False Start.

So, before the FTW Ranch trip, I tried to get a start on putting the Glock 39 through the whole 2,000 round rigamarole. The gun seemed pretty clean, with only the soot from the first fifty rounds I'd fired in it. I put a new recoil spring assembly in the gun prophylactically, added a drop of Lucas Oil to all the factory-specified lube points, and went to the range with fifty rounds of S&B 230gr FMJ and fifty of Speer Lawman 185gr FMJ.

Something was definitely off. The gun experienced one failure-to-feed and three failures to fire, the latter all showing a light, off-center primer strike. Normally this would be the sign of an extremely filthy gun with an old recoil spring, but the gun was clean and sported a brand new RSA. Another possibility would be a too-tight extractor, so I scrubbed the area between the claw and the breechface with a toothbrush and then checked extractor travel and tension. It looked good.

I went back the next day with a hundred rounds of the Sellier & Bellot and experienced ten of the light, off-center FTFs over the course of the range session: One round in ten. Something was definitely wrong.

I PM'ed a Facebook friend who works at Glock and asked for some suggestions. In addition to the Armorer's Manual suggestions of "Clean Gun, Replace Recoil Spring", he noted that I might want to detail strip the slide and make sure everything looked good in there, and try a different trigger bar as well.

I just so happened to have the complete trigger assembly from my Glock 37 handy, since it was currently sporting a ZEV trigger, so I tore the little 39 down to have a look inside and swap the trigger while I was in there.
 

The tar-like sludge in the striker channel can't be helping. Did the previous owner not know to not lube that shit?

Me: "Jesus, all the small parts are tacky...the slide lock, the firing pin safety, the striker spring...feel like they've been lubricated with the Pepsi and popcorn butter from a theater floor. I mean, look at this trigger bar... Here's the trigger bar that came out of my G37 after the 2,000 round test. It's kinda gray and sooty, but it hasn't been cleaned. Now here's the trigger bar from the G39. It's covered in a sticky layer of black cack, and I guarantee it hasn't fired no 2,000 rounds. It's like the gun's been lubricated with..."

RX: "Crisco. Congealed vegetable oil."

Me: *eyes widening* "Holy shit you're right." *spins chair to keyboard*

It was exactly like you see on guns that have been stored a long time with the plant-based oils on them, and they'd gotten that stuff on every small part in the gun. They would hardly be tackier to the touch if someone had spilled a Coke in there. In the picture above, the trigger bar I'm holding is the one that came out of the 39: That buildup of soot and cack is from ~250 rounds of shooting. The gray trigger bar in the gun now is the one that came out of my G37 after 2,000 rounds. It hasn't been cleaned, other than whatever fingers have knocked off it from handling.

I'm going to hit the gun with some synthetic-safe Gun Scrubber to degrease it good, re-lube it properly, and then we'll start shooting it for realz, yo.
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Post-Racial America

So, as I surmised, the initial identification of the at-large suspect in the Cascade Mall shooting as "Hispanic" was incorrect. We've had hoofbeats all over the place lately, and guessing horses is more often right than guessing zebras.

"Some questioned how describing a suspect as “Hispanic” could be meaningful, when it’s a linguistic, rather than racial, distinction."

Well, the suspect was at large, and they needed a descriptor for folks to be on the lookout for, and people would have lost their tiny little minds at "swarthy", "dark-skinned", "olive-complected", "dusky" or dozens of other quaint descriptors for "dark haired and not pasty white, but not a black dude, either". None of those are neutral terms for people's Pantone hues anymore; they've all been loaded with a full charge of powder in this era of racial healing.

"More than 15 percent of the population of Skagit County describes itself as Latino or Hispanic.

Most major news outlets, including The Seattle Times, mention race or ethnicity in relation to crimes only if the crime is considered racially motivated or if an armed, dangerous suspect is on the loose."

See? They couldn't describe the gunman who'd just fled the mall as "He looka like a man."

Overheard in the Hallway...

RX: "I had the strangest dream. I'd won one of every Stanley screwdriver ever made."

Me: *laughing* "That is the Bobbi-est dream ever. You could fix all the things!"

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #149...

The Sig Sauer P320C 9mm I won at the Friends of the NRA banquet, now sporting a Boresight Solutions frame. (Which I had on hand and was the reason I picked the P320 off the Wall of Guns.)

I need to decide on some sights and get a Gray Guns Carry Action Package, just because. Come 2018 or 2020, when I move away from the Glock, this is probably the direction I'll head.
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Late Start...

I rode the snooze button express for nearly an hour this morning.

Going out for a Broad Ripple breakfast with Shootin' Buddy and then to the range to bust some caps with the new Ruger. I'm trying to get it into a bunch of different hands.

More later.
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Morning Thoughts...

• Number of YouTube followers does not equate to competence. There is no correlation, inverse or otherwise. There are some squared-away trainers who have a handle on social media, but there are a ton more who don't use it, or are even actively bad at it. Conversely there are some who border on household names on the gunternet who are so completely devoid of clue as to be cringeworthy. Facebook likes or YouTube followers shouldn't be a factor, positive or negative, when you seek training.


• "Lad" is an English slang term roughly equivalent to "Dudebro". Except apparently a more nancy, big girl's blouse version of "Dudebro" that completely loses its shit at the sight of a lockback pocket knife of the variety usually given to Texans on their eighth birthday.


• EVEN THE BUILDINGS ARE AGAINST ME!

Day at the Office...with a SECRET RUGER!

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

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

...a Ruger Mark IV!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'd been in a pretty chipper mood, and then...

I think I'll go to the range.
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Ding!

There's nothing like a little head-to-head shooting exercise to liven things up.

Jeff Hoskinson of MGM Targets sets up the targets...

...and explains the course of fire.

Head-to-head, the shooter had to knock down the three falling plates, execute a reload (reload with retention the first go-'round and a speed reload the second run-through) and drop their popper first. The stop poppers, of course, are set so they fall down overlapped, so there's no doubt about whose went down first.

I was up against Gail Pepin my first run, and not only was my reload an abysmally slow soup sandwich, but I did a speed reload instead of a tactical reload. My opponent sped ahead of me by the expedient of not reloading at all, so we both took our procedurals on that stage and moved on to the next one...

 Round Two had some good matchups...

Gail is shooting here against Denny Hansen, my boss at S.W.A.T. Magazine. Michael Bane and Massad Ayoob look on in the background.

The Ruger 9mm Commanders ran well, and shot really flat with that 10# recoil spring. A 9mm 1911 is pretty much shooting in "Easy Mode".

Mas goes up against Rich Nance in a tight race. Between these two and Jim Tarr, most of the rest of us were looking at fighting over fourth place.

There was a bowling pin event with those weird guns with round things in the middle, though, and your humble correspondent managed a second place overall finish in that, and seeing as the winner was the guy who literally wrote the book on bowling pin shooting, I'll take it.
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Home again, home again...

Yesterday started with a 2½-hour ride from FTW Ranch to the airport in San Antonio at 7:30 AM and finished with a taxi depositing me at Roseholme Cottage at 7:30 PM.

I'm pretty exhausted and suffering the inevitable letdown of a fantastic weekend. It was my first big press event wearing my shiny new Handgun Editor title from Shooting Illustrated, and getting a chance to see Massad Ayoob, Michael Bane, and Denny Hansen again was a lot of fun. Made new friends, shot a bunch of other people's ammo, saw some breathtaking scenery and exotic species of deer. If heaven ain't a lot like this past weekend, I don't wanna go.

I have a bajillion photos...well, six hundred and something, actually...to sort through and I'll post some up, but first I have to drive up to Lafayette to pick up the gun I won at the Greater Lafayette Friends of the NRA banquet last week. That's right, after all the little tickets I've bought in all those corny little games at all those banquets, I finally won a gat: A Sig Sauer P320 Carry in 9mm.

I'll write more when I get back.
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It could catch on...

I'm thinking about starting a new religion where the payoff for a good life is you die and go to FTW Ranch.
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Thank you for calling booksbikesboomsticks.blogspot.com...

...your call is very important to us, but right now we're at FTW Ranch in Texas shooting Rugers and getting schooled by Dave Spaulding, so you're just gonna have to hold your water for another couple days until we get back into cell phone range of civilization.

Thank you!
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Gotta shoot and do some other stuff...

...breakfast was a hasty donut.

Donuts! #thedancingdonut #yum

A photo posted by Tamara Keel (@tamarakeel) on Sep 15, 2016 at 6:06am PDT

Will post more after I knock out some chores.
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Okay, I'm going in...

I'm going to make sure the G39 is clean and lubed, with a fresh recoil spring assembly, and do the 2,000 round thing with it. It's going to be a little bit 'spensive in the ammo department, but I'm legit curious to see how it holds up.

My only real experience with the teeny Glocks, other than with diagnosing customer or range rental guns, has been with a pair of .357SIG Glock 33s I owned in succession back around the turn of the millennium. Being honest with myself, they probably saw a couple hundred rounds, tops, in those days of weekly range visits with two or three pistols randomly selected from the dozen or so I owned... Well, I meant to get to the range weekly, but sometimes it was more like bi-weekly. Or monthly. But I shot a lot, you betcha, and my guns were all flawless over, I dunno, like a thousand rounds! Or more!

You can see why I'm skeptical of Internet gun claims; I have been as guilty of them as anybody, and it's why I try and document the bejeezus out of things now. You think I've never been standing there with a gun I like, with the slide hung up just slightly out of battery, and nobody on the range but me and my conscience...and my self-respect? There's often an audible sigh as I pull the pen out of my pocket and scribble "#72 OOB" on a piece of torn-off cartridge box flap.

Every five hundred rounds I'll do the recoil spring test, too. Rule of thumb on the compact & midsize Gen 3 guns is replacing the RSA somewhere in the 2,500-3,000 round area, but I'm unsure of the subcompacts.
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From discussion elsewhere...

A conversation about Mosins generated this musing...

"On the bright side, at least we weren't buried under a deluge of $49 Mle.1886 rifles and crates of nickel-a-round corrosive 8mm Lebel. I can only imagine the contortions neckbeards would be going through to justify the awesomeness of those.

Although, now that it's in my head, the idea of a Tapco'ed-out Lebel has a sort of perverse attraction."

Two Is One...

So I reached the point where I had enough 9mm Glock mags, of the G17 and G19 varieties, to completely fill my GPS Magazine Caddy. While I was at Indy Arms Co. today, I picked up a second one that will be for all the oddball caliber Glock magazines, like 10mm Auto, .357 SIG, .45 GAP, and .40 S&W.

Fried.

I got home from class, sunburned and tired, a little before 9PM. Bobbi was asleep because she was working the 0MG30-Noon shift. I stayed awake 'til her alarm went off, and evidence would dictate that I stayed awake a little past that, but I woke up sprawled atop the covers, fully clothed and in my shoes still, at 3:20AM.

I had intended to walk her out to her car and retrieve my suitcase full of laundry and stuff from my car in the garage at the same time, but that didn't work out as planned.

Half-awake, I shucked out of the grimy range clothes and into PJs, flopped back down atop the comforter, and didn't move again 'til the TV in Bobbi's bedroom turned on of its own accord at 6AM, which is coincidentally the same time that Huck was frantically mewing in my ear to let me know he was likely to starve to death in the next 37 seconds if I didn't do something about it.

I dozed fitfully for another hour or so before getting up and heading to the range to pop some caps, mostly so I could sort out the round count on some gun logbooks:

Count the ammo left in the bag, plus what's left in loaded mags, and...whoops, don't forget there's a round of FMJ in the chamber of the gun on my hip...and subtract that from 500, now add seventeen for the carry ammo that was in the gun at the start of the class, and that will tell me how much ammo I fired in the class. (355 rounds, but I sat out some drills to photograph stuff.)

I'd write more stuff today, but frankly I'm too in need of a good night's sleep to write well.
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Day Two.

First day of class went okay for me yesterday. Didn't set myself on fire. Learned a thing.

Ready for day two. Gonna be on the range all day.
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Race To The Bottom...

"That tightening has frustrated many Clinton allies and operatives, who are astonished that she isn’t running away with this race, given Trump’s deep unpopularity and his continuing stream of controversial comments."

Democrats seem baffled that their candidate isn't galloping away with this thing.

So, my Democrat friends, you know how you're all "Jesus, how could the Republicans pick someone so incredibly loathsome? Are they stupid?" Pretty much that right back at you.

Just like the Republican primaries managed to select the only candidate who could possibly get beaten by the Lizard Queen from Zeta Reticuli, your unDemocratic Superdelegate Logrolling Festival managed to turn up the one candidate in your party who might lose to Cheeto Jesus.

Both major parties are, ironically, in a place where the best thing that could happen to their electoral chances is for the headliner on their ticket to suffer a sudden heart attack.
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Overheard on I-70 Eastbound...

Driving toward Dayton this afternoon, I gradually hove out of sight of the shoreline of Indianapolis's NPR broadcast island and hadn't gotten within reach of Dayton's. Rather than wade through the assortment of unknown classic rock, country, and He Who Walks Behind The Rows-type religious stations out in eastern Indiana, I tried to power up the Bluetooth speakers I have for listening to podcasts on my phone as an interim solution until I replace the Zed Drei's head unit.

Unfortunately, the battery in the speakers was flatter than the soybean fields I was droning past, and so I just turned the audio off to leave myself listening to the thoughts in my head and the wind noise in the convertible top...

...jerking my head upright from what was certainly only a blink's worth of sleep, my eyes flew open and I shouted "The SMERSH powder is all he had on him!"

I have no idea what it means, either, and it's amazing that I got enough dream detail to yell that in what was not even enough of an eyeblink for the car to wander in its lane.

Needless to say, I was wide awake for the rest of the way to my destination.
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Overheard in the Kitchen...

Me: "It gets her attention, but what if she doesn't recognize 'Rannie' as being a sound-symbol for her, but rather a sound that means 'O Bastet, this monkey humbly requests your attention'?"

21st Century Hipster Bulldog...

Of the guns that I've put through the whole 2,000 round thing here on the blog, I've come away with unqualified admiration for four of them: The full-size Sig Sauer P320 in 9mm, the Sig P250C in .380, the Glock 19, and the Glock 37. The 37 is the oddball of the bunch, being chambered for Glock's peculiar and almost proprietary .45 GAP cartridge (Springfield Armory cataloged XDs in the chambering for a year or so, but other than that, GAP has pretty much been an all-Glock show.)

After the good experience with the 37, I wondered how well a certain other gun in .45 GAP would work...

Keeping consistent with the rest of their catalog, Glock had followed up 2004's duty-sized Glock 37 with a 2005 introduction of a compact Glock 38 and subcompact Glock 39. The 39 was on the same frame as the 9mm G26, .40 G27, and .357SIG G33, but with a slightly wider, more massive slide to address reliability and durability concerns.

The Glock 26-size magazine would hold ten rounds of 9x19mm or nine of .40/.357. In .45 GAP it holds six, and the "Plus 2" extension is only a "Plus 1".

This is still a combination of size, weight, bore diameter, and magazine capacity that is pretty unique on the market. It scratches the same not-entirely-logical itch for me that the small/medium-frame big-bore revolvers like the Charter Arms Bulldog or Smith & Wesson 696 do...

Recoil is surprisingly mild, even with Sellier & Bellot's 230gr FMJ offering. I would rather shoot this thing than the .40 S&W Glock 27 any day of the week and twice on Sunday. The more massive slide brings it down to a recoil level that is subjectively hard to distinguish from that of the 9mm Glock 26.

The best part is that the hipster Glocks are generally pretty cheap on the used market when you can find them. This one, complete with night sights and the mag extension, was won for $375 shipped on Gunbroker.

Reliability testing will commence soon.
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Hermit Crabby Kingdom

My blog is now apparently blocked on all five computers in the DPRK. https://t.co/MB7aHePxnF

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) September 9, 2016

Gang Signs

The best part of today being the fiftieth anniversary of the Star Trek franchise was watching the decidedly non-nerdy anchors on the local morning news program try to show how un-with-it they were by doing what they called the "Vulcan grip".

Bobbi muttered "Someone should run out there and give them the Vulcan grip..."

It was hilariously funny at 0615.
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The 'Hood?

So I'm driving home from the monthly club meeting at Marion County Fish & Game last Tuesday night, and I decided to take the more northerly of the two major routes, since the southern one runs in on 38th Street and generally if something bad happens in Indianapolis at night, it will happen at the corner of Thirty-somethingth Street and Something Avenue.

The alternate route is to zip one more exit up I-465 and come home via 56th Street instead.

At the intersection of 56th & Georgetown, the convenience store parking lot was full of flashing lights. Looked like four cop cars had one car pulled over. Probably not just a speeding ticket...

While I was trying to reach in with as much zoom as the Lunar's 18-55mm lens had, an ambulance came running code up Georgetown from the south, turning west on 56th... Busy night.

So the next morning I crank up Google to see if there was any news, and there wasn't. At least, not from Tuesday night. But the corner of 56th & Georgetown itself? It made the news plenty...

• "Following the first shooting, Tyson made another U-turn and continued southbound on Georgetown before heading west on 56th Street..."


• "Man injured in shooting near 56th and Georgetown Road"


• "According to Indianapolis Metropolitan police, officers tried to pull the SUV over near 56th Street and Georgetown Road, but the vehicle didn’t stop."


• "Police said the victim was shot at The Woods at Eagle Creek apartments, near West 56th Street and Georgetown Road. There was a report of shots fired at that location at 6:36 p.m."


• "It happened at a clothing store called Hang Time at 56th Street and Georgetown Road early Saturday morning."

...and that's just from the first page of Google news hits on "Georgetown and 56th".

Mind you, if you follow that street just another mile or two east and it becomes Kessler Boulevard and passes through some of the most exclusive neighborhoods in Indianapolis.

The trip in on 38th Street takes you through neighborhoods that signal their roughness in typical inner city ways: Boarded-up homes and businesses, graffiti, generic urban blight. But to look around with a casual glance at the corner of 56th & Georgetown, you'd just see convenience stores and strip malls, subdivisions of single-family houses, garden apartement complexes, and fairly conventional suburbia. You'd need to notice the tenants of the strip malls...the payroll cashing places, pre-paid phone stores, bottle shops, and other indicators...to realize that you were in a neighborhood where things could suddenly get every bit as sporty as they could down in the more obvious 'hood.
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#StayInYourLane

Well, @NRA, don't forget that pontificating on things he doesn't understand is pretty much @piersmorgan's job description.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) September 7, 2016

Literally

From discussion here...

Due process of law is literally what separates civilization from barbarism. And yes, Lana, I know what "literally" means.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) September 7, 2016

Bought the T-Shirts...

The other day I wrote:

"You cannot on the one hand spout this sort of "Oopsie! Hah-ha! What a faux pas!" claim of ignorance in one moment and then turn around and claim that you are the hard-nosed, experienced, understands-how-government-works alternative to Cheeto Jesus in the next.

Only you can, apparently, because we're voting for teams now, and it doesn't matter what the Turd Sandwich or Big Giant Douche say; people are going to vote for them based on the color of the box they come in."

I give you Exhibit A.

The simple fact that you can find a fault...any fault at all...with [$MESSIAH] indicates possible signs of heresy and perhaps profound mental deficits.
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Rumble in the 12 Items or Less Lane

When people envision self-defense scenarios, it's usually something they consider themselves being well-prepared to handle: The obvious robber who announces his intentions from ten paces away in the Walmart parking lot, or the masked robber forcing entry somewhere between dinner and bedtime, while our hero is still mostly dressed and within arm's reach of his trusty heater.

Nobody's envisioned self-defense scenario starts out with their back against their loved one, hemmed in by a grocery store checkout on one side and a rack of Juicy Fruit and The National Enquirer on the other, and with the bad guy on top of them having just drawn a pistol...

From discussion elsewhere:

There's a chance that Mr. Seedy wasn't even trying to get her PIN but just looked like he was and, when confronted about it, bowed up and "Stood muh ground!"

You just need a clean criminal record to get a permit, you don't need any intelligence or social skills.

EDIT: Followup article...

Harryman, who did not testify at his trial, said he told Young that he was armed. It was a warning, not a threat, Harryman said.

Young responded, "I don't give a (expletive). I'm gonna (expletive) you up," Harryman said.

Harryman said he had seconds to deal with an unprovoked attack.

Young punched him and Harryman said he did not punch back. "I got beat up so bad I had a stroke," Harryman said.

The gun was his last resort.

Next self-defense scenario: You're standing in line at the grocery store when the husband of the woman in front of you in line decides you've been trying to read his wife's PIN and circles the register, shouting obscenities, to physically assault you... 
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Grime Will Tell...

Friday morning at the range, I fired off the last box of the Sellier & Bellot 180gr FMJ from Lucky Gunner through the Glock 20. I also had most of a box of 9mm and decided to run it through one of the 22rd ETS magazines I'd recently bought but hadn't used yet.

I had forty rounds of nine and loaded them into the mag twenty at a time. Although forty rounds isn't indicative of anything, I was pleased that there were no hitches whatsoever. (I put another sixty-eight rounds through it yesterday morning as well. I'll try and keep a running tally...)

The Glock 20 on the other hand...

The griminess seems to have affected the big 10mm more than any of the other Glocks I've done this with. There was a small amount of drama with the Glock 32 test, while the 19 and 37 were pretty near trouble free, but the light, off-center primer strikes are really beginning to plague the G20 now.

There were three on Friday, on rounds #3, #5, and #47 of the day (#1,683, #1,685, and #1,727 of the test).

Page 84 of my Glock Armorer's Manual says the fix is either a good cleaning...or possibly it's a too-tight extractor. (Which might explain the intermittent and odd failures-to-feed, as well.) When I tear this thing down for a cleaning at the end, the extractor (and extractor spring) will be getting prophylactically replaced. I'll be keeping an eye on this one in the future to see how that affects things. Another good reason for keeping log books on guns...

This makes 1,730 rounds since the Glock 20 was cleaned or lubricated, with six failures to feed (#401, #454, #1,213, #1,297, #1,413, #1,593) and eleven failures to fire (#598, #1,016, #1,029, #1,376, #1,595, #1,628, #1,633, #1,640, #1,683, #1,685, #1,727). 270 rounds to go.
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Yesterday as viewed through Prisma...

Shootin' Buddy arrived at 9:00AM and we saddled up the bikes and headed northward. Our Zero Point was roughly 54th street. Bear in mind that Indianapolis blocks are a tenth of a mile.

We stopped for a late breakfast at  Public Greens in Broad Ripple (64th Street). Shootin' Buddy had scrambled eggs and a cup of yogurt, while I had the chilaquiles. They put feta cheese in their chilaquiles. Too few dishes on this planet have both feta and salsa verde.

We stopped at the Kroger on 86th Street for some bottled water. There's a little bicycle maintenance station, with cabled tools and a tire pump, out by the bike rack at the Kroger.

This is the Palladium concert venue in Carmel. Just south of 126th Street.

We got all the way north to Grand Junction Brewing Co. just south of 176th Street in Westfield, where we enjoyed a One With Nature APA before turning around and heading back south. The exercise doohicky in the iPhone indicated we'd done about fifteen miles at this point.

While pedaling north through Carmel, I'd noticed Union Brewing Company just off the trail to the east. On the way back south, we stopped in for a pint of their Preacher Pale Ale, never having sampled the place or its offerings before. We will be back for sure.

 Arriving back at 86th Street, it was time for lunch at Big Lug Canteen. I had the Hans Grubeer, a "German IPA" with Hallertau and Mandarina Bavarian hops, and a charcuterie plate with their delicious bacon jam.

By the time we pulled back up to the garage at Roseholme Cottage, the iThingy indicated we'd ridden as close to thirty miles as makes no nevermind. And my backside is feeling it today.
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Yum.

Next time I'm @BigLugCanteen, I'm just going to order a bowl of that superlative bacon jam and a spoon. pic.twitter.com/32PSWROtQH

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) September 4, 2016

If you like how they deliver the mail...

...you're gonna love how they manage your health care.

"Useless Eaters" scheduled for next round of cost cutting. https://t.co/Z00hDn78xG

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) September 3, 2016

Unbelievable...

"Clinton told the FBI she "could not recall any briefing or training by State related to the retention of federal records or handling classified information," according to the bureau's notes of their interview with Clinton. The documents indicate Clinton told investigators she either does not "recall" or "remember" at least 39 times — often in response to questions about process, potential training or the content of specific emails."

This is about as plausible as "the dog ate my homework". She claimed she didn't know that the "c" meant "confidential", that nobody told her that she should retain work emails as they are part of the public record. Further along in the article, she throws her staff under the bus, in effect claiming that her underlings and minions told the dog to eat her homework.

That's some Grade A leadership there, right? Makes you wanna sign right up for that outfit, no?

Further, I have an Ivy League lawyer, wife of a former governor and president, who lived in the White House for eight damned years, then went on to be a senator and Secretary of State telling me she didn't know about classified email and that work-related documents needed to be saved as part of the public record?

Look, I don't mind you bullshitting me a little bit, Hillary, but don't you ever lie to me like I'm Montel Williams.


The newsreader's report this morning had me wondering aloud how she read it with a straight face without blurting editorial commentary.

You cannot on the one hand spout this sort of "Oopsie! Hah-ha! What a faux pas!" claim of ignorance in one moment and then turn around and claim that you are the hard-nosed, experienced, understands-how-government-works alternative to Cheeto Jesus in the next.

Only you can, apparently, because we're voting for teams now, and it doesn't matter what the Turd Sandwich or Big Giant Douche say; people are going to vote for them based on the color of the box they come in.
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Having fun with the Prisma app...

The Zed Drei in Broad Ripple.

A photo posted by Tamara Keel (@tamarakeel) on Sep 2, 2016 at 9:21am PDT

Fifteen hundred plus

Wednesday morning was an indoor range session with another fifty rounds of Lucky Gunner's Remington 180gr FMJ and fifty of their Armscor 180gr FMJ. There were no malfunctions of any type to report.

You, too, can have a cool Spyderco Delica Emerson Opener!

Went out to Atlanta Conservation Club with Mike Grasso Thursday morning to do a bit of shooting in the glorious Chamber of Commerce weather we finally got after a hot, rainy August that felt more Houston than Hoosier.

I finally shot some of that 180gr Remington FMJ over the chronograph. Despite all the flash and noise at the muzzle, the velocities were pretty tame, outrunning only the Prvi Partisan and American Eagle loads.

LO: 1050
HI: 1070
AV: 1059
ES: 20.15
SD: 6.24

While there, I also tried some of Sig Sauer's house brand .357SIG ammo through the Glock 32. I figured that since their name was on the cartridge, they might put a little extra sauce on it. Instead, it was loaded fairly mild, but extremely consistent.

LO: 1284
HI: 1307
AV: 1295
ES: 23.02
SD: 8.83

The Glock 20 experienced one failure to feed, on the thirteenth round of the day (#1,593 of the test)...

Again it was the third round in magazine number three. There is a pattern emerging. Also, as the gun has gotten dirtier, the light primer strike thing has really reared its ugly head.

There were four out of a hundred rounds fired yesterday, two with Remington UMC (#1,595, #1,628) and two with Armscor (#1,633, #1,640). When I tear this thing down in a couple hundred more rounds, the inside of the striker channel will be of special interest.

This makes 1680 rounds since the Glock 20 was cleaned or lubricated, with six failures to feed (#401, #454, #1,213, #1,297, #1,413, #1,593) and eight failures to fire (#598, #1,016, #1,029, #1,376, #1,595, #1,628, #1,633, #1,640). 320 rounds to go.
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Stash Guns

A post by Massad Ayoob referenced something Rich Grassi wrote over at The Tactical Wire about having a little gun like a Ruger LCP for a "house gun".

This ties into a discussion we had some months back at pistol-forum.com, where a detective described a homicide he worked, one where the decedent had loaded guns stashed all over the house:

"One of my very first murder scenes as a uniformed officer was a guy toes up halfway in/halfway out of his door and in his boxer shorts. Someone had dumped a mag of .25 in him. Evidence indicated he was gut shot, fell down, and they they emptied it into his face. I spent over 3 hours clearing guns to transport to the property room for safe keeping until next of kin could be notified. Eleventy bajillion loaded guns in the house, dead on the door step in his boxers."

A lot of people apparently spend more time nekkid around the house than I do. I'm usually dressed within about thirty minutes of waking up and stay dressed until bedtime. And my holster is already on my jeans before I pull them on in the morning.


For me, I guess, it's reached a point where it's just not that big a deal. To quote my very smart friend Kathy Jackson:

"Sooner or later, every person new to concealed carry asks this question, sheepishly, of other people they know who carry. “Would you carry a gun to _______?” they ask. The blank can be filled by any number of things.  Would you carry a gun when you go camping? Would you carry to your mom’s house? to work? to church? to the movies? to your kids’ Little League games?

The question, earnest as it is, always bemuses me somewhat. You see, I don’t usually carry a gun to anywhere in particular, but I do go places and do things. And I simply carry, wherever I might be.

What I’m getting at is that years ago I made a decision that my default setting would be to carry my gun wherever I went and whatever I was doing. As a result, if I’m ever not carrying, it is because I made a deliberate decision not to do so right then, based upon some specific reason not to do so. So I don’t have to look for reasons why I might want a gun wherever I’m going. I’m taking my gun with me unless I have a good reason not to."

...and that includes around the house.

It's a safety thing, too. If you just put the gun on in the morning and leave it there all day, it eliminates a lot of unnecessary administrative gun-handling, and as anybody who's ever looked around the walls of the sally ports, locker rooms, and restrooms of the local cop shop can tell you, unnecessary administrative gun handling is when most of the unnecessary loud noises happen.
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From Elsewhere...

Photographic Tab Clearing...

• This is just some hilarious stuff right here:"The international hipster community is in shock this week after the purchase of a vintage Polaroid camera by a young hipster failed to bring him instant acclaim as a gritty, original, yet quirky photographer. Meanwhile, the non-profit Hipster Photographer Rescue has revealed that “this kind of tragic occurrence is happening so often now that it’s almost become mainstream”."


• From the Dumb Crook Files: Cameras make high-value targets for thieves...unless you break into a struggling vintage film camera store and clean out the showcases of the pedestrian stuff they'd been unable to sell and were planning to take to Goodwill.

That'll buff right out...

When you have your Bible on the Kindle app... https://t.co/Y5OxHLNcxL

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) August 31, 2016

Annoyance...

Tuesday morning marked another trip to the indoor range at Indy Arms Co. for respite from the heat and (especially) the humidity at MCF&G. I had with me another hundred rounds of Lucky Gunner's 180gr Remington UMC FMJ 10mm ammo.

On round number thirty-three of the day (#1,413 of the test) there was a failure-to-feed malfunction absolutely identical to the ones on the last two range outings with this ammo: Round was nose-up with the cartridge rim just barely not under the extractor claw. A slap of the floorplate and the slide went into battery normally.

Like both previous times, it happened in one of the first few rounds in the magazine and this time I took note of the mag number (#3). I wish I'd done that before, because it nags at me that these malfunctions have three things in common:

1. All with the Remington UMC ammo.
2. All with a relatively full magazine.
3. All since I purchased magazines #3 and #4.

Really do wish I'd bothered to take notice of which mag it was the previous two times.

Anyhow...

I fired the first box at the five yard line and then moved the target back to ten. It was hot, I was cranky, my glasses were fogging, I'd already fired fifty rounds of 10mm, and all those other excuses...

This makes 1480 rounds since the Glock 20 was cleaned or lubricated, with five failures to feed (#401, #454, #1,213, #1,297, #1,413) and four failures to fire (#598, #1,016, #1,029, #1,376). 520 rounds to go.
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Consistency.

Went to MCF&G yesterday morning to do some chrono work. I had a pistol along for a forthcoming Shooting Illustrated article, as well as the Glock 20. I was meaning to chrono some of the 180gr Remington FMJ I got from Lucky Gunner as well as some Federal American Eagle 180gr FMJ I'd purchased at Indy Arms Company. Unfortunately, I forgot the Remington at home, so the only ten mike-mike that got measured yesterday was the American Eagle.

I'll do the Remington on Thursday, because today and tomorrow are supposed to be much like Monday was: 90°F/90% humidity, and that's indoor shooting weather as far as I'm concerned. The humidity down there on the banks of Eagle Creek will take the starch right out of you.

The American Eagle 10mm has a reputation for being ".40 S&W power level", which isn't entirely true, as it's 50-100fps hotter than pretty much any 180gr .40 I've chrono'ed, but it is definitely the mildest 10mm load I've yet clocked.

It's also the most consistent. Freakily consistent...

The first string of ten had velocities so close together that I shot a second one just to see how much of a fluke it was. The second string had one round that was, at 1,011fps, about a dozen fps slower than the next slowest round in the string, and that opened up the standard deviation to a hair over 7 feet per second, which is still astounding.

Here's the better of the two strings:

LO: 1020
HI: 1033
AV: 1028
ES: 13.42
SD: 3.87

I spent the remaining thirty rounds shooting the steel plates from the 20 yard line. Even with the never-to-be-sufficiently-damned factory sights and the factory Glock trigger, it was stupid easy.

There was one failure to fire on round number forty-six of the day (#1,376 of the test). The round went off on the second try. It looks a little like the gun may have been slightly out of battery, but I could not make it replicate the situation in dry fire? Besides...

...even the good primer hits are well off-center in the G-lock.

This makes 1380 rounds since the Glock 20 was cleaned or lubricated, with four failures to feed (#401, #454, #1,213, #1,297) and four failures to fire (#598, #1,016, #1,029, #1,376). 620 rounds to go.
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Commercial Art

This is just an amazingly great little sixty second bit of cinema. Bravo, Dove Chocolate, for paying for the most entertaining thing I'll likely see on my TV this morning, unless Matt Lauer catches fire or something.
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I can see my house from up here!

So I was looking for something local on Google street view, and was just amazed at the detail you can see...

I mean, check out that 2008-model Trek 7100 in the nickel/mocha color scheme with the quick-detach Bontrager baskets fore and aft, there.
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Grinding on...

Another hundred rounds of Lucky Gunner's Remington UMC 180gr FMJ got sent downrange at Indy Arms Co yesterday.

Apparently the flash and noise from the stuff is pretty noticeable on the range's CCTV cameras.

There was a failure to feed on round number sixty-seven of the day (#1,297 of the test) that was identical to the one photographed in the previous post. The slide went into battery when I slapped the mag floorplate. By this time, my hands were sweaty, my glasses were fogged, and I was focused on the sights and trigger, trying to keep rounds in the upper A at ten, and so my grip might not have been all it could be. I dunno.

Other than that, it was a pretty uneventful range session. I fired off a hundred rounds through the gun and got off the range pretty quickly; when a range's filtration system is pulling that much outdoor air through, even herculean efforts by the HVAC have a hard time staying very far ahead of 90+°F/90+% humidity weather. Shooting outdoors yesterday afternoon would have been truly miserable.

This makes 1330 rounds since the Glock 20 was cleaned or lubricated, with four failures to feed (#401, #454, #1,213, #1,297) and three failures to fire (#598, #1,016, #1,029). 670 rounds to go.
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Where has the time gone?

Apparently my blog turned eleven today while I was out screwing around at the gun show.

Eleven years ago, Louisiana had been freshly wracked by disaster, I was working in the gun biz, had no dough, and spent a bunch of my weekends browsing the aisles at fun shows to help maintain my dough-less status.

Not a lot has changed, as you can see.

It's weird to think that first-graders who had my first blog posts read to them are now perusing college catalogs.
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Fun Show Time!

Let's all 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.

I'm broker'n dammit, so I'll probably just be putting nose prints on display cases. I've got to save my dough for hotels & airfare over the next couple months.
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Seriously.

The first person who comes up with a USB-powered throat-punching peripheral will retire a gazillionaire.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) August 27, 2016

Guys! Guys! You'll never guess what it's doing out there!

That's right, the weatherman has broken into regular programming again today to tell me about lightning and winds and flash floods.

Yet again it is piss-pouring down rain in the back yard and the thunder is making the windows rattle in their panes.

Good thing I changed my mind and skipped the bowling pin match at the club this morning. The storm's track is southwest-to-northeast, exactly the direction of travel I'd have been taking home from the match.
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Yow!

Another hellacious thunderstorm just tracked right over Indianapolis. Lost power for about five minutes, there.

Rain is coming down outside in biblical quantities and it hasn't stopped thundering for near thirty minutes. Supposedly there's plenty more where this came from, too...
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Festive.

Power's out from Keystone Avenue east and from 54th Street north. Which means that Indy Arms Co. was out as a shooting destination this morning.

Back to the house I went. Thankfully, Roseholme Cottage still has juice. Two and a half hours after the storm had rumbled through, there were still the sounds of sirens everywhere. TV was saying that there were ~60mph straight-line winds and we've got a lot of old trees on the north side of the city, rooted in soil that's been soaked by a very rainy August...
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Malfunction!

Thursday morning I headed over to Indy Arms Company and sent another hundred rounds of Lucky Gunner's 10mm 180gr Remington UMC FMJ ammo downrange through the test Glock 20. Wednesday evening the UPS man brought the two extra G20 mags I'd ordered from Brownells, so I reckon I'll be keeping this one for a while.

On round #83 of the day (#1,213 of the test) I experienced the first failure-to-feed with the gun that I'm not 95% comfortable attributing to a poor grip and hot ammo. I don't know if you can see in the picture there, but the rim just barely hung on the extractor claw. As a matter of fact, when I shifted the gun slightly to take a second picture, the jostling of the magazine floorplate against the shooting bench was enough that the slide shot into battery of its own accord.

I fired the first fifty rounds at the upper A-zone at fifteen yards. Then I ran the target back in to the five yard line and fired at the lower A-zone in three-to-five-round strings at a pace that I would never use if I weren't the only one on the range.

This makes 1230 rounds since the Glock 20 was cleaned or lubricated, with three failures to feed (#401, #454, #1,213) and three failures to fire (#598, #1,016, #1,029). 770 rounds to go.
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Thanks, Mother Nature.

Well, I had planned to go out to Marion County Fish & Game to do some chrono work this morning, but we just had a hellacious thunderstorm track right across Indianapolis in the middle of morning rush hour.

We had a limb down across Bobbi's ham antenna, there are branches down all up and down the block, trees down all over Broad Ripple, and flooding in all the low spots from getting an inch and a half or more of rain in about fifteen minutes. (As flat as it is around here, flooding can be a problem because there's no real incentive for the water to go anyplace other than right where it landed.)

TV's saying six thousand...scratch that...seven thousand without power and more reports coming in all the time.

I think I'll shoot indoors today. Monday morning looks like a good window in the monsoons for chrono work. What I really need is one of these.
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