If all the other kids jumped off a bridge with Perazzis?

I would not use the people with the double-barrel ballistic golf clubs as models of firearms safety.

Yeah, they've made shoe buttons for a long time. Almost as long as they've made heroin. Both assist in forming bad habits.
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Overheard in the Office...

RX: "You know, when the Orthogons attack, it's from a completely unexpected direction."

0900 and that's pretty well guaranteed to be the nerdiest joke I'll hear all day.

See this? Don't do this?

“We have a lot of people outside our house, yelling and shouting profanities,” he said. “I yelled at them, ‘Please leave the premises.’ They were showing a firearm, so I fired a warning shot and, uh, we got somebody that got hit.”

“Someone was shot?” the operator asked.

“Well, I don’t know if they were shot or not, ma’am,” he told her. “I fired my warning shot like I’m supposed to by law. They do have firearms, and I’m trying to protect myself and my family.”

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/crime/article94248182.html#storylink=cpy

This dude messed up by the numbers, killed a man, and wrecked his life and his family's life, in addition to those of his victim and his victim's family, all because he was stupid and believed a lot of the sort of BS self-defense advice you pick up from well-meaning ignorant morons in gun stores and on the internet.

Folks, self defense with a firearm is no joke. This is life and death stuff right here; it literally does not get more serious than that. With great power comes great accountability.
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Forgotten Weapons, and I don't mean the Ian kind.

A disproportionate number of guns seized by the TSA are little pink or purple autochuckers, which tells me that they were probably either bought as gifts, or under spousal pressure, or as an impulsive reaction to a crime story on the news, then thrown into the bottom of a purse and forgotten until found by the TSA. These are the same sorts of guns that occasionally kill toddlers.

One time, on my way out to New Hamster, I checked out the “Seized Last Week” scare poster at the head of the TSA line and it sported a photo of an RTF2 Glock 19 with a Surefire X300 U-boat. Now THAT was a sad camper whose story I’d like to hear...
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Hardware report...

The gun I used in class was this Gen2 Glock 17. It had 1,051 rounds in the book since I bought it with no malfunctions in the last 1,000+ (since I replaced the goofy trigger that the previous owner had put in it.)

The only two changes I made to the gun before class were adding the Overwatch Precision TAC trigger and NY1 trigger spring, and moving my T&E Gadget from my Glock 19 carry gun to this one.

I think if you're going to be going into and out of a CCW holster with a Glock dozens, if not hundreds, of times over the course of a weekend and have access to a Gadget, you'd be a fool not to use it.

Also, there was an inadvertently funny Gadget advertisement. In order to demonstrate how anemic handguns actually are, as well as how easy it is to make even the most reliable ones choke, Tom asked if anyone in the class was shooting a Glock 17. I was the only one to raise my hand, and so I forked my pistol over to be used for the demo.

Before I realized that "Um, maybe my gun's not the one to use for this particular demo," he had his thumb on the back of the slide to prove that it could be held shut by thumb pressure alone while it was fired. He was yanking on the trigger as hard as he could with no effect when someone piped up with "It's got a Gadget on it."

D'oh! I'd gotten so used to it that I hadn't even thought about it.

I had a couple-three FTE's on day one and two more early on day two, mostly due to a poor grip with a sweaty paw and low-powered ammo. There was (as I expected) one failure-to-fire with hard-primered Russian ammo.

I'll note that with my Glocks and the Sig Sauer P320, I expect a failure to fire every several hundred rounds of Russian ammo, whereas with the Steyr C9 I was getting them at a rate of one-in-fifty.

Very happy with the Overwatch Precision trigger. The flat face makes it very obvious if you have your finger out of place; fantastic feedback.

Counting the Federal HSTs that were in the gun on day one, which got blown downrange in the name of putting fresh BBs in the gun at the end of class, I expended 872 rounds of ammunition. (That'd be all the empty boxes in the picture above.)

The gun earned a cleaning, and is still in my holster until I can get around to cleaning and lubing my Glock 19 and moving the Gadget back to it.
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Wehraboo becomes Wehrabubba...

I suppose that the swastika armband that was also lifted off the dead Nazi general who was carrying this Luger has vanished. They usually have.

One thing I have learned from decades of seeing Lugers come into gun stores is that every single one of them was lifted off a dead Nazi general, along with his swastika armband, which is now missing.

The western front in ’44-’45 was apparently manned by entire divisions of Luger-wielding generals wearing red swastika armbands, which must have made camouflage difficult.

Hydrate or Die

The humidity needle lying on the bottom of the dial is a nice touch.

You want to drink plenty of water and remember your sunscreen when you're running around all day like this. Especially if you're a squishy and out of shape sedentary type like I seem to have become.

I drank four or five liters of water, plus a couple sodas, each day. In retrospect, that probably wasn't enough. I was definitely falling behind the power curve at the end of day one. Day two was better.
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You can't improve what you don't measure.

There are countless self-defense-oriented handgun classes out there these days that purport to teach you the skills required to use a handgun in a stressful life-or-death environment, or to take the pistol skills you already have and refine them or make them better.

In a distressing number of these classes, you will never shoot to a par time, have a score on a target tallied, be ranked against your fellow students or even assessed against your own performance at the start of the class.

A 271 on the Rangemaster Bullseye Course.

So how do you know you haven't just wasted several hundred dollars, several hours of your life, and several hundred rounds of ammunition? I mean, you can go shoot at the range on your own time and not get scored or graded and only be out the range fee. Sure, you think you've learned stuff, but can you demonstrate what you learned? Can you prove it?

"Well, there's no timer in a gunfight!"

No, but there's some guy trying to kill you and you need to make him stop before he gets finished doing it.

"There're no scoring rings on a bad guy!"

No, but there are a distressingly few square inches on a human body where a pistol bullet is going to have any noticeable effect in the space of seconds that we are talking about, here. As Tom Givens wryly put it this weekend, "Can shooting the guy in the stomach kill him? Sure, but probably not in your lifetime."

Mike Grasso's edge-on 2x4 hidden by a tee shirt starts to gain a whole new relevance when you think of it like that.

If the trainer is not grading your performance, is not measuring your skills against your peers and/or your own performance baseline at the start of the class, it's generally for one of two reasons:

1. They're probably not as clueful as they think they are.
2. They don't want to hurt the feelings of customers because that cuts down on repeat business and good word of mouth.

Sadly, the latter is as common as the former; it's the "Everybody Gets A Ribbon" culture as applied to gunfighting. Except everybody doesn't get a ribbon in a gunfight, unless you count a toe tag as a ribbon.
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Tore up from the floor up.

Gun school in August in the Midwest...at least it wasn't quite as humid Saturday and Sunday as it had been over the previous week. The sun was merciless and, while I haven't counted yet, I'd guess I probably busted about nine hundred caps over two days.

Yesterday evening I got back to the motel room in Goshen after a delicious dinner served family-style at Amish Acres in Napanee, sat down at my computer to write stuff...and...and...I woke up an hour and forty-five minutes later still sitting upright in the chair. I took a soak and went to bed and then did it all over again today.

I will write more tomorrow and the rest of this week as stuff occurs to me, but for now, I think I'm going to enjoy some mindless video game fun or something...
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Gun School Time!

Off to start day one of a two-day Intensive Pistol Skills class w/Tom & Lynn Givens.

Usual gun school objectives are in effect:

1. Don't set myself (or anybody else) on fire.
2. Learn something.

Wish me luck!
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Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #148...

Function checking ammo for a class this weekend. #glock #glock17 #9mmglock #phlster #overwatchprecision #magpul #robarcustomguns #fiocchi #indyarmsco #pewpewlife

A photo posted by Tamara Keel (@tamarakeel) on Aug 3, 2016 at 8:44am PDT

I'm not a huge Olympics fan, but...

I do enjoy watching the US women's soccer team totally, completely, casually pwn the rest of the world at the one sport every other country on the globe desperately wishes we'd give half of a fuck about.

Oh, and it's fun trying to figure out where they sewed the antigravity belt in Simone Biles' leotard.
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Overheard in the Office...

Presented without context...

RX: "Yeah, I almost wanted you to come along and ȴѳճԟ ͳ the guy, take his temperature..."

Me: "'LICK' the guy?!"

RX: "'LOOK AT' the guy! Are you deaf?"

Me: "Whew. I was wondering what that was supposed to accomplish. *slurp* 'He tastes kinda salty and...'" *mimes feeling someone's forehead* "'...he feels pretty warm.'"

Fifty More

Wednesday morning I ran another box of fifty Sig Sauer 180gr FMJ through the Glock 20.

I tried it at fifteen yards, which...have I mentioned how I hate the factory sights?...was a little disappointing. I'm sure the gun was fine and the suck and fail was all mine. UPLULA is still helpful getting that fifteenth round into the magazine.

There were no malfunctions of any type to report.

This makes 680 rounds since the Glock 20 was cleaned or lubricated, with two failures to feed (#401, #454) and one failure to fire (#598). 1320 rounds to go.
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"High Capacity"

Elbert Searle's .32 self-loader design for Savage was a pretty futuristic pistol for its time. The double-column ten-round magazine was hyped heavily in advertising...

...as well it should be, when you see other contemporary methods used to try and get more than the usual seven or eight rounds into a pistol mag.
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Moving Notice

Longtime columnist and Friend of S.W.A.T., Claire Wolfe, has moved her writings to her new blog site: Check it out!https://t.co/e6OUBbRhKf

— SWAT Magazine (@SWATmagazine) August 5, 2016

Can't brain today. Have the dumbs.

So I spent the last few days putting the finishing touches on two columns and a feature article and sending them off to make sure editors cancelled the hit contracts they'd doubtlessly taken out on me by now.

That's *scribbles on back of envelope* a little over three thousand words total, and it's left me drained. I mean, if you scraped the bottom of my brain pan right now, you might find some loose syllables and a spare consonant or two, but I ain't got any whole words left in the tank. It's going to take time to grow a fresh crop.

Now, my friends who are real writers? Three thousand words would be a slow day for them. Mad respect for that.
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Click Click Boom

A hundred rounds worth of 10mm fun was had on the indoor range at Indy Arms Co. yesterday morning. It says something about the difference between Sig Sauer's 10mm FMJ loading and most other commercial 10mm FMJ loads that I make a point of shooting the Sig first, while I'm still fresh.

I got one "click" instead of a "bang" from a round of S&B ammo, on round number 68 of the day (#598 of the test). Always a risk with hard primers and striker-fired guns, and in my experience, S&B primers are harder than woodpecker lips. The round ignited on the second try.

There were no other malfunctions to report.

This makes 630 rounds since the Glock 20 was cleaned or lubricated, with two failures to feed (#401, #454) and one failure to fire (#598). 1370 rounds to go.
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Passing five hundred...

Range trip to Marion County Fish & Game yesterday noonish to do some chrono work with the Glock 20 for a couple loadings I hadn't measured yet.

First up was the 180gr FMJ load from Sellier & Bellot.

LO: 1088
HI: 1115
AV: 1102
ES: 26.79
SD: 9.00

So, basically your typical 10mm commercial ball ammo: Hotter than .40S&W, but nothing to shake your fillings loose.

The numbers from the Sig Sauer Elite Performance 180gr FMJ were as much spicier as the felt recoil would indicate:

LO: 1172
HI: 1203
AV: 1188
ES: 31.23
SD: 12.40

Most of a hundred feet per second faster than the S&B, and you don't stand around wondering if the gun went off, either. I'll note that this pretty well echoes the numbers of the 180gr V-crown JHP offering from Sig, making it a legit practice load, and it's priced pretty aggressively, too.

After the chrono work, I spent the rest of the range session shooting steel at about twenty yards. I didn't have any paint with me, and that center target was hard to pick up in a hurry. I did have one failure to feed with round #24 of the day (#454 of the test) that may have been caused by limp-wristing the gun. I was concentrating hard on sight alignment and trigger control and was holding it pretty loosely when this happened:

There were no other malfunctions to report.

This makes 530 rounds since the Glock 20 was cleaned or lubricated, with two failure to feed (#401, #454). 1470 rounds to go.
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Overheard in the Office...

"'Pay My Bill'...What do you mean 'Page Not Found'? Why are you making it difficult to give you money? 'Click Back Button'? Okay...oh, there's all my stuff. Do I want to use the stored card? Yes. That's the whole reason I stored it, you knobs. Would I like to sign up for auto pay? No, I like sticking needles in my eyeballs like this on the first of every month..."