Motivation.

I am given to understand that a key in fighting depression, lethargy, and general malaise is to start your day when you wake up. In other words, exercise volition as the very first thing you do on becoming conscious in the morning.

This morning, Bobbi's bustling woke me at 0500 (the alarm clock doesn't go off 'til 6) and, the minute I realized that this was not just a transitory bit of wakefulness, I put my feet on the floor and started my day, rather than lying abed, waiting for the alarm to go off.

Yesterday morning I walked twice around the block first thing. It turned out to be about .7 miles, and so this morning I added a third lap, and that was 1.02 miles, or as close to a mile as makes no nevermind. So I think that's the new morning routine: Wake up and take three quick laps around the block before I do anything else. More exercise and less beer. I had my lack of physical conditioning demonstrated to me conclusively the weekend before last, and I need to fix that.
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"What'll you do with an LCP 2?"

Among the random bits of marketing detritus lodged in my brain from childhood is the ad jingle for Ford's LTD II, and I hear it every time I see LCP 2.

Anyway, shooting the new single-action-only Elsie Pea proceeds apace. The other day it saw a box of fifty zinc-jacketed, steel-cased TulAmmo. Out of the fifty rounds it experienced two failures to go completely into battery (#18 and #47). It's up to you whether you want to charge those against the ammo or the gun.

Yesterday I put a box of fifty Federal RTP rounds through the gun, about a third of them fired strong-hand-only.

There were no failures of any kind to report. The wider backstrap on the LCP 2 does make it less outright uncomfortable to shoot than the original, but fifty rounds is still a lot more wearing than it would be on a full-size piece.

This makes 211 rounds fired since I started testing, with two failures to go fully into battery (#129, #158).
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Overheard in the Office...

RX: "Huh. Birch Bayh isn't dead."

Me: "If he tried harder, he could be."

RX: "He's 88."

Me: "Well, he's working on it, then."

Anticlimactic.

Oh, look. An AR-15.

Product Improved

On the bottom is the early Robar Custom Glock 17 that has been my inadvertent carry gun for several months now.

I say "inadvertent" because I installed an Overwatch Precision trigger that they sent me for T&E in it and decided to use it in the Rangemaster class I took in Nappanee back in early August. Since the class would involve a large amount of drawing and holstering, I moved the Gadget from my carry G19 to the 17. Out of sheer laziness, I never moved it back and therefore have been carrying the 17 since then, including using it at the Citizens Defense Research class in Ohio and at ECQC out in Albuquerque.

Other than a few user-induced FTEs at the Givens class and once fouling the slide on my right bewb shooting from retention in ECQC, I've had absolutely zero trouble from the gun. According to my logs, I've put 2,660 rounds through the gun since I've had it, which means it's nearing time for a prophylactic recoil spring change.

Incidentally, I'm glad I let Dark Star Gear talk me into the G17-length holster even though I was intending to carry the G19 in it.

People were telling me that the ECQC class was going to be a lens through which I viewed a lot of stuff very differently afterwards and they weren't kidding. One example is that I now really prefer holsters from holster makers who've attended that class. There's a reason that a handful of holster makers are dramatically over-represented in that sector of the training community...

The P320 Compact I won at the Friends of the NRA dinner immediately received the Boresight Solutions frame transplant (I had the frame on hand; it's why, when I had first pick off the Wall of Guns, I picked the 320C) and that's the state it was in when I took it along out to Blogorado to let some other folks try it. It's now had 226 rounds through it, and this weekend I swapped the fire control unit to a friend for his Gray Guns tuned FCU, so it's now technically a different gun. The trigger is phenomenal, and I've ordered a set of Dawson Precision sights to go on it.

I guess this marks the start of 2,000 rounds for the 320C, then? 226 down and 1,774 to go?
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Upgrades.

@sigsauerinc P320 with @boresightsolutions frame and @grayguns trigger/fcu

A photo posted by Tamara Keel (@tamarakeel) on Oct 29, 2016 at 2:54pm PDT

It's fun show weekend.

Posting has been interrupted by me hanging out at the fun show. I split a table with a friend, as much for the people-watching as anything else. 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 much of a crowd, and nobody's buying much of anything. You'd think that folks would be in the middle of a frothing election panic right now, seeing as how the gun-buying public is prone to such things, but maybe folks are all panicked out? Alternatively, folks might be too broke to panic.
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Overheard in the Office...

RX: "Hmm. 'Smoked mullet'..."

Me: "I'll go with 'What is what happened when Joe Dirt's trailer caught fire?'"

True fact.

If you sold chocolate lollipops for $2 and dog shit on a stick for $1.75, the American gun-buying public would suck a turd every time.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) October 29, 2016

Really close quarters...

My final evolution of the weekend:
To paraphrase the great warrior-poet, Lt. Aldo Raine, the problem with fighting in a car is that you're fighting, in a car.

When that gun came up in his left hand, it got all up inside my OODA Loops.
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Sorry...

I had more stuff to write up about the ECQC class today, but this morning I discovered that Soldier of Fortune magazine has decided to lift one of my columns whole from Shooting Illustrated.

They say that blatant copyright infringement is the sincerest form of flattery, but flattery don't pay no bills.
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EDITED TO ADD: I am now informed that SoF had permission to reprint the column.

Overheard on the Phone...

Phone: *RING! RING!*

Me: "Hello?"

Phone: "Hi! This is...*fake static*...Amy; I'm a Medicare advisor. How are you today?"

Me: "You're not a Medicare advisor, Amy. You're a robot."

Phone: "Great! Our records show that you are enrolled in Medicare or someone in your house is enrolled in Medicare. Is this right?"

Me: "Medicare makes me sooo hot, Amy. What are you wearing?"

Phone: "..."

Me: "Amy? Are you there? Did I not use the right keywords for your dialog tree?"

Phone: "..."

Me: *click*

Ugh.

I spent three weeks on Mountain Time and now I'm back on EDT. This is the first time I've been gone long enough that re-acclimatization is a thing; it feels like I'm up and about at a reasonably bright and early 7:17AM, but instead it's after nine.

I'm snowed under with work to catch up on. I promise myself I'll do a bunch of stuff while I'm on the road and then I'm lucky to do half of it.

To top things off, either the HDD or the drive controller on my desktop machine went toes up while I was gone, and the last backup of the documents folder is months old. Plus my copy of Adobe Acrobat is installed on that machine and that makes it hard to uninstall to allow it to be reinstalled on the laptop.

There's plenty more grief where that came from here at Roseholme Cottage, but that's enough whining for this AM.
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Tab Clearing...

• Airport cops in the Philippines planting ammo in travelers' baggage.


• When your only tool is a handgun, every problem is a B21E.

Things go wrong, Part One...

Guy in the plaid shirt walked up on our hero (in white) and said "Hey, you gotta phone? I need your phone. Gimme your phone and your wallet."

Our hero drew and the bad guy stopped, arms out to his side, and asked  "What're you gonna do? Shoot me?" He must've twitched the wrong way, because the good guy promptly did.

It was at that point that things went pear-shaped with the arrival of the Good Samaritan bystander who immediately started Samaritan-ing the wrong dude: "Hey, man! You just shot this guy!" Good Guy tries to explain what happened, while not letting Samaritan get too close. Samaritan interprets Good Guy's refusal to let him get close as being a sketchy guilty dude trying to get away.

Good Samaritan decides he's going to play hero and detain Good Guy for the cops. A tussle for the gun erupts, likely because of Good Guy's understandable reluctance to shoot Good Samaritan, and so Good Samaritan ends up stabbed fuckity-eleven times in the retention fight for the gun. It was ugly.

The Derpening? The Derpvergence? The Derpularity?

So, there you are, hunkered down with a good (well, good-ish) cheekweld on the stock of your bullpup Mosin 91/30, squinting through the 36-color illuminated mil-dot reticle of your UTG 6-24x50 at the advancing horde of shambling blue-helmeted UN Nazi zombies. It's your job to provide overwatch for the third platoon of the Mom's Basement militia, and if you can't cover their flanks with accurate sniper fire, they'll be overrun and turned into zombie merde.

But who will cover your flank? If only your spotter had a weapon worthy of protecting you, the wielder of Tsarina, so that you could keep her barking defiance at the undead!

Never fear, your spotter's weapon is here.
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Overheard in the Truck Last Night...

Me: "Hey, everybody remember to push your buttons down, because you know what I don't want to do today? Get into a f****ing gunfight."

Stingray: "Oh, wait. We already did that."

Me: "Okay, you know what I don't want to do today? Get into another f***ing gunfight."

Where I've been all weekend...

ECQC started out at 6PM on Friday and ran through 10PM that night. We were sweaty and sore and grabbed a quick bite at Denny's before bedtime. Left the motel at 6AM the next morning, were on the range by 7:45, class started at 8:00, and ended at 7:30PM with me flat on my back on the caliche, wearing a FIST helmet and getting housed in the headlight glare of a couple of trucks.

Remember: At these distances, it's not your gun, it's y'all's gun.

Stopped for supper on the way back to the motel, and Sunday morning was a repeat of the previous day, with things wrapping up about six-ish with the final evolution of the class: A fight in a car. We went out for a class dinner and then it was time for the drive back to Los Alamos, arriving at Nerd Ranch shortly after midnight.

I didn't have a lot of time to write this weekend, but I'll be writing plenty about this class this week. It was nothing short of a transformative experience.
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I don't care who you are...

...that's funny right there.

Disaster. Harpooner's an immigrant. This "Ahab" guy, he drowns everybody. Typical. I woulda brought the whale back, okay? #TrumpBookReport

— MateoG (@MateoG) October 20, 2016

Breathtaking lack of self-awareness...

So, this happened...

There are no clichés in a gunfight (or rather "there are no cliche's in a gunfight" because an apostrophe means "Look out! Here comes an 's'!" in internetese) is just gem-like; perfectly fractal in its utter lack of clue at every level.

There was only one thing left to do. Quick, Robin! To Teespring! (And by "Robin", I mean PHLster, who saw genius and seized the day.)

I've ordered two. Excellent apparel for SHOT or NRAAM. That is our mascot, Sheepdogwolfbear.
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Historical realism...

Declassified testimony that had been redacted from Douglas MacArthur's Senate hearings paints a pretty grim picture of our overall military readiness posture during the Korean War.

Conventional interpretation is that somehow the Chinese benefited more from the limited and only-in-bounds nature of the conflict than we did. I was certainly never encouraged to think about, say, the effects on our supply lines of the Russian sub fleet at Vladivostok being turned loose to prowl the sea lanes between Japan and Korea.

(H/T to Weaponsman.)
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No respecter of kings.

Here's a pretty interesting little piece on dysentery's effect on the monarchy of England.

It probably claimed more than one royal victim. A drafty garderobe or campaign tent in the field would be a hell of a place to poop your life out.

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Neat-o!

On my daily peregrinations about the internets yesterday, some photos from a travel piece on CNN caught my eye.

By Cristian Bortes - Salina - TurdaUploaded by Rsocol, CC BY 2.0, Link

Apparently an ancient salt mine in Romania has been converted into a sort of underground theme park, with minigolf and an underground lake and everything. Best of all, its name is "Salina Turda".

Tell me that your inner third grader would not just be in absolute nirvana paddling a rowboat around an underground lake and singing "Salina Turda! Salina Turda!" just to listen to the echoes.
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How it's framed...

The headline at CNN looked pretty grim:

New York police officer fatally shoots 66-year-old woman

Yikes. Well, NYPD pistol training is hurting pretty badly these days, and we all know what happens when you give an undertrained person a gun and a healthy dose of paranoia via hours of scary dashcam videos.

Then I read the body of the piece:

A sergeant entered the seventh-floor apartment and encountered the woman, who was armed with scissors, but he persuaded her to put them down, Nikunen said.

The woman grabbed a baseball bat and attempted to strike the sergeant, Nikunen said. The officer fired two shots, striking the woman in the torso, he said.

Wait, what? What's the problem here?

Look, y'all, if you see someone swinging a baseball bat at me and I'm not already shooting them, I'd be much obliged if you'd get to shooting them for me. I don't care if they're 16 or 66 or what bathroom they use or if they're white or black or a sort of tie-dyed color.

A baseball bat to the cranium is lethal force and don't kid yourself otherwise. You start lethal forcing at me and I'm gonna lethal force right back at you to make you stop.

EDITED TO ADD (because it came up in the BookFace discussion):

Ignore the "Why didn't he draw his taser?" thing. That's a red herring. The use of force spectrum is not like baseball. You do not have to touch every base. If you need to run straight home from second, that's perfectly legal. 
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Sorry.

It's feeling pretty vacation-y today.

Maybe later.
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Fry Your Fingertips

If you're making a laptop with the graphics Wheaties to run games, you shouldn't put the GPU right under the metallic WASD keys, Asus. Ow.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) October 17, 2016

Patent Troll

This is one of those things of whose existence I was vaguely aware, but had never paid much attention to.

Now that I've actually stumbled across the patent while looking for something else, I have to think that Mister Albert B.Pratt of Vermont was trolling the patent office, or was completely off his nut.

Come to think of it, I'll bet the folks at the patent office get to deal with plenty of nutters.

How was the hat not supposed to fly off your grape under recoil?

As a side note, even limiting my search to patents issued prior to 12/31/1920, it's amazing how many were issued that contain "breech block".
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Saturday night's alright for fightin'...

Well, a roller derby bout isn't exactly a fight, but derby's definitely a contact sport...

At some point around the turn of the Millennium, roller derby somehow exchanged the trailer park for a loft in the arts district, and swapped PBR for IPA (unless you're drinking the PBR ironically.)

My hosts here in New Mexico are both heavily involved, Stingray as a referee and LabRat skating for the local Los Alamos team. The latter had its final bout of the season Saturday night, an away game against Albuquerque at Expo New Mexico, which I gather is the state fairgrounds. I have an affinity for fairgrounds, so I tagged along.

The lighting indoors was...let's go with "suboptimal", and I almost went and locked the camera bag in the truck, but I decided to keep it with me rather than risk window breakage on the Nerds' vehicle. Besides, I'd hate for a thief to be embarrassed by trying to pawn the contents of my Lowepro.

I had the D1X and the D200 with me, but the usual zoom lenses I keep on them for travel are painfully slow for the lighting conditions in the exhibit hall, and especially when attempting to do action photography. Oh, well, I dialed up the ISO and opened wide...

Los Alamos was ahead at the half, but they were short a few skaters and the home team blew it wide open in the second period in front of a wildly enthusiastic all-ages home audience that filled the bleachers, the chairs, and the floor in front of my seat. After the buzzer, the fans all crowded the track to exchange high fives with the circling skaters, home team and visitors alike.

After the bout, we repaired to the local Rudy's for some well-earned postgame chow: baby back ribs and prime rib and a Shiner Bock to wash it down.

And then it was time to drive back up to the ranch, listening to Wolf 359 podcasts on the truck's stereo.

It was a pretty good Saturday night, all-in-all, even if it did ensure that I'm going to have to save money for some faster glass.
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Tab Clearing..

• Hovering robot billboards buzz highway traffic jams.


• To the Millennial voter, you might as well be dragging out JFK's peccadilloes.


• Plum Crazy, Tor Red, and Curious Yellow. (I Am Curious (Yellow).)


• Know Your PT Boat (via Weaponsman.)

Weird dream.

I dreamed I was back in Atlanta. I was hanging out with a photographer friend in the area around Lenox Square of a Saturday afternoon, and we were walking from restaurant to pub, taking photos and reminiscing about the good old days and how much the area had changed. (It had changed a great deal, since my brain was fabricating a dream Buckhead/Lenox that was a sort of amalgam of mid-'90s Atlanta and Twenty-Teens Near Northside Indianapolis, cityscape-wise.)

The night dragged on well past midnight and our wandering afoot had wound us up in the parking lot of the Brookhaven MARTA station, from where my friend bid me adieu and headed home.

I am now realizing that I'm in an empty big city parking lot, afoot, at 0430, with a camera bag containing a couple DSLRs and other very pawnable stuff, and I'm mildly inebriated and the better part of a mile away from my car. So I start walking southwest along Peachtree Industrial. As I'm trundling along, I'm taking heart in the fact that we're nearing the end of the crook's working day and it won't be but another thirty or forty-five minutes before joggers and early-rising first-shift types outnumber gang bangers, dope dealers, and last-call-dodging drunks on city streets.

Sure enough, a few blocks along and I pass a couple groups of runners headed in the opposite direction on the sidewalk; two to four dudes out huffing and puffing a few miles before work. As the second group passed me and I turned my head to follow them, I noticed I had a guy following me. He was looking around as though keeping an eye out for witnesses, and gaining on me pretty steadily.

I stepped up my pace but, P'tree Industrial being seven lanes wide at this point and already starting to pick up in traffic volume from its wee-hours doldrums, I couldn't easily just jaywalk across the street to see if the guy followed or if I was just being nervous. I would have had to pause long enough to look both ways and make sure it was safe to cross, which would have given him time to catch up, and that seemed no bueno.

Glancing over my shoulder again, I saw he was closing fast and still scanning around him. I quickened again into the shambolic jog that's the closest thing I have to a run these days. I heard him start to jog behind me.

"Hey, I'm not gonna hurt you. I just need..." he says.

"I don't have anything. Go away!" I yell.

"You stop!" Fingertips brush my right shoulder.

"Don't touch me! Leave me alone!" My right hand goes under my jacket and onto my pistol as I try to run even faster.

Accompanied by a growl, his hand tries to grab my right shoulder again, misses its grasp, and instead gives a forceful, unbalancing shove. I start to stumble forward, half turn, draw the gun and fire twice. He's very close. I hit right where I'm aiming and the dude stops running forward, stands up straight for a second...

But I've already turned and run another half-block. Finding an open doorway, I back into it. I fumble my phone out of my shirt pocket with my left hand. I haven't holstered the gun and I'm trying to work the phone and safely hold on to the pistol at the same time. I can't get my fingers to work my phone's screen right and end up asking Siri to dial 911. (Can Siri do that? Note to self...)

The guy doesn't follow me. I set the gun and the phone down on the pavement, collect my breath, pick the gun up and holster it, then pick up the phone to wait for the po-po. The cops show up. Detectives show up. There's yellow crime scene tape being strung up back down the block. The cops tell me the dude is DRT. For some reason, I feel compelled to defend myself, to relate the entire narrative I've just told you to the police.

I lay out the details of the guy closing on me deliberately, and all the pre-attack cues, everything from his constant scanning combined with direct movement towards me, to actually physically laying on of hands. Kathy Jackson is there for some reason. "Mas would be very disappointed in you," she says, somewhat wryly, after I finished my tale to the responding po-po.
"I didn't want to clam up and ask for a lawyer and look guilty, but I probably said too much and look like a Strange Ranger," I moped.

I had to wait there for a while. I'm relieved of my gun. By the next afternoon, they'd got video from cameras in three or four locations, including one of him trying to shove me to the ground and me shooting. They'd also completely combed over my social media accounts. It turned out that dude had a big knife under his coat and a long prior record. I woke up in the middle of them telling me that I was free to go, for now at least.

That was extremely weird.
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Things I Don't Get #719,582

So there's a some sort of Instagram-like app called "Rich Kids" that is apparently just like Instagram, but charges you a thousand dollars a month to post your photos?

"To ensure the quality and exclusivity of our members the membership is set to be $1,000 per month.”

By charging a thousand clams a month to do the same thing one can do for free on Instagram, one is definitely ensuring something of one's membership, but it has more to do with density than any other quality.

"A ____ and his _____ are soon ______" Ready? Go!

Maybe I'm instagramming wrong? I thought I was posting pictures of guns and food and cameras mostly because I like taking pictures of things I like, but also because I like sharing those pictures with my friends? I mean, the majority of the people I back'n'forth with via social media on any kind of regular basis are people I know, either in meatspace or in that weird pen-pal way you can get from years of online correspondence.

I had no idea that we were supposed to be keeping some kind of score.
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Training opportunity...

The Contextual Handgun: The Armed Parent/Guardian class being held in Brookville, Ohio the weekend after this still has seats.

As for the quality of instruction, I watched John & Melody working with a shooter who was having difficulty keeping them on the paper on the morning of day one, and by the end of day two, she'd passed the FBI qual handily. Drawing from concealment.
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Assets.

It purely boggles my mind how many of my 'net acquaintances who used to quote Ayn Rand at the drop of a fedora are all in the middle of awkward no-homo man-crushes on a balding Russian autocrat. However much the FSB spent to suborn ZeroHedge, they certainly got return on their investment.
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Pot, meet kettle.

So the US government is going to hector me about cyber security in this op-ed allegedly co-written by Valerie Jarrett:

"That is why recently we launched the Lock Down Your Login campaign. This is a public-private campaign designed to educate everyone on immediate and simple steps we can take today to better secure our data, personal information and online transactions."

Hey, Valerie, you .gov employees need to just slow your roll on the finger-wagging about cyber security at me. After all, I'm not the one with servers in my bathroom or using "00000000" for an ICBM launch code.

(This is, of course, from the same executive branch that spies on you like a mofo and always wants backdoors in any encryption scheme which they will, honest injun, only use in a constitutional manner.)
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Of downballots and coattails...

"Mrs. Clinton’s campaign has concluded that at least two traditionally Republican states, Georgia and Arizona, are realistic targets for her campaign to win over. And Republican polling has found that Mr. Trump is at dire risk of losing Georgia, according to people briefed on the polls, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Mrs. Clinton now holds such a strong upper hand that Priorities USA, a “super PAC” backing her campaign, may direct some of its war chest into Senate races, two people said, and may begin broadcasting ads for those contests as soon as next week. Congressional Democrats also hope to persuade Mrs. Clinton to continue pouring money and campaign resources into states like Virginia and Colorado, where they believe her victory is assured, in order to lift other Democratic candidates."

I'll say it again: if Donald Trump had been hired by the Clinton Foundation as a Trojan Horse to torpedo the GOP and leave the party a sinking wreck, what would look different?

To restate an earlier post:

Raise your right hand if you remember the basic plot outline of The Producers.

This whole thing is side-splittingly hilarious, except the part where, you know, it's actually frickin' happening.
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Pictures and words.

Earlier this year I read of the passing of longtime Car and Driver photog Aaron Kiley in a glider crash in France, and now this.

Found out that while I was on the road that 2016 decided to take Brock Yates, too.
Fuck you, 2016. I hate you so much.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) October 11, 2016

Here's his obit at the magazine's site.

A lot of what I know about writing comes via osmosis from the pages of C/D, and not a little of it was via Mr. Yates.
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Silly Season '16

I used to wish I had telepathy.
Then social media actually let me know what everyone was thinking.
The meteor can't come soon enough.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) October 11, 2016

I'm not saying that the Voluntary Human Extinctionists are right, but let's hear them out at least. We don't want to be hasty and rush to judgment.
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Impressed thus far...

The LCP II was tried by several shooters yesterday. It's now had 111 rounds run through it with only one stoppage, and that was caused by a dud primer in a round of MagTech .380 FMJ. I ran it through twice without it igniting, and then tried it in my Sig P250 with similar results.

Stuff like this is why I get skeptical when I hear people telling me they've fired zillions of (un-logged, un-corroborated) rounds through their blaster. "All those cases and cases of ammo and not a single dud primer or out-of-spec case?"

"Nary a one."

"I am dubious."

I was shooting plates at fifteen yards a lot more easily than I would have been with the DA triggered original. It's still not the sort of gun you'd want to shoot all day, but the wider backstrap did help mitigate felt recoil.
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Quote of the Day: Be Real Edition

I have probably used the term "dress around the gun" on these pages before. And the truth of the matter is that a lot of people do carry a smaller gun than they could (or no gun at all) because they're unaware of concealment options. With tuckable holsters and other options, a G26 or G19-size gun can be carried lots of places. However...

""Dressing around the gun" is the single dumbest goddamn concept the industry has ever come up with. Espoused principally by two groups; those who carry under color of law and those who don't have real jobs. That is to say, not on the same planet as the rest of us." -Claude Werner

There are people who work daily in non-permissive environments with dress codes, where a gun may be legal to carry, but would be a firing offense. Telling a 5'4" woman in a skirt with no belt loops to "dress around" a Glock 19 in an IWB holster makes one sound a little dense. 

There are people who have social lives who like to dress normally around their friends and peers at dinners or cocktail parties. There is a place for a gun that can be carried very discreetly.

Small nines like the Shield and G43 have changed this somewhat, but like I wrote elsewhere on this blog:

"Maybe they'll shoot like gangbusters, but single-stack guns too big to go in a pocket just don't have any practical use for me. Since I'm rarely in anything you'd call a "non-permissive environment" and I dress like a hobo, if I'm carrying a gun on my belt, it's going to be a service-sized pistol. The next size step down for me is "small enough to slip in a jeans pocket", which leaves out a lot of otherwise fine guns, like the P-239, Shield, or the 3913."

We do not live in a world where everybody can wear an untucked polo shirt over a gun belt with a Glock 19 and centerline fixed blade knife, and can take all their vacation days every year to attend gun school. Nor should we. By making that sound like the lowest hurdle for responsible self defense, we turn off more people than we attract.
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New Ruger LCP 2!

A total redesign on Ruger's best-selling pocket .380: Single-action, better sights, fatter backstrap for comfort, last-round hold-open. A pocket holster is included in the box.

Overheard at 34,000 Feet

Hell is other people.

A worse hell is other people's children.

The worst hell is other people's children kicking you in the small of the back halfway across the continent. And, because the steady chatter from row 36 was in Mandarin or Cantonese, you're pretty sure that your turning around somewhere over Arkansas, fixing the child with heavy eye contact, and saying "Let's play a new game called Stop Kicking The Seat In Front Of You" was just so much wasted breath.

I changed my phone's wallpaper.

So now I have a cat staring reproachfully at me even when I'm not at home...

Now if I can get it to make random querulous noises, paw at the hem of my gun burkha, and occasionally bite my ankle, I will have an electronic portable housecat.
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Purity Check

Examine your wardrobe.

Award yourself one point for any garment that meets any of the following criteria:

• Military surplus
• Has MOLLE loops
• Non-hunting-oriented camo (double points for Multicam, triple for Kryptek)
• Any gun- or gun-related company branding other than Beretta or Browning
• Made by: Arc'teryx, Kitanica, Propper, 5.11, Blackhawk, et al
• Has gun-specific features like mag pouches or holster compartments
• Has epaulets 

Tally up the total number. This is your score. It is important that it be displayed prominently in online interactions because everyone with a lower score is a Fudd and everybody with a higher score is a Tactard. You must fight with them to the death,

Well...poo.

The 37 sports Ameriglo CAP sights and a ZEV Fulcrum trigger.

The proof is in the shooting, right?

I took the 39 to the range with a hundred rounds of ammo, and the firing pin safety and extractor assembly from the 37 installed in its slide.The light, off-center strikes still occurred, so I drove home and retrieved the G37 (which now had the possibly problematic parts from the 39 installed in it.)

Raven Freya magwell on G37 is working out well.

The 37 continued to run like a top. According to my logbook at id.Glock.com, it has fired 2,180 rounds of all kinds of .45 GAP ammo since last October, with one failure to feed and one failure to fire in that time. I want the 39 to run like that.
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I should be a much better shooter than I am...

Doing some quick math, I've fired over 20k rounds of centerfire handgun ammo in the last year. Not a lot to some folks, but a record for me.

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

Worth a thousand words...

On balance, this photo pretty well sums up the first half of 2016. It had some bright spots, but there was a lot of nasty-looking wilted-ass broccoli and nowhere near as many big chunks of beef as I was led to believe there'd be.

(The latter half is off to a decent start, though.)
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Ups and Downs...

Yesterday morning I corrected one obvious error I'd made with the Glock 39: When I'd swapped in a new trigger bar, I swapped in the entire assembly: Trigger/trigger bar, and the trigger mechanism housing/ejector assembly.

But the trigger mechanism housing I'd swapped in was one for a 9mm, which has a different ejector than the one used by the .45 GAP. So yesterday I swapped the original trigger bar and trigger mechanism back into the gun, while also replacing the entire striker assembly in the slide with a complete spare I had on hand.

(The fact that someone with my level of total mechanical ineptitude can do this in five minutes on a TV tray in the office before heading to the range is a testament to the simplicity of the design.)

Unfortunately, this didn't clear up the problem. I had high hopes, as the first three magazines (19 rounds total) went down without a hitch, but the light, off-center primer strikes quickly reappeared.

My last try here is to replace the firing pin safety assembly and extractor assembly with the known-good ones in my Glock 37 and take it to the range today and see if it works. I want it to work, because the little gun really does shoot great, and there's something about a tiny little gun that launches huge fat bullets that appeals to my inner gun nerd.
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I'm so over this.

I went to bed after Bobbi left for work this morning. 3AM? 4AM? I have no clue.

I woke up at 8AM, when a frantic cat managed to rouse me.

I tried to go back to sleep, but couldn't. I lay in bed for another three hours, mostly staring at the ceiling and listening to the TV drone in the background.

I made it to the range. The Glock 39 is still not fixed. I've got about one thing left to try before I just mail it to Glock in frustration.

The empty box of crushing disappointment bolted to the front of the house just made the clanking noise with its lid, indicating that the mailman has been here. He left me nothing.

I couldn't tell you what time it was on a dare, except that the mailman comes between 3:30 and 6:00 so it's probably in there somewhere.

Waking up today was a mistake.

Maybe tomorrow.
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Sorry!

Bobbi's working the weird shift again and that's got my sleepytimes all scrambled, too, since I try to stay awake at least until she wakes up, and then have to wake up to feed the cats at 0600.

This morning I had a delicious Broad Ripple breakfast at Taste with Shootin' Buddy, and then we repaired to Indy Arms Co. for a little shooting. After busting caps, a trip to check out Redemption Alewerks up on 96th street...

A flight of six little beers at Redemption Alewerks

Home for a quick nap and then met Keads who had dropped by Indy to see some sights. We sat on the patio at the Broad Ripple Brewpub and chatted over a late lunch while watching the neighborhood enjoying a glorious early autumn evening. He needs to come back when he has time for the museum tour!

Excuses...

Huh. Not a lot of posting action in September. It could have something to do with the fact that I spent a total of eight days on the road that month, three at the Citizens Defense Research class in Troy, OH and five at the Ruger event down at FTW Ranch.

Of course, August was busy, too, with both the Friends of Pat Rogers celebration in Alliance, OH and the Rangemaster class in Nappanee, IN eating up seven days put together, yet I managed almost half again the number of posts.

I need to write more on a recreational basis. It's good for keeping the brain limber.
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Lions and tigers and badgers...

I dreamed that Bobbi and I had moved to a '70s-vintage contemporary ranch in a subdivision in the Colorado mountains.

I was out in the glassed-in sun porch when I noticed that there was a bear rolling around just on the other side of the low chain-link fence surrounding the back yard, using the fence as a back-scratcher. I checked to make sure the cats were inside and went to go fetch Bobbi, so she could take a picture of it for her Facebook page.

As I headed down the hall to fetch her, I glanced out another window into the back yard and noticed that right outside the window, in the yard, was a leopard eating a freshly-killed pronghorn. The leopard looked up from its meal and right into my eyes, which was pretty creepy.

Yes, I know that leopards aren't exactly endemic to Colorado, and have I mentioned that the bear in question wasn't a black bear or a grizzly, but rather a polar bear? Clearly my dream zoologist was taking the night off.

Anyway, I return to the glassed-in sun porch with Bobbi to find that the polar bear and the leopard are now sitting cheek-by-jowl in front of the sliding glass door, where they have been joined by a badger for some reason I can't possibly fathom. All three are staring intently into the sun porch at the cats therein, and the bear has started idly pawing at the sliding glass door, which is unlocked.

So now I'm holding the door shut and asking Bobbi to please latch the little latch on the handle and hustle the cats into the house. When she does, I let go of the half-latched door and rush to follow her. The problem is that the doors that divide the porch from the rest of the house are flimsy-ass accordion doors like you'd find on a closet, with little siding bolts at the top for privacy locks, but hanging free at the bottom. If a bear hit that, it'd hinge open like a giant cat door.

So Bobbi helped me slide a small bookcase in front of the doors and then while she was on the phone with Animal Control ("Yes, a polar bear and a leopard. No, I'm not kidding. Please don't hang up!") I ran and grabbed my carbine and, because it finally had a purpose in life, my .405 Win T/C Encore...

Then I woke up.
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Fixes...

Two guns to the range yesterday, one to diagnose ammo and the other to diagnose the gun.

The P320C was to test the CCI Blazer, which had caused multiple failures to extract in the Ruger American Compact on Saturday's range trip with Shootin' Buddy. The ammo ran in the Sig, but the way rounds dribbled out of the ejection port and rolled down my forearm, or flipped weakly back just far enough to bounce off my eye pro and land in my shirt pocket, tells me that this is a weaksauce batch of CCI's budget load. They skimped on the powder and passed the savings along to the customer. Won't hold that against the Ruger.

The Glock 39 had been detail stripped and the slide flushed out with Slip2000 Cleaner/Degreaser and scrubbed of all the sticky residue, and then the striker assembly, extractor claw, and firing pin safety plunger were scrubbed with the cleaner until they were slippery to the touch instead of tacky. I reassembled it with yet a different trigger bar and took it to the range where it fired off the Magtech just fine. I think I have it pretty well de-bugged, but we'll see how it does with S&B.
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New Ruger pistol...

Tonight Ruger officially announced the pistol I used to shoot Dave Spaulding's Handgun Combatives "Essential Pistol" class out at FTW Ranch the other weekend: The Compact American 9mm.

Several of us ran the pistols through the class, as well as in informal range sessions and competitions before and after and, despite a rough round count between 400-700 rounds per gun (thank you, Hornady!) I only recollect two malfunctions.

You'll note the dual captive recoil spring. The gun ships with small, medium, and large backstraps, as well as both flush and pinkie-rest floorplates for the 12-rd mag and a grip adapter for the 17-rd mag. States behind enemy lines get two 10-rounders.

The guns are available both with ambi thumb safeties and in a "Pro" variant with only the trigger safety. The thumb safety locks the slide when on, like on a 1911. Kinda wish it didn't.

As you can see, the American Compact splits the difference, size-wise, between the G19 and G26, much like the Smith & Wesson M&P9C does.

The one I used at FTW Ranch was a non-thumb-safety gun, so I'm looking forward to getting more trigger time in on this thumb safety model.
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Overheard in the Hallway...

RX: "I can't really put this up because it's juvenile and I'm trying to refrain from that, but I'd pay $20 for the person who could slip a 'No Fat Chicks' bumper sticker on Trump's limo."

Me: "..."

RX: "You don't think that's funny."

Me: "I think it's hilarious. I'm trying to think how to do it."

Maddening...

So, I took the remainder of the CapArms FMJ Target/Match ammo, as well as a box of the Duty/Carry, to the range yesterday to shoot some benched groups at 25 yards with the P320C. For each group, I loaded five rounds into the magazine, chambered the top round, shot the group, brought the target back, recorded the group size, and sent the target back out.

I'm thinking that the hand-chambered top round was opening up the groups, because each and every one had four pretty reasonably clustered rounds with a fifth shot hell and gone from the other four.

For instance, the first group of the 147gr FMJ, fired at the bottom right bull, had a cluster of four rounds in 3.6" just below the bull, and the fifth must have gone clear off the bottom of the paper.

And so it went for all the FMJ:

• four rounds into 5" with the fifth opening the group to 10.25"*
• four rounds into 3.5" with the fifth opening the group to 6"
• four rounds into 5.5" with the fifth opening the group to 6.5"
• four rounds into 5.6" with the fifth opening the group to 9.8"**

*That one was a called flier.
**This fifth group I shot freehand unsupported.

After the FMJ, I cracked open a container of the Duty/Carry ammo with its XTP JHP projectiles, and tried again, using the same method. There was still the fifth-round phenomenon, but not as pronounced.

• four rounds into 5.25" with the fifth opening the group to 8"
• four rounds into 4.4" with the fifth opening the group to 6.2"
• four rounds into 3.25" with the fifth opening the group to 3.8"

I fired the last five shot group of the XTP freehand, standing, just to see if it would give me any better results.

The first shot, unfortunately, is that one high and slightly right, not the one at six o'clock on the bull below the one I was aiming at. That one was cranked off toward the end of the string before I'd cleaned up my sight picture. I might have cussed some, because even with the first round being high-right, those four went into 2.2", which is about as good a freehand standing group as I've fired at 25 yards, and then I blew it.

Boresight Solutions frame would look cool in an a-ha video.

Now I feel like I have something to avenge.
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Musings of a Formerly Cigarette Smoking Woman

From a thread discussing new media gun and gear reviews that morphed into a gun media thread in general...

If I get asked "So, what do you think of the Blastomatic 2000?" when I'm only three or four hundred rounds into my time with the gun, I get cranky.

Some things are easy to form an opinion of pretty quick: "The sights on this gun blow goats and whoever thought they were a good idea needs to die in a crotch fire."

Others take at least a little bit of familiarity: "This magazine release works great if you run it with your trigger finger, but that takes some getting used to."

And still others might require a largish data set to suss out: "Every single malfunction this gun had over the last 3,200 rounds was with standard-velocity 115gr JHPs using Sierra bullets."

Someone wrote that they feel like they know their gun well enough to review it after firing 50k rounds through it...

While I appreciate that level of dedication, I'm usually feeling pretty comfortable with my opinions on an individual gun after a case or two of ammo and a couple months of dry practice and poking around in the innards.

Speaking of which, a good class where you shoot five hundred or a thousand in various drills, from the leather, sometimes on the move, at differing ranges and types of targets, will tell an observant user a lot more about the gun than 2,000 rounds standing flat-footed on Joe Youtuber's backyard plinkin' range.

EDIT: And if at all possible, let other people shoot the damn thing! Recruit 5'2" friends and 6'7" friends and novice friends and your USPSA B-class buddy...get feedback from folks with differing grip strngths and hand sizes and skill levels.

There's a difference between a long-term test, a review, and some initial impressions. Some people have a hard time making that distinction. "Here's a review of the gun I got to fam-fire at a manufacturer's dog & pony show" is not a review, while "2,000 rounds through the Blastomatic in a month and a half" is not a long-term (or torture) test.

Oh, and my pet peeve crops up:

My personal pet peeve is the little ammo manufacturers or distributors who reach out to bloggers/YouTubers/whatever by email and ask "We'd like you to evaluate our ammo and do a review of it on your site. We're not asking for a favorable review, just an honest writeup. We're willing to send you a box of..."

I'm tempted to print these out for the added tactile satisfaction of balling them up and tossing them in the trash can when I get to that line. It would be so much more rewarding than just clicking "delete".

Seriously. The idea that you can "review" ammo with a box or two is silly. Further, if it doesn't involve chrono data and shooting benched groups (and, in the case of defense-oriented ammo, terminal ballistics testing against some consistent standard) then it's not a review, it's just "initial impressions". I appreciate that some companies want to get their name out there and that some people are willing to do it for a box of BBs, but it's just tawdry...

On the O.G. Dead Tree industry back in the day versus Digital Intertubecasts & Bloggery today:

I will say that the barrier for entry is oddly both lower and higher now.

Lower, since you don't have to even convince an editor or publisher that you have the faintest clue what you're talking about; you just need to be able to set up a WordPress site, FaceBook page, or YouTube channel and spread your links around. If you get the eyeballs coming, desperate vendors will start sleazing up to you via email with enticing offers of free stuff. And some New Media types don't look at this free stuff and think "You know, I'd throw that away if it fell out of a gumball machine I hadn't put a quarter in." At least someone writing for another entity can claim they were doing it for a paycheck and not for a free $10 Chinese pocket knife.

Higher, because you have to get the eyeballs, and a lot of savvier industry entities are a whole lot more gun-shy of raw FaceBook likes, pageviews, or Instagram followers, since all that stuff is easy to game for the unscrupulous. Some now have their own social media people to counsel them on how much reach and buzz a person generates. This has no correlation, positive or negative, with the person's actual level of clue; just how much exposure they can give the manufacturer's product. 

Critical Defense and Critical Duty

Got to see Hornady's 135gr +P Critical Duty fired into ballistic gel while we were out at FTW Ranch...

The +P stuff did dandy out of a small auto, even through the panoply of barriers dictated by the FBI's ammunition testing protocol.

Penetration was 12"-14" across the board. No jackets stripped off by sheet metal or auto glass.

It was my first chance to see the .44 Special 165gr FTX bullet fired into anything more scientific than a water tank, too. Through denim, shirt, & tee shirt, the bullet expanded just dandily...

 ...but the penetration was less impressive. Intellectually, I was prepared for this, since the bullet has the sectional density of a dime, but it was still a little sad-making to see with my eyes.
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Will we have an endless surge/drawdown/surge cycle?

They will all be wearing sneakers in order to keep from putting any American boots on the ground. https://t.co/JuEaRNa9Jd

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) September 28, 2016

Gun School Thoughts...

D.W. Drang of The Clue Meter went to a MAG-40 class this summer. He's written a post sharing some of what he learned and why you might want to look into going yourself.
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Apparently we are all entitled to our own facts.

Tonight at 8PM...

...on the Outdoor Channel, Michael Bane's Best Defense show will be airing a special on mass casualty attacks that looks to be interesting from the previews.
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Same Planet, Different Worlds...

So, as half the planet knows by now, Glenn Reynolds got his Twitter account briefly yanked for this tweet the other day:

In one parallel universe, it's a cold-blooded exhortation to run over people peacefully protesting the cold-blooded, racist extrajudicial murder of an innocent man armed only with a book.

In the other parallel universe, Glenn was blurting out what to do when bonfire-setting, truck-looting rioters were blocking the interstate ahead of you and converging on you and your loved ones in your car.

In that first universe, George Zimmerman chased down and shot an innocent teenager while playing wannabe cop, Michael Brown was gunned down like a dog in the middle of the street while his hands were raised in surrender, and Alton Sterling was murdered for selling CDs.

In that universe, people who've never been punched in the nose and wouldn't know use-of-force policy from a hole in the ground sit in cool judgment of actions taken under pressure in the blink of an eye while discounting any physical evidence that doesn't fit their narrative.

The problem is plainly obvious to anybody with two functioning brain cells to rub together, but I have no clue what the answer is, here.
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Overheard in Front of the TV Last Night...

One or another of the candidates is talking over the moderator, again...

RX: "Lester Holt needs switches."

Me: "Damn skippy. I'd cut them for him myself and bring him fresh ones when they broke."

RX: "I meant microphone switches."

Me: "I meant letting him hit the candidates with a stick. Imagine how much people would pay to watch that shit on Pay-Per-View. You could pay down the national debt."

Tale of the Tape...

So, CapArms had sent me some ammo for evaluation purposes. Five hundred rounds of their 9mm 147gr RNCB Match/Target ammo packed loose and a hundred rounds of their 147gr XTP Duty/Carry load in the retail 20-round blister packs.

I ran three hundred and some-odd through the Glock 17 at the Citizens Defense Research class in Ohio with no malfunctions. When I got home, I put the remainder of the Match/Target ammo, save fifty, through the Gen3 G19 during a range trip before leaving for Texas. There were no malfunctions on that outing, either.

The remaining fifty were saved for the purpose of chrono testing and shooting some benched groups. To that end, I went to MCF&G and set up the chrono yesterday morning...

The first shot of the day, shooting off the bench, was the very first shot through the brand-new P320C, and a reminder about what powder-puff match loads require:

With the loose grip on the benched pistol, the first round failed to eject properly. The remaining nine, with a firmer grip on the gun, dribbled out of the ejection port, with most of the rounds landing on the table by my elbows.

The consistency was outstanding. Frankly, most small ammo companies don't have outstanding consistency in the velocity of their loads. I've seen multiple lots of Nosler Match, for example, turn in velocity spreads that looked more like East Bloc steel-cased fodder. Generally, for consistency in factory ammo you wanted Hornady, or premium ammo from Federal or Speer.

The numbers on the CapArms Match/Target, however...

LO: 814.7
HI: 839.3
AV: 826.5
ES: 24.68
SD: 7.74

And as good as the ball ammo was, the Duty/Carry XTP hollowpoints turned in an even better performance:

LO: 896.2
HI: 914.2
AV: 905.4
ES: 18.00
SD: 5.74

Ejection was firm and consistent, dropping all the brass neatly over the shooter's right shoulder.

The only downside to these is that the XTP bullet is a little behind the state of the art and not as insensitive to intermediate barriers or heavy clothing as more modern designs like the HST or Hornady's newer Critical Duty.

While there, I also chrono'ed a string of 230gr Federal HST through the Hipster Bulldog Glock 39:

LO: 842.3
HI: 867.0
AV: 854.7
ES: 24.73
SD: 8.88

So that's a 30 foot-per-second drop in velocity moving from the full-size Glock 37 and its 4.48" barrel to the stubby 3.42" tube of the little Glock 39. Jello testing to follow...
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As usual...

...we are very late in throwing the official VFTP endorsement in Kilted to Kick Cancer month to a worthy underdog. Go support Team Guns & Coffee for that warm, plucky-underdog-supporting glow.

If you're in it for a chance to win some swag while kicking cancer's ass, Team Dragon (if KTKC had dynasties, they'd be one) has gone out and gotten some of Dennis's excellent holsters autographed by some luminaries:

"For every $10 donated you get one entry towards a holster that you want to try to win. Multiples of $10 can all go to one rig, or be split out among several. The holsters are my signature line of Valkyrie paddle rigs, as follows:

Tanburst, 1911 5", autographed by Dean Cain (actor who played Superman in the 1990's TV show Lois and Clark.)

Tanburst, 1911 5", autographed by Jesse James of Monster Garage and West Coast Choppers fame.

Greenburst with lime gren Ostrich Skin and embossed with the MHI logo, autographed by Larry Corriea.

Greenburst with green Kangaroo skin ALONG WITH Mahogany-trimmed Saddle Brown Crocodile skin, autographed by the Motor City Madman himself, Ted Nugent. He signed TWO!

Folks can see the holsters on my website here: https://www.dlwtn.com/kilted.

At the bottom of said page is a link to the KtKC donation page, with instructions on how to forward they PayPal receipt to me so I can enter them in a drawing."

Missed Opportunity...

Hillary went on at length about the dangers of state-sponsored cyber-encroachment on our nation's computer infrastructure and how it was a bad thing...

...and Trump did not immediately lead off his rebuttal with "Well, maybe if we didn't keep our vital national security servers in our bathrooms at home..."

Seriously, that was a hanging curve ball belt-high across the plate and he didn't swing at it. Mediocre!
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