Rugers in the office...

I drove over to Indy Arms Co. with a brace of Rugers yesterday morning: The LCP II and the American Compact. I had a box of Lucky Gunner's Armscor .380 for the little Ruger and some Prvi Partisan 115gr FMJ 9x19mm for the not-quite-as-little Ruger.

The Prvi had tremendous flash and muzzle blast. I still have a box from this lot and I'll try and chrono some tomorrow. The American experienced one light primer strike on its 34th round of the day (#284 through the gun). This is seemingly always a risk with striker-fired guns and harder primers, and PPU primers are harder than woodpecker lips. The round went off on the second try.

The LCP II experienced a failure-to-feed on round number fourteen of the day (#540 of the test.) Other than that, no malfunctions were experienced.

When I was photographing the target after the range session, the new guy behind the counter at IAC noticed that a pin in the Elsie Pea Too's frame had started to walk. I have tapped it flush again with a plastic hammer.

For the LCP II, this makes 576 rounds fired since the gun was last cleaned or lubricated with three failures to return to battery (#128, #158, #245) and one failure to feed (#540). 1,424 rounds to go.
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Muse

To celebrate P.J. O'Rourke's 69th birthday, I bought myself a copy of his most recent compendium, Thrown Under the Omnibus. Sure, I already have all this stuff under separate covers, but I owe P.J. a lot, or at least my writing style does. Plus, it'll be a good excuse to drag an actual book to a restaurant or bar someplace and read text in a medium that doesn't allow me to tab over to Facebook every fifteen minutes.

Sunday, Shooty Sunday

Day Two of the Citizens Defense Research: The Armed Parent/Guardian class starts off with a little ballistics demo, and at the Ohio class I brought along my Glock 35 and some FMJ ammo so there would be a .40 on hand for the demo.

(This is a reflection of the decline in popularity of the .40, at least among the demographic of people who attend firearms training classes above and beyond the minimum state-required CCW permit kind. Out of ten or fifteen students, pretty much everybody will be shooting nines of some kind, with the possible exception of a lone 1911 iconoclast shooting .45ACP. I can't remember the last class I saw a .40 on the line. Well, other than Tom Givens unholstering his 35 for a demo.)

The .40 FMJ round, some Federal RTP 165gr, performed as expected. Like FMJ pistol bullets from service-caliber autos are wont to do, it zipped all the way through one gel block and into the next, demonstrating in visual fashion that people often are concealment, not cover.

Anyhow, as a result of this, I've been driving around since September with a box of 49 rounds of .40 S&W ball ammo in the trunk of the Zed Drei. So on Sunday afternoon's range trip with Bobbi, I dragged the Glock 35 Gen4 along with the LCP II: The Ruger for work and the Glock just for fun.

The Ruger fired another 50-round box of Lucky Gunner's Armscor .380ACP 95gr FMJ ammo without a hitch, and the Glock also experienced no malfunctions of any kind.

For the LCP II, this makes 526 rounds fired since the gun was last cleaned or lubricated with three failures to return to battery (#128, #158, #245). 1,474 rounds to go.
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Saturday on the range...

I drove over to Indy Arms Co. yesterday afternoon with the LCP II and the Sig Sauer P320C to continue reliability testing with the Ruger and check the installation of the Dawson Precision sights on the P320.

The rear sight on the Sig needs to be moved just a touch to the right.

The box of Armscor 95gr FMJ I grabbed for the LCP II only had 35 rounds in it. Apparently I'd used it on a previous range trip and then mixed it back into my cache rather than putting the partial box in an ammo can like usual.

I fired two magazines from the LCP II with two hands on the gun and then the remaining four magazines were fired strong hand only. All the .380 was from the five yard line at the head zone of the target, firing in siz round strings as fast as I could get an adequate sight picture to press off another shot. Obviously the LCP II doesn't turn in blindingly low splits.

Neither firearm experienced any malfunctions of any type.

This makes 476 rounds fired since the gun was last cleaned or lubricated with three failures to return to battery (#128, #158, #245). 1,524 rounds to go.
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MILC

The NEX-7-based Hasselblad Lunar has been an enjoyable camera to use. With its 24MP APS-C sensor, it takes pictures as good or better than any of my long-in-the-tooth DSLRs. Its only real downsides relative to the D200 I do most of my shooting with is that the D200 powers on effectively instantly, has better weather/dust sealing, and has an actual viewfinder rather than a little TV monitor behind an eyehole.

With the demise (or partial demise) of my Nikon P7000 pocket camera, I decided to replace it with a mirrorless interchangeable lens camera that used the same Sony E-mount lenses but was small enough to go in a jacket pocket or the document pocket of my gun burkha. I shopped around and found a used Sony NEX-5T in what was alleged to be "BGN" condition, in KEH's notoriously understated grading system.

The NEX-5T really leverages how slim a MILC can be without the necessity of a mirror box or pentaprism. The body itself is much smaller than the P7000, which admittedly packed a relatively serious zoom lens. Adding the compact 16-50mm Power Zoom lens doesn't make the camera unwieldy. It's not a lot of reach, though, being roughly equivalent to a 24-75mm zoom lens on a 35mm film body.

I think for, say, a trip to the zoo, with my current options I would leave the 16-50 on the NEX-5T and mount the 55-210mm long zoom on the Hasselblad body. The compact zoom and tiny body mean the NEX-5T'll dangle handily off a wrist strap.

Ideally I'd like to add a compact fixed prime, and that wouldn't need to be huge bucks; there's a pretty good variety of 50mm and shorter primes that sell in the <$300 range. As a present to myself, though, I'm going to dedicate the spare change jar to saving up for some nice faster long glass, hopefully in time for Blogorado next year.
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Pew! Ow! Pew! Ow! Pew! Ow!

Swung by the range yesterday afternoon with the Elsie Pea Too and a box of fifty rounds of Armscor .380 FMJ from Lucky Gunner.

Spare mags for the LCP II are still scarce in the retail world, so I bought a regular LCP mag off the shelf at Indy Arms Co. It functions the gun fine, although it does not activate the last round hold-open feature like the LCP II magazine does.

That's seven yards, with two rounds fired at the head zone of the B21E target and the remaining forty-eight at the torso area. It's a mixture of two-handed and strong hand only (SHO) shooting, and at a reasonable pace. The egregious low left and high right holes are examples of how difficult it is to get a consistent grip or trigger finger placement on these little guns for people with grownup-sized hands.

Incidentally, at some point in the session the fingernail of my trigger finger scooped a divot of skin from the base of my weak-hand thumb under recoil. I didn't notice until I was out at the counter to settle up and noticed the bloody patch on my thumb. The little gun jumps a bit and it's hard to find room on it for my paws.

There were no malfunctions of any kind to report. This makes 441 rounds fired since the gun was last cleaned or lubricated with three failures to return to battery (#128, #158, #245). 1,559 rounds to go.

Our Game

Despite having read and enjoyed the companion coffee-table volume, I had never actually watched the Ken Burns Baseball documentary. It's free for Amazon Prime members right now, and so I'm rectifying that oversight.
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On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month...

The American Civil War is viewed differently in the North and the South in large part because most of it happened in the latter. It was a war that Hoosier and Buckeye boys marched away to fight, but it happened right in the front yards of Tennesseans and Virginians. Southerners of my grandparents' generation would have learned about the war from men and women who, as small children, had watched their homes burn, and anybody with a metal detector can still go looking for Minie balls and shell fragments near the historical markers that dot the roadsides.

Similarly, I don't know that we as Americans really get the Great War. Sure, we sent some troops there at the end, but the sheer scale of the thing...

Consider this: During the invasion of Normandy, V Corps suffered ~3,000 casualties total; killed, wounded, and missing. Antietam, the bloodiest single-day battle of the Civil War, saw over 3,500 KIA for Union and Confederate forces, combined.

By comparison, on the opening day of the Somme Offensive the British army took almost 60,000 casualties, over nineteen thousand of whom were killed outright. The Battle of the Somme in its entirety dragged on for another four and a half months and accounted for a million casualties between all the participants. In the kindermord, the 'Massacre of the Innocents' of the first battle of Ypres, the Germans lost almost 20,000 KIA, a third of them practically children. The bones of more than 130,000 unidentified Frenchmen and their German foes are piled in the Douaumont ossuary.

And this awful corpse-furnace burned in one place for four years as Europe stoked it with the better part, literally, of an entire generation.

It's little wonder that the day on which the guns fell silent on the Western Front is still commemorated.

Thank you, veterans.

I'm grateful you stepped up to the plate, and I'm sorry for all the dumb things we asked y'all to do over the past decade and more.
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Wednesday...

Wednesday morning I dropped by the range for a little more shooting with the Para LTC 9mm. I seem to be hitting low and left. I don't know how much of that is the sights and how much of that is the trigger nut being loose. I was on an empty stomach and hungry enough that I was a little light-headed. I hurried through the box of ammo so I could finish up and go sample the newest item on the menu at 20 Tap...

Roasted Brussels sprouts drizzled with harissa and served atop a nice gooey blob of goat cheese. Yum!
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Days of Pique

Remember 8 years ago when Conservatives got out there and blocked interstates and set shit on fire in #NotMyPresident protests? Good times! https://t.co/3Bh1ghguPR

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) November 10, 2016

Happy 241st Birthday, Devil Dogs!

On this day in 1775, in Tun Tavern in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the very first U.S. Marine made his mark on the dotted line, laid the pen down, turned and looked behind him at the second guy in line and said

"Things were different in the old Corps."

Happy birthday, USMC!



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Question...

So, is dissent the highest form of patriotism again *now*? Or not 'til middle of January? #askingforafriend

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

QotD: Politics as Unusual Edition...

From Roomie's post this AM:

"I wasn't looking forward to four years with a vindictive, wrong-headed authoritarian in the White House. 

     Instead, we'll have four years of a feckless authoritarian in the Oval Office.  The press will loathe him with a loathing hitherto reserved for Dick Nixon and Spiro Agnew,* which is one of the most sure checks and balances we've got.  Given only a choice between a conniving person who knows exactly what laws she's got to sneak by or subvert, or a high-concept guy who still seems hazy on the Constitution as amended, to say nothing of the broad sweep of Federal law and custom going back to George Washington, I suppose I'll take the latter, whose own party has a vested interest in keeping him from going off the rails and who will be "...scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize and study the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water,"† by both the media and his political opposition."

Go and read the whole thing.

That pew pew life...

Yesterday's range trip was just for fun, to use the actual aroma of burning powder to get the metaphorical stink of the polling place out of my nostrils.

For pure shooting enjoyment, it's tough to beat a 9mm 1911. I grabbed the Wilson and brought the Gun Blog 9 out of hibernation.

One of the things I had wondered about the Wilson test gun was "Will those Wilson 10-rd 9mm magazines work better than the ones that came with the Para Ordnance LTC?"

For one thing, the Para mags, when loaded with ten rounds, would frequently nose-dive the top round into the feed ramp, and so I used them as nine-round mags. For another, the gun had issues with certain brands of hollow point bullets.

I didn't test it with hollow points, but the ten round thing definitely went away when using the Wilson magazines.

Also, wow... I'd forgotten how easy it was to shoot with that fine-bladed fiber optic front sight. The first three magazines from the Para went into a ragged, star-shaped hole and it was the last twenty rounds that opened it up to what you see in the photo.

The Wilson, by the way, is at 1,070 rounds with zero malfunctions of any sort, if my logs are correct.
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Time Bandits

Dear Tamara 1996,

This letter is from Twenty Years Future You. I just wanted to let you know that the presidential candidates are Bill's wife and that Donald Trump guy that Spy magazine makes fun of all the time. You remember him, they put his brain in Bill the Cat for the last bit of Bloom County.

Best,
Tamara 2016

PS: I am absolutely not bullshitting you here.

PPS: Sorry about the Bob Dole thing. It gets worse.
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Tiny Pistol Ballistics

Also at the range yesterday was the Ruger LCP II, along with a variety of .380ACP ammo, to do some chronograph testing.

I had some Armscor 95gr FMJ and Speer Gold Dot 90gr GDHP courtesy of Lucky Gunner, as well as some Hornady 90gr Critical Defense and Barnes 80gr TAC-XPD out of my personal stash.

The Armscor was pretty random stuff. I fired two strings to make sure the results of the first weren't a fluke, but the second had an even wider velocity spread than the first:

LO: 781.2
HI: 906.5
AV: 849.0
ES: 125.3
SD: 39.48

LO:790.7
HI: 925.4
AV: 864.1
ES: 134.6
SD: 36.97

Velocity spreads over 100fps are something I tend to associate more with bulk-packaged rimfire than commercial centerfire ammo, but at least all the rounds fired and functioned in the LCP II.

The Speer Gold Dot functioned equally well. My first couple strings were bedeviled by the fact that the south pistol bay was still half in shadow and the rising sun cast dappled tree shadows across the chrono, causing errors and anomalous readings. The third string finally registered correctly:

LO: 795.0
HI: 864.1
AV: 836.4
ES: 69.07
SD: 19.67

Again, all thirty rounds of Speer GDHP functioned fine in the little Ruger.

Last up were Hornady's 90gr Critical Defense FTX HP load and the 80gr Barnes TAC-XPD solid copper hollow point. First the Hornady:

LO: 875.0
HI: 900.7
AV: 890.4
ES: 25.72
SD: 9.21

Typical Hornady consistency, and pretty good velocity numbers from the stubby tube of the LCP II.

Lastly, the Barnes:

LO: 781.0
HI: 811.6
AV: 794.3
ES: 30.64
SD: 11.48

Good and consistent, but painfully slow. The solid copper XPD is a good bullet, but it needs more velocity to do any work.

I wound up with five rounds of the Armscor and five of the Critical Defense left in their respective boxes, and so I fired them off as well. This meant 25 rounds of Armscor, 30 of the Speer, 15 of the Hornady, and 10 Barnes; eighty rounds total with no malfunctions of any type to report.

This makes 391 rounds fired since the gun was last cleaned or lubricated with three failures to return to battery (#128, #158, #245). 1,609 rounds to go.
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The only reprieve on my TV...

Hereditary Representative Andre Carson, who got his gig when they could no longer prop his grandmother up in her House chair in a convincingly lifelike pose, is in one of the safest gerrymandered districts in the state.

Oh, sure, the GOP half-heartedly shoves someone into Rocinante's saddle to go after him every two years, but he has Indiana's 7th District (comprising the southern, poorer, two thirds of Marion County/Indianapolis) sewed up tight.

As a result, his campaign is the only one that hasn't run any negative ads this season. You just get thirty seconds of smilin' Andre pressing flesh and a voiceover murmuring platitudes along the lines of "America, don't you love it? Andre does, too. Let's do good things! Together!"

At least the commie is spending his campaign dollars on something pleasant, like non-annoying commercials. He could just not run any commercials at all and still get elected.
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Across the Finish Line

Yesterday morning's range trip to Marion County Fish & Game finished up the 2,000-round test for the Glock 20 10mm pistol.

I finished up the last fifty rounds of American Quality Ammunition 180gr FMJ and also fired twenty rounds from a company I hadn't tried before, Bobcat Armament out of Shelbyville, Indiana. Bobcat Armament is apparently the FFL portion of Bobcat Steel, a well known local supplier of steel targets.

I chronographed one ten round string from each brand. The American Quality Ammo FMJ turned in pretty typical 10mm range ammo numbers: 180gr bullets at just barely supersonic velocities.

LO: 1082
HI: 1121
AV: 1110
ES: 38.93
SD: 12.28

Reasonably consistent, too. The Bobcat Armament stuff, on the other hand, was some honest 10mm, with noticeably more thump on firing and commensurately larger numbers on the chronograph.

LO: 1192
HI: 1242
AV: 1225
ES: 50.56
SD: 17.11

That's six hundred foot pounds of energy, which is nothing to sneeze at, if energy numbers are your thing. It certainly equals or exceeds most popular commercial .357 Magnum deer loads.

In firing my last ten rounds of the Bobcat Armament stuff, the now filthy Glock had one last light, off-center strike on round number sixty-one of the day (#1,991 of the test).


This makes 2,000 rounds since the Glock 20 was cleaned or lubricated, with eight failures to feed (#401, #454, #1,213, #1,297, #1,413, #1,593, #1,777, #1,907) and twelve failures to fire (#598, #1,016, #1,029, #1,376, #1,595, #1,628, #1,633, #1,640, #1,683, #1,685, #1,727, #1,991). Here endeth the test. Close-up photos of the dirty, disassembled gun to follow, along with my general thoughts, in a wrapup post.
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Another casualty of the election season...

I follow William Gibson's Twitter feed. Dude churns up lots of interesting stuff, both artsy and science-y, and I've learned a lot from it.

But to say that Gibson and I don't see eye-to-eye on a lot of political issues would be the understatement of the year. (Of course, "Understatement of the Year" is a damned low hurdle in this, the Year of Hyperbole.)

His popularity means Twitter's algorithms cluster his stuff near the top of my feed. Combine that with the fact that here in peak election season, he tweets in huge chunks, five or ten minute bursts of a dozen or more mostly politically-oriented tweets, and it means that I'll have to page down two or three times to actually see tweets from people I know.

If Twitter is trying to make me set up a reader rather than use my raw feed, they're going about it the right way. I normally only use that for work tweets.

As it is, I've had to unfollow Gibson until the election crazy settles down, or I'd never see anything but him

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #150...

Chrono some.380ACP. The Barnes is shockingly slow. The Hornady is predictably consistent. #hornady #380acp #rugerlcp2 #ruger #speergolddot #marioncountyfishandgame

A photo posted by Tamara Keel (@tamarakeel) on Nov 7, 2016 at 10:12am PST

Janet Reno has passed away.

I'm not going to disrespect her or her family by feigning that I'm all tore up about the news.
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Camera Quandary

So, I have gotten a bunch of mileage out of the Nikon P7000 I bought used in March of last year. However it has never really recovered from getting left sitting atop my range bag in the blowing grit on the range in Topeka earlier this year.

Alas, little Nikon...

The little leaf shutter that protects the lens would stick in a not-fully-open position. Some alcohol on a Q-tip helped, but it got a fresh dose of grit at either Blogorado or ECQC and I think it's probably snapped its last. Considering I bought it used for about a c-note and carried it everywhere for well over a year, I'm thinking I got my money's worth.

So I'm on the horns of a dilemma when it comes to replacing it...

On the one hand, shopping the used market in the same class of camera can get a lot of bang for the buck in the $150-$250ish range. Plenty of cameras with reasonably fast lenses in the superzoom category; you can find four- and five-year-old high-end P&S in this price class.

Alternatively, for $300-ish, I could pick up a used Sony NEX-5N or -5T and a compact 18-50mm Power Zoom lens. This would be crowding the boundaries of what I can carry in the document pocket of my gun burkha, but it uses the same E-mount lenses as the Hasselblad. That means that in addition to being my day-to-day pocket camera, I could probably carry both around the zoo, one with the short zoom (or a fast fixed lens) and one with the long zoom, for less bulk than the D200 and its big battery grip and a second lens.

Also, it would use a conventional lens cap instead of the fine little leaf shutter. I'm a little paranoid about the durability of the latter right now.
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Meanwhile, on Twitter...

Kim du Toit assured me that this would never happen. https://t.co/DOKGMZLflS

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

No word on whether FSP has successfully rewritten NH law to allow bail to be made in Bitcoin. https://t.co/ztVZxbkCr1

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

Another Country

What other government in the history of the human race would attempt to reduce global instability by drying up stockpiles of surplus military weapons around the world under the guise of buying them up to sell to their own civilian population, where they would be considered safely harmless?

The past, indeed, was another country.

Or, to quote Roomie, "And they say there's no such thing as American exceptionalism."
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Side Effects

Cutting down on beer consumption and making a conscious effort to be in bed around 10PM means I'm having dreams again.

For instance, the other night I dreamed I got a job photographing safaris in Africa for a double rifle manufacturer. I woke up from that one with genuine pangs of regret, and spent some time in the morning at my keyboard furtively fingering a .405 Winchester cartridge like a worry rock.
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Roar some more.

Saturday, after some yard work and a walk with Bobbi to the Dancing Donut for a late breakfast, I swung back by Indy Arms Co with the Glock 20 and that box of American Quality Ammo to put another hundred rounds downrange.

Everything worked mostly without a hitch, except for another failure-to-feed malfunction on round number seventy-seven of the day (#1,907 of the test.)

This makes 1,930 rounds since the Glock 20 was cleaned or lubricated, with eight failures to feed (#401, #454, #1,213, #1,297, #1,413, #1,593, #1,777, #1,907) 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). 70 rounds to go.
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Red.

Cycle of the seasons. #motorcycle

A photo posted by Tamara Keel (@tamarakeel) on Nov 5, 2016 at 12:52pm PDT

So, um...

Wasn't there a Glock test I was doing back before my September and October got all crazy busy with other stuff? Oh, yeah...the Glock 20 10mm autocannon was on the final stretch toward the finish line.

I bought some American Quality Ammunition from Lucky Gunner. I'd never heard of the stuff, but hey, it has "quality" right in the name, right? It purported to be new-manufacture 180gr FMJ for 38¢/rd, shipped as 250 rounds loose in a cardboard box.

I ran a hundred rounds through the gun at Indy Arms Company on Friday morning.

I experienced one failure to feed, on round number forty-seven of the day (#1,777 of the test.)

I still intensely dislike the factory sights, although I'm beginning to embrace a contrarian viewpoint in one way: I don't want Glock putting more expensive sights on the gun. Rudimentary plastic sights are great because they hold the cost of the pistol down and sights are such an intensely personal choice that everybody has their own preference in aftermarket sights, so why burden a gun with a hundred bucks worth of night sights that some large percentage of the customer base is going to knock off and replace with something else anyway?

Anyway...This makes 1,830 rounds since the Glock 20 was cleaned or lubricated, with seven failures to feed (#401, #454, #1,213, #1,297, #1,413, #1,593, #1,777) 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). 170 rounds to go.
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Shooting for fun...

Thursday morning was just recreational shooting. I had a G17 magazine full of HST that I'd been carrying around since that Citizens Defense Research class in Troy, Ohio that was ready to be cycled downrange, and so I grabbed it and a box of 9mm ball and headed to Indy Arms Company with two souped-up plastic gats.

On the left is the Sig Sauer P320C with a Boresight Solutions frame and a Gray Guns fire control unit in it. On the right, an early 1990s-vintage Robar Custom Glock 17 that's had an Overwatch Precision trigger added.

Both guns ran fine with the aluminum-hulled CCI Blazer (which didn't feel as weak as the most recent batch I had. Ejection was a lot more vigorous, at any rate.)

I've got the Dawson Sights for the  P320C in hand, but I'm awaiting a sight pusher tool that I want to try.
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From Facebook...

Day One.
Put my feet on the floor when I woke up. Got dressed. Walked two laps around the block before turning on the computer. My brainy little watch says it was sixteen minutes of walking, seven tenths of a mile.

Day Two:
Woke up at shortly after 0500. When it became obvious I wasn't going right back to sleep, I instead put my feet on the ground and started my day, rather than lying abed waiting for the alarm clock. Took three laps around the block to see how far that would be. Comes up to 1.02 miles, or near enough to a mile as makes no nevermind. 1.02 miles in twenty minutes and fifteen seconds.

Day Three:
Woke up with the alarm clock at 6AM. Got dressed. Three laps around the block. 1.05 miles in twenty minutes and ten seconds, according to the portable magic elf box.

Day Four:
Woke up about fifteen minutes before the alarm clock. Put my feet on the floor. Got dressed and headed out the door, put in my three laps.
Walked 1.04 miles in twenty minutes and fifty-five seconds.

It's easy to kid yourself about the shape you're in. Usually, at least.

But when you're laying on the cold, hard caliche in the glow of truck headlights, well into a panic attack as oxygen debt sets in and you're being pretzeled by someone who is going to pull your own gun from your holster and shoot you with it and there's not a damn thing you can do about it, there's no lying to yourself about what shape you're in.

I'm going to fix that. Baby steps, first, starting with more exercise and less beer.
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Overheard in the Office...

Overheard in the Office: "I think Delaware is a fictional place, much like Belgium. Do we actually know anyone who lives there?"

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

Ups and downs...

Both the Glock 39 and LCP 2 came along to the range at Indy Arms Company yesterday. Testing continued with the Ruger and the Glock was hopefully going to show that it had been cured of the light, off-center strike problem with the addition of a new recoil spring assembly.

The guy in the lane to my left is a regular. He always has a .44 Magnum revolver and a .45ACP autoloader. He always puts his target out at five yards, and he always just seems to randomly scatter bullet holes across the paper. He does his a couple-three times a week, and he hasn't shown a lick of improvement in the all the time he's been coming there. I don't get it, but I reckon he's having fun, so it's none of my beeswax as long as he's being safe.

Unfortunately, the problem with the Glock continued. I have replaced every part in the gun except the frame, slide, barrel, and striker channel liner. I have a fresh striker channel liner to install. It's my last thing to try before I throw my hands up in defeat and send the gun to Glock.

The LCP 2 fired fifty rounds with no malfunctions of any kind to report. Consistency in grip and trigger pull is hard with such a tiny gun.

This makes 311 rounds fired since the gun was last cleaned or lubricated with three failures to return to battery (#128, #158, #245). 1,689 rounds to go.
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Once upon a time...

I say I grew up in Atlanta, and I still regard it as my hometown, but I didn't get there until late in my third grade year. I was born in Chicago.

Once upon a time, when I was in third grade, living in the near 'burbs of Chicago, I got called to the principal's office.

Like any kid, I reacted with trepidation. I walked slowly down the hall to the office, playing back all my recent activities to see which one could have gotten me in this jam. I couldn't think of anything I'd done wrong, which only made things worse. Was I going to get jacked up for something I didn't do? Should I maybe go ahead and do something wrong in the hallway on the way there just so I wouldn't get busted for nothing?

On arriving, my dad was waiting there for me in the principal's office. "Come on," he said, "let's go."

"Go where?"

"Just come with me."

Well, okay. When dad says "go", you go and you find out why when you find out. I knew we were going to be moving to Georgia, but that was 'way in the future. Like, whole months from now.

We got in the car and dad proceeded to drive into the city. Well, we must be going to visit Grandma & Grandpa down at Diversey & Laramie, but... No, we passed where we would have gotten off the highway for that. Where were we going? Dad was completely uncommunicative.

Finally we parked the car and walked toward a huge building, a baseball stadium.

"This isn't going to mean anything to you right now," said my father, "but someday I want you to be able to say you skipped school and went to a Cubs game at Wrigley Field before they put lights in the stadium."

And to this day I can say that.

The Saga Continues

Yesterday's range trip had two goals: Put another fifty rounds through the LCP 2, and evaluate the effect of a fresh recoil spring assembly on the Glock 39's plague of light, off-center primer strikes.

The Glock fired fifty rounds of Speer 185gr FMJ without incident. I am cautiously optimistic. I want to be optimistic, because as you can see, that little gun shoots like a house afire.

The LCP fired fifty rounds of Federal 95gr FMJ and experienced one failure to return fully into battery on round number thirty-four of the day (#245 of the test). This makes 261 rounds fired since the gun was last cleaned or lubricated with three failures to return to battery (#128, #158, #245). 1,739 rounds to go.
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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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