbaric."

Jesus, pull these guys strings and and it's just "Wounded Knee! King David Hotel! Zionism! Manifest Destiny! Crusades! We're Bad Too!"

I grew up with Southern Baptist preachers warning me of the dangers of moral relativism, but the problem with modern Progressivism is its absolute lack of anything even like moral relativism. Bad things are bad, and there are no degrees of badness, except maybe a +5 badness modifier if the bad thing in question was done by a white dude, with an additional +3 if he spoke English.

It's an odd moral calculus, where Victim Blaming is as bad as Victim Stoning.  If you try going Godwin, they hasten to point out that the US had concentration camps in WWII, without acknowledging that there's a pretty substantial difference of degree between a concentration camp where one leaves via the front gate versus one where the only exit is via the chimney.

"Me, me, me! I'm the bad guy, here! Oh, woe is me!" It is an essentially childish self-centeredness. If you ask them to loath someone more than they loath themselves, they reflexively try to find a reason to make it all about them anyway.

Hey, I know that writer!

My review of the Walther CCP for Shooting Illustrated is online now. I liked it because I got to write the following line:

"There was the PPK (the continued existence of which hopefully results in annual gift baskets and thoughtful Thank You cards from Walther HQ in Ulm to the Ian Fleming estate)..."

As an aside, if someone really wants to penetrate the Gun Nerd market, they need an inexpensive gun with either a rotating barrel or gas-delayed blowback operating system, and they need to chamber it in .22 TCM or .32 NAA. Gun Nerds love that stuff.

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #126...

M&P 22 with 10-8 rear sight.

While at the range yesterday I also fired off the last forty-eight rounds of a batch of Aguila subsonics (not the 62gr SSS, just regular ones) that made excellent grip trainers in the M&P22.

See, they had barely enough energy to run the slide, so that if you allowed the gun to move at all under recoil, it sapped enough energy that a variety of interesting malfunctions would occur. The slide wouldn't go back far enough to eject the empty, but it would go back far enough to pick up a fresh cartridge from the mag, while the spent case was still under the extractor claw.

Welp, those are gone, and I can dump some high-velocity .22 into the deuce-deuce ammo can now without fear of getting them mixed up.
.

1300...

One hundred fifty more rounds through the P320 today. Fifty rounds each of Magtech 115gr FMJ, Federal 115gr RTP9115 FMJ, and American Eagle 115gr AE9DP FMJ were fired with no failures of any type to report.

This brings the total number of rounds fired to 1300. The gun still has not been cleaned or lubricated in any way. Other than a couple of shooter-induced failures to lock open on an empty mag, the only malfunctions thus far are one dud primer at round #903 and that weird failure-to-feed on round #978. Seven hundred rounds remain before the gun gets its bath.
.

That's odd...

.

Not Paying Attention

So, for some reason, a couple-year-old hand-wringing lament by the Chicago Police Superintendent has bubbled to the surface and is making the rounds again on the Book of Face:

“I don’t care if they’re licensed legal firearms, people who are not highly trained… putting guns in their hands is a recipe for disaster. So I’ll train our officers that there is a concealed carry law, but when somebody turns with a firearm in their hand the officer does not have an obligation to wait to get shot to return fire and we’re going to have tragedies as a result of that. I’m telling you right up front.”

Protip to the Chicago Head Cop What Am In Charge: "Turning on the officer with the gun in hand" will likely get a person shot from coast to coast. It's why we tell people not to do it, which you would know if you'd been paying attention to the Use of Force Best Practices for the last twenty years instead of playing Political Pocket Pool.

Every time a new jurisdiction gets legal CCW, you get some blowhard with more gold braid than a Nazi train conductor get up behind a podium and sonorously intone the horrors that are going to happen when the poor, benighted citizens who he valiantly watches over are allowed to pack heat and stand watch over themselves.

And every time it happens, his dumbass predictions keep not coming true. Which he would know if he removed his head from the mayor's lap long enough to look around at other jurisdictions that have had legal CCW since his rookie days, brown-nosing his NYPD FTO back in the '80s.
.

Things That Annoy Me, # 351,624

If I hear "prep" used as a noun, specifically a plural one, one more time, the speaker had better be ready to use their survival skills.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) July 1, 2015

I LOL'ed.

I haven't seen a German defense caught that flat-footed since Normandy. https://t.co/RGtBu70IZX

— Bob Owens (@bob_owens) July 1, 2015

Shooting in Washington...

The cameras I took on the trip:

• Nikon F5: My favorite camera to play with. Have I mentioned how I have a mad, passionate, irrational love for this camera? Shot mostly B&W (T-Max and Tri-X) plus a roll of Portra 160.


• Nikon D200: My new work camera. This thing takes the place of my trusty Canon 20D. Well, it will when I get a VR lens to replace the Streetsweeper.


• Nikon Coolpix P7000: Most of the pictures on this blog for the last several months have come from this camera. It rides in the "document pocket" of my gun burkha and is my "go everywhere" camera.

It's the sort of thing Twitter was made for...

At this moment, the only people in this country who are not contending for the GOP presidential nomination are me, you, and Hillary Clinton.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) June 30, 2015

Turns out that was exactly 140 characters. (Coincidentally that will be the maximum allowable length of an election season stump speech in 2024. All other messages will have to be conveyed by the candidate's tattoos.)
.

The opposite of a surprise.

So Chris Christie has just thrown his oversize hat into what has become an impossibly crowded ring. At this moment, the only people in this country who are not contending for the GOP presidential nomination are me, you, and Hillary Clinton.

The headline at Meet the Press's site regarding Christie's announcement read thusly:

Chris Christie's Challenge: He No Longer Looks Like Mr. Electable

I think Bridgegate proves he's no longer the guy the media have picked to take a fall in the ninth against their guy. Now they want Jeb for a target dummy.

Of course the media's all in a sulk at the moment because the more Progressive among them are coming to terms with the fact that Elizabeth Warren isn't running and that, while there IS a candidate with legitimate Progressive chops contending for the Democrat nomination, he's even more of an Old White Dude than Hillary.
.

The downside...

...of visiting friends in the Mountain or Pacific time zones is that I'm a natural night owl and, propelled by the energy of wanting to stay up and hang out with people I see way too infrequently, I go to bed at late o'clock local time. You know, eleven or midnight, maybe a little later, like a grownup.

But then my eyes pop open involuntarily at about 0700, or 0800 at the latest because oh my lord, have I fed the cats*? And that happens at 0700 or 0800 Eastern time.

What this translates to is a week of three or four hours of sleep per night, which I can keep up for a while, but it eventually takes its toll. And I paid that toll last night, gladly, with eight hours of deep, dreamless sleep. It was glorious.


*No, it's not that I think that thought literally, but years of having the alarm clock go off at 0600 gets the body in a rhythm.

** Desmond Morris, Catwatching, p.75

*** You know how to drive someone crazy? Put in a footnote that has no referent in the text.
.

Sorry...

Grueling flight schedule back from the curiously dry Pacific Northwet.

I just left southwestern Washington state, where it's been a blistering, sunny, sticky, ninety-something °F for the last several days, and landed in Indianapolis, which has been overcast, rainy, and experiencing daily highs in the mid-70s in my absence. Freaky.

Flight left from PDX at midnight last night and I wasn't wheels down at IND until ~10:30 local this morning, changing planes at ATL in a comedic round of Musical Departure Gates.

Here's a picture of Mount St. Helens. I'm gonna get some shut-eye.

Sunday Morning Test Pattern...

The North Head lighthouse at Cape Disappointment

I can't leave you people unsupervised for five minutes.

So, I go spend a few days at gun school, largely disconnected from the intertubes and the 24-hour news cycle...

Swear to God, my Facebook feed is full of more bomb throwing and nihilism and less love of fellow man than downtown Beirut in the '80s.

.

The changing face of gun school...

So, for years, this was the image that sprang to my mind when I thought of a self-defense shooting class:

Nick Grossman of Bolt Defense does an exemplar drill with right-handed Jeff playing a left-handed student.

Some dude teaching another dude how to shoot guns. Frequently "classtumes" were involved, as cargo pants and gun company tee-shirts came out of the back of closets, along with multicam plate carriers and morale patches.

Rory Miller is practicing the exemplar drill with Glenda Edwards of Friday Harbor Gun Runners as the student.

Now, I've been in quite a few co-ed shooting classes that were only co-ed because I was there. However, as time goes by, more and more women are getting CCW permits and becoming more interested in self-defense and shooting in general.

Our teacher for the week, Kathy Jackson (aka The Cornered Cat) demonstrates the exemplar drill with Tammy Smith of GunStart.

Lately there has been an explosion in the number of women's firearm classes taught by women. Many of these new instructors were new shooters themselves not too long ago and there exists a need for passing on to them the institutional knowledge of how to safely teach firearms self-defense. Further, many experienced firearms instructors have little to no experience running classes with a majority of women, and how this will affect group social dynamics and learning styles.

Melody "Limatunes" Lauer offers instruction as J.B. Herren of Friday Harbor Gun Runners serves as the student.

In the future, the above photo might not be as uncommon a sight as it is now or was in the past. And that's a good thing.
.

Stay Off My Side.

Q: "How can you tell an open carry activist from an incipient spree killer?"

A: "One just up and starts thumbing rounds into his gauge right there in the middle of Walmart."

Barring some amazing extenuating circumstances, if some local had proactively put a round into the back of the guy's grape while he was doing that, I'd have a tough time voting to convict. Personally, if I see somebody just up and start loading a long gun in public with no berm or deer anywhere for miles around? I am unassing the AO with a quickness.

You are not helping, dickwad.

(h/t to Unc.)
.

Seen at gun school...

The perfect assistant instructor's shirt. Available here.
.

Grglmph...

Don't start with me this early, internet. I'm really cranky before my first cup of coffee.
.

A damned sight worse.

Losing the rear sight didn't do anything good for my accuracy. Given the pace and type of shooting, at seven yards there should have been a ragged hole with a few outliers from getting frisky and overconfident on the weak-hand shooting. Instead, my target looks a mess.
.

All guns break.

You know what'll really help you focus on your front sight? If your rear sight snaps clean in half on the fifth shot on the first morning of gun skool. You did bring a second gun, right? Right?

Basically, when the slide assembly reached the rear limit of its travel, the back half of the sight decided it wanted to keep going and it had enough inertia to do so. I don't recollect it actually hitting me, but always wear eye pro, kids! .

A small chunk of metal and plastic and ego...

There's a comment over at Ambo Driver's blog, right here.

Translated, it reads: "Waaahhhh! I bought this gun and then, after I bought it, I decided to google it to validate my decision (rather than googling it first to help me make an informed one.) When I did, I discovered that half the internet was making fun of the dumb gun I wasted my Best Buy paycheck on, and so, in order to salve my tender, butthurt fee-fees, I told a fat joke."
.

Still Ticking

Fifty rounds of nasty steel-cased Wolf Polyformance 115gr FMJ and fifty of Remington's 147gr High Terminal Performance JHP loading went downrange via the Sig Sauer P320 this morning at Iggle Crick. First I've tried of the latter.

No malfunctions, although I again caught myself parking my thumb on the slide stop and preventing it from locking back on the empty mag twice. I've almost gotten shut of that issue, but it apparently still likes to crop up if I'm trying to run the gun fast.

The gun still has not been cleaned or lubricated in any way since I popped the latches on the box several months ago. The round count now stands at 1,150 with one dud primer (#903) and that weird failure-to-feed (#978). In just 850 more, the gun gets a bath...or at least some lubricant.
.

Today Was A Good Day...

Breakfast and coffee at Good Morning Mama's to get the day off to a good start. I had the fruit, yogurt, and granola parfait in the foreground. Yum! Lotsa blueberries and pineapple in there.

Range time at Eagle Creek Pistol Range. Shot both the M&P22 and the P320.

Shootin' Buddy with a 22/45, me playing with 5 frames-per-second. Check out the cool fire visible in the ejection port, where the shell has just been pulled free of the chamber.

After we finished up at the range, we got to Glendale Mall in time for the noon showing of Jurassic World (where I made sure to point out the cool stuff from Dennis at Dragon Leatherworks!) and then into Broad Ripple Village for lunch at the Sushi Bar.

Alas, now I have to catch up on some work...
.

I swear...

I swear, some people wouldn't know Occam's razor if you slit their throat with it...

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) June 20, 2015

Dream Cars 5

 Ultra-lightweight BMW Gina roadster.

The fabric-skinned car does weird, organic things by altering its body lines...

I hate you, AT&T.

There needs to be a special Smart People Illuminati you can join where you get special Service Line numbers so you can avoid having to listen to endless ****ing phone tree questions that ask retards "Is the land line plugged into the wall?" and "Is the cup holder on the computer retracted?"
I nearly threw my ****ing cell phone across the room.

"Yes! Yes! I already checked the simple stuff! That's why I'm calling you people!"
.

The barometer is dropping.

I can tell this by the crackling pain in my right shinbone. I just use the barometer in Clifford, the Big Red Watch to confirm what my built-in one has already told me.
.

You can hear the jimmies rustling at the thought...

"Put Ayn Rand on the Sawbuck!"

.

I'm getting pretty jaded over here...

XM17 draft request for proposals released
FORT BELVOIR, Va. (Jun. 17, 2015) – The U.S. Army Program Executive Office Soldier announced today that a draft solicitation for a new military handgun was released on the Federal Business Opportunities website. This announcement follows the agency’s notice that the Army intends to host a fourth industry day July 7-8 at Picatinny Arsenal, N.J., to discuss the document and receive feedback from industry.

Oh, look! Lucy's holding the football again. Let's see who runs up to try and kick it this time.

"THE ARMY'S NEXT SERVICE PISTOL?" is turning into "NEXT-GENERATION MID-ENGINE CORVETTE?" of the firearms journalism industry. (Except there's actually a greater likelihood of the latter.)
.

Drudgery...

So the Drudge Report headlined a link yesterday from that notable clearinghouse of chemtrail data, reptiloid spotting guides, and black helicopter sightings, Infowars:

Drudge joins “blame anything but Roof’s racism” crowd w/ blaring InfoWars story on his SSRI use. (h/t @mcmoynihan) pic.twitter.com/8RSwLnOqfJ

— Andrew Kirell (@AndrewKirell) June 18, 2015

Naturally, the crankier corners of my internet, for whom the bleating of "False flag! False flag!" is nearly a spinal reflex, scooped this rather dubious ball up and ran with it...

For starters, I wouldn't believe Infowars if they told me the sun was coming up in the east without independent verification, let alone splash their uncorroborated tale across the top of my page as a credible source of info.

Even if he was on SSRIs, so what? As Andrew Rothman pointed out over on the Book of Face, everybody in a hospital who dies of a lethal infection was on antibiotics, but that doesn't mean antibiotics cause lethal infections. People's ability to discern cause from effect has gone out the window; we live in the era of Post Hockey, Ergo Propter Hockey.

Drugs didn't pull that trigger: An evil bastard with heart full of hate did.
.

Another random snark attack...

This morning's post...

...was going to be epic, but has been sort of overtaken by events.

I would note that under the South Carolina Code, Title 23, Chapter 31, Section 215:

(M) A permit issued pursuant to this section does not authorize a permit holder to carry a concealable weapon into a:

...
(8) church or other established religious sanctuary unless express permission is given by the appropriate church official or governing body;

Well, that was just all illegal to bring a gun into a church! Why would anybody need a gun in church, anyway?
.
.

Camera decisions...

A gracious reader sent a package containing a couple of 35mm Nikons: An F5 and an FM2n. Prior to this, my Nikon use had been limited to the little entry-level EM and some mid-Nineties consumer-grade autofocus bodies. Handy cameras, but nothing to wax rhapsodic over. The FM2n and the F5 were not like that; I was (am) smitten with those cameras. I'll pull them off the shelf just to handle them, and maybe do a little dry-fire practice, as it were.

Much as with guns, I'm not really a brand fangirl. If I had any sort of brand loyalty, I guess it would be to Canon, since an AF35ML was my first 35mm camera and an AE-1 Program was my first SLR. As a result, when I bought my first DSLR, it was a Canon as well.

I'm not a brand fangirl, but...

Film cameras are fun for me. A hobby. Digital cameras I use for work: Pictures for columns or articles, stuff for the blog, and so forth. If I can share lenses between hobby film cameras and digital work cameras, that's a big savings in money, space, and hassle.

I'm seriously thinking about trading in my three Canon DSLR bodies and my EF-S lenses on a Nikon D300 or even a D700 and just keeping the EF lenses for the EOS film bodies.

Disparity of forces and missed opportunities...

From a good interview with Steven Zaloga (if you're at all a tank nerd):

"To give you a general sense, in April of 1945 the Germans have about 90 tanks on all of the Western Front.  All tanks, everything, Panthers, Panzer IV, Tigers.  They had a handful of Tigers.  They had about 400 other armored vehicles, assault guns, Stug III and things like that.  So they had just short of 500 armored vehicles on the entire Western Front, from the North Sea all the way down to Bavaria and Southern Germany.  At that point in time the United States had 11,000 tank and tank destroyers, to give you some sense of the disparity in forces."

Regarding the state of armor museums in the US:

" No, not at all, I mean, it’s a national scandal how bad it is.  Until recently, until five or six years ago there were two significant collections.  There was the Patton collection down at Fort Knox down at the armor school and there was the Ordnance Museum over at Aberdeen Proving Ground (Maryland.)  With BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure), the base realignment program, they basically took both collections and just threw them away.  There were plans to move the Aberdeen collection down to Fort Lee.  It was in fact moved down there but the Army has no money, so the tanks are basically sitting out in an open field rusting away.  The same thing happened with the Patton museum collection, that was sent over to Fort Benning and its basically sitting in the motor pool, with nothing to show and just rusting away."

True Story: So, this one time when Shootin' Buddy and I went down to Knob Creek, we got down there early in the afternoon the day before so we could take in the Patton Museum. As we pulled into the road leading to the gate, we were confronted by the big "Beretta in a red circle/slash" sign reminding us that the whole facility, parking lot and all, was on an Army base and our sidearms were strictly verboten. So we headed off to the hotel to ground our bags and de-gun.

We went back to tour the museum and my first thought was "Oh, damn! I left my camera in my bags back in the hotel room. That's okay, though, I'll bring one on my next visit and take pictures of all these cool tanks..." Only now I never will because they're not there anymore. Thanks, Obama Bush!
.

Do you doubt it?

It was almost certainly its proximity to the flagpole that got this thing its media legs. I mean, did the much scarier Texas 7 even get this much coverage, this high up in the hour, on the national news shows? It's been a while, so I might be downplaying my memories...

.

What am I going to do with this cake?

The other day, while I wasn't looking, Borepatch hung up his keyboard:

"It's been a long run, but two weeks before my seventh blogiversary I'm hanging it up."

Happy Trails, BP!
.

Safety first, accidents last!

Via email from Shootin' Buddy:

Velociraptors must remain locked in employee's personal vehicles. Violation of this policy may lead to penalties up to and including termination of employment.
.

Dream Cars 4

One of Edsel Ford's personal rides.

Priorities, polictics, and a USS Cesar Chavez...

There's no USS Larry McDonald, but there's a USS Gabby Giffords? Dammit, stop the bus right here. I want off.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) June 14, 2015

I mean, Larry McDonald* was actually murdered by a foreign nation's armed forces. And he was a Democrat, too, so what's the hangup?

The Jack pointed out that if being a shot congresscritter is enough to get a warship named after you, why is there no USS Leo Ryan*? He was a victim of Gun Violence and Religious Extremism!

What the hell, I'll go there. Besides, you know you were thinking it, too...

At least we know the ship will be able to sail slowly in circles even after taking a hit to the bridge. http://t.co/C5oHPggDIT Too soon?

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) June 14, 2015

*Raise your hand if you needed to click on the links to find out who Ryan or McDonald were.
.