You Light Up My Life

So, I love my Surefire EDCL2-T. I've been carrying it since I got it. It's hella bright, bank-vault solid, and the switchology is, I think, ideal for a tacticool CCW-type flashlight. It's reminiscent of the original non-clicky SureFire switch, where you push for momentary and either tighten or loosen the whole tailcap for constant-on or lockout. Additionally, a light push on the button gives a 5-lumen working light while a complete press releases all twelve hundred lumen-hounds.

But to get a continuously on light, you have to either keep holding the button down or tighten the tailcap, which some might find a bit fiddly. Also, while I'm the kind of gear nerd who thinks $175 for a flashlight is just hunky dory, that's a little chi-chi for a lot of folks (yes, this one was a free review copy, but I've paid more than that for SureFire lights in the past and will in the future.)

So I've been spending the last few days with the G2X Maxvision flashlight, to see how it does in comparison.

The switching is different, less tactical and more oriented towards the way normal Earth people use flashlights. One click on the tailcap gets you a 15-lumen beam, which is adequate for most tasks for which people use flashlights: finding dropped keys, walking down sidewalks without stepping in dog poop, finding your way to the outhouse on a camping trip, that sort of thing.

A second click gives 800 lumens of light, using SureFire's Maxvision beam shaping technology. The light is extremely even from one edge of the beam to the other, rather than a very bright hot spot in the middle that tapers off rapidly the further from the center you get. The high beam on this thing will let you find out what made that noise in the yard, because the high beam will light up the whole yard.

You don't have to hold the tailcap down to keep the light on, should you need to set it down and do stuff with both hands.

Its one real downside as an everyday pocket flashlight, to me, is that it didn't have a pocket clip. Without one, they wind up down in the bottom of the pocket of my mom jeans, getting dimes jammed  in the lens and the tailcap switch inadvertently pressed.

Fortunately I had a Switchback 2.0 lying around that had come in a package of stuff from Thyrm, and I installed it.

Once I realized it was supposed to have the clip to the rear and the ring forward, which allowed it to lie flat in my pocket, it made sense. It's comfortable and doesn't snag on stuff while in my pocket, and I now wish they made a version that would fix my EDCL2-T.

So for fifty bucks less than the current king of pocket tacticool flashlights, you could have the G2X + Thyrm Switchback 2.0 setup, and have a flashlight that may be more useful in day-to-day flashlight use.
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Brakes and Boycotts

The Zed Drei needs front brakes, but it's probably going to be a week before I can get to that, so I plan on using my city-dweller privilege as much as possible for the next couple days and just bicycle around.

Bobbi had left letters to be mailed that she wanted dropped in a mailbox rather than wait for our mail carrier to service the box on the front of the house (our carriers tend to the dilatory and peripatetic.)

So I saddled up the Broad Ripple SUV and pedaled over to the box at Locally Grown Gardens. There's one out front of Sam's Gyros, too, about equidistant from the house, but it requires waiting for the light to cross College Avenue and I seemed to recollect it has a crazy-early pickup time.

Anyway, it was a lovely day for a bicycle, and I arrived back home fairly happy, but then I remembered I had some other things I'd promised to pick up...

Normally, this would not have been a big deal: Point the bike north and the tiny Broad Ripple Kroger is about fifteen minutes away...

Normally I'm not big on boycotts, but Kroger went after my wallet directly, so they can get bent as far as I'm concerned.

So the Zed Drei got rolled out and errands were run at Meijer instead. They didn't have the current issue of Concealment on their newsstand yet, though.
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Feature piece...

Hey, look! https://t.co/GFDnuVgrTj

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) May 4, 2018

Nine Hunnert...

Tuesday was another range day at Indy Arms Co with the last two hundred rounds of my case of CCI Blazer Brass 124gr FMJ.

I've gotten a little more comfortable pushing some speed with this gun. It continues to run fine, and had no hiccups that day. It's dirty enough that it's leaving pretty noticeable deposits of cack on the traffic finger of my shooting hand, where crud is getting blown through the hole where the trigger passes through the frame.

This brings the total rounds fired through the 5906 to 900 since the gun was last cleaned or lubed, with no malfunctions of any type to report. 1100 rounds to go.
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The single most dangerous thing...

...most people will ever do with a loaded gun is put it in a holster. If you practice a lot, you holster a lot, and it's important to do it right every time, lest you inadvertently wind up giving yourself a pop quiz on your tourniquet application skills.

Kathy at Cornered Cat has an excellent post detailing her holstering method, which I have blatantly stolen from her because it's good. You should read it and incorporate it into your armed lifestyle.
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SALE!

Okay, I've decided to pull the trigger on this and ditch my APS-C sensor Sony E-mount stuff and get another full-frame Sony E-mount body and macro lens.

This will get me shut of Sony crop sensor lenses and leave me with full-frame Sony stuff for work and Olympus Micro 4/3 bodies for fun and playing hipster street photographer.

Here's the stuff in the package: Sony NEX-5T, 16-50mm f/3.5-5.6 collapsible power zoom lens, Sony 18-105 f/4 G lens, Sony 55-210mm f/4.5-6.3 zoom, Sony 50mm f/1.8, Sigma 60mm f/2.8 Art, and Sigma 30mm f/1.4 lens.

No reserve eBay auction is here.

Chugging along...

Monday was another indoor range session at Indy Arms Co with the 5906 and two hundred rounds of CCI Blazer Brass 124gr FMJ.

I was pretty seriously flouting the range's speed limit with this thing now. Two pounds of steel will pretty well soak up most of a 9mm's recoil.

The gun went through it's complete cycle of operation every time with no issues.

This brings the total rounds fired through the 5906 to 700 since the gun was last cleaned or lubed, with no malfunctions of any type to report. 1300 rounds to go.
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Tab Clearing...

• New Jovian Thunderbolt toys with the idea of a Hudson H9.


• Jeff Gonzales on the value of training. I am so tired of hearing "That class costs how much? I could buy another gun for that!"


• For heaven's sake, people, don't leave your guns where little hands can get on them. That means holstered or locked up, not hidden or up high.

QotD: Mudslinging Edition...

Bobbi has a post up on the debate from last night amongst three guys vying for the Hoosier GOP senatorial nomination, which boiled down to each one claiming to be Trumpier than their swampy closet Obama-lovin' opponents.

It has been an ugly campaign. Each man has been trying to run to the Right of the other two, a process in which shoving your opponent Left works just as well -- and that is, perhaps, good, since they're running out of room on the Right.

It was as nasty a bout of purse swinging and hair pulling as I've seen on a debate stage.

Life Expectancies...

Over at Misfires & Light Strikes, Kevin is nearing the finish line of his 2,000-rd test of the Ruger LCP 2. He observes that all was pretty much well in LCP land up until about the 500-rd mark, and then the problems started occurring.

Similarly, when I was shooting the BG380, things went swimmingly up until 800 or so rounds when the light strikes started rearing their ugly heads. (I'll note, however, that when I called the test at 1,335 rounds, the gun hadn't had any failures to feed, extract, or eject.)

One thing with these little pistols is that the mainspring serves as a major component of the recoil system right along with the recoil spring.

And when you ask companies about recommended maintenance/replacement intervals on guns like the LCP or BG380, they look like you like you’ve sprouted a second head growing out of your shoulder. The vast majority of these little things are unlikely to see more than a box or two of ammo in their lives.

I wanna say that I recall hearing that LAPD armorers recommend swapping recoil and mainsprings on issue BG380 backup guns every 250 or 300 rounds.
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Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom...

Someone new has decided that blogging is a little more archival and better suited to long-form musings than the newer social media platforms. I'm encouraged by this! And his inspiration was Hognose at Weaponsman, which is as noble a blogging inspiration as there could be.

I give you: the Counter Jockey Chronicles.

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Relics...

Seen in the parking lot at the Peru Hamfest this past weekend. I quipped to Bobbi that there were only three in there when he first dropped the tailgate.

I wonder how many extraneous CRT's are in the attic? I mean, I want to save the NeXT and I know there's one little 14" Mac color monitor, and there's a 9" green screen Apple that goes with the IIc, but there are probably one or two 17" generic CRT's up there, Viewsonics or the like, that are mine. Probably one or two of Bobbi's two.

Heck, there's probably my first round or two of LCD screens, too. All that stuff is, essentially, garbage now.

It's a weird side effect of not wanting to throw away something that works and then, by the time it's depreciated to zero, we're living in a day and age where there's a city ordinance banning throwing away electronics. I wouldn't have any fear of slipping a dead calculator or clock radio in with the coffee grounds, but a 17" CRT is the sort of thing that could trigger an incident if Officer Obie finds it next to my junk mail at the bottom of a pile of garbage.
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I read it on the internet...

So my boyfriend went to drop off his friend at the airport last night. He went to the Newport News one which is like 45 minutes from our place in Norfolk. He left like 10:30pm. He dropped him off, text me he was on his way home, and stopped at a 7-11 in VA Beach.

— Hermione Danger (@kelseybew_) April 25, 2018

Thus began the Twitter thread that quickly went viral.

Only there appear to be some problems...

According to the woman’s thread, the incident began after her boyfriend drove a friend to the airport in Newport News. She said he left their Norfolk home at 10:30 p.m. Tuesday for the roughly 45-minute drive to the airport. According to the airport’s website, the last flight on Tuesday was at 10:05 p.m. – a half-hour before he would have begun the drive. The next flight after that was at 5:39 a.m. the next day.

Almost nothing in the story matches up. And the tweeter hasn't replied to any of the media that have tried to contact her.

So, here's my question:

Was this an exercise in short fiction that got more attention than intended? Or did the "Boo" of the story give the OP a tale about "dropping his friend off at the airport" and a "harrowing police stop" to cover for an eight hour absence when he was off doing stuff that he didn't want his girlfriend knowing about?
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Photos from the 'hood...

Pupper was on his porch, not tied up or anything, just chilling. We made eye contact as I passed, but he didn't get up. When I paused on the sidewalk to snap some photos of the flowers in the yard, I looked up to see that I was being observed.

The dinosaur's gate was open, so I finally had a chance to get a good photo of him without any bars in the way.

Finally, it is springtime.
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Getting Dirtier

Friday morning I stopped in at Indy Arms Co. with another two hundred rounds of 124gr FMJ CCI Blazer Brass ammo and the Smith & Wesson 5906.

The front sight had gotten so dirty that it was hard to get a good sight picture against the gray-black of the target, especially considering that I use my Wiley X Air Rage sunglasses as safety glasses on the indoor range.

The hundred rounds at the head on the target was actually fired much faster than the lower hundred rounds, since the sights were readily visible against the lighter background. I concentrated on a good grip and a sight picture and just trusted my trigger finger the Do The Right Thing. It was pretty zen for a bit there.

I mean, I know how to pull a trigger without disturbing the sight picture; I do it often enough in dry-fire. It's just a matter of controlling the gun in live fire and letting my trigger finger work. This came from following a discussion where Bruce Gray was talking about how there's no real necessary tradeoff between speed and accuracy. I need to go find that and see if he'll let me quote some of it.

Anyway, there were no malfunctions of any type to report.

This brings the total rounds fired through the 5906 to 500 since the gun was last cleaned or lubed, with no malfunctions of any type to report. 1500 rounds to go.
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Friday morning...

Finally some more spring-like weather.

Thought about dropping the top on the Zed while I was running errands this AM, but decided it was still a couple degrees too airish to do so. Monday and Tuesday are supposed to be Chamber of Commerce weather, though...

I guess if you have a targa instead of an actual open air roadster you can go topless at cooler temps...

Sunny Range Day

First nice outdoor sunny range day in a long time on Thursday. I tagged along to ACC with Mike Grasso, since he had to sight in some pistols with slide-mounted MRDS. I figured to grind out another hundred rounds apiece through the 4046 and 5906.

The 4046 is growing on me, perversely.

This is the end result of two hundred and fifty rounds of Speer 165gr Lawman FMJ through the 4046. Note how much cleaner it is than the CCI Blazer Brass residue on the Model 5906 below.

Also note that two of my three magazines for the 4046 have the later blue follower, while one is older and has the original yellow follower. The blue follower mags are likely the ones that were original to the gun. Getting the eleventh round in them still pretty much requires me to use an UpLULA, and it kinda helps with the tenth.

Notice how vile the residue of only three hundred rounds of 124gr FMJ Blazer has left the snout of the Model 5906.

I was able to do pretty good work with the trigger on the 4046 by now. That's a hundred rounds in the head of the target, somewhere between seven and ten yards. The trigger is heavy, but the travel is short for a DA trigger, and I pretty much got the hang of prepping it in recoil so that it was ready to fire as soon as the sights settled.

Neither gun experienced any malfunctions of any type.

This brings the total rounds fired through the 5906 to 300, with no malfunctions of any type to report. 1700 rounds to go.

This brings the total rounds fired through the 4046 to 250, with no malfunctions of any type to report. 1750 rounds to go.
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Ouch, Inspirobot.

Lost Ground

Kevin at Misfires & Light Strikes has a good point about the sharp decline in shooting shows out there in basic cable land. Show on The Outdoor Channel are preaching to the choir, when what we need is evangelism to the unconverted.
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Overheard in the Office...

The TV down the hall is discussing Kanye West's statement that he wanted to run for president in 2020...

RX: "And who would that make the First Lady? I'm sorry, I'm just not ready for a First Lady whose ass I've seen." 

Me: "Too late."

Bobbi replied that she hadn't actually seen those pictures, so it technically didn't count.
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Double action trigger work...

Just the 5906 at Indy Arms Co yesterday morning, since persistent drizzle scotched outdoor range plans.

Another hundred rounds of 124gr FMJ Blazer Brass went downrange. Eighty-five rounds at the lower A-zone, in long 5-7 round strings, decocking between strings of fire and trying to push some speed at seven yards.

The last fifteen rounds were fired at the upper A-zone in individual double-action press-outs from a compressed high ready. (See if you can spot the one where I pressed out and immediately yanked the gun back instead of following through on the sights.)

This brings the total rounds fired through the 5906 to 200, with no malfunctions of any type to report. 1800 rounds to go.
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Auction ending tonight!

Crimson Trace Lasergrip and Lightguard, with genuine powder residue from the inaugural Citizen's Defense Research class! And Dark Star Gear holsters!

Even More Triggered

I've been working a lot on my trigger manipulation lately. I really wish I hadn't spent all those years doing the "pin the trigger, align the sights, let the trigger out juuuust enough to reset..." thing.

Here's a good piece by Jeff Gonzales on trigger prepping.
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A sitting duck is easier to hit than a flying one.

Good look at institutional-level active shooter response training with some thought behind it.
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Tab Clearing...

• Gunsite Academy


• Borei-class submarine


• Fleet in being

I can't even remember why most of those were open.
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Triggered...

Monday morning saw me at Indy Arms Co with the two Smiths, looking to move the round count ball downfield a little more.

The 5906 was fired at the upper 3x5" zone. I decocked on loading and any time I came off the sights at the end of a string. The DA trigger is easy to manage, but the SA takes some getting used to, because there's a long-ish almost weightless takeup and then a light-but-crunchy break.

The 4046 was shot at the 8" circle about as fast as I can run that trigger so far. The DAO on the Smith is not like the regular DA trigger. The travel is much shorter, and it's heavier, but there's zero stacking and a nice rolling break at the end. You just have to remember to shoot it like a revolver, and let it reset itself during recoil.

Both guns went through another fifty rounds with no problems, which brings the 5906 round count to 100 and the 4046 to 150.
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Interrupting the narrative again...

They should register vans and license drivers.https://t.co/HbPOGmU8bx

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) April 23, 2018

What the hell? Where were you guys in the '80s?

As a child of the Cold War who participated in Civil Air Patrol and AFJROTC and who assembled one of the above-pictured model kits in high school as part of a project, something that I'd been hearing on the news recently startled me.

During the news cycles that followed the Russian's test announcement of the new SS-X-30 Satan 2, I kept hearing NBC talking heads saying the weirdest things:

"The missile can reach the continental US..." 

"The missile can carry multiple nuclear warheads..." 

"The missile is believed to be able to reach anywhere on the globe..."

...and all these were voiced in tones of fear and wonder, like this was shocking and scary new information.

I can sort of forgive that out of Dylan Dreyer, because she was in grade school when the Berlin Wall came down, but I was hearing it from Chuck Todd, who is only a few years younger than me, and Hoda Kotb, who is a few years older.

Now, I realize that since the end of the Cold War we haven't talked a lot about how Manhattan is thirty minutes or less away from a Russian SLBM launch 24/7, but back in the Eighties if you were old enough to turn on a television, you certainly knew it.

I'm not expecting everyone to have been a war nerd like me who memorized throw weights and CEPs like I did, but surely everyone who was at least a teenager in the Eighties knew that the Russians had missiles that could hit anywhere on the planet and that these missiles could carry multiple independently-targetable reentry vehicles, right?

So why, when the SS-X-30 announcement happen did everybody act so startled? Have they gotten so used to covering the comic opera missile program in North Korea, with its smuggled Iranian technology and repurposed fireworks?

Official (and unofficial) 2k tests underway.

So, the 4046 has, judging from the appearance of the internals, hardly been fired. An extremely low-mileage gat with a born-on date in April of 2006 is about as close as I'm likely to get for a New-In-Box Smith & Wesson 3rd Gen auto to run through the usual 2k test.

The 5906, on the other hand, shows evidence of a reasonable amount of use, so while I'll do the 2,000 round thing with it, too, I'll be bearing its age in mind if anything should go south. The 5906 test should probably be considered to have a big asterisk.

With that in mind, I ordered up some 250 rounds of 165gr Speer Lawman from Lucky Gunner this past week, lubed both guns up with some Liberty gun oil, and headed off to Indy Arms Co to get this party started.

The 4046 was slow-fire at the 3x5 box from seven yards, trying to get the feel for the gun's trigger. The 5906, on the other hand, I was trying to run as fast as I could at the 8" circle from 7 yards. That one way low and slightly right and the one high and left where where I was caught off guard by the DA/SA transition.

The first range session was fifty rounds through each of the guns while the second was just a quick pop-in at the range for fifty more through the 4046.

This session I tried to work up some speed with the DAO trigger on the 4046, doing failure drills at seven yards.

So far, so good. Neither gun has experienced any problems. The 5906 has 50 rounds through it and the 4046 has 100.
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Spring Cleaning

In order to raise funds for a couple of projects, I'm finally getting around to a little bit of spring cleaning.

The first order of business is making an eBay listing for a little box I've had sitting in a corner for a year now. It's a package deal with a Crimson Trace Lasergrip and Lightguard for a Glock, and a pair of Dark Star Gear kydex IWB holsters that'll fit a Glock 19/23/32 with the CTC Lightguard mounted.

There'll be some Gunbroker listings in the near future, too...
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4/19/18

Well, Patriot's Day passed without anybody doing anything to add a further anniversary to 4/19, for good or ill.

It was a slow day here at VFTP. I managed to get to the range, though...

Shooting @smithwessoncorp pistols @indyarmscompany today. Gonna do the full 2k on the #smith4046 #fortycal #smithandwesson3rdgen #pewpewlife #indyarmsco #phlster #igmilitia

A post shared by Tamara Keel (@tamarakeel) on Apr 19, 2018 at 11:09am PDT

This project is shaping up...

Well, this is turning into a project... #gunwriting #smithandwesson #smithandwesson4046 #40cal #igmilitia #indyarmsco

A post shared by Tamara Keel (@tamarakeel) on Apr 18, 2018 at 2:20pm PDT

The zoo's my blues muse.

So, the first time I went to the Indianapolis zoo, we were there for a company picnic with Bobbi's employer. It was late summer of 2011, and I had the Kodak EasyShare V1073 that I'd bought to photograph the LuckyGunner blogger shoot along with me. I had a lot of fun shooting pictures at the zoo.

The next time I was there was again with Bobbi, on a lark on one of her vacation days in 2013. Two years later, I had a more formidable camera. The Canon PowerShot SX500IS was all ate up with megapixels (16!) and zoom-X's (30!) relative to the Kodak, and I did indeed manage to get some better pictures with it.

In the summer of 2014, Kirk and I bicycled down to the zoo, and I schlepped along my then-current camera, a Canon 20D with an 18-135mm travel zoom lens fitted. I was super happy with a few of my shots. I was more patient on the shutter, and had at least some eye toward composition.

Fast forward to yesterday:

The Winter That Won't End has not been kind to my SADS. I've been struggling with enough give-a-damn to get out of the house on plenty of days, and have had too many that saw me stay in pyjamas, sitting at my keyboard until well in the afternoon before I could yank myself out of a mope long enough to run errands.

Tuesday's weather was forecast to be sunny by lunchtime, with a temp that might flirt with fifty degrees in the afternoon. "You know what?" I thought to myself on Monday afternoon, "I'll bet a trip to the zoo tomorrow, just by myself, with no schedule to worry about, would be just the thing to snap me out of my funk. I'll bring good cameras, and it will be awesome."

So I drove down and pulled into the zoo parking lot and the signs were good. I'd tried doing this last Friday only to abort at the last minute when I saw that the parking lot was jammed full and half of it was school buses. Tuesday at lunchtime, though, there were only a half dozen school buses and the parking lot was barely a quarter full.

The weather, though, had probably something to do with it. It was 34°F and gusting as I walked across the parking lot. There were more kids running around screaming than I thought there would be, and my hands were getting a little cold as I stood looking down into the walrus tank...

But, oh what I was seeing through the viewfinder! I had the full-frame Sony A7 with me, fitted with the 24-240mm zoom that my friends had pooled their dough and surprised me with. Oh, you could see the walruses' vibrissae glistening and the water droplets frozen in space as they surfaced and spun and dove... These pictures were going to be great!

After about ten minutes of shooting, I noticed the kids were thinning out, and I decided to duck into the desert biome to warm my hands while I shot pictures of lizards.

There in the indoor display, shooting from an awkward angle, I was composing the shot using the screen on the back of the camera instead of the viewfinder and... what were those orange letters blinking in the top right corner of the screen?

NO CARD

Oh. Fudge. Except, much like that more famous Hoosier, I didn't say "fudge".

I fumbled in the little pocket of the Event Messenger 100 intended to hold spare memory cards. There was no card in there, either.

Oh. Fudge.

Wait, the zoo gift shop! They used to sell film in those back in the day! Maybe they had some cheap SanDisk 8GB cards for three times what they were worth?

I half-ran across the zoo to the gift shop, but no dice. Oh, they had some emergency battery chargers for smart phones, which is how half everyone records images these days. If you were perverse enough to be schlepping actual camera gear around the zoo, you were obviously expected to be squared away enough to have remembered to check your cameras before you left the house.

Walking dejectedly from the gift shop, I took a few deep breaths and centered myself.

I'd learned one lesson from that long ago trip to Tennessee: Anyplace worth bringing one camera is worth bringing two. The camera bag over my shoulder is the one I take with me everywhere. It holds my iPad Mini and its type cover, an Olympus PEN E-P5, and three lenses, with the 14-150mm zoom mounted on the camera. It's a good little rig and the one I used to do almost all my picture-taking at Tac-Con.

Determined not to waste the trip, I decided to just walk it off and shoot the zoo with the PEN.

Meanwhile, the sun came out, the temp rose into the 40's, and along about one o'clock or so, the zoo largely emptied out. I was glad I stayed.

The Olympus did just fine, by the way, and I had a fantastic time.

You know, the zoo is only about a twenty minute drive from the house, and annual memberships aren't terribly expensive. This is some cheap therapy, when you think about it.
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Risk.

In my brief flirtation with drag racing cars back in my misspent youth, I learned about things like "scattershields" and "transmission blankets".

See, in your car, there are rotating parts under and next to your feet that are spinning at high rates of speed. In race cars, they are subjected to sudden, violent forces and the torque of high performance engines. Here are a couple pics I found doing a quick Google search:

That there above is what resulted when a Torqueflite 727, a heavy duty automatic transmission, came apart under the force of a 2,000+ bhp blown Hemi.

That's the side of the car, where the bits of transmission exited through the passenger door.

This morning on the news, Savannah Guthrie was mouthing something about "...what happened yesterday on a Southwest Airlines jet, and could this happen to the engines of other airliners?" causing me to yell at the TV screen again...

"JESUS, HONEY, DO YOU EVEN KNOW HOW JET ENGINES WORK?"

Surely everyone else who has been confronted with this view has spent at least a few seconds idly contemplating what would happen if the compressor section shredded itself under centrifugal forces, right? Then you accept how unlikely it is and what a marvel it is to have this view at all. And you nod off to sleep.

It must be jarring to go through life not realizing the existence of any of the unlikely dangers that surround you every day, only to have one rear its ugly head unexpectedly.

(I thought for a moment that photo might have been taken on a Southwest 737, but on checking my records, that was a Delta bird, IND-ATL. It would have been a freaky coincidence to have a photo of the engine in question, but fortunately I do not.)
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Bad Neighborhoods...

So, I'm reading the news story about a woman who got shot multiple times in a CVS parking lot here in Indy last night. And I get to this part:

Police say the woman was shot multiple times in the parking lot of the CVS Pharmacy at Shadeland Avenue and Pendleton Pike around 8:30 p.m. Monday. An employee heard the shots and called 911. 

The woman reportedly drove herself to the 3900 block of N. Grand Avenue, near 38th & Emerson.

And as God is my witness, the first thought to flash across my consciousness was "Drove to 38th & Emerson? Did she want to get shot again?"

I mean, 38th & Emerson wouldn't be my first choice if I wanted to go get in a shooting...that'd be 42nd & Post...but it's definitely in my top five list of "Areas to Avoid in Order to Remain Un-Shot".
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Flashbacks...

Just like the good ol' days of the Cold War, socialist hellholes that can't feed their own people will still have Kalashnikov factories.
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Slipping down a rabbit hole...

There's a story here I'm wrestling with.

When law enforcement agencies in the US started the mass migration from revolvers to autoloaders in the mid- to late-'80s, Smith & Wesson's classic line of double action autos had the lion's share of that market, thanks in no small part to their crushing dominance in the police revolver business.

SIG-Sauer and Beretta had tiny market shares initially, when that upstart Glock began making ever-bigger inroads.

Yet the P229 and the 92FS are still here, if only barely, while the traditional S&W autoloaders are all but consigned to the dustbin of history.

And therein lies the story...
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Oh, the weather outside is frightful...

What fresh hell is this? #snowinapril

A post shared by Tamara Keel (@tamarakeel) on Apr 16, 2018 at 6:02am PDT

I just stuck my head out the door to confirm what the noise I was hearing was. It was, in fact, a mower. The Democrat Next Door's landscapers apparently have the same motto as the postal service, because they weren't letting the fact that it was snowing deter them from their appointed rounds.

Clearing a tab...

I've had a tab open to this good report on Tac-Con '18 as a reminder to link to it. Sign up early for Tac-Con '19! Registration is usually full by mid-late summer.

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Duck!

Took my new lens to the canal today...#Ducks #photography #sonyA7 pic.twitter.com/sKSm0Dnqs0

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) April 14, 2018

Project underway...

Well, this is a thing that happened. #3rdgensmithandwesson #model5906 #9mm #smithandwesson

A post shared by Tamara Keel (@tamarakeel) on Apr 12, 2018 at 1:22pm PDT

While the classic P-series Sigs and the Beretta 92 cling to ever-thinning market share in an increasingly plastic world, the traditional metal Smith & Wesson autoloaders are no more, and there's a story in there.

Okay, this is Spring.

2018 Firsts Today: Recreational walk on the Monon Trail, cotton socks, no jacket, top down on the Zed Drei.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) April 12, 2018

Sorry 'bout that.

I had a video clip on here yesterday morning of a dude getting a piece of brass down the back of his hoodie at an indoor range and, in the process of doing the hot brass dance trying to extract it, cranking off a pair of ND's to his six o'clock, narrowly missing an RSO.

The video was security camera footage from the range that had been posted to a secret Facebook group by the RSO in question. He had asked that it remain in the group (I don't know which group; I'm not a member) but someone leaked it and it went viral.

Unless I'm contacted by dude saying it's okay to repost, I'm leaving it down. Just because everybody else is violating dude's confidence is no reason I should.
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Hard Lessons

So, you'll hear me harp a lot about anchoring your support hand during the draw and not "floating" it in space. This guy is an example of why you only collect the gun with your support hand at the "three" count of the draw (and only turn loose of it there during the re-holster.)


But while I was watching this video, I'm not going to lie: My stomach clenched as I thought "Oh, God, he's gonna do it again right here on camera..."

While I appreciate the dude being willing to share his errors so that hopefully others will learn from them, my initial reaction on seeing the video on FB was pretty strong...

Pimp-Slapped by the Invisible Hand?

I'm sad that I no longer have a Bank of America account to close.

If a company is going to insert themselves that proactively into a political fight, it's only fair that they experience whatever consequences will come from it.

They presumably thought that this was a move that would generate more goodwill than lost business. We'll see if the invisible hand pats them on the head or gives them a pimp slap.
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Interesting Times

DDH-184 Kaga

The Chrysanthemum Fle...er, "Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force", having already added to its blue-water abilities with a brace of 800+ foot long "helicopter destroyers", has now stood up a brigade-sized marine unit to go with them.

When a Japanese newspaper reported last December that the Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force was looking at modifying the carri...er, "helicopter destroyers" to better support F-35B STOVL operations, it drew a strongly-worded response from Beijing.
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Fewer ads...

Project Wonderful ads have gone away on this blog.

Truth be told, I'd been keeping them up mostly for nostalgia the last several years. I don't know what their advertiser policies were, but no small kydex benders or knife makers ever used them to get views on this blog. I was down to seeing maybe ten bucks a month revenue from them and so when they complained that their bot had crawled the site and couldn't find one of the ad boxes, I just deleted them all.

Frankly, these days this blog is more of an outlet for writing I can't sell elsewhere, and a business card for writing I wish I could. Writing it nowadays is a net loss, as every keystroke is one I could be doing for pay elsewhere, and the guns I shoot in 2k round tests here are bought out of my own pocket.

So, anyway...no more Project Wonderful ads. Hope the blog loads faster for y'all. Peace! 😎
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April showers...

While I first fell in love with my neighborhood under a light dusting of early winter snow and still think it looks charming that way, this is not the weather I ordered for early Spring.
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