A New Beginning...

Pictures of the Glock 32 still need to be taken and its final eval written.

In the meantime, the next round of Special Snowflake Glock Testing is underway.

Next on the docket is a Gen 3 Glock 20 in 10mm Auto. It has had a hundred rounds fired through it since being purchased lightly used. It exhibited some of the same sluggish return-to-battery issues as the G32, so, rather than waiting 700 rounds to do so, this time I started out with a 20# recoil spring (which came with the the gun when I bought it used) on a metal guide rod. This time, a correctly thread-locked metal guide rod.

Oh, it's also had, like, fifty rounds of 9x25 Dillon through it on the spare barrel.

Anyway, a thorough wipedown of the bearing surfaces and a good lubing with what I had close to hand at the time (Snake Oil Prime) and we were off to the races.

Started things off with a 50-round box of Sellier & Bellot 180gr 10mm FMJ. Seemed reasonably warmish. Factory claims 1160 fps out of a 5" tube, and that seems plausible. I may have some more around here to chrono later this week.

I'd forgotten what massive horse pistols the big Glocks are... Anyway, all fifty rounds functioned the weapon with no failures of any type to report.

This makes 50 rounds since the Glock 20 was cleaned or lubricated. 1950 rounds to go.

Also ran fifty rounds of Remington FMJ through the Glock 37 with the T&E Overwatch Precision trigger in it. Lotta dry-fire Sunday morning and afternoon as well. I am intrigued; I need to get this thing out to MCF&G where I can do stuff on the clock...
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Potential Travel Problems:

You might find out your hotel room is built right atop a cursed graveyard.
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Brunch Was Accomplished...

Beef bordelaise and a fried egg over home fries. #yum #beef #brunch #tastecafeindy

A photo posted by Tamara Keel (@tamarakeel) on Jul 24, 2016 at 7:09am PDT

Turning from junk back into stuff...

I get emails from KEH Camera Brokers, usually offering the monthly or weekly sales, but sometimes soliciting purchases of old camera gear. Since I don't sell cameras, I don't usually look in those, but this one offering an extra 10% on 300 "Most Wanted" models caught my eye. What were these most wanted models, I wondered?

Nikon F4S, Nikon F5, Nikon FM2N, Canon AE-1 Program, Pentax K1000, Contax G2... Wow. And they were offering buying prices that I would have considered selling prices just two years ago, furthering my belief that the film camera market has seen its price bottom.

I'm still not selling them any film cameras, but if you have some lying around, here's their link.
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Sunday, Yummy Sunday...

Plans are afoot!

We will greet the day with brunch at one or another of the fine eateries here in Broad Ripple, and then hie ourselves to Indy Arms Co. to enjoy some range time in the air-conditioned great indoors.

Project Whimsy has a TAC Trigger from Overwatch Precision installed for T&E purposes, with an eye toward making it my bowling pin eliminator. (Of course, I punked out of bowling pin shooting yesterday because it was hotter than dammit yesterday.)

Looking forward to trying out the new trigger, and maybe getting started on the next 2,000-rd test. Tune in!
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Food Pic...

Still wrestling Winston's black dog today.

Bobbi did take me out for a late lunch/early dinner, which was nice. We rode our bicycles over to Twenty Tap, where I sampled a menu item I'd not tried before.

Southern chicken sandwich. #yum #20tap #sobroindy

A photo posted by Tamara Keel (@tamarakeel) on Jul 23, 2016 at 2:18pm PDT

And that's a wrap.

Fifty rounds of Speer Lawman and twenty-one of Fiocchi on Thursday morning finished up the 2,000 rounds for the Glock 32.

There were no malfunctions of any type to report.

This makes it 2,000 total rounds fired since the Glock 32 was last cleaned or lubricated, with five failures to go completely into battery (#63, #78, #126, #748, #1,503*), five failures to feed (#221, #224, #282, #734, #1,529*), one failure to eject (#1,033), and one broken (aftermarket) part.

Look for a follow up post with dirty, dirty gun pics and a final breakdown of the test.
 .

Sorry.

I just wasn't feeling it this morning.

Check out this article at Lucky Gunner Lounge!

Or this column from the July issue of Shooting Illustrated!
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QotD: Long, Slow Disaster Edition...

"I’m really glad my Grandparents didn’t live to have to make the choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. It also doesn’t say anything good about our politics that my grandparents, who have been dead for 20 years, would still know both candidates." -Sebastian SNBQ

Frickin' almost done...

Fifty rounds each of Fiocchi and Speer Lawman .357SIG ammo got sent downrange at Indy Arms Co. Wednesday morning.

The 20# recoil spring and 11-coil mag springs seem to have done the trick. The firearm went through the complete cycle of operation each time.

This makes it 1,929 total rounds fired since the Glock 32 was last cleaned or lubricated, with five failures to go completely into battery (#63, #78, #126, #748, #1,503*), five failures to feed (#221, #224, #282, #734, #1,529*), one failure to eject (#1,033), and one broken (aftermarket) part. Only 71 rounds left to go.
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This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, Pt. I

Speaking as someone who talks about guns on the internet, it pains me to admit that one doesn't need to look long or hard to find reasons why "internet gun advice" has become the proverbial equivalent of "politician's promises" or "Confederate money" as a synonym for "valueless".

Everyone knows the guy on the forums who insists that his off-brand, low-budget pistol has been just (and I quote) "flawless" over...oh, it must be thousands and thousands of rounds, but who knows? It's not like he keeps a log book, but it's a lot!

There are the devotees of one brand or caliber or type of gun who come up with the most tortured reasons why their choice is best choice, and if you don't agree, you're just a "hater" or a "gun snob".

And on YouTube, you can't swing a 5.11 Tactical man purse without hitting some would-be instructor who doesn't know his ass from the hole he's fixin' to shoot in it.

Here's a bit of internet gun rationalizing of the second type:

Let me clear up some of his confusion: the answer comes down to ammo prices.

You can get spam cans of 7.62x54r for as low as $0.23 per round if you know where to look, whereas cheap .308 starts at $0.42 per round and .30-06 is a full $0.15/round more expensive than that.

The Ruger American Rifle comes in a bevy of calibers, but it does not come in 7.62x54R, so you can’t train as cheaply with it as you can the Mosin. If you shoot a lot, then over time the $1,000 Mosin is ultimately a lot cheaper than the $300 Ruger American Rifle.

Let's check his own math: He's claiming a $700 price difference in guns and a $0.19/rd difference in ammo costs. He says that if I shoot a lot, then the pimped Mosin pays for itself over time.

Gratuitous New England Westinghouse Mosin receiver shot

Let's cipher out the gozintas on this! *sharpens pencil* Hmmm...scribble scribble...carry the two...

At a 19¢/round gap between the two, you would need to shoot 3,684 rounds to make up a $700 cost difference.

Not that I think they don't exist, but I would like to sometime see either a Ruger American or a Mosin Nagaint with 3,500+ documented rounds in a gun book, especially the Mosin, which are often fed diets of corrosive ammo, bimetallic jacketed bullets, et cetera. That's probably most of the gun's barrel life, right there, or at least most of the accurate part of it.

The dude then suggests that Ruger make the American in 7.62x54R, which, given the diameter of the case rim, is unlikely without major alterations to the design and thus seems highly unlikely.

It's okay to like stuff just because you like it. You don't have to try and go out and justify it as the best choice for the zombie apocalypse or whatever.
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Because I hate using my good material at an away game...

"Seeing the stock plastic sights on a Glock in use is like seeing picture frames with the sample picture still inside them, or someone trying to pay for their purchases with the cardboard "credit cards" that came in their wallet. It's a little sad and awkward and you feel sorry for the person and don't know quite what to say."
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Tuesday Pewsday

Robar Glock, Magpul mags, RCS Eidolon holster, budget ammo

Still using the Zevtech trigger in the Robar-customized Gen 2 Glock 17. I'm liking it better now.

I've been shooting this gun almost entirely with Magpul 17-rd magazines. The first one worked well enough that I bought two more. According to the logbook, yesterday's 100 rounds of Silver Bear made a total of 803 malfunction-free rounds through the gun so far, all but 50 of which have been through the Magpul magazines.
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New Theory...

Maybe she got the speech in a chain letter?

 "If you deliver this speech exactly as written, good luck will befall you. Mrs. M.O. of Chicago, IL gave this speech exactly as written and her husband was elected president. Ms. J.D. of Assbend, MO did not deliver this speech as written and suffers from the heartbreak of psoriasis."

You have got to be kidding me.

"Manafort said the words Melania used were not "cribbed" but are common words.

"There's no cribbing of Michelle Obama's speech. These were common words and values. She cares about her family," Manafort said. "To think that she'd be cribbing Michelle Obama's words is crazy.""

Glock Steady

Went to Indy Arms Co. with a hundred rounds of Speer Lawman 125gr TMJ ammo early yesterday afternoon.

The Glock 32 went through the complete cycle of operation every time.

This makes it 1,829 total rounds fired since the Glock 32 was last cleaned or lubricated, with five failures to go completely into battery (#63, #78, #126, #748, #1,503*), five failures to feed (#221, #224, #282, #734, #1,529*), one failure to eject (#1,033), and one broken (aftermarket) part. 171 rounds left to go.
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"It's time to start running!"

Oh, Jesus, this isn't some fin de siècle dystopian SF movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger... This is really happening.

I thought "Clouseau" was a French name?

"The assailant, armed with a knife and an ax, was identified as a 17-year-old Afghan man living in Ochsenfurt, Bavaria, according to Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann.
...
The attacker's motive is not yet known, Hench said."

I've got a guess or two, Mister Detective.
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Overheard on Bicycles...

Shootin' Buddy: "Wow, this neighborhood's really gentrified. You know how I can tell we're in a Green Zone? All the hair salons."

Me: "And a lack of check cashing joints. As a matter of fact, we seem to be in a payroll advance desert."

SB: "Quick! We need a federal program!"

...minute later, pulling into the coffee house parking lot...

Me: "Given how trendy the neighborhood is, I'm surprised at how few bike racks they have. It's like a bike rack desert!"

SB: "Quick! We need a federal program!"

QotD: About That Life Edition

"Every truck stop bathroom is a dojo if you try hard enough." -Jack Clemons

A Good Day

Shootin' Buddy arrived at 0900. We'll say our story starts at the intersection of 54th Street & the Monon Trail, since that's about where it started. From there we pedaled the mile-and-change north to Broad Ripple proper, to get breakfast at Public Greens.

I had the chilaquiles with a fried egg and smoked pulled pork, washed down with a couple glasses of water and a cup of coffee to fortify me for the day ahead.

About six miles south on the Monon and then a jog right on 10th Street puts you on the Cultural Trail, pedaling down Massachusetts Avenue.

The Cultural Trail wends right past Henry's Coffee Bistro, where we stopped for a breather. Shootin' Buddy had a cup of joe, but I got my SWPL on with an iced mocha latte.

Then it was back on the bikes to wend our way through downtown, circling around to a new spot at College Avenue and Georgia Street...

Metazoa Brewing Company. They weren't technically open yet, but the guy behind the bar took pity on us and pulled a couple pints. We looked like we'd been riding a ways, I guess.

Just north up College Avenue a half mile or so is St. Joseph's Brewery & Public House, where we pulled in for a half pint of their Seraphim Sour Ale before pedaling northwards in earnest.

At 25th Street, we took a detour west, pedaling a few blocks off the Monon to The Koelschip, located next to Goose the Market at 25th & Delaware. Since I'm stuck on sour beers for the nonce, I went with Artisan Tears, from Central State Brewing.

 I mentioned it was next to Goose the Market, right?

And then it was back on the bikes for the long uphill pull past Broad Ripple, and into Nora up on 86th Street, to try out another new-to-us place...

 Big Lug Canteen. This was where we had lunch...

I ordered a pint of their Bruce Lopez, a salted lime pale ale, and a charcuterie plate that came with a healthy scoop of the best bacon jam I have ever had in my life. Seriously, I'm going to go back and see what I can do to order just a fist-sized dollop of that bacon jam and a pile of crostini to smear it on.

And then it was back south to 54th & the Monon.

And I didn't have to use my AK.
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TRUCK KILLS!

"Truck kills dozens in latest French attack." -politico.com

Look at the headlines:

• "Scene of Devastation After Truck Kills Revelers" -NBC News


• "Bastille Day attack: truck kills at least 80 people in Nice" -The Guardian


• "Truck kills dozens in Nice, France" -USA TODAY

Gosh, if you went by the headlines, you'd be excused for thinking that things had gone all Steven King out there, what with trucks just up and killing people...

It's telling...

...that when you plug "Reichstag" into the Google News search, the first entries all involve Turkey and not the German parliament.

"Whether there was a conspiracy at play or not, Recep Tayyip Erdogan is shaping up to emerge victorious from the upheaval, which has reportedly led to swift reprisals, including the removal of 2745 judges from office and a purge of the country's armed forces.
Describing the unrest as "a gift from God," Erdogan is reported to have vowed that the "members of the gang" involved would "pay a heavy price for their treason" – and seems to have already set about backing up his words."

Goobernatorial.

When Reagan's two terms were up, George Bush ran one of the easiest presidential campaigns of all time, in effect saying "If you liked Reagan, voting for his Veep would basically be asking for a second helping of the same." Of course, it didn't turn out like that and my memories of the Elder Bush administration mostly involve feeling a vague sense of disappointment.

Similarly, the previous Republican governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels, was the sort of dull Cincinnatus too rare in public office these days, and the GOP replacement was offered up on a platform of "Hey, if you liked the last Republican governor, why not vote for this guy and get more of the same?"

And for the last four years I've had a vague feeling of disappointment. Now the guy has been offered a bucket of warm piss by Trump and accepted. On a forum, someone asked what I thought about our governor...

Pence? Not a bad governor. A little more of a Social Conservative than I'd like, but it's not like it didn't say so right on the package. Solid on guns and fiscal matters. A+ NRA rating and actually followed through on campaign promises to lower taxes. Too eager to spend time rearranging the Gays-'N'-'Bortion deck chairs on the S.S. GOPtanic, but that's endemic.
B+: Would have a beer with him and his wife; they seem like nice people.

(ETA: The selection of Pence...indeed, none of the three VP finalists...does nothing to dispel the notion that Trump is only in this for the yuks and wants to throw it to Hils. After RFRA and a recent abortion bill, Pence's approval ratings here in Indiana are at ~40% and he was facing a tough election against a sad-sack Democratic candidate who should have been a walkover. Neither Pence, Christie, nor Gingrich could reliably deliver the electoral votes of their respective home states, which is considered kind of a key job of the VP pick.)

So, he's got the homo-hatin' and 'bortion-banning chops that the Trump candidacy lacked and I guess is on the ticket to keep the hardcore SoCons from staying home in disgust on election day. We'll see.
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...Continued From Last Time.

Like I said, the Lone Wolf steel guide rod got bent like a banana somehow. The gun kept running without it, but required a hammer to disassemble. Now in place is the White Sound Defense non-captive guide rod, still with the 20# ISMI flat wire recoil spring. (Replacing the factory 18# unit.)

This was also a heads up for me to order a small handful of factory G19/23/32/38 recoil spring assemblies from Lone Wolf.

This called for a range trip to Indy Arms Co. on Friday morning to function check the gun with the guide rod. Also to use up the last of my Remington 125gr FMJ .357SIG ammunition. While I was there, I put a box of fifty Silver Bear 115gr FMJ rounds through the Gen2 Robar G17. I just ordered five hundred of the things and wanted to make sure they work.

Just dirt-shooting really, to run up the round count. The Silver Bear worked fine in the 17. I need to get some real sights and a stippling job on that 32.

The Glock 32 went through the complete cycle of operation every time. 

This makes it 1,729 total rounds fired since the Glock 32 was last cleaned or lubricated, with five failures to go completely into battery (#63, #78, #126, #748, #1,503*), five failures to feed (#221, #224, #282, #734, #1,529*), one failure to eject (#1,033), and one broken (aftermarket) part. 271 rounds left to go.
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From elsewhere...

"US support of populist democracy in that part of the world over the last eight years has helped contribute to a giant "failed state" from the Pillars of Hercules to Antioch, with an island of quasi-stability in Israel. When our current president was sworn in, you could drive from Marrakesh to Istanbul with no bigger worries than the occasional border shakedown. Now it's one vast Mad Max wasteland with god-bothering wogs chopping various bits off people who pray wrong.

I heartily hope the U.S. sits this one out, but I'm sure Barry is already drafting speeches in favor of Erdogan and democrazy."

Interesting Times

Turkey coup: military attempt to seize power from Erdogan as low flying jets and gunfire heard in Ankara and bridges across Bosphorus in Istanbul closed 

Link to live coverage at telegraph.co.uk

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Work, work, work...

Still working on the USCCA article on high end CCW 1911s, which meant more shooting with the Wilson yesterday morning at Indy Arms Co.

Another hundred rounds of Winchester 124gr NATO FMJ (Q4318) without a bobble brings the total fired to 800 without a malfunction of any sort. Everybody who's tried it had been impressed. Hopefully I'll get it to the range for some chrono work and some benched 25yd groups on Monday or Tuesday.
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Scraping the bottom of the barrel.

While it's fairly common to use the "boneyard" of Davis-Monthan for spare parts, it's a little less common to use it to source entire aircraft, as the USMC is doing in order to get enough airframes to keep a modicum of readiness while the F-35 procurement drama drags on.

""Today, there are not enough flyable aircraft -- our 'ready bench' -- if our nation were subjected to a crisis," Davis said. "Today, I could fly 43% (443 of the 1,040) of the aircraft I should have on my flight lines."

A lack of spare parts and maintenance personnel trained to repair damaged aircraft are two of the main factors contributing to the lack of operational aircraft, according to military brass."

It's got that whole Carter Years vibe about it, doesn't it?
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Speedbump...

So, I'm sitting on two semi-snakebit pistol tests right now.

First is the Steyr C9-A1. Okay, there's a known extractor issue with the pistols, and Steyr has released an upgraded extractor to solve it. But I don't know if my pistol already has this parts fix or not. I'll contact them for the part, but... The fact that I talked to one of their service guys in Louisville in May and got told the "Well, now, it's a precision European pistol and you don't want to feed it junk ammo," was disheartening. Especially since the weaksauce Blazer Brass 115gr stuff that gave the Steyr such fits was devoured happily by a certain other Austrian pistol that's every bit as European.

Euro-manufactured ammo is less likely to suffer from being underpowered, but tends to have harder milspec primers, which give the Steyr's striker-fired ignition setup fits. (And at a much higher rate than noticed with the similarly striker-fired Glock 19 or Sig P320.) If I'm going to try and gallop this thing across the finish line, I'm going to need to source myself a case of Fiocchi 124gr or similar and cross my fingers.

Meanwhile, you might have noticed that you haven't heard much about my Glock 32 lately...

Well, Tuesday last week I took it and a hundred rounds of ammo to Indy Arms Co. for the typical morning range session. Fired the hundred rounds without any malfunctions. At the end of the trip, I decided to pull the gun apart and LocTite the guide rod. The slide needed to be beaten off the pistol with a rubber mallet again, and the guide rod turned out to be bent like a banana.

100rds at 10yds. Yes, I know the sights are off.

On the advice of a couple of pretty Glock-savvy friends, I went ahead and ordered a White Sound Defense non-captive guide rod to avoid this problem in the future. I would have dropped the factory recoil spring assembly back in there to keep shooting the gun in the meantime, but it seems to have gone air-soluble. (Note To Self: Order a small handful of factory Gen 3 19/23/32/38 RSAs.)

This makes it 1629 total rounds fired since the firearm was last cleaned or lubricated, with five failures to go completely into battery (#63, #78, #126, #748, #1,503*), five failures to feed (#221, #224, #282, #734, #1,529*), and one failure to eject (#1,033). 371 rounds left to go.
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Tell us what you really think.

Jesse Benn, last seen discussing the moral necessity of rioting when a political party picks a candidate you don't like, dropped this gem in a recent column:

"Naturally, bootlickers across the globe are unquestioningly celebrating the slain officers as heroes, innocents, and protectors. But what if one of those dead cops was a white supremacist—is he still a hero? And I don’t mean a white supremacist in the sense that all cops are enforcers of a classist white supremacist order, which they are."

Boy, putting that in your opening paragraph just screams "unbiased journalism ahead", doesn't it?
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Well...

Today was pretty much a complete write-off.
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Be strong, Tam!

It's Amazon's big sale day (Prime Day!) today. I am sure that all kinds of fabulous stuff I don't need will be dangled in front of my nose at prices too good to pass up...
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I do this for a living, Max.

My Vocabulary Size is about: 【30500】! What about you? https://t.co/Ld5uE99Mtn #NLN

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) July 12, 2016

Presented Without Context...

Interlocutor: "Something I heard once was something to the effect of 'If you ever read about an ancient war and one side uses elephants, that's the side that loses.'"

Me: "Rome's biggest success was in emulating Alexander by sending intelligence operatives posing as war elephant salesmen to plague the procurement bureaus of their foes."

From Facebook at 0400...

"I have *got* to bust caps tomor^h^h^h^h^htoday, and do laundry, and write...something? Blog...thing maybe? Column? Check notes...
But Roomie worked the bizarro shift and I power-chugged a bunch of Mello Yello Zero to make sure I could stay awake until 0mygod30 to walk her out to her car in the alley...and now I can't sleep. This is wack. I was nodding off at the keyboard at 8:00PM and now I'm wide-goddam-awake and the cat-feeding buzzer goes off in barely over two hours.
I'd start laundry now to get a jump on that but, sure as God made little green apples, I would nod off and find a washer full of mildewing clothes at lunchtime tomorrow..."

So, I stayed up and ran two loads through the washer (yay!) and got to bed about 0630. *yawn/stretch* Anything blow up while I was sleeping?
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It's easy to forget...

...that, like whitetail deer, alligators were once pretty much extinct over much of their natural range.

When Disney World opened, the alligator was on the Endangered Species list. When I was little, it was still kind of a big deal to see a whitetail deer in the wild. Forty years later, driving the I-64 corridor from St. Louis across Illinois and Indiana to Louisville, the shoulders of the highway looked like a Bambi abattoir in places.
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Artiste.

So, I'm browsing CNN.com and I find this video of a little 4BR fixer-upper for sale in Manhattan. The fixer-upper in question happens to be the 16th-floor penthouse apartment at 1185 Park Avenue and it was apparently put on the market at a price of $1,000,000/floor-of-elevation.

That's right: A $16m apartment in need of complete renovation. At least it's in Manhattan, so you wouldn't have to worry about where to put your gun safe.

Anyway, the hook to the video is they've got this creative designer type wandering about, sharing his visions of how things should look. This guy is obviously trying to cultivate a personal zen of being intensely laid back, and so when the camera pulls out, I have to chuckle. I've never before seen anyone wearing tailored suitcoat and weskit (but with coat unbuttoned and tie raffishly loosened) and...casually torn-up blue jeans.

I am almost willing to bet that there is a company that sells very expensive used jeans that they have paid people to tear up in actual use, because jeans that have been deliberately shredded would be inauthentic. These would be artisanally distressed.
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Gimme Shelter

Gimme Shelter from mike Sabbagh on Vimeo.

I'm sorry.

I was up way late last night.

I've been trying to think of something to type.

Nada.

I'm going to the range.
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The march of CCW...

Fascinating post on the inexorable (thus far) march of the Right to Carry movement in America over at Weaponsman, complete with charts and graphs and color 8x10 glossies with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back...

1. For the first time since our 1986 data horizon, May Issue declined, but it was because May Issue states are increasingly adopting unrestricted Constitutional carry.


2. No state has gone from Shall Issue to one of the two more restrictive categories in these 31 years.


3. The only state that went from Ban to May Issue (Tennessee) proceeded to Shall Issue within 5 years.


4. At least three states (Mississippi, Alaska and Arizona) went from outright ban to Permitless carry in two stages, first going Shall Issue.

Things I Don't Get: #what the hell ever number we're on now...

So, there you are, confronted by a couple cops all up in your grille for (at least by your lights) not doing anything wrong. The downside is that you know you're rolling dirty; if they find the gun in your pocket, you're in deep s#!t.

How do you think this situation is going to play out any better if you physically don't comply? Is there some point where you think the cops are going to just shrug their shoulders and walk away? Say "Oh, hey, you wrestle good. You can go home"?

By the time you've gotten to the "Yeah, buddy, actually you are being detained" portion of the conversation, you ain't winnin' anything there by the side of the road. It's going to take a lawyer and a judge for you to have any hope of coming out of that situation on top. So what is the possible potential upside of wrestlin' with the po-po there in the parking lot?

I just do not get that.
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Neat-o!

Mesmerizing gun video...
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At least he's honest about it.

"If you think it’s important to avoid “condescending” to white working-class voters in order to persuade them to vote for Hillary Clinton, you are living in a time when Democrats were afraid to say the words “gun control” or “minimum wage.” Those days are over. The voters you romanticize are not persuadable, and they haven’t been for a very long time. The Democrats don’t need them, they shouldn’t want them and they should once and for all stop coddling them."

Actor, writer, and sometime Progressive pundit Peter Birkenhead basically comes out and says that non-college-educated white folk* are automatically racist and the Democratic Party should just not bother worrying about their vote. Apparently only a thorough rubdown with a liberal arts sheepskin will get the taint of racism off your cracker hide and get you thinking (and voting) right.


*By which he apparently means white dudes. Of course, looking at his biographical info, I can see why he'd be nursing a bit of a rageboner against white dudes. I'm not saying that there are daddy issues here, but wow...
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Sunday pics...

Shootin' Buddy showed up at 9:00 on Sunday morning and we drove through drizzle into Broad Ripple proper for a tasty breakfast at Public Greens. I had the pork hash: smoked pulled pork, sweet potatoes and caramelized onions all fried together, with toast and eggs. Then it was back into the truck and over to Indy Arms Company for some pew pew pew.

I wasn't planning on a long range session; just some blasting before going to the movies. I had the Wilson Tactical Carry Professional and the Nighthawk Kestrel with me, along with a box of ammunition for each.

Shootin' Buddy put a magazine through each. He carries a Les Baer Thunder Ranch Special every day, and he preferred the Nighthawk.

The remaining 82 rounds were just blasted away by me for the fun of it. Winchester 124gr NATO through the Wilson and Federal 230gr RTP ball ammo through the Nighthawk. Incidentally, the Wilson has now fired 450 rounds without a bobble since being taken out of the box.

After the range trip we met up with Shootin' Buddy's dad to go see The Free State of Jones, best described as "The Wookie-Suiter's Civil War Movie" by a blog reader.

We were the first ones in the theater for the Sunday matinee showing and, as the place started to fill up, I couldn't resist leaning over and whispering "Was there a coupon in this month's AARP magazine?" to Shootin' Buddy, who replied "Stand up and say 'Does anyone have pictures of their grandkids?' I dare you."

Let's see how this works.

While there was no clear evidence of intent to speed, officer, I handled the task of observing my speedometer with extreme carelessness.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) July 5, 2016

Tab Clearing...

Four wiki tabs open at the moment, some I can't even remember why...

• Isle Royale


• Jewish diaspora


• Panthera leo spelaea


• Gentrification

Snakebit

I put another Glock 32 range trip in this past Friday. Another hundred rounds of Remington 125gr .357SIG was scheduled to go downrange.

Long about round number seventy or so, the slide travel started to feel funny. Rough. Kinda...graunchy? On round #73, the slide didn't go all the way into battery and so I locked it to the rear to take a look at what might be the problem. The aftermarket Lone Wolf recoil spring guide rod seemed to be missing.

I looked downrange, thinking it would be out there someplace and I'd have to see if they could call the range cold, but it wasn't there. I looked at the floor between my feet, and there it was.

The Lone Wolf rod has a threaded cap on either end, and the rearmost one had backed out, allowing the rod to fall out. Note that, until that one failure to return to battery, the gun had fired most of a magazine with no guide rod in it.

I borrowed a rubber mallet and knocked the slide off, then enlisted the much appreciated help of one of my former coworkers to thread the head back on the guide rod while I held the spring compressed with both hands.

Then I went out to fire off the last couple magazines.

On round #99 of the day, the quality control of Remington's .357SIG FMJ ammo reared its ugly head again. This is the second sideways primer I've seen in five hundred rounds of the stuff. Also, this round failed to feed; I don't know as I can hold that against Remington, though...
 

Should read "99 rds" instead of "50 rds".

For the cherry on the icing of the cake of my day, the guy on lane five managed to put a bullet through my target.

This makes it 1529 total rounds fired since the firearm was last cleaned or lubricated, with five failures to go completely into battery (#63, #78, #126, #748, #1,503*), five failures to feed (#221, #224, #282, #734, #1,529), and one failure to eject (#1,033). 471 rounds left to go.
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Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #146...

Gen2 Glock 17 customized by Robar.

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Free State of Jones capsule review...

Happy You're Not the Boss of Me Day!

We did our grilling on Saturday because it's been raining like a Ray Bradbury short story here since yesterday morning.

I told Bobbi I'd pick up some steaks from the Fresh Market, and when I got there, they had the special aged prime filets out next to the regular ones. They were 'spensive, but they were so beautifully marbled and, well, America doesn't turn 240 every day...
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We get letters...

From an email reply to a reader this AM who wondered why I "shoot left with Glocks" and am knocking the factory sights on Glocks when he does okay with  the sights on his 26...

"Dear Reader,

If you look at the picture, the Glock 32 group is left-of-center, while the Glock 17 group, despite being shot at .3-.5 split pace, is pretty well centered. If you go back and look at all the Glock 37 pics, they're all nicely centered, too. Of course, it has real sights on it as well.

The factory Glock sights (which, in addition to being flimsy, have that ridiculously busy "dot-and-U" setup where the white markings don't actually correlate to the physical alignment of the sights*) on the 32 are misaligned. Since I do not carry the gun and am eventually going to put some real sights on it, I am not bothering to drift them. I hold a consistent sight picture and the bullets impact a consistent area and that's all I need.
-T.

*If you line the top of the dot up with the top of the vertical arms of the "U", which is what the eye wants to do at speed, the top of the front sight blade will actually be proud of the notch and shots will go high. If you alight[sic] the top of the front blade with the top of the rear blade in a correct "equal height, equal light" sight picture, the bottom of the dot on the front blade is actually below the bottom edge of the notch in the rear blade. It's a lousy sight setup, but Glock refuses to change it because Perfection. Personally, I think that the tendency of the sights to shoot high at speed is built in to counteract the fact that most people can't shoot and are going to start cranking them low and left any time the pace picks up faster than a slow crawl."

Since that's a jillion keystrokes I'll never get back, I might as well recycle them here.

(I can't believe I typed "alight" instead of "align". Once I became a jackleg touch-typist, my fingers were free to commit all kinds of odd errors, since they were no longer under visual supervision and my brain is usually several words ahead of them.)
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Thursday morning...

Drove out to MCF&G Thursday morning to get some shooting done. Mostly just dirt-shooting to build the round count on the Glock 32, but also some work I wanted to put in with the Robar'ed Gen2 Glock 17 and its Fulcrum/Zev connector/NY1 trigger setup...

The targets were close enough to ten yards as to make no nevermind. (That's an RCS Eidolon holster I'll be writing up soon.)

GPS mag caddy is handier than a pocket on a shirt.

A hundred rounds of Remington 125gr FMJ .380 Ultra Mag from the Glock 32 at the target on the right, and fifty of 115gr CCI Blazer Brass at the target on the left. Same sight picture for both targets. The .357SIG on the right-hand target was done at a roughly 1rd/sec cadence.

The left-hand target with the Glock 17 (with vastly better aftermarket sights and trigger) was done in an attempt to continue to develop a "rolling cadence" with the trigger, to further shed myself of the awful habit of pinning the trigger and trying to "ride the reset". I basically tried to keep the trigger in motion constantly, letting it reset in recoil and prepping it as the sights settled, breaking the shot as soon as I had a decent sight picture. About the pace I'd use on the 3x5 card in a FAST. I'm getting better, but still dropped too many shots outside the circle.

Both Glocks went through the complete cycle of operation each time.

For the Glock 32: This makes it 1430 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). 570 rounds left to go.
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"Hollywood's run out of ideas!"

That meme annoys me.

There have been six film or TV adaptations of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, with a seventh slated to drop next year. Ten of The Jungle Book, with an eleventh coming in 2018.

Nobody goes to the theater and says "Oh, Christ, not Romeo & Juliet again! They've run out of ideas for plays!" Good stuff gets added to our cultural repertoire and enjoyable stories get told over and over again, re-imagined, set to music, or recast in different times and places...

There are only a handful of basic plotlines, when you get down to the nitty gritty, and they're all probably recorded on baked clay tablets someplace.
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Overheard in the Office...

Before the internet, how would arguments have been settled at Roseholme Cottage? (And, as illustrated above, you can find anything on the internet.)
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Odd cat is odd.

Rannie has latched onto one particular mouse baby and spent most of yesterday carrying it back and forth between the bed in Bobbi's room and the futon in the living room, singing the mouse baby song the whole time.

She's brought it into the office twice this morning.

Usually she doesn't fixate on any one particular toy, but she seems to have taken a shine to this one. Two days is practically a long-term relationship in Rannie terms.

One hundred years ago today...

At 7:30 AM on this morning in 1916, the fire of over fifteen hundred British artillery pieces shifted from the targets they had been pounding for eight days straight. Eleven entire British divisions clambered out of their trenches and, following orders not to run or become disorganized, started walking forward across No Man's Land. Huddled in their bunkers where they had been pounded with almost two million artillery shells for over a week, the German troops knew exactly what that silence meant. They dragged their heavy machine guns up stairways and ladders to firing embrasures, and for the next several hours a thirteen-mile stretch of French countryside became a scene more grotesque than anything Heironymus Bosch had ever painted.

"We were surprised to see them walking, we had never seen that before. The officers went in front. I noticed one of them walking calmly, carrying a walking stick. When we started to fire, we just had to load and reload. They went down in their hundreds. We didn't have to aim, we just fired into them." -A German machine gunner

In minutes, Haig's planned "Big Push" blew apart in a torrent of Maxim bullets. Barbed wire entanglements had not been cut by the bombardment as expected. A British mine that had been dug under the German trenches detonated late, killing British troops that had already advanced that far. The methodical pace and four rank attack, deemed necessary by Haig and his staff due to their professional skepticism regarding the soldiering qualities of the new "Kitchener's Army", turned the mud in front of the German positions into an abattoir. The British 8th Division, attacking near Ovillers, started with 300 officers and 8,500 other ranks. After two hours, it had been reduced to 82 officers and only 3,226 enlisted. The slaughter was similar all up and down the front. The only gains were made in sectors where subordinates had ignored the plan, either by having their units lie belly-down in No Man's Land before the attack, or ordering them to charge at a run rather than stroll at trenches that were supposedly devoid of life due to the bombardment.

When the sun set on that first day of what history remembers as the Battle of The Somme, the British army had suffered almost sixty thousand casualties, 21,392 of which were dead or missing. A French artillery observer, watching the attack, turned and commented to his British liaison, echoing the same words spoken in the Crimea half a century earlier: "C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre."

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #145...

Wilson Combat Tactical Carry Professional 9mm, black/burnt bronze