...so it's got that for an upside.

Election Season '16 has propelled me to hitherto un-imagined heights of misanthropy; exposed whole new sweeping vistas of contempt...

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) March 30, 2016

Precisely as fast as a speeding bullet.

Yesterday morning I took the Canik and some ammo to the (newly remodeled! come join!) MCF&G range to do some chrono work. Three full fifty-round boxes of ammunition, plus an additional lot of odds and sods for science. The temperature at the range was 43°F when I arrived and 49°F when I left, according to the thermometer in the Bimmer.

First up, we'll start with the full metal jacket range ammo. I was curious to see the numbers that the notorious lot of CCI Blazer Brass 115gr would put up. When I saw them, I was not surprised:

LO: 1070
HI: 1123
AV: 1090
ES: 52.37
SD: 16.94

At that altitude (~790 feet ASL) and temperature, the speed of sound is just a shade under 1100fps if I'm mathing right, and most of this ten-shot string did not crack that.  In other words, CCI Blazer Brass 115gr is a light-bullet subsonic load, or at least lot # B01W44 is.

Like I noted elsewhere, the Federal American Eagle 115gr from Lucky Gunner appeared to by marginally stouter, judging by differences in the brass ejection patterns and the sound of the report. The chrono bore out my subjective impressions:

LO: 1109
HI: 1144
AV: 1128
ES: 35.15
SD: 11.18

A small difference, an average of thirty-eight feet per second, but it made all the difference in the ability of the round to function the weapon.

I also had some 124gr CCI Blazer Brass along. It was pretty tame-feeling...

LO: 1069
HI: 1142
AV: 1103
ES: 73.78
SD: 24.93

I experienced one failure-to-eject with the Blazer Brass 124gr, on round #20 of the day (#1220 of the test).

The last FMJ range-type ammo I had with me was a box of Sellier & Bellot 124gr. It was tamer than I would have suspected, given the widely-accepted "Euro ammo is always loaded hotter" meme.

LO: 1086
HI: 1122
AV: 1099
ES: 36.18
SD: 10.29

It was also freakishly consistent for inexpensive ball ammo.

Black Hills 115gr EXP

Next up: Jacketed hollow point self-defense ammunition. I'll list it in order of projectile weights, lightest to heaviest.

First up was Black Hills' offering, a standard-pressure 115gr EXP load.

LO: 1220
HI: 1258
AV: 1239
ES: 38.13
SD: 13.03

Those are some pretty respectable numbers, especially in light of the next round in line, Remington's 115gr +P HTP ("High Terminal Performance") jacketed hollow point:

LO: 1206
HI: 1252
AV: 1223
ES: 46.60
SD: 17.08

Note that the standard pressure Black Hills is slightly hotter than the Remington, despite the latter being labeled and sold as "+P".

Now for the real "+P": Federal's legendary 115gr +P+ JHP, the 9BPLE load that everybody lusted after in the Nineties...

LO: 1276
HI: 1305
AV: 1290
ES: 29.18
AV: 8.42

Speaking of freakish consistency, that's outstanding uniformity from a light bullet driven that hard.

Now a standard-pressure 124gr loading, the Federal 124gr Hydra-Shok JHP, which claims an 1120fps muzzle velocity on the box flap...

LO: 1043
HI: 1089
AV: 1054
ES: 46.01
SD: 13.60

Not quite 1120fps, there...

Last up, Federal's P9HST2 147gr HST Tactical load, the only hollow point in this test that was both designed in this millennium and is on DocGKR's approved list.

LO: 956.3
HI: 993.6
AV: 969.7
ES: 37.29
SD: 12.36

Good, consistent numbers typical of Federal quality control on their Premium lines, but...

...the long overall length and blunt prow seemed to disagree with the feed geometry of the TP9v2. Out of a box of fifty rounds, I experienced two identical failures-to-feed, on rounds #112 and #125 of the session (#1312 and #1325 of the test.) Both fed with a simple "tap-rack", but I'd consider this round no bueno for carry in this pistol.

I may have mentioned that the rear sight is a little...busy...on this pistol. Here's a pic. It's definitely slower for me to pick up when trying to shoot at even moderate speed on tight targets.

Anyway, the Canik has now fired 1410 rounds without cleaning or lubing and experienced nine failures to eject and nine failures to feed in the initial fifty, as well as one failure to fire (#221), one failure to lock the slide back (#350), four more failures to eject (#323, #379, #997, #1220), and two more failures to feed (#1312, #1325). 590 rounds to go.
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#wheelgunwednesday? I'll play!

Riffing off @ShootingIllustr, here's @SmithWessonCorp Model 544 in .44/40 for #wheelgunwednesday... pic.twitter.com/vC1ZuUelxG

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) March 30, 2016

Community Policing...

MattG engages in some.
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Magazines...

The Canik shipped with two 18-rd magazines, and I purchased a third at Indy Arms Co.

While both the mags that came with the gun and the one sold separately had identical markings indicating that they were made by Mec-Gar for Canik, the magazines themselves had subtle differences.

The magazine on the left is the one bought solo. Notice it has a polished blue finish, as opposed to the semigloss matte finish on the one that came with the gun.

The one on the left has numbered witness holes, unlike the ones that shipped with the pistol.

Lastly, the one bought individually has the company crest on the floorplate, while the one on the right does not.

Dimensionally the two types of mags seem to be identical, and the followers appear to be the same.
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Inadvertent Facebook Experiment

This AM's conclusion on the Internet's order of preference:
1. Cat memes
...
3. Gun pictures
...
...
...
27. Talking about shooting.

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

Product Placement

I'm not saying I moved S.W.A.T. Magazine to the front row of the magazine rack at the local drug store, but I'm not saying as I didn't, either. The column on p.96 is awesome. Y'all should read it.
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Monday morning...

...it was back to Indy Arms Co. with the Canik TP9v2 and another two hundred rounds of Lucky Gunner's Federal American Eagle 115gr FMJ.

The UpLULA is only needed to get the eighteenth round in the magazine now, and not all the time, at that.

Started with fifty rounds in the top left. I'm still working on the new grip, and it seems a little more fatiguing. Moving counter-clockwise, you can see things deteriorate as my support hand got more tired. I decided to leave on a positive note and ran the target back in to five yards and hammered the bejeezus out of the dot while flirting with the range's speed limit. The rear sight is awful busy.

There were no malfunctions of any type to report.

The Canik has now fired 1200 rounds without cleaning or lubing and experienced nine failures to eject and nine failures to feed in the initial fifty, as well as one failure to fire (#221), one failure to lock the slide back (#350), and three more failures to eject (#323, #379, #997). 800 rounds to go.
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QotD: Euphemism edition...

I would have happily emptied Miss King's ashtrays for years to have penned this. You'll be half a sentence past it before you realize the knife's gone in, and then you have to back up a phrase and just look at it, admiringly....

"Giving one’s memoirs a title that has to be explained must be a status symbol among the leftist literati. First there was Lillian Hellman’s Pentimento; now comes Gore Vidal’s Palimpsest. Miss Hellman’s title at least sounded pretty, but Maître Vidal’s sounds like an arcane sexual practice involving an inflated condom that explodes like the Hindenburg in the tradesmen’s entrance of some hired Apollo, sending ecstasy and other things washing over Maître Vidal." -Florence King

Tab Clearing

• Hobo nickel


• Magna Graecia, which you can explore with the detective Marcus Didius Falco in Shadows in Bronze.


• Lawdog in fine form.

They're multiplying!

I was recently gifted this lovely Nikon S. Unfortunately, it has succumbed to the vicissitudes of age and needs a new shutter curtain and a CLA (Cleaning, Lubrication, Adjustment) if ever it is going to take photos again.

Email me if you have a recommended camera gnome for these services. It's probably easier to find a farrier these days.
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Farce.

The worst thing about this whole election season so far is that Hunter S. Thompson and Florence King are too dead to make fun of it.

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

I mean, this is comedy gold, here.
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P250 two thousand round wrapup (pic heavy)

So the P250C in .380ACP has run through its full two thousand rounds. The gun hasn't physically loosened up enough to notice, and no parts fell off. Let's field strip it and see what it looks like.

I'll note that it got vile enough that I had to wipe the front sight blade so that the white dot & tritium vial were usable.

Rear frame rails, hammer, and slide stop are all visible here. Nothing showed any unusual wear in this area.

Front frame rails and the axle that the bottom barrel lug cams against. Everything's in order here, too, but filthy.

The underside of the slide, barrel, and recoil spring assembly. Pardon the slide looking bent; that's an artifact of the fact that the Nikon P7000 can get sketchy in the focus department while in macro mode unless the lens is at the widest angle setting.

 Muzzle crown is dirty...

 ...as is the feed ramp and barrel hood.

The extractor claw was still good and the breechface was fine.

I'll clean it, lube it, and probably shoot it a little more before taking it to a class in April. Also thinking about frame stippling, and maybe a caliber exchange kit.

To recap the round count, the P250C .380 went through 2002 rounds without being cleaned or lubricated, with one failure to go completely into battery (#447) and one failure to fire (#1578). Ammo fired included the following brands of FMJ: TulAmmo, Fiocchi, Magtech, Sig Sauer, Remington, Federal, and Sellier & Bellot. Additionally, a few rounds of Hornady Critical Defense and Barnes TAC-XPD were fired, mostly for the chrono results.
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Rabbit People

University professor sees cadets in uniform with guns, loses her $#!+, calls 911. Hilarity ensues. It got her all worked up enough to write a letter to the newspaper...

I look up from my office computer to see two figures in camo with guns outside my window. My first thought is for my students' and my safety: I grab my phone, crawl under my desk and call 911. The dispatcher keeps me on the line until someone can see if ROTC is doing maneuvers.

I can barely talk—first, with fear, and then with rage when the dispatcher reports back that yes, in fact, I've probably just seen ROTC cadets, though they're going to send an officer to check because no one has cleared it with them. They thank me for reporting it.

A few minutes later, a university officer calls me back—not to reassure me, but to scold me for calling 911. He says ROTC has permission to do this exercise. When I tell him that this was news to 911 and that they encouraged me to call whenever I see a gun on campus, he seems surprised.

He also tells me that ROTC will be doing these exercises for the next couple weeks.

So I reply that I guess I'll be calling 911 for the next couple weeks—and I will. Every time.

You have to wonder about someone so absolutely blind to irony. She swears up and down that she's going to call 911 every time she sees a gun on campus, even in the hands of ROTC. So, suppose she gets her wish and the cops do show up? Is she going to call 911 when she sees their guns, too?

You have to wonder how a quivering mass of jell-o like that works up the nerve to peer out from under her blanket fort every morning.

And bear in mind that this wasn't in some soft, toothless corner of the northeast or one of the squishier coastal enclaves on the shores of the Pacific! No, this took place in hairy-chested North Dakota, albeit in one of those ink blots of California/New York/Massachusetts that are spreading across our fair land...

(H/T to Weaponsman)

LOL of the Day...

To quote Instapundit: "Heh."
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Still not in my world...

Puff piece on electric cars going on the TV in the next room. The newsreader is breathless about how new models will change everything, since some of them have a range of two hundred miles!

Hey that's great; that'll get me halfway to Knoxville, leaving me a sad panda somewhere around Lexington, Kentucky. I could get a hotel room and plug in, of course, turning a five-hour drive into a two-day slog.

Thing is, I gas up the Bimmer in Lexington anyway, since it's well below the half-tank mark by that point. But that full tank takes five minutes and usually covers all my driving around in Knoxville for the week I'm there, too.
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Media Bias

The biggest hurdle to researching anything about Carthage is that the bulk of surviving written history was written by Romans. This is like being in the year 4170 and trying to research the Soviet Union with only old copies of The New American as research material, or researching the Bush administration using nothing but the HuffPo archives to draw on.

The Roman republic practically invented the concept of "just war", bellum iustum,  and were very conscious of the need to make sure that the bad guys were understood to be bad guys. Also, at the time of the Punic Wars, Rome was still very much in love with its self-image as a republic of yeoman farmers, although there was hardly any farm dirt left on its citified hobnailed sandals by then. The mercantile empire of the Carthaginians, based on buying stuff one place and moving it someplace else to sell, looked effete and decadent to their eyes. If you want to know that the Romans thought of the Carthaginians, all you have to do is look at the Ferengi characters on Star Trek.
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Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #142...

From last Tuesday morning, a Brethren Arms semiauto MP-5 clone. With a GoPro picatinny mount for making your own first-person shooters...

It was a fun morning, full of this sort of thing...

Hitting the target market...

Here in America, land of the lawsuit, our ammunition manufacturers generally adhere to the maximum chamber pressure guidelines set forth by the Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers' Institute, or SAAMI. (Its international equivalent would be the Commission Internationale Permanente pour l'Epreuve des Armes à Feu Portatives, or CIP.)

One area of difference between the two is how the 9x19mm (9mm Luger or Parabellum) cartridge is handled. SAAMI's spec is conservative by several thousand PSI, because it was adopted with an eye toward all manner of Doughboy and GI bringback guns, including guns like the Glisenti, which might not really be up to firing full-steam 9x19 loads without turning into pipe bombs.

Soft-shooting SAAMI-spec 9mm probably helped cement the reputations of many war trophy bringback pistols as unreliable jammomatics, which brings us to the current test of the Canik TP9v2. It has had issues with both CCI Blazer Brass 115gr FMJ and, now, Federal American Eagle 115gr FMJ. Both are loads that are within SAAMI spec and have functioned fine in all the pistols in which I've tried them. (The Blazer Brass is actually the standard range ammo at Indy Arms Co. and functions just fine in all the rental guns.)

So here's the thing: You're importing a gun from Turkey and are planning on selling it at a bargain price. Do you think that people who can only afford to shell out $340 or so for a pistol are going to want to shop around to find ammo that will reliably function their weapon, or are they going to expect it to run with whatever SAAMI-spec ammunition they buy?

This is reminding me of the early days of the HS2000, which eventually became the XD after Springfield Armory swooped in and snatched the import rights away from Intrac back in Knoxville. You've gotta be wondering if someone's waiting in the wings to pull the Canik away from Century and give it a flashy name, an ad campaign, a solid warranty program, and about two pounds less recoil spring.
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Halfway point reached.

Around lunch time today, I turned up at Indy Arms Co. with two hundred rounds of the Federal American Eagle 115gr FMJ provided by Lucky Gunner. I purchased a couple of targets and headed out to lane four.

Still working with the new grip. That's fifty rounds in the upper grouping and a hundred in the lower.

I had somehow never shot a Casino Drill before. I decided to play with the target off the clock for the last fifty round box.

(The Casino Drill is from Tom Givens at Rangemaster. Three magazines with seven rounds in each mag; twenty one rounds at twenty one feet. One shot on target #1, two on #2, three on #3, et cetera... reloading as necessary.)

On the 197th round of the day (#997 of the test) the pistol experienced a failure to eject. While hotter than the CCI Blazer Brass, the American Eagle is 115gr budget range fodder as well, and I figured that it would have at least some issues with running the gun. I haven't tried, but I'll bet I could limp-wrist the gun at will with the AE9DP loads.

The Canik has now fired 1000 rounds without cleaning or lubing and experienced nine failures to eject and nine failures to feed in the initial fifty, as well as one failure to fire (#221), one failure to lock the slide back (#350), and three more failures to eject (#323, #379, #997). 1,000 rounds to go.
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