A boy and his dog...

...are always a good photo subject.

Nikon D2X & 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR II

Muh Research

Fortunately most of my epidemiology and virology credits were transferrable to my rocket science Internet PhD program. https://t.co/FJQH8LLivN

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) April 22, 2023

"D'you feel bogus? Well do ya?"

An hilarious column about Eastwood impostors on Twitter.

There’s something almost nostalgic about this mix of genuine befuddlement—the whole thing does actually feel like a 92-year-old man trying to run a social media account—and active fan participation. The accounts’ followers seem like an even split between folks who believe they are genuinely engaging with Eastwood (or someone representing him, at some level), and “Film Twitter” freaks engaged in a form of ironized, in-on-the-joke kayfabe. To anyone watching half-attentively (or, in my case, obsessively) the online microdrama is a welcome throwback to Twitter’s mid-2000s heyday, when the social media giant was its own sort of Wild West, populated by freaks, weirdos, and, yes, the occasional genuine superannuated movie star.

RTWT.

.

Automotif CCCLVII...

Here's a 1987-'88 Ford Escort GL wagon that has somehow miraculously not oxidized completely away. This is the car that Ford expected to do battle with the Civics, Corollas, and Golfs that dominated the subcompact market.

It was propelled, after a fashion, by a wheezy undersquare 113 cubic inch overhead cam inline four with throttle-body fuel injection putting out 90 SAE net horsepower.

Echo Chamber Construction Kit

It’s allowed people who are bad at thinking to more easily locate other people who are bad at thinking and gather into poorly-thinking groups where they think poorly together in a self-reinforcing manner.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) April 20, 2023

It's how we ended up in our current world of Choose Your Own Epistemological Adventure and easily-weaponized social media groups.

.

Hey, that's cool!

There's an article on travel safety tips for women by globe-trotting traveler Greg Ellifritz at Women's Outdoor News and they used a photo I shot of Greg for the author pic. That's neat!

If you'd like to read more by Greg, his book Choose Adventure: Safe Travel in Dangerous Places is available on Kindle. He wrote it based on his experiences vacationing in spots not generally considered very tourist-y. 

If you want etiquette tips on how to properly bribe the local militiaman who is sticking a Kalashnikov in your snoot when you're just trying to enjoy a post-siesta stroll, it's the travel book for you.

.

Dear Smith & Wesson...

How come if I want a three-inch S&W Model 681 with a hammer-mounted firing pin and a flash chromed hammer and trigger like the good ol' days, I have to go to Rossi to get one?

Slim Future?

I recently did a review of the SIG P210 Carry for Small Arms Review, which you can read in its entirety here.

Dimensionally, the P210 Carry is basically a twin for the Commander-size 1911, as can be seen in this photo of the test gun side-by side with my old Para Ordnance "Gun Blog Nine" LTC.

The SIG holds 8+1 rounds of 9x19mm, typical of classic single-stack nines, while the Wilson ETM mags in the Para will hold ten rounds (and work reliably with all manner of ammunition, unlike the classic nine-round Colt 9mm magazines.)

Think is, these are limited in capacity by the fact that they're true single stack magazines in metal-framed pistols with separately-attached grip panels.

There are a host of modern polymer-frame pistols that are just as slender and use stagger-stack magazines with as much as half again the capacity.

It was the time spent reviewing the P210 and thinking about recent experiences with pistols like the Shield Plus and the P365 that made me wonder...is the traditional true single-stack kind of a dying breed? An anachronism for lovers of bygone blasters?

. 

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #237...

Being hand-modeled here by Annette Evans of On Her Own (who has one to test), the Beretta 80X Cheetah is a super-slick little traditional double-action straight blowback .380 pistol with a 13-rd double-stack mag. It has a Picatinny-type accessory rail, and can be carried cocked and locked if that's your bag.

If they made a decock-only version, I'd be sorely tempted.

Final Boss Nerd

It's like we took cells from a fedora, fertilized them in vitro with a neckbeard gamete, and then floated the resulting zygote in a vat of overheated liquid cryptocurrency until it grew to the size of an adult human, while fed on nothing but manosphere comment threads and memes. https://t.co/XT5oidF0wP

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) April 18, 2023

Foreigners bought your spank bank.

Has anyone been following this PornHub acquisition story?

...Whoever owns this website will not only have a direct influence over the state of sex trafficking globally but will also hold the emails, credit card numbers, and most private browsing habits of tens of millions of people. So, this deal matters beyond mere intellectual curiosity.

[snip]

On March 16th, Pornhub announced it had been bought by—get this—“Ethical Capital Partners.” It’s like the Medellin Cartel getting bought by “Totally Not Crime LLC.”...

Go and read the whole thing.

You'd think that what is possibly the single largest, most valuable trove of potential blackmail material in the history of ever winding up in such mysterious and sketchy hands would make a bigger splash.

.

Neat-o!

So, my friend Marko just gathered all his existing short fiction, plus three new stories, into a single volume titled Oddments and published it at BezosMart. (There's also a print-on-demand version for those who prefer dead tree format.)

That's a lot of content...395 pages, a hundred and twenty thousand words*...for $5.99 in Kindle format.

Reading through the titles of the new pieces, I see at least one of those is another excursion into his "Ink & Blood" universe, which is like late 19th Century Europe, with single shot black powder Mausers and pickelhaubes, but also with magic.

*That 120,000 word count is such a daunting number to a short form writer like me. 120k words is about ten years worth of monthly columns.

.

Wow.

For years the Rangemaster Tactical Conference, traditionally held around the end of March somewhere centrally located in the country (I've attended two in Little Rock, one in New Orleans, and now three in Dallas), would sell out of attendance slots sometime around the beginning of the previous October.

Last year it felt like an anomaly when TacCon '23 tickets sold out in just four days.

Tickets for TacCon '24 went on sale Sunday evening at 6PM CDT...and were all gone by 5AM CDT Monday morning.

I'd like to think my story in Concealment helped spread the word...

Well, you can still get on the wait list in case someone cancels, I guess?

.

Practical Popguns

It's no secret that I'm a fan of a flyweight deuce-deuce for an "around the house" gun. A Smith & Wesson 43C or Ruger LCP II .22 stuffed with eight or ten rounds of Federal Punch or CCI Velocitor is light enough to not drag down pajama bottoms or sweatpants, as well as being cheap and easy to shoot.

Putting a few into a dude's snotbox at three to five yards is bound to have an effect, rimfire or not.

Don't take my word for it, listen to Hsoi. He's smart.

September 5, 2022 I was dumbbell bench pressing the 95s. I start going down for rep 7 and something felt weird in my left wrist. I immediately stopped. I don’t know how to describe it, but… something… shifted? All those little bones in your wrist (carpal bones); if you know what the carpal bones look like, just imagine something… shifting, getting compacted by 95# of steel. Yeah. Makes you wince, doesn’t it?

I went shooting soon thereafter. Shot my P365XL with the Wilson grip and inserts. After 100 rounds I couldn’t stand it – the pain was too much.

I’ve been hangin’ with a few guys into revolvers (GuG, Hizzie). I mean, “the underwear gun” is a thing. And with the stuff Rhett‘s been doing. Well… I figured now’s a good time detour and play with this concept.

Yes, the LCR is hard to shoot it because it’s lightweight with a heavy-ass trigger, craptacular snub-sights. But I can shoot it… a lot. I can even shoot Federal Punch (my defensive load) and not feel bad about the money.

Go read the whole thing and give it some thought.

But remember, to really get the best use out of a revolver, especially a subcaliber one, it's important to remember the revolver's U-shaped utility curve. Practice, practice, practice...

Caleb explains the curve.

That reminds me, I should get some speed strips and put in some serious dedicated .22 wheelyboi practice myself.

Miami Heat

From the "So Goofy They're Cool" category, we have Canik's Miami Signature Series limited edition pistols...

Get on it!

Registration for TacCon 2024 is open now.

If history is any guide, it will be full up in less than a day.

.

Yeet Cannon

Seen at NRAAM: The Boaty McBoatface of the gun industry, the high-cap Hi Point, will supposedly be shipping soon.

Shooting at the Speed of Thought

From a worthwhile piece over at GAT Daily, titled "Don't Shoot":

Darryl Bolke likes to drive the point home that every round fired is its own individual use of force decision, requiring independent justification. Going back to the Bill Drill example, just because dude needed shot on round 1 doesn’t necessarily mean you’re cleared hot for all 6.

Whether the target drops their weapon, stops advancing, or whatever else, at some point they’re no longer presenting a reasonable threat to you. If you continue putting rounds into them after that point, it’s entirely possible that you’re at the very least complicating your defense and, worst case scenario, have surpassed the window of justifiable homicide entirely.

When I first heard Scott Jedlinski refer to sub-0.18 second shot-to-shot intervals as "jailbait splits", I had to chuckle because there's a very obvious double entendre there. The only way to shoot that fast is to have already decided to pull the trigger again while you're still in the middle of the previous shot. That's how you go fast on, e.g., a Bill Drill or a FAST or a Casino Drill. It's also how you wind up needing the courtroom services of an expert witness.

Here's the thing, though: If you can shoot that fast, if you have put in the work required to have the ability to run your gun at that level of automaticity, then shooting at decision-making speeds of .3 or .4 second splits feels positively leisurely.

Jon Hauptman put it in concise bumper sticker format with "Braking distance increases with speed" or, more pithily, ".17 in the sheets, .35 in the streets".

Going fast.

Weirdos.

If plain ol' Flat Eartherism isn't loony enough for you, there's apparently a guy running around the web telling people that the flat planet used to be covered in giant forests and the things we call mountains and mesas are just the stumps of those enormous trees.

The internet was a mistake.

.

Wheel Goes 'Round

Well, I certainly didn't have "Henry, the lever-action rifle company, releases an all-new revolver" on my 2023 bingo card.

There's no locking detent on the front of the ejector rod, which is sort of Colt-like. What appears to be a separate brass grip frame made me initially think that the lockwork forked up from below, like in a Charter Arms or Ruger, but flipping it over revealed a conventional sideplate like a Smith or Colt. It's available with both round- and square-butt grip frames.

It's a fairly decent-sized piece for a .357 Magnum. If it's a success, likely other calibers will be along.

I'm going to try to get one to write up for a dead tree outlet.

Called Shot

Man, Mike Black got nothin' but net with this prediction:

E'rrbody running around like "OH NOES! HOW DID THIS JUNIOR ENLISTED HAVE SUCH CLEARANCE??"

Well, when you're the digital plumber in charge of keeping the Sooper Seekrit series of network tubes unclogged and running and you have superuser access, they gotta give you clearance. Sure, they make you pinkie swear that you won't look at stuff you're not supposed to look at, but sometimes that just doesn't work out so hot.

As they say in the sewers of the internet: “wew, lads”.

Dude has thoroughly wrecked his life and damaged national security and also possibly the global order, all for the sake of some clout-chasing with a couple dozen incel gamers in a Discord server. It's not even like he got seduced by a hawt Russian agent or was promised a jillion bucks; he just wanted to flex for his Minecraft pals.

The future is so dumb.

EDITED TO ADD: Worth a read.

.

Supertank

What's hilarious is that I know Putin stans who still insist that Russia hasn't used their good stuff in Ukraine yet.

"Show me that they've used T-90s!"

Er, okay?

“Someone left a Russian T-90A tank … captured by Ukraine last fall, on a trailer after the truck hauling it broke down and pulled into this truck stop off U.S. Interstate 10” https://t.co/krLsh3Idmi

— Shashank Joshi (@shashj) April 13, 2023

Dude, Russia...er, "independent Donbas separatists"...have been using T-90s for nearly a decade now in eastern Ukraine.

.

Revenge of the Nerds.

Some dork stealing classified documents to impress his friends by posting them on a gamer Discord channel is just absolutely the most Current Year thing I've seen in a while.

"OG told the group he toiled for hours writing up the classified documents to share with his companions in the Discord server he controlled. The gathering spot had been a pandemic refuge, particularly for teen gamers locked in their houses and cut off from their real-world friends. The members swapped memes, offensive jokes and idle chitchat. They watched movies together, joked around and prayed. But OG also lectured them about world affairs and secretive government operations. He wanted to “keep us in the loop,” the member said, and seemed to think that his insider knowledge would offer the others protection from the troubled world around them."

I wonder what this gomer's screen name is on Arfcom? Because you frickin' know he has one.

I'll tell you what his screen name should be: TomNicholsWasRight.

.

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #236...

I'd had a Smith & Wesson Model 469 before, but it wasn't the most handsome example and I unloaded it at an Indy 1500 some years back.

When I got a call from Indy Arms Company telling me that they'd gotten one in, I jumped on it. I didn't recollect having ever seen a matte nickel one before. When I got it home and went to look up the serial number in the Standard Catalog of Smith & Wesson to find the date of manufacture (1984, by the way), it turns out that's because the nickel ones were a distributor exclusive run of 1,500 pistols for Ashland Shooting Supplies back in the day.

.

Not this again...

Somehow guns become more lethal the farther they get from their point of origin...

Nearly 20% of the guns used to commit crimes in Chicago come from Indiana. It doesn’t do much good for a city to have strict gun laws when everywhere around it has them readily available. pic.twitter.com/kFR7TNsab5

— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) April 12, 2023

Legit LOL'ed...

Found here.

All-New Micro Nine

FN America officially launched its new large-capacity Reflex micro compact CCW pistol today. Available in black and tactical dirt color in both regular and red-dot-ready formats, the Reflex ships with a flush-fit 11-round magazine and a 15-round 'stendo.

It uses the grip texturing from the Tactical 509 line, has a rail that will accept the TLR-7 Sub from Streamlight or Surefire's XSC, and doesn't require a trigger pull to disassemble. 

The MRD version doesn't use adaptor plates, instead direct-mounting optics that use the RMSc/507k footprint and mounting screws of varying lengths are included. A front night sight with a tritium vial and hi-viz surround is standard, and the rear sight has a pair of plain white dots.

In addition to the pinkie-rest floorplate that ships on the 11-round magazine, a flat floorplate is included if you really want to shrink it down.

Look for a full length in-depth review in a future issue of Shooting Illustrated.

.

TacCon Roundup

Greg Ellifritz has posted his annual roundup of TacCon blog posts. Like he points out, "The conference consists of three days of material taught by 40 different world-class instructors. Each instructor teaches blocks on a variety of tactical topics lasting between two and eight hours long. It’s an opportunity to get a lot of top notch training at a very reasonable price."

The shooting blocks of instruction are limited to a certain number of shooters, and there's a signup process that happens ahead of time. Of course, there's always a cancellation or two, and so it's not uncommon to see one of the instructors take advantage of some downtime in their schedule to hop into one of those empty slots.

Tim Herron taking a class from Tim Kelly of Apache Solutions

Ernest Langdon taking a class from Wayne Dobbs of Hardwired Tactical Shooting

Tim Herron and Ernest Langdon have national championships under their belts and are both well-established, top-notch instructors, and they easily could have spent the spare time between the classes they were teaching hanging out in the shade and chilling, but instead they were out sitting in on classes with other instructors.

I think about that when I hear someone telling me how they're just way too cool for school...

.

Automotif CCCLVI...

Here's a 1970 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme Holiday Coupe. At some point over the last half-century it wound up with a Cutlass S badge on the nose, there, but the notchback roofline says it's a Supreme. All Cutlass S coupes had the fastback roofline.

The more formal roofline and option-heavy menu of the Supreme was Oldsmobile's attempt to horn in on some of the rapidly blossoming "personal luxury coupe" action there in the early '70s.

What does NSA Gollum say?

"What has it got in its packetses?"

Thank you, I'll be here all week. Try the veal.

.

Geardos

This looks hard and complicated. Can we talk about Glock versus 1911 instead?

So, I linked the post from Saturday morning and the one from Sunday morning over at Facebook, which has sorta become the blog's de facto comments section.

While both generated a reasonable amount of engagement and discussion, the one on aftermarket Glock 48 magazines had more comments and shares in an hour than the one on locking your damn doors did in a whole day.

Gear posts always generate more discussion than those concerning tactics, soft skills, or even actual shooting techniques. 

People will engage in endless passionate flaming internet debates over less than a tenth of an inch of bullet diameter or a quarter of an ounce of lead. On the other hand, if you want to talk about the utility of a surreptitious draw versus its possible downsides, or the importance of positive target identification even in one's own home? Crickets.

People have weird priorities.

.

Automotif CCCLV...

Of all the days I decide to go retro with a camera, using an old Canon EOS 40D and the EF-S 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS walking-around zoom lens, it's a day that a pitch-black Ferrari F458 Italia decides to go grocery shopping at Fresh Market.

I'd almost grabbed the D800 on the way out the door, with three times the resolution and greater dynamic range, to boot, too.

Ah, well. Despite being sixteen years old, the 10MP sensor in the EOS 40D will still turn out bigger, better images than can be accurately reproduced via social media after the aggressive compression these platforms use.

The 562bhp 4.5 liter direct-injection V-8 sounded glorious, even though he obviously got it nowhere near the 9,000(!) rpm redline.

. 

You have got to be s itting me.

Imagine if the dorkiest, most socially awkward dude in your IT department stumbled into a jillion dollar windfall via some fluke-y IPOs and buyout dough...

Wait, you actually don't have to imagine. https://t.co/9xflf3KZFq

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) April 10, 2023

Easter time in SoBro!

All shot yesterday with the old Canon EOS 7D & EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS lens.

.

"Hi, fren!"

Canon EOS 7D & EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS

Not a Fan, Personally...

I can provide my own "Glock w/malfunction" stock photos.

When Glock released its 10+1 capacity slimline 9x19mm pistols, the G43X and G48, it didn't take long for the aftermarket to rush a sheet metal 15-round flush-fit magazine to market.

Made by Shield Arms, they're really popular, but I remain dubious. For starters, metal aftermarket mags have been a hot mess in Glocks since the days of the USA-brand ones in the early Nineties. For another thing, Glock already makes a perfectly serviceable 15-shot compact with a 4" barrel, and it's practically the industry standard for reliability and shootability. If you want a compact 4" 9mm Glock with reliable 15-round magazines, why not just get a "widebody 48", a.k.a. the Glock 19?

Nearly every class I've attended or sat in on to photograph over the last couple years has featured someone running a G48 and having issues with aftermarket 15-rounders. At the Rangemaster Instructor Development class here in Indiana back in September of 2020, Tom Givens mentioned that he'd seen numerous students have issues with them (the topic came up because, you guessed it, a student was having issues with them.)

It looks like Dr. Sherman House isn't entirely sold on them, either:

I’m still undecided on the SHIELD magazines for the Glock 43X and 48. I know people that have success with them, but I’ve also seen a number of them fail. I chose to go with, “eleven for sure,” in my 43X, but you’re welcome to use what you like. I enjoy having the availability of a nearly 50 state legal pistol in stock configuration, but that’s my view.

If I were to go back to carrying a Glock after my Year of Living Dangerously (with a wheelgun), a Glock 48 might well be my choice...but I'd stick with the factory magazines. "Eleven for sure", indeed.

.

Magic Anti-Crime Trick!

Suppose I told you I had a magic personal protection device you could carry that would make any potential assailant have to stop twenty feet away from you and announce themselves and give you thirty seconds to a minute to prepare yourself for any possible bad intentions they may have, would you cary it?

Suppose further that it weighed nothing, didn't take up any space on your belt, in your pocket or purse, and it was free, would that make you more likely to carry it?

While a portable gizmo like this is beyond our current technological capabilities, you already have one of these devices for home invaders and other intruders! Yet a surprising number of people act like it's a huge imposition to lock their frickin' doors even when they're at home.

Ask any big city police detective and they'll tell you that the vast majority of citizen encounters with criminals in their home, especially in daytime hours, are "meeting engagements" where a burglar has entered a house they assumed to be unoccupied and ran into a homeowner who had been asleep or in the back yard or whatever. In these cases it's often a big surprise for both because the criminal had been able to stroll in rather than make a noisy forced entry.

"Force the bad guy to announce himself with this one weird trick!"

People who are willing to drag around all manner of "EDC gear" for all kinds of improbable events get all bent out of shape when told that maybe they should be keeping their doors locked, even when they're at home. It's the same puzzling reaction you get when you suggest maybe they shouldn't leave guns in their car.

It's like they acknowledge that crime exists, but only care about the kind they can solve by blazing away, rather than the kind they can prevent from happening in the first place..

Automotif CCCLIV...

The overall proportions on the Mini reboot, at least the original '01-'06 ones, are so close to the original that this thing can get well within visual range before my hindbrain recognizes that something's off about the scale.

Those early-2000s BMW-built Minis were tiny cars, but they were still nearly two feet longer than this original.

.

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #235...

Between the six-shooter, a sight with batteries, a Surefire handheld with only 500 lumens, and a pocket knife with a sub-3" blade, I was eliminated by ninjas thirty-seven times just while taking this photo.

A fellow victim of ninjas, Sherman House, has some thoughts on the 856 TORO here:

Thanks to a volatile gun industry, capacity restrictions, modern/effective defensive ammunition and more states granting either Constitutional Carry, or carry permits, there has been a big uptick in revolver sales and use. Some are calling this a REVOLVER RENAISSANCE. I think the proliferation of better/improved designs, and the simple utility of revolvers has recaptured the imagination of the shooting public, and the relatively small national firearms training community (Tom Givens estimates that the national training community that progresses past a permit class is approximately 10,000 members strong) who NEVER STOPPED using revolvers can now be public about it in ways that actually encourage revolver neophytes to join the dozens of us (literally DOZENS OF US) revolver users.

You should be reading his blog. He's a clueful dude.

.

QotD: Monomania Edition

It's all kulturkampf, all the time over there now...

Ronald Reagan used to describe conservatism as a three-legged stool, comprising social conservatives, fiscal conservatives and defense hawks. These days it looks a lot more like a pogo stick.

.

That was close...

I was looking for several boxes of .38 Special to take to the range today and they'd seemingly gone air-soluble since I'd last used them as photo props for an article in Concealment.

I was a little upset, because this was a stash of 50-rd boxes of some pretty premium stuff, like Remington 158gr +P LSWC-HP, some old 95gr +P Winchester Silvertips, and the last of my stash of 148gr Federal Gold Medal Match wadcutters.

I needed some of that for chrono testing today!

I'd about given up the search, resigning myself to the idea of giving myself a future unexpected Christmas present in some forgotten corner of the basement, garage, or attic...when I found them, right in the dining room in the box with all the other things I'd used as photo props for that story.

.

QotD: Actual Malice Edition

I really appreciate the lengths to which Kevin D. Williamson is willing to go to cushion the blow of losing P.J. O'Rourke.

One of the legal terms of art that comes up in determining “actual malice” in a libel or defamation case is “reckless disregard for the truth.” I am a former newspaper editor, not a lawyer, but if a reporter had brought me a piece and the source was a [profane 13-letter participle adjective deleted] ghost, I would fire that reporter on the spot, lament that in these civilized times I could not throw him out the [same participle] window, and write “RECKLESS DISREGARD FOR THE TRUTH” on the HR paperwork.

Reminder: Your Car is Not a Gun Safe

From The Tactical Professor:

In other relevant gunowner news, 217 guns have been stolen from cars in Nashville so far this year. ... That is 76% of the guns stolen in Davidson County, the county Nashville is located in.

If this rate continues, more than 1,000 guns will be stolen from cars in Nashville alone in 2023. Some of them will end up involved in criminals activities. This one is a no-brainer; don’t leave unsecured guns in your car. If you have to leave a gun in your car when you go to work or other prohibited places, get a car safe and use it. And certainly, don’t leave your gun in your car outside your home at night.

Every time someone brings this up, there's a certain coterie of gun owners who get all assmad and complain that they should be able to leave their guns anywhere! It's the thieves' fault for taking them! Et cetera and whatever!

Yeah, in a perfect, criminal-free world you shouldn't have to take any precautions like not leaving your gun in your car. Sure.

Of course in a perfect, criminal-free world you wouldn't need to carry a gun in the first place, so I know that their little brains can grasp the concept of "taking precautions", it's just that they apply it really selectively.

I guess you can't show off pictures of your car safe or lockbox collection to your friends on the forums.

(You ain't gotta spend a hojillion bucks on some hard-mounted biometric rapid access swoopy monstrosity. Daytime smash and grab dudes are in a hurry; they want to grab as much stuff in as little time as possible. A securely cabled lockbox is ninety percent gonna send them on to the next vehicle for easier pickings. Just pick a size that will accommodate your holstered pistol. Excess drawing and holstering is when unwanted loud noises happen.)

.

Your Daily Dose of Dada

I can't look away from the strangeness...

Twisters II: Convection Boogaloo

The tornados that came through Indiana last Friday night were enough to pretty much wipe the town of Whiteland, a southern exurb of Indy, half off the map and killed three people in Sullivan County out on the Illinois border. The next day saw straight-line winds gusting near fifty here in Broad Ripple all day long. When I walked to lunch, I did so down the middle of the street because I didn't want to get pithed like a frog by a falling limb.

The debris is nowhere cleaned up in Whiteland, and here we go again.

It's 70-some degrees on this side of the front; unseasonably warm for this time of year. Drive an hour and a half west and the temperature is ten degrees colder and falling fast. That's a recipe for another round of serious convective activity.

.

The heart wants what it wants.

Even though this wasn't full rock-and-roll 10mm, it still managed to generate a bit of pre-ignition push from me, especially when trying to go fast. Of course, some of that is because I haven't been shooting much so far this year and I'm more than a bit rusty.

That's ten rounds at the 3x5 and forty at the 8" circle, all at seven yards. The forty rounds at the 8" circle included a big, goofy mag dump with the 22-round 'stendo that FN includes with the 510 Tactical.

My head knows that 10mm doesn't bring anything to the table that can't be handled by a 9mm 124gr +P HST or Gold Dot, unless you live someplace where bears are a problem, and we don't see a lot of grizzlies in Broad Ripple...but my heart has an irrational fondness for Best Millimeter.

.

Monday Range Day

At Indy Arms Co yesterday with the FN 510 Tactical. I need to chrono some of that Armscor 180gr stuff. It felt spicier than I remember. Not, like, hunting ammo spicy, but probably running 1100fps or so.

"Tubular Repeating Claymore" or nah?

What's the best buckshot loading for home defense?

I used to favor one that "gave a bit of spread", but have since changed my mind and am an advocate of Federal FliteControl, specifically the LE133 00 load, which basically acts like a .72 caliber Glaser Safety Slug at any realistic inside-the-home distances. 

In the course of a conversation with Tom Givens, all-around smart dude Greg Ellifritz came around to the same viewpoint.

Because of the shorter ranges encountered in a home defense scenario, I’ve historically believed that a wider pattern spread would be beneficial because of the greater chance of hitting a moving target. I don’t need a 40-yard capability in a shotgun when the longest shot I can physically take in my house is a measured 12 yards. Why not open the pattern size up a little bit to increase the odds of getting a hit?

Tom convinced me that this thinking was erroneous. He was, of course, correct. Let’s talk about why a tighter pattern is better, even for short range home defense.

Go read the whole thing and see what you think.

Space Kablooie Spinoff

According to Marko, the first novel in his new Frontlines: Evolution series, Scorpio, will be dropping in November. 

The Kindle version is available for preorder now. You know how much publishers love them preorders!

.

Power Up With Sisu!

Vladimir Putin's plans continue to blow up in his face as Finland officially becomes the 31st member state of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization today.

Back in the early 2010's, I was questioning the need for NATO. I hadn't really been paying attention to the events in the Donbas, and the Euros themselves didn't seem very interested in keeping up their militaries or worried about Russia*.

But then ol' Vlad decided to become NATO salesman of the decade. Good job, Vlad.

*In retrospect, I should have taken the hint when Russia jumped froggy with Georgia (the one in the Caucasus, not the one on the way to Disney World) back in '08 during the waning days of the Dubya administration.

.

How fast is fast?

The Casino Drill from Tom Givens is a pretty good test of how well you think and shoot at the same time.

It's a 1911-neutral drill, since it only requires seven rounds in the gun to start, and two more magazines loaded with seven rounds each, for a total of twenty-one.

The target is one of those ones with the six colored shapes on it, numbered "1" through "6" (it's technically called the "DT-2A" target.) 

Stand with a holstered firearm at five yards from the target and, at the sound of the beep, fire one round at shape number 1, two rounds at shape number 2, three rounds at...you get the picture. Reload when necessary.

Par time is twenty-one seconds. This means you don't want to dawdle on your draw and slide-lock reloads.

Like I said, this test was designed with the 1911 in mind. With a striker-fired 9mm carry auto, I generally run in the twenty-point-something second range, barely under par. Maybe a little quicker if I've been doing a lot of shooting lately.

This isn't a revolver-neutral course of fire. Even a fast revolver reload is going to be slower than a middlin' decent semiauto slide-lock reload, and if you're running a six-shooter? Well, you've got a whole extra one of those slow revolver reloads in there.

Of course, if you're blazing fast with a revolver, like Caleb Giddings, that may not be that big of a deal...

21.89 with zero down and three on-the-clock revolver reloads...from speedloaders, not moon clips...is blistering. And with a plain-Jane medium-frame Taurus Model 82 with the grips wrapped in goon tape that looks like it came out of an evidence locker someplace. 

If he hadn't slightly pooched that middle reload, he might have skated under par.

If he'd been shooting a 7-shot revo, he'd have easily beaten my best auto time, and by a healthy margin.

If you want to up the difficulty or reintroduce an element of randomness that requires more thinking in the Casino Drill, you can do things like start from the number 6 target and work your way to number one. Have a friend call out whether you start on no. 1 or no. 6 right before the beep. Even better, have your friend load your magazines so that the twenty-one rounds are distributed in some different fashion than seven per mag, so that the reloads come by surprise. There are a jillion ways to introduce some added complexity.

.

QotD: The Internet is Real Life Edition...

"Social media and online writing can give us the illusion that everything we do is just words on a screen. It’s not real. Therefore, it can’t have real consequences, or so it seems.

This illusion is dangerous." -Natalya Antonova

From a good post at Natalya Mitigates the Apocalypse. (Bolded test in original.)

.

Woof.

This is Gary. Gary was on the patio at Twenty Tap on Sunday morning.

Gary likes skritchies, kiddos, and french fries. Not necessarily in that order.

The patio still has the plastic sheeting up to keep the warmth in, but I imagine it will be coming down in the next week or two. Maybe by the time NRAAM is here.

Gary was photographed with a Nikon D7100 using a 16-80mm f/2.8-4E VR DX lens.

.

Forgotten Flyer

The final evolution of the late Sixties factory aero cars...

.

QotD: AR15 Edition

The general conservative press...and its associated blogosphere...has rarely impressed me with the quality of its firearms-related content from a technical standpoint. Generally the difference between a conservative outlet and a liberal one is that while the writers for both places are largely ignorant of firearms, at least from my point of view, the conservative one at least likes them okay.

So to find Kevin D. Williamson dropping big ol' Martin Fackler quotes in his latest rebuttal to the WaPo's piece on AR-pattern rifles was a breath of fresh air.

It's a pretty decent read.

If the editors of the Washington Post really believe that speed is what makes a bullet lethal then, by all means, I invite them to take one of those high-velocity squirrel guns mentioned above—or a 5.56mm AR-style rifle, for that matter—up to Alaska to hunt some coastal grizzlies. I’d recommend doing some thorough estate planning beforehand.

All the Post has actually established is that a modestly powerful rifle is typically more powerful than a modestly powerful handgun—authoritatively disposing of a matter that has never been, as far as I can tell, in dispute.

Total Protonic Reversal

This dude doesn't sound very copacetic about the current state of AI research.

To visualize a hostile superhuman AI, don’t imagine a lifeless book-smart thinker dwelling inside the internet and sending ill-intentioned emails. Visualize an entire alien civilization, thinking at millions of times human speeds, initially confined to computers—in a world of creatures that are, from its perspective, very stupid and very slow. A sufficiently intelligent AI won’t stay confined to computers for long. In today’s world you can email DNA strings to laboratories that will produce proteins on demand, allowing an AI initially confined to the internet to build artificial life forms or bootstrap straight to postbiological molecular manufacturing.

If somebody builds a too-powerful AI, under present conditions, I expect that every single member of the human species and all biological life on Earth dies shortly thereafter.

(Big discussion in comments at LessWrong.)