Contextual Handgun: The Armed Parent/Guardian

So, in the news recently was this dramatic security camera footage of a woman fighting off some creeptastic dude trying to abduct her 13-year-old daughter right there in the middle of the Dollar General.

If you carry a gun and have a family, odds are good that when you need to use that gun to fend off some bad guy, you will not be alone, but rather will have loved ones close at hand.

There's very little in the way of firearms training that specifically takes this into account, however. Recognizing this, my friends John Johnston and Melody Lauer have spent the last year and more putting together a curriculum built around the realities of employing a firearm in the situation that is every parent's nightmare: With toddler in hand or baby in arms.

Melody, known on the intertubes for her site "Limatunes Range Diaries" (now MelodyLauer.com) was hired by John Johnston to help stand up Citizens' Defense Research, the training division of Ballistic Radio. Melody's an EMT with a gun school resume that puts mine to shame.

John Johnston, host of Ballistic Radio, has been to a whole ton of gun school himself. It was in doing all this training that John noticed the void that the Armed Parent/Guardian class was designed to fill.

John's a big fan of two things:
Context, because a lot of tactics, techniques, or bits of gear get criticized by people who have no understanding of the context for their use; and high standards of measured performance.

It was the latter that had me criticizing the curriculum when it was first being bandied about. The class standard for shooting was high enough that I wondered aloud if students would be able to keep up.

I was wrong.

Day one began with a well-organized classroom presentation that laid out the reasons for the course and gave video examples of the sorts of situations that the training was created to address.

Melody explaining the actual vital areas on a target and how they shift based on the bad guy's orientation relative to the shooter.

The hand-picked students for the shakedown cruise of this class consisted of a bunch of industry professionals as well as a few students who had never run a gun from a holster on the clock before.

Day One was spent on the range after lunch working on basic gun handling and shooting from the holster, with the pace gradually picking up until we shot the current FBI qualification course.

Day Two started off with a ballistic gel demonstration which served to illustrate what a bad idea it is to plan on using your body to shield your loved ones. Against FMJ ammunition (or un-expanded hollow points), human bodies are concealment, not cover.

Context: Are there times when you want to close the distance on the bad guy instead of opening it? Well, is the bad guy actually holding your loved one? Will stepping in get the muzzle past your loved one?

Day Two featured the meat of the shooting portion of the class: Shooting with babe in arms or child in hand.

Shooting one handed can be hard...

...when the other hand has a child pulling and tugging on it. Techniques were discussed to mitigate this, such as pinning the child's arm to your side with your elbow, which stabilized your shooting immensely.

SAND BABY!

When I learned that the graduation exercise would be shooting the FBI qual with baby either in arm or set down before shooting, but with no change to the par time, I was again skeptical. That's tight, especially for some of the newer shooters.

Again I was wrong. The quality of instruction was good enough that the entire class shot passing scores despite having to deal with SAND BABY.

If you have munchkins, preteens, or adult kids who leave the grandbabies with you, I highly recommend looking into this class. It'll be available September 10-11 at DTS in Troy, Ohio, or you could contact Melody and look into hosting the class at a facility near you.
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Pound Takes Pounding On Brexit Vote

I'm going to go stand in the beer aisle at the grocery store and wait for them to mark down the Boddington's.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) June 24, 2016

Gun Forum 101...

You're only allowed to own one gun at a time and if you don't convince everyone else to buy the same one, you lose at internet.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) June 23, 2016

Thank you, Captain Obvious.

""We don't know who the shooter is or what kind of weapons he has, but the possibility this could be a terror attack is crossing the minds of people here in Germany," CNN's Atika Shubert reported from Berlin. "

You must need some sort of advanced degree to make stunningly obvious statements like that.

Reporter: "There is a silence. I must quickly fill it with noises from my mouth parts!"
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300...

...failure-free rounds thus far through the Wilson.

Took it to Indy Arms Co yesterday and put another hundred rounds of Winchester 124gr NATO ball through it.

I ran the target out to fifteen yards and fired a magazine through it, cold. Could have done better, there, but I'm still getting used to the sights. Pulled it back in to ten yards and put eighty more rounds into the target, saving the last ten to let the guys who were working there that morning get a chance to try some five-shot groups with it. Response to this gun has been pretty universally positive; the gee-whiz factor is off the charts.
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#RememberUCDavis

This is one of the funniest things I've ever seen in gov. Democrats are literally acting like toddlers pic.twitter.com/YUWFkvAP23

— Stephen Miller (@redsteeze) June 22, 2016

Do Capitol Police not have pepper spray?
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Recoil-Operated

When I was arranging delivery of the Wilson 9mm, my contact at Wilson Combat pointed out that when the gun was new I should stick to 124- or 147-grain ammunition, in order to make sure that it had ample recoil energy to cycle the gun. Given my recent experiences with subsonic velocities from cheap 115gr plinking ammo in the Canik and Steyr, I ordered two 500-rd boxes of Winchester Q4318 124gr NATO ball ammo from Lucky Gunner to feed the Tactical Carry Professional.

Curious to see how it would function in the Steyr, I hijacked a hundred rounds of it and took the C9-A1 to Indy Arms Co yesterday morning.

While the pattern of ejected shells was as erratic as ever, the gun functioned fine, going through the complete cycle of operations every time. I did manage to keep the slide from locking back twice by inadvertently contacting the slide stop with my strong-side thumb while firing.

This makes 830 rounds fired through the Steyr C9-A1 without cleaning or lubing, with seven failures-to-fire (#8, #472, #535, #555, #558, #672, #695), seven failures to extract (#234, #266, #276, #531, #535, #543, #558), and one failure to go completely into battery (#116). 1,170 rounds left to go.
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You're Not Helping, Part MCXII...

This is vehicle from PA heading to NYC stopped @ #HollandTunnel by @PANYNJ with cache of weapons inside. @NBCNewYork pic.twitter.com/tEavRLDCpG

— Marc Santia (@MarcSantia4NY) June 21, 2016

“Astute Port Authority Police work led to the stoppage of a vehicle on the New Jersey side of the Holland Tunnel this morning, leading to the arrest of three individuals from the state of Pennsylvania on a variety of charges related to illegal possession of guns and ammunition,” according to a statement from Joe Pentangelo, a Port Authority Police spokesman. “At this time, the investigation is continuing, but the agency does not believe the incident is terrorism-related.”

Seriously, that vehicle looks like the illegitimate offspring of Rob Pincus's PDN tour truck and Grave Digger.

That's, like, whatever the opposite of "Grey Man" is. Chartreuse Man? Plaid Man? 

If this guy were Frodo, he'd have rolled right into Mordor through the front door with a twelve foot neon "THE RING OF POWER IS IN MY LEFT POCKET" sign over his head. It's hard to work up a head of sympathy for this cat. 10/10 for style, but minus several thousand for not thinking things all the way through.

That gunwriter life...

Friday morning I dropped the top on the Zed Drei and headed north to meet up with Mike Grasso and go do some gunwriter stuff at Atlanta Conservation Club. I could tell when I got into Hamilton County by the scenery...

I had a couple of pistols with me that I need to shoot a bunch for an upcoming article.

Along for the ride were a Nighthawk Custom Kestrel in .45ACP, a Commander-size pistol optimized for CCW...

...and a Wilson Combat Tactical Carry Professional in 9mm, a 4" gun also set up as an ideal carry piece.

Mike shooting the Wilson. It has run like a sewing machine from the get-go. Two hundred rounds of the Winchester NATO 9mm so far with nary a bobble to report.

Mike had brought along a custom gun of his own that had just had some work done on it and needed to be put through its paces to make sure everything was still right. It was.

After wrapping up at the range, we stopped off for lunch at Grand Junction Brewing Company in Westfield for lunch. I had a pint of their One With Nature APA with some boneless hot wings.

Since I did not have to use my AK, I am going to pronounce this a good day.

Tab Clearing...

• Threat Awareness and Attack Openings.


• Gun Show Safety Device for Cletus.


• Gotthard Base Tunnel

[omitted]

Paul Revere: "The [omitted] are coming! The [omitted] are coming!"

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) June 20, 2016

"On this day, December 7, 1941, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of [omitted]."

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) June 20, 2016

Sorry.

Bobbi worked the weird shift last night/this morning, which means I was up 'til almost 0400 seeing her off, got a couple hours shuteye, woke up to feed the cats, and then dozed restlessly for another couple hours before I got up to get ready for lunch.

I'll be back to normal by tomorrow. I hope. Right now I couldn't string two coherent thoughts together on a dare.
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Overheard in the Office...

Me: *chuckling* "Oh, man, look at this..."

RX: "..."

Me: "The name. On the back of his jersey. 'Hu'."

RX: "..."

Me: "Hu's on first."

RX: "How can you tell it's first?"

Me: "What? Because you just can! Look, there's the foul line and then the base path curves away, it can't be third; it would be a total mirror image..."

RX: "How do you know it's not second?"

Me: "Because there aren't any foul lines near second, it's just by itself in the middle of some dirt and...You know this could have gotten you shot as a German infiltrator during the Battle of the Bulge?"

RX: "What would I have been doing at the Battle of the Bulge?"

Me: "Getting shot as a German infiltrator."

Now It Can Be Told...

Since it showed up in the mailbox, I guess I can post this...

Now that Shooting Illustrated is an Official Journal of the NRA, if you want to change your subscription from National Rifleman or America's 1st Freedom, you can just go to the member services page and change it there.

If you want more personal defense and action sports shooting stuff, SI is the NRA mag for you.
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It's that time again!

It's Fun Show time! Let's sing the Fun Show Song!

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

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

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

Not really needing anything, but you never know. There might be that one special something I suddenly realize I can't live without.

Doubleyou-Tee-Eff?

Out on the road today, I saw a Bernie sticker on an S-class Benz
A little voice inside my head said, WTF? SRSLY, WTF?

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) June 17, 2016

Overheard in the Office...

Me: "...and you go across the conservative side of the web and find the people who scoff at the Constitution as a 'living document' and ask them if the First Amendment applies to the Internet. Hell yes it's a living document, we have got to constantly judge how the Constitution applies to situations that the Founding Fathers could never, in their wildest dream fantasies, have imagined..."

RX: "You don't think they could have imagined Internet hentai?"

Me: "Not even...well, Ben Franklin probably could have come the closest of any of them to imagining Internet hentai... This is going on the internet."

While typing:

Me: "Google's spellchecker knows 'hentai', for whatever that's worth."

Screw this.

People are acting like retards. I'm going to the range for a bit, and then go do something productive.
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Making America grate on my nerves again...

I like how once The Donald brings up the Terror Watch List thing, suddenly we're not all TJIC anymore.

Question

How much wookie-suited threeper stuff do you have to post to wind up on a terror watch list? Asking for a friend.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) June 16, 2016

Who watches the watch list?

"Before September 11, 2001, the no-fly list, which names people who are banned from boarding flights in or out of the U.S., contained 16 people. A leak revealed that that number had grown to 47,000 as of 2013. Most of those names were added after President Obama took office. The broader terrorist watch list maintained by the Terrorist Screening Center has an even more expansive scope; the estimated number of people on the list has ranged from 700,000 to more than 1.5 million, figures which include Americans and foreigners."

So, what other constitutional rights do we think it would be cool to strip from people extrajudicially?

What can get you put on a terr'rist watch list? Commenting too frequently at WRSA? Linking to Mountain Guerilla?

ETA: To put a finer point on it...

"A lot of folks who are screaming to throw all Muslims on to terror watch lists are the same folks who were cheerleading for that assclown Amon Bundy and his band of dipshits. Little do they realize expanding secret lists of "enemies of the state" will be their undoing...." -A Facebook Commenter

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Once upon a time...

Seeing a deer was a big deal. Seriously. As recently as the Seventies, just seeing a whitetail in suburbia east of the Mississippi was a rare thing. Now, though? After half a century of careful herd management here are so many of the damn things that some stretches of interstate can look like an abbatoir, with four or five of the things bloating along the roadside in the space of a mile or two.

Similarly, Walt Disney World opened in Florida in 1971 and would have been in operation for sixteen years before the American alligator was removed from the endangered species list. Now the things are traffic hazards in Florida. They also seem to serve the same function as grizzlies in Alaska: A reminder that we're not automatically at the top of the food chain.
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Three Eighty Ultra Mag

Yesterday I realized I had not been to the range since Thursday. I fished around in the Zed Drei's trunk and found a partial box of American Eagle .357SIG ammo (minus twenty rounds used to shoot two ten-round chronograph strings) and so I pulled a target out of the box in the garage and swung by Indy Arms Co. on the way to the grocery store to get a quick blasting session in.

Three magazines of ten rounds at fifteen feet, at a reasonable cadence, didn't do much except confirm that I really need to replace these awful factory sights.

There were no malfunctions of any type to report.

This makes it 1130 total rounds fired since the firearm was last cleaned or lubricated, with four failures to go completely into battery (#63, #78, #126, #748), four failures to feed (#221, #224, #282, #734), and one failure to eject (#1,033). 870 rounds left to go.
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Three Eighty

Last Thursday saw a return to the P250C in .380 for some more trigger time as I finish up a story on it. I had a box of the Armscor it had such difficulty with in Topeka, as well as a box of the Sig Sauer brand .380 FMJ.

The Armscor still had issues, in the form of about five or six failures to go into battery. The rim wasn't sliding up under the extractor claw and a slap on the magazine floorplate would cause the gun to finish going into battery. Sounds like a rim thickness issue, or a combination of rim thickness and COAL (cartridge overall length).

I switched to the upper A-zone and the Sig house brand .380 FMJ, and the gun ran like a top for the rest of the session.

That Armscor is the only ammo that's caused issues in the gun; it's eaten Prvi and Tula, S&B and Remington white box with equal aplomb. I'd say that points to the ammo and not the gun.
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The Master at work...

"How could the FBI have ignored all these glaring red flags?" - country about to nominate Clinton and Trump

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) June 13, 2016

Terminology, again...

As we enter the third 24-hour period of relentless media coverage, the part where even the local TV stations have custom bumpers for the incident with distinctive theme music, let's make sure we have some things clear.

TV news does not sell news to you.

TV news sells commercial time to corporations and your eyeballs are the poker chips in the card game.

Atrocities (and let's keep our terminology straight: hurricanes and earthquakes are tragedies, this was an atrocity) are like a Double Bonus Round in the Eyeball Delivery Sweepstakes for FOXNews and CNN and MSNBC.

And all this attention is just incentivizing the next Eyeball Deliverer out there, patiently loading magazines (or mixing fertilizer, or dumping powder into pressure cookers, or studying a flight manual, or filling jerry cans...)

And, yes, ironically this post is just more attention being paid, and by complaining about the problem I make myself a part of it. It's a hell of a thing.
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A point, please...

"Regardless, the three deadliest shootings in the U.S. have occurred in the past 10 years

The Orlando attack was by far the deadliest shooting in U.S. history (49 killed), and it is not even 10 years removed from the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre (32 killed), and the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting (27 killed). In fact, of the 30 deadliest shootings in the U.S. dating back to 1949, 16 have occurred in the last 10 years."

So, all of those have occurred after we prohibited the purchase of guns through the mail (1968) and after we instituted mandatory background checks for firearms purchases (1993)?
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News to me.

"(T)he MCX is known in military circles as the "Black Mamba"" -Mother Jones is where I go for all my gun facts!https://t.co/yGtnDAD3yU

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) June 14, 2016

I gave an involuntary bark of laughter. I'm sorry, but I don't think I've ever heard the MCX called the "Black Mamba", not even in a video game.

I'm not sure whether this is an example of Argumentum ad anus extractus, which is the logical fallacy of pulling stuff out of your ass, or Argumentum ad feces fabricatum, which is argument by making shit up.

ETA: I've been informed by friends that it was in inside term during project development because the black mamba is the bane of the honey badger. I'll contend that that's still a pretty big jump to "known in military circles".
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Because I hate using good material at an away game...

From comments here:

"The inability of most people to pass an Ideological Turing Test saddens me. My daily internet meanderings take me to an eclectic variety of sites. The one unifying factor among them is that most of the people in the comments section make no attempt whatsoever to understand their opponents on whatever the issue at hand may be. 

 90% of illumination on the internet is provided by burning straw men."

...but war is interested in you.

Sometimes the war doesn't care if you want to be in it or not.

"Whether you think we’re at war with radical Islam is immaterial–while it may take two to tango, only one side has to decide to throw a punch to start a conflict. They’ve already been punching on American soil; the attack over the weekend was just the latest hook shot in a conflict that will absolutely continue regardless of your personal feelings on the matter. I can’t tell you the long term answers to Islamofacist terrorism, but I know they won’t be presented or pushed by our current political circus in a quip on a news clip."

"Now, now, that's not what you really meant."

An article of Progressive faith is that you don't silence a person's own narrative. Unless it's "I am doing this for Islam and the caliph!"

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) June 13, 2016

Understand Your Terms...

Talking heads are talking about the glory days when we had an "Assault Weapons Ban" and all the evil assault weapons like the AR15 were banished from the land, and how the evil Republicans allowed it to sunset in 2004...

This picture was taken when the Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 was still in force. All three of those guns were very legal at the time. Two were legally considered "assault weapons" but were grandfathered in because they had been made prior to 1994, which made them valuable commodities at the time. One is not an "assault weapon" and was perfectly legal to buy in 2003.

All three of those thirty-round magazines ("high capacity bullet clips") had been made prior to 1994 and were thus grandfathered. They weren't terribly expensive, because there were literally millions in circulation, and those millions are a fraction of what's out there now.

At the time, I owned one AR-type weapon. Now I have several. And what I have is a tiny fraction of an electron in one atom in a water molecule of a drop in the civilian-owned AR15 bucket. Conservative estimates have the number of these things in circulation as closer to ten million than five. The horse is well and truly out of the barn.
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Herbivores...

The little tremolo effect Willie Geist gets in his voice every time he intones "AR15-style assault weapon" is just adorable.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) June 12, 2016

Counterproductive.

I wish that TV talking heads would quit calling this "officially the worst mass shooting in US history". Will you people quit keeping a leaderboard? There are sick f***s watching you that take that as some sort of challenge as they update their .xls spreadsheets.
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This morning on the telly...

Too bad it wasn't tennis interrupting my Meet the Press this morning.

Brokaw was just warbling and emoting into the camera that we need to have a "prayerful" discussion about gun control, this before everybody's bleeding has even been controlled.

Some other talking head (didn't see which, I was down the hall in the loo by that point) wanted to know whether we should construe this as a terrorist attack or a "hate crime". Hey, numbnuts, how about it's both?

Shooter's dad's first comment to press concludes with "This is not about religion," which, of course, identified the shooter's religion before anybody in any of the press conferences had mentioned it.
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#Fantasyland

In a #worldwithoutguns, the lion will lie down with the lamb... any time it wants to, and the lamb will shut up and take it, or else.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) June 11, 2016

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #143...

A test gun has arrived...

And here I thought my irrational love affair with 1911s was safely in the past.
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Breakup.

It's not you, Lasergrip and Lightguard, it's me.

I carried my M&P9 from the middle of 2011 until earlier this year. For almost that entire time, it sported both the Lasergrip and the Lightguard from Crimson Trace. I thought both were handier than a pocket on a shirt.

I was obviously in a minority on the Lightguard. I found myself caught between two schools of thought: On one hand was the ALL THE LUMENS camp, who correctly pointed out that the Lightguard's modest 100-lumen output was barely SOME of the lumens and not even close to MOST of them. It didn't generate near enough light for "bounce" to illuminate a room. On the other hand was the camp who pointed out that most people don't go hunting for bad guys with a CCW pistol and therefore a weaponlight is unnecessary bulk and expense.

Nobody, however, could point out the downside to having something at which I'd already decided to shoot be a little better illuminated, and the Lightguard was reasonably priced and didn't make the pistol any longer or wider or harder to conceal.

Unfortunately, when I switched to the Glock earlier this year, I discovered that the shape of the Glock Lightguard was not as friendly, especially during extended shooting sessions. By the end of the first day of the Contextual Handgun: Armed Parent/Guardian class in Topeka back in April, I had the worst case of "Glock Knuckle" I've ever had. I'm not normally susceptible to the malady, but with the addition of the Lightguard, the second knuckle on my shooting hand was slathered in Liquid Skin and wrapped in Bandaids by the end of the class.

What made it annoying is that I've taken that M&P, complete with Lightguard, to multiple classes and it never caused any problems.

The modest benefits accrued by the Lightguard aren't worth that. After five months, it looks like my Lightguard is coming off the Glock.

Similarly, the Lasergrip. On the M&P, it's a no-brainer. It simply replaces the pistol's factory backstrap, unobtrusively adding a laser for no increase in bulk at all. It's such a no-brainer that I'll admit being a little judgy of people who run M&Ps without one.

So when I switched to the Glock 19, I ordered a Glock Lasergrip from Amazon. I didn't think anything about it until April, which was the first time I was having to reload the pistol on the clock and... holy cow did this thing complicate mag changes! Any benefit I'd gained from adding the Vickers mag release was negated by the fat battery saddlebag sitting right where my thumb needed to go to get to the release.

So it's a reluctant goodbye to the LG-619, too.

Ironically, Crimson Trace has just released a new product, the Laserguard Pro, which combines a light and laser into the footprint of the Lightguard. I'd put one of those things on my Glock 19 in a New York minute and figure out a way to mitigate the "Glock Knuckle" problem, but CTC is only going to offer them for the bitty little Glock 42/42 and not the normal-size Glock 19. Que sera, sera.

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Froggy Life Flight

"Morgan got in touch with a frog hospital nearly 500 miles away in Cairns and an airline reportedly offered to carry the injured amphibian on one of its flights there.
“It was unbelievable coordination to be able to get the frog to us but he did eventually make it to Cairns and we picked him up from the airport,” Deborah Pergolotti, president of Frog Safe, told local media."

In case you were wondering what the dot at the top of the pyramid of Maslow’s Heirarchy was, now you know. You’ve pretty much gotta have the cave bears wiped out and a good handle on what next year’s crop is going to look like before you can start life-flighting frogs.
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More shooting...

I had one box left of that 115gr Blazer Brass. I also had half a box of Fiocchi 115gr ammo that, unusually for Fiocchi, had been extremely under-powered. I'd used it testing the Ruger 9E, where it had turned in an average velocity of 1035fps, with some rounds not even breaking the 1000fps velocity mark. That caused this in the Ruger:

Now, my Glock 17 is old, at least as Glocks go, with a serial number that dates it to 1992, but the recoil spring assembly is fresh, having been prophylactically replaced...*checks logbook*...428 rounds ago.

It's been running fine with the Blazer Brass, but how would it deal with this dregs of this defective lot of Fiocchi? (And I do mean defective. The velocity spread between the fastest and slowest rounds in a ten shot string was a full hundred and five feet per second.)

I ran the target out to seven yards and did a bunch of single shots and fast three- and four-shot strings from low ready with the Blazer Brass, before sending it out to fifteen yards to shoot at the upper A-zone with the Fiocchi.

The Fiocchi ran the gun fine. I wish the same could be said of me, but it was hard to make out the head box at 45 feet. I probably would have done better on a traditional bullseye, or even a free-standing USPSA target.

The CAP sights are such an improvement over the factory Glock sights, especially for shooting fast.

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Overcorrection...

Look, I know that The Little Golden Book of World War Two is incorrect when it teaches kids that the war started when Pearl Harbor got bombed and then the US saved everybody from Hitler with 1911s and Sherman tanks.

And I know that Hollywood has performed some amazingly ahistorical gaffes in the past with movies like U-571 that basically write the British out of the story and fabricate tales of American war-winning out of whole cloth.

But to leap from that into this quote is pure knee-jerk-ism...

"But despite "Band of Brothers," despite "Saving Private Ryan," despite those 11 photographs taken by Robert Capa in the swell on that morning of June 6 1944, D-Day was not a predominantly American effort. Rather, it was an Allied effort with, if anything, Britain taking the lead."

Band of Brothers was a story specifically about Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment. The reason the British are not portrayed in Band of Brothers is because...sit down, this is going to come as a shock...American Army units tend to be made up of Americans, while British people are usually in British army units.

I blame Star Trek for this bizarre inclusionism. I realize that there were Vulcans and Russians and Klingons and Scotsmen and African-Americans on the bridge of the Enterprise, and that's great! Maybe that's how it is in the 23rd Century. But there were darn few Japanese-Americans on the bridge of CV-6 at the Battle of Midway, and when some future war movie throws some in there because inclusionism, it's just going to be awkward. "No, Billy, your great granddad wasn't on the Enterprise at Midway; he was in a concentration camp in the desert. No, an American concentration camp."
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Overheard in the Office...

Bobbi is reading an '80s SF novel in the cyberpunk subgenre...

RX: "I don't think he knows much about cattle butchering. Twice now a cow has been killed off-camera and then people are eating steaks a very short time later. And he keeps making up calibers. He gave one character an HK 7mm pistol."

Me: "He knows 9mm is a real caliber, and Future Bullets are smaller. By giving somebody a smaller caliber, that's how you know it's the future, like having a black or woman president."

Hmmmmmmmmmmmm...

Bobbi had the a/c off and a box fan running in her bedroom window last night, its low hum providing a pleasant white noise that had me sleeping the sleep of the Just...

...until about 0mygod30 this morning, just before dawn, when she turned it off and suddenly in my dream the red emergency lighting came on in the subterranean asteroid colony as the air-handling system went silent. That had me sitting bolt-upright in bed, let me tell you.
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I'm Winchester!

I've got at least a case of premium Winchester Ranger and Federal HST, but I'm danger low on 9mm FMJ practice ammo. How'd that happen?

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) June 8, 2016

Way of the Gauge

Darryl Bolke, who is a veritable fount of clue, drops some knowledge bombs to dispel the myths you hear about shotguns on the internets...

"One of my personal favorites is “you just need to rack the shotgun and criminals will run”. This is utter nonsense. In my first shooting, the two carjackers I was up against both told investigators individually in interviews that they heard me rack my Remington 870 as I exited my car. The effect it had was exactly nothing. They did not surrender or change their actions at all, other than to prepare for a fight."

You should go read it. Now.
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Just shooting.

I had a box and most of another one of that CCI Blazer Brass 115gr FMJ...you know, the stuff that won't run the Canik or the Steyr reliably?...and so I took it and my Robar Custom Gen2 Glock 17 to Indy Arms Co. yesterday morning.

Robar-ed Glock with Ameriglo CAP sights, Vickers mag release, and Zev Fulcrum trigger, UpLULA, and Raven Eidolon holster.

Unlike the Canik and the Steyr, the Glock happily chewed through all ninety rounds without a malfunction.

I fat-fingered the target carrier controller and poked in 31 feet instead of the usual seven yards. Despite not being able to distinguish individual 9mm holes at that distance with my sunglasses on (let alone the faint lines around the scoring zones) I decided to go ahead and shoot from 10.33 yards anyway.

On the upside, I seem to be finally getting accustomed to the Zev Trigger in the Glock. Since I was by myself out on the range, I didn't feel bad about breaking the 1-rd/sec speed limit, and the whole reset-during-recoil/"flip and press" is coming a lot easier now.
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Automotif CXXIX...

Seen on my trip to the corner grocery store yesterday...

 ...a nice-looking butternut yellow '67 Camaro RS convertible.

Fender badges say it has the base 250c.i.d. inline six-cylinder, which means it would have a hard time matching the scintillating performance of, say, your typical Chevy Aveo rental car. Still, I wouldn't kick it out of the garage. If you're going to be in a pig-slow car, it may as well be a gorgeous one with a folding top.
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What difference-at this point what difference does it make?

It matters when giving speeches on income inequality in a coat that cost more than my BMW.https://t.co/CmDo55ec6C https://t.co/AHY2Z6cQg1

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) June 7, 2016

What Media Bias?

So, late in the East Coast day yesterday, and TOTALLY COINCIDENTALLY just in time for the six o'clock news in places like, say, LA and San Francisco, NBC announced Hillary Clinton as the prospective Democratic Party nominee.

I'm sure whoever wrote the headline woke up this morning and was all like "Oh, shit! I totally forgot that the California primary was today! I hope nobody thinks we were trying to put our thumb on the scales!"
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Light strikes twice in the same place...

I took the Steyr C9-A1 and a hundred rounds of TulAmmo 115gr FMJ ammo to Indy Arms Co yesterday to work on running up the round count.

On the one hand, the TulAmmo had a good track record of having enough steam to run the gun and not cause cycling or feeding problems. On the other hand...

...I might have mentioned before that while the Glock 19 had one light strike during its test and the P320 had three, this Steyr just does not like hard Russian primers. Two more light strikes this trip on rounds #42 and 65 of the day (#672 and 695 of the test) bring the total to seven failures to fire. That's 3:200 with TulAmmo, 4:50 with Wolf Polyformance, and one with regular ol' CCI Blazer Brass for those of you keeping score.

I fired one box at seven yards, and then backed the target out to ten yards and fired the other one at the head zone. The gun's easy to shoot well, and there were no failures to feed, extract, or eject.

This makes 730 rounds fired through the Steyr C9-A1 without cleaning or lubing, with seven failures-to-fire (#8, #472, #535, #555, #558, #672, #695), seven failures to extract (#234, #266, #276, #531, #535, #543, #558), and one failure to go completely into battery (#116). 1,270 rounds left to go.
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Pretty much, yeah...

"Well, it's like political discourse, except for...hey, let's go ride our bikes!"#ExplainTwitterToA4YearOld

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) June 6, 2016

Automotif CXXVIII...

A common sight around Broad Ripple is this '64 or '65 Chevy van with the Fighting 31 insignia on both front doors and a host of veteran and 2A stickers in the back windows...
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Safety Is For Always

Everybody with a logo-embroidered polo shirt wants to come up with a replacement for Cooper's Rule One: "All guns are always loaded." It's a target for the ire of everybody with the slightest hint of Aspie tendencies, because they plainly know that there's such a thing as an unloaded gun.

The entire point of Rule One is that when you are handling a firearm, you need to be mindful. You need to be constantly aware of the fact that what you have in your hand is not a banana or a can of soup but an object that can, under the right circumstances, discharge a projectile with lethal consequences.

Chuck Haggard says that one shouldn't have separate habits of handling for "loaded" and "unloaded" guns because when one is tired or distracted, one can inadvertently default to the wrong one. ("How do you dry-fire, Tam?" As though I'm expecting a loud noise at any moment. And I sure don't have that gun pointed at anything I'm not prepared to pay for if I'm wrong about the gun's status.)

That's why stuff like this sends me completely around the bend:

I could have snapped this exact pose, or a variant of it, a thousand times at the NRAAM. Ignoring for a moment the way his finger has migrated right to the trigger the way the swallows return to Capistrano, what in the name of sweet baby Odin is up with the way people pick up a purportedly "unloaded" handgun and immediately plop the muzzle into their offhand paw?

Remember the small-town Indiana police chief who creased his leg with his duty Glock because he holstered it along with the drawstring on his jacket? Go watch this video for a refresher. What's the first thing he did when he got the Glock 42 handed to him by the gun store clerk? He cradled the muzzle in the palm of his left hand. His left hand which he had put a bullet through some years earlier.

Let me reiterate that: He was resting the muzzle of the handgun inches from the bullet scar where he'd previously shot himself. How many times does one have to blow a hole in their hand to unlearn that goofy habit? More than one, apparently.


What you see there with the chief in the video and with the guy in the picture above is bad gun-handling habits at work. This is why, whether I'm handling an actual firearm or a SIRT or a blue gun or an airsoft or whatever, I am very conscious of where the muzzle is pointing and do not point or wave it around casually. I want the default, habitual behavior for when there is a gun-shaped object in my hand to be caution and awareness. I always want the action of aiming a gun at something to be a conscious and deliberate choice.

And I don't ever want to have to utter the words "Oh my God, I'm sorry! I thought it was unloaded!"

Bastards.

Meet the Press got bumped out of its normal time slot to 0800 this morning, which meant that it was preempted by the local news program here in Hoosieropolis.

I use Meet the Press to get blogging ideas, keep up with politics, and (importantly) pressure-test my cerebral arteries by yelling at senators on a Sunday morning. How am I supposed to pressure-test arteries watching the French Open?

Despite being a very physical sport to play, televised tennis ranks right up there with golf as a soporific, what with the metronomic whacking of the ball... pock!*grunt*-pock!*grunt*-pock!*grunt*...and the carefully hushed tones cultivated by the announcers, as though they knew that if they got excited about what they were watching, they might wake you up.
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That New Shooter Smile...

It's often noted that people seem to have a lot more fun at a gun range than they do at the anti-gun range. Of course they do. "Free Beer!" is an easier sell than Temperance and always has been.

Besides, firing guns resonates on a very deep level, as I mentioned elsewhere*:

"Monkeys like throwing stuff and hitting things with it on a deep and primal level. Guns just let you fling poo like a rock star. You can't not like it."

*You know how I hate using up good material at an away game.

Elevenses.

After brunch yesterday morning, I ducked in at Indy Arms Co. with my last fifty-round box of .357SIG Speer Lawman...

That upper A-zone is hard for me with the junky factory plastic sights.

There were no stoppages or malfunctions of any kind to report.

This makes it 1100 total rounds fired since the firearm was last cleaned or lubricated, with four failures to go completely into battery (#63, #78, #126, #748), four failures to feed (#221, #224, #282, #734), and one failure to eject (#1,033). 900 rounds left to go.
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Hooray!

It's Fun Show time! Let's sing the Fun Show Song!

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

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

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

Unfortunately, it's that time of the freelance writer's month where the bills are paid and now one is eagerly awaiting the sound of the postman, in the hopes he might have brought more cashable mail. Therefore I doubt I'll be doing much other than staring longingly at stuff, but it'll be a chance to meet up with friends and keep up acquaintances.
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Overheard at the Restaurant...

Bobbi, who didn't have to go work on starship engines until later than usual, treated me to brunch at Good Morning Mama's this morning.

While we were there I read on Marko's blog that there was an actual official Frontlines novels fan club that had formed on Facebook. I joined, just to get in on the ground floor...

Conversation at the table meandered around various topics of a bookish bent, and at some point, while looking at my Facebook screen, I muttered "I've never been Tuckerized."

The air grew chill...

RX: "That hurt."

Me: "I mean, present company exc... I mean, well, you had to Tuckerize me! You Tuckerized my cat!"

RX: "And she's a more interesting character than you!"

Ow.
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Yum!

I have learned that if Twenty Tap has a special of the day, you should order that thing...

Lunch yesterday was a meatball sandwich on a hoagie roll. The meatballs were in a barbecue sauce that had blueberries in it. I mean, there were a couple actual whole blueberries floating around down in there. It was just delicious.
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Ten-Fiddy...

Fifty more rounds of Speer Lawman 125gr FMJ through the Glock 32 yesterday morning at Indy Arms Co. Had one get pretty much completely away from me there. The sights hadn't yet settled when prepping the trigger turned into breaking the trigger. Ouch. There was much cursing.

There was one failure to eject on round #33 of the day (#1,033 of the test). This looks like a pretty conventional limp-wristing failure. I'm on the horns of a dilemma, here. With the 18# factory spring, I can keep the gun from going fully into battery almost at will, but the 20# spring is going to want a firm grip to prevent FTEs like the one above...

This makes it 1050 total rounds fired since the firearm was last cleaned or lubricated, with four failures to go completely into battery (#63, #78, #126, #748), four failures to feed (#221, #224, #282, #734), and one failure to eject (#1,033). 950 rounds left to go.
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Random Pic...

I love the stormtrooper Christmas tree lights festooning the area behind the bar at Twenty Tap...
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Overheard in the Office...

Me: "...the crushing letdown of those comic book gadgets that didn't work..."

RX: "Like x-ray glasses?"

Me: "Sea Monkeys. I was crushed to find out they were just brine shrimp and not these little... For some kids, that moment of cynicism comes when you find out Santa Claus is just your parents. For me, it was discovering Sea Monkeys weren't little homunculi that would build castles in a fishbowl."

Halfway Point

When the AC isn't running on the indoor range and the air temperature's a sticky 88°F, sweaty hands magnify the jumpy nature of the Glock 32. Makes me want stippling, or maybe I'll order some adhesive grip treatment, like TalonGrips or AGrip.

Fifty rounds was about all the fun I cared to have with it yesterday morning, what with errands to run and other work to do.

The pistol went through the complete cycle of operation every time. It's halfway done with the two thousand rounds now.

This makes it 1000 total rounds fired since the firearm was last cleaned or lubricated, with four failures to go completely into battery (#63, #78, #126, #748) and four failures to feed (#221, #224, #282, #734). 1,000 rounds left to go.
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Automotif CXXVII...

Here's a puzzler, and no mistake. It was eye-catching enough that I hopped out of Bobbi's car and jogged across the parking lot to snap pics while she was waiting at the pharmacy drive-thru.

 It's a '70s Pontiac Grand LeMans....

 ...whose taillights say '76 or '77...

...but which sports the 12-slot "Endura" front end of a '74 or '75 Can Am. Note that someone included a "6.5 Litre" badge on the decklid trim.

Regardless, it's a pretty cool ride.
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Sport non-Utility

New Jovian Thunderbolt ponders the utility of the new .45 Shield.

I dunno. Dude lives in Maryland. A Shield in a state w/no concealed carry would be like a car on an island with no roads or gas stations. Sure, it might be cool to own, but what would you do with it?
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Confidence booster...

Last week's dismal outings with the Glock 32 having left a bad taste in my mouth, I decided on a quick stop at the range to cheer myself up and maybe regain a little confidence.

I had a couple partial boxes of .40 FMJ left over from the M&P Shield test article. Consolidated, it was thirty-five rounds of .40 that I had no real plans for, so I divvied it up between three mags and dropped the factory barrel back in the Glock 35.

On the way to the grocery store, I detoured to Indy Arms Co and ran in with ear muffs in one hand and a zippered pistol pouch in the other. "I just need a freebie target and a place to stand and launch bullets for a couple minutes," I said, sliding my driver's license across the counter to hold a lane.

"That little guy? I wouldn't worry about that little guy."

Run the target out to a nice, easy five yards and pop through the three magazines at a relaxed, metronome pace... BOOM-one-thousand-BOOM-two-thousand-BOOM...

That felt better.

I went on to the grocery store in an altogether better mood.
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