I can barely keep up with this anymore...

This just in: Joe Scarborough says he's leaving the Republican party:

.@JoeNBC announced that he's leaving #GOP to become an Independent. @StephenAtHome's full interview with Joe and @morningmika airs tonight! pic.twitter.com/OhLgXvYakH

— The Late Show (@colbertlateshow) July 11, 2017

In other news: Apparently Joe Scarborough was a member of the Republican party.

Also, MSNBC is apparently unhappy with the way Trump tweeted at their talking heads:

MSNBC responded to that incident with a statement: "It's a sad day for America when the president spends his time bullying, lying and spewing petty personal attacks instead of doing his job." 

To hear their clucking disapproval, you'd think that Trump had hoisted Scarborough up off the ground by his ears and then showed Mika his gallbladder scar.
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Here's something...

I have some stuff I want to natter about, but first I have to go bust caps at the range so I can put this FN 509 review to bed for Shooting Illustrated and then I have a couple errands to run, but there will be bloggery committed later.

In the meantime, in lieu of thinky, have some linky: Go check out this dude's blog.
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Christmas in July!

Amazon wants us to spend a lot of money on Prime Day. I need to check to see if there's anything I can't live without.
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...and Sunday's shooting...

I have decided that weekends are for shooting my own stuff. I can do work shooting on weekdays. Sunday saw another hundred rounds of TulAmmo sent downrange through the Gen3 19.

I started out shooting at the upper target box at seven yards, at about the pace I'd use on the 3x5 in a FAST...call it .6 or .7-ish splits. Then I backed it out to ten yards and shot the bulk of the ammo at the lower target, trying to push speed at ten. There were no malfunctions, and the gun now has 4,144 rounds through it.

Overheard in the Kitchen...

I come wandering into the kitchen, singing the theme song to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air...

Me: "♫...I got in one little fight and my mom got scared, and said 'You're moving with your auntie and uncle in Bel-Air'♫... I have no idea how I remembered all that. It's not like I ever watched the show."

RX: "It's your lifelong secret crush on Will Smith."

Me: "Stuff White People Like: Will Smith."

Saturday, Caturday, Gaturday...

I think Huck had the right idea for Saturday, nevertheless I saddled up and headed over to the range.

The weather was glorious, with temps in the mid-70s and low humidity. A few puffy white clouds to add some texture to a mostly clear blue sky... It's weather such as this that makes one mighty happy to be able to drop the top on a roadster.

Shooting at Indy Arms Co. was mostly just for fun, using the Gen3 Glock 19 that used to be my carry gun. It's the one I used to do the first "2k round" series of posts here on the blog.

I put a hundred rounds through the gun, working on pulling the trigger faster. I'm getting the hang of it slowly, but it demands that the grip not be all jacked up. Incidentally, this range trip put the gun over the 4,000-round mark, at 4,044 rounds. It ran fine.
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This modern world...

You can be pondering the infinite in The Smallest Room and ask your phone what year Jeff Cooper was born, and it will answer you.

What a fascinating modern world in which we live!

Ugh.

After not walking on Friday, and generally wasting the day in a funk (other than that range trip) I had a pretty productive weekend. Got some writing done, went out to lunch with Bobbi, got the lawn mowed, and got to bed shortly after ten last night with the intention of bouncing out of bed on a Monday morning and doing my walking first thing.

Instead I sprang wide awake at 3:30AM and could not get back to sleep for the life of me. I lay in bed reading as the hands on the clock spooled steadily toward the 6AM alarms.

I wrote off this morning as a bad idea and went back to sleep and finally got a couple (mostly) solid hours from eight to ten.

Have to go to the range now. More later.
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Friday...

I'm thinking a couple of these Case Club cases could really improve my life. There's an 8-pistol one with rolling wheels and some stowage space for ammo and such that would be just the heat for longer trips, such as Blogorado or visiting New Hamster. Meanwhile, this four pistol one is earmarked for holding whatever configuration my Sigs are currently in.

So, I did some fun shooting on Friday over at Indy Arms Co., with my former CCW Gen3 Glock 19 and my pimped-out P320 Compact, as well as .22LR Sig P250 Compact I picked up from CDNN. (They're still selling these things for under three bills, and they're fully compatible with centerfire Caliber X-change Kits. That .22LR compact's trigger group has been dropped into a full-size .357SIG and a 9mm compact.)

First I fired the deuce-deuce at the 2" circles and 1" square at three yards, by way of warming up and concentrating on pulling the DAO trigger smoothly. Next, the Glock 19 at the 3x5 upper target at seven yards went about like I expected.

Finally was the P320 Compact at the 8" circle at seven yards, trying to work on some speed. It was hot on the range, since it was muggy and rainy outside and there's no way that the HVAC unit could keep ahead of the rate of air exchange. The Boresight Solutions frame made a big difference in controllability in my sweaty paws, relative to the stock Gen3 Glock frame, which is pretty bar-of-soap-y in wet hands. The Grayguns trigger is a delight. The Dawson sights are making me think about skinnier front sights on all the things...

A money-saving proposal!

So, with a good chunk of my adopted home state lying athwart the area of the country known as "The Rust Belt", it's probably no surprise that Indiana punches slightly above its weight in drug overdose deaths.

From 2011 to 2013, Indiana had the fifteenth highest rate of deaths from drug overdoses among U.S. states, at sixteen per hundred thousand Hoosiers. We're only the seventeenth most populous state, and hardly a hotbed of hedonism and other assorted whoop-te-do, but the nation's overdose center of gravity seems to have shifted.

The most statistically common place to go on a final nod these days is not a trendy loft in Soho, but rather in a split-level midwestern ranch a few blocks down from the shuttered wheel bearing factory, or a single-wide in the mobile home park across the tracks from the defunct curtain rod plant.

Anyway, Indiana has decided to open five more Opioid Addiction Treatment Centers in various small cities around the state.

One of these small cities is Lafayette, which is a city I'd think was doing pretty good, economically speaking. They've got the Subaru plant, Caterpillar, TRW, and others, as well as being right across the river from the sprawling Purdue University campus.

Another reason I'd think they were doing pretty good is that they apparently want to build a new $16M dollar home for their Lafayette Aviators, a Prospect League team.

Funding for this new pine tar cathedral is supposed to come from the local Economic Development Income Tax. I think this shows a lack of imagination. Why not glom onto some of that sweet state payola for the Opioid Addiction Treatment Center and build a dual-purpose facility? You could employ the inpatient addicts to hawk peanuts and take tickets during game times, and as groundskeepers between games, as long as nobody tried to snort the third base line.

The junkies could learn a trade and the ball park gets cheap labor. You could bunk them down in the press box or the visiting team's clubhouse.

Multi-use developments are all the rage these days, anyway.
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I've had better days.

Check back for bloggery tomorrow. Maybe I'll be funny again.
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Knight's Fork

So, a new piece of legislation has been introduced in Congress: The Silencers Help Us Save Hearing Act ("SHUSH", get it?) that would move to completely deregulate suppressors at the federal level. This would make cans just another firearms accessory as far as the feds were concerned, which is of little consolation to those in states with their own suppressor laws, but a big deal for the rest of us.

This is the more radical fork of the Hearing Protection Act, which has now been rolled into the broader SHARE bill. Personally, I'd love it if they both passed, but if I had to pick one, I'd hope that the new SHUSH act draws all the heated opposition away from SHARE, and here's why: Which would you rather have:

• Suppressors completely de-regulated and the Sporting Purposes Clause of GCA '68 left intact? Or...


• Suppressors moved to Title I (treated as regular firearms, w/a 4473) and the Sporting Purposes Clause of GCA '68 repealed? Remember that the Sporting Purposes Clause is the underpinnings for everything from the ridiculous BATFE "Points System" for imported handguns to the hated 922(r) regulations.

Yeah, me too.

So now we have SHUSH playing the heavy, making SHARE look reasonable. Knight's fork.
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Well...

The MP5K-PDW is a Tokyo Marui airsoft electric gun, and the "grenade" is a lighter... But the rockets are real rockets, so there's that.

Well, half of it's faker than dammit, but the fireworks are real! 😄

A post shared by Tamara Keel (@tamarakeel) on Jul 4, 2017 at 8:09pm PDT

In case you're not feeling very rebellious...

...the following .pdf link contains the instructions for my fellow Hoosiers to pop off fireworks today while avoiding any imperial entanglements.

LINK TO IN.GOV FIREWORKS LAW .PDF

Note that today's hours, like those on New Year's Eve, Memorial Day, and Labor Day, run an extra hour.

We had enough bottle rockets, small fountains, and sparklers left over from last year to make a pretty good fifteen minutes of fun on the front walk, but I went ahead and picked up some 8-oz. rockets and colored sparklers from the local gypsy fireworks joint just in case.
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Hey, Look!

I have a new piece up at Breach Bang Clear!

You should go read it and share it with the people you know who point guns at themselves. Preferably while they're eating, just to get the point across. (Yeah, there're some bloody pictures, but it's for a good cause.)

Happy You're Not The Boss Of Me Day!

Keep that 'Merican spirit alive and rebel a little harder today. Also, fireworks. It's a known fact that the king of England doesn't like them, so be sure to set a bunch off.
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Overheard at the Grocery Store...

Cashier: "How are you this evening, Ma'am?"

Me: "On a scale of One to Bald Eagle, how 'Merican are you feeling today?"

Sometimes the Personal isn't Political.

So, when I mentioned getting the cordless electric lawnmower, commentary on the Bookface (as well as my email inbox) trended heavily toward the "Y'all don't seem like godless vegan commie hippies. Why the electric mower instead of a 'Murrican-engined one?" sort.

Because the only reason one could possible want an electric power tool is because politics, apparently, and not because one doesn't want to mess with the vagaries of small combustion engines, rope starts, dealing with the total abortions that are currently sold as gas cans, or other pragmatic reasons.

I mean, from a pragmatic point of view, now that battery and motor tech has gotten to the point that cordless electric lawnmowers are possible, for a yard a small as ours? It's worth it to me for the convenience cost.

But when everything is viewed through the lens of politics, you get stuff like this:

"The way I look at it, wanting to buy an electric vehicle (airborne or road) is virtue signalling.  Wanting to sell an electric vehicle is more like the old quote, "there's a another one born every minute."  You want to spend money to feel good?  We'll be more than happy to take your money!"

So, the only reason somebody would want to buy an electric car is for virtue signalling? (This is kind of funny, since the comment by SiG is, in fact, virtue signalling to his own tribe...)

First, the electric car has come of age, at least as an urban/suburban commuter. It means that never again does the city or suburban driver have to go to a gas station or convenience store, which are, let's face it, the watering holes on the Serengeti of crime.

Second, the Tesla seems to be marketed pretty well as...well, an urban commuter rocketship.

"But, Tam! You can't take roadtrips in it!" In my experience, people in the Tesla-buying bracket usually fly, anyway. And when they do take roadtrips, they do so in rented vehicles so as not to run up the miles on their POV.

Hell, some people who live in cities don't even have cars, which I find weird, but it's a (mostly) free country.

The Tesla's not the kind of car for me, but that's because I'm poor and need my own vehicle to be able to run to Texas as well as it runs to the corner store.

What I want to know is how many of the people who hold this anti-electric point of view are willing to go all the way, and replace the hippie vegan battery packs on their electric toothbrushes and razors with these? How come nobody uses gasoline-powered drills? Ya bunch of granola-smoking commies!
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Waiting...

...for the sun to get far enough in its track that the front yard is in the shade before I start mowing. It's going to be warm out, but the dew point will only be 55°F (temp in the mid 80s, humidity in the high 30% range) so it should be downright pleasant in the shade.

Grass should be dry enough to bag easily and not clog the chute.

Mowing is a chore I actually kind of like, because progress is so visible.
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Unconventional Glocks...

This is a project that is just now getting underway, so this post is kind of a preview. It's my Gen3 Glock 20 with the grip chopped to take Glock 29 magazines. Call it a "G29L".

Flash Thunderworks in Knoxville did the work, which includes stippling, a high hand cut, removing the finger grooves, and a grip reduction, among other things. The gun sports an SSVi Tyr trigger and a Leupold Deltapoint Pro. I'll do a more detailed post on the gun shortly...

Friday I met up at Indy Arms Co. with a friend & former coworker to let him bust some caps through it, what with him being an aficionado of high-horsepower carry pistols. The pic above shows his current carry gun for work, a full-size Glock .45ACP, but with a longslide treatment. He let me run a few rounds through it, and it ran well, let me tell you. I'm thinking a Glock 40MOS might be in my near future...