"Remington files bankruptcy, let's blame Trump."

The headlines on Remington's bankruptcy are pretty funny. Not a sparrow can fall from a tree without Cheetoh Jesus catching the blame.

It can't have anything to do with shittastic QC, questionable product decisions, failed gun launches, or massive overleveraging by Cerberus (who is...thank God...losing control of the company.)

I remember being so excited when libertarian darlings of Cerberus first stuck their toe in the gun biz back in the early Aughties. I think Bushhamster was their first acquisition? Anyway, a decade and a half or so later, I have to ask: If a group of wealthy investors decided to try and destroy the domestic firearms industry, how would it have looked any different?
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The price of snowflaking...

I'll preface this by saying that I bought the P2000SK used, and therefore have no idea what its round count was before I got my hands on it. I consider myself a fair judge of round counts on a pistol, and this one looked lightly used.

At any rate, the first hundred and fifty rounds went off without a hitch, and then came Federal 124gr +P HST. Recoil was snappy, with that distinct feeling of the slide bottoming out the recoil spring, and then stopping a fraction of an inch out of battery.

It did that a total of six times in a box of fifty rounds. I tried standard pressure 124gr HSTs the next day and managed to induce it four times in a box of fifty. It doesn't do it with mild-shooting range ammo.

My first diagnostic here would be to replace the recoil spring assembly, which with a Glock or 1911 or even a Sig or M&P is a twenty- or thirty-buck transaction with Brownells or Lone Wolf or whoever. But the P2000 series is almost stereotypically German in its complicated multi-part, multi-spring recoil reducing guide rod and spring parts package, which is $120-$140 and out of stock almost everywhere.

So the P2000SK test is called off before it really started, while I look into what the factory recommended maintenance interval is on the RSA.
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Goldilocks...

I have stumbled on a Micro Four Thirds setup that will actually ride in my shirt pocket like a compact camera. The Lumix GF3 body was only $85 at KEH Camera Brokers. I already had the little 12-32mm pancake lens. For once, I'm not mad about a lens being all plastic, because that compact and light lens makes it small enough to go in the document pocket of my gun burka.

The NEX-5T isn't much bigger, and sports an APS-C sensor rather than Micro Four Thirds, but the bigger sensor needs bigger glass, and the smallest zoom lens for the E mount is the 16-50 PZ, and it weighs almost as much by itself as the whole GF3 and lens combo.

The pancake collapsible 12-32mm isn't exactly a superzoom, but it'll snap a picture of a car parked on the other side of the street, which is about all the zoom I usually need.

Automotif CXLIV...

Scion, Toyota's attempt to create a young, hip, sporty division to appeal to Gen X'ers and Millennials who had come to associate Toyota with the bland Camry and its plushbottom cousin, the Avalon, only ever succeeded in producing one model that was young, hip, and sporty. And they needed Subaru's help to do that. Then the division folded.

Sisyphus in the Styling Department

I'd never paid much attention to the '80s-'90s Buick Century. It just wasn't the sort of car someone in their teens or twenties pays a ton of attention to.

Built on GM's A-platform, darling of rental car lots everywhere, it's what happened when you took a Chevy Celebrity and added plush velour and plastic woodgrain. (If you added alloy wheels and fog lamps you got a Pontiac 6000.)

Going to school for automotive design and winding up at Buick in the Reagan/Bush Sr. years must have been like getting picked last at kickball and parked way out in the outfield: A sign that others were less confident in your abilities than you were.

So I'm walking through the parking lot at Meijer's yesterday and really looked at the prow of a late fifth generation Century (I had to look them up on Wikipedia to verify the year) and I felt sorry for the guy in Buick's styling department.

The model received a mid-cycle facelift in '89 and from the leading edge of the hood forward was actually a sharp-looking car.

The thin, dangerous-looking bumper and reverse-sloped front end have a sort of Eighties BMW 635CSi thing going on. The grill has a hint of that throwback Buick waterfall and it's framed by narrow, mean-looking flush glass headlights that flow into wrap-around glass for cornering lamps. The whole thing is obviously supposed to generate a bit of brand identity that marks it as being from the company making the Reatta.

That fascia is actually pretty nice. Some dude worked hard on that. And then it's bolted to one of GM's dullest, most plebeian transportation boxes. Because the rest of the A platform is the Brutalist architecture of automotive styling, carrying forward the torch originally lit by Ford's Granada. "There will be no fun to be had behind the wheel of this car," is emphatically stated by its lines.

And scratch that.

It looks like the indoor range today instead.

Today in the glamorous life of the gunwriter I discover that the manufacturer wants me to ship the test gun back so they can send me a fresh copy. It wouldn't make sense to get the chrono data from this one and then do the accuracy testing and the rest of the writeup on the replacement.

At least I don't have to play in the muddy snow, so...yay?
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Oh, well...

It looks like this is the best outdoor chronograph weather I'm going to get in the next week or two. So be it.

There'll be snow in the pistol bays. I'm debating whether I should bring the tripod and mount the chrono on that, or just set it on the table like usual.

"Hurr durr a bad day at the range beats a good day at the office!" Yeah, no. I'd rather stay here and write and futz around on Facebook than go out there and get my nose froze off getting chrono data. You can turn anything into work, ask a porn actor.
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Deadlines...

I seem to be up to my ass in deadlines post-SHOT. On the one hand, it's good to have the work. On the other, staring at the blinking cursor on the blog after sweating out a couple thousand words to make an editor happy is daunting.

My skull is positively devoid of anything to write about. Well, that's not actually true. I have things I want to write about, but I can't put them to text. It's a weird feeling.
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I wrote a thing...

"Yes, that is a guy running around and blazing away from the hip with a semiautomatic shotgun while wearing a ghillie suit. No, we don’t know why he’s wearing it, either. It would seem to be rather counter to the principles of stealth and camouflage to be jumping through doorways in a shoot house, doing 12 gauge mag dumps, but we’re not marketers."

New 2k Test Gun...

So, if I switch to AIWB carry of the P30L, as appears to be underway right now, this little fella is a strong contender for a more-concealable backup. It's got the LEM trigger (V1 style). I have a temporary holster solution in the form of a Blade-Tech Klipt with Melody Lauer's little life hack done to it, but I'll be ordering a better one if this turns out to work.

I lubed all the indicated spots with Liberty Gun Lube and ran fifty rounds of Aguila 115gr FMJ through the gun on Monday morning. There were no malfunctions of any type to report.

As you can see, despite the last time I shot an LEM trigger being ToddG's HK45 test gun back in 2010, the gun shot pretty okay for me.

This makes 50 rounds since the firearm was last cleaned or lubricated with no malfunctions. 1,950 rounds to go.
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Still Standing...

Despite being exposed to the muzzle blast of a thousand rounds of .357SIG generously donated to the cause of science by Lucky Gunner, the Surefire XC1B is still working fine. I'm thinking that whatever durability issues the original XC1 had, they're pretty well worked out in the new version. Plus it's half again as bright.

The Glock 32 is probably due for another cleaning and lubing, and I guess I'll move the light over to my Glock 29 and see if 10mm Auto does anything to it. (And if that doesn't rattle it, I have a 9x25 Dillon G29 barrel and some Double Tap ammo sitting here...)
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Will you look at that?

I leave the blog alone for a day to catch up on some paying writing and the stock market craps the bed. This would have been prime blogfodder and yet here I am with my word tank on "E".

I need to refill it.
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E'rrbody loves an underdog.

Poor #TomBrady. As the clock ran out he looked so...deflated.#SuperBowl

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) February 5, 2018

I'm just watching for the commercials. Honest.

Best surprise #Superbowl end zone appearance against the Patriots since Refrigerator Perry ran one in.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) February 5, 2018

This. This right here. A thousand times this.

Kathy Jackson is spot on here:

"When you hear someone try to talk women out of firearms ownership because the gun a woman purchases might be “more likely to be used against someone you know”, remember that [number] many women are killed every year by someone they know.

Self-defense isn’t just about protecting yourself from random strangers who jump out of the bushes to grab you off the sidewalk in the middle of the night. It’s about protecting your life from a violent attacker, no matter who that attacker might be or where that attack might happen. Someone you know can kill you just as stone cold dead as someone you don’t.

That’s the harsh reality we need to face whenever we talk or think about self defense."

Go and read the whole thing and share it widely.
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Post Title Goes Here

 Thursday's session used up another hundred rounds of .357SIG from Lucky Gunner.

950 rounds in and the Surefire XC1B continues to function just fine, with all switches and levers working correctly and the mounting screw hasn't even loosened.
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It's not lying...

I have to get chrono data for a magazine test gun. It's not going to happen today, I can tell you that.

The downside is that looking at next week's forecast, there aren't many balmy days in the near future, and we're into the part of the season where anything north of freezing feels pretty doggone balmy. By early February, 35°F and no wind is practically sunbathing weather.

I should have asked for a Labradar for my birthday. Being able to shoot my mandatory 25-yard groups in indoor comfort just down the road at Indy Arms Co has done wonders for foul weather testing, but I don't have an indoor chrono solution yet.
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Hey, look!

I wrote a thing.
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Overheard in the Kitchen...

Me: "'♫♪Someone's in the kitchen with Dinah, stronger than the Old Man Joe!♫♪' When I was little, I always wondered who the Old Man Joe was, and why was he noted for being particularly strong?"

RX: "He's the cousin of Round John Virgin. I think one of them was the guy Jimi Hendrix kissed."

BOOM!

In what has been a daily tradition this week, Wednesday morning saw me at the range with another hundred rounds of .357SIG, generously donated to the cause of science by Lucky Gunner (so go buy stuff from them), in an attempt to break the Surefire XC1B.

Also along for the ride was a magazine test gun and some ammo I'd purchased to feed it. While Lucky Gunner occasionally sponsors some ammo, I also buy a ton of it from them. The reason for this is because not only are they good folks with whom I enjoy doing business, but also that when I put my order in before 3PM and select FedEx Ground delivery, the ammo shows up on my front porch the next morning before the range opens. That's handy.

Anyway, the test ammo for the other gun was Speer Lawman 200gr FMJ +P. If I knew this load existed, I'd somehow forgotten about it. If you carry 200gr +P JHPs in a .45, it's definitely handy having an FMJ practice load that's a ballistic twin.

I shot one box of .357SIG in big, lazy mag dumps at the lower A-zone, keeping the light on the whole time. The second box I used up doing Mozambiques, checking the light's function after each one. The light continues to function normally and hasn't loosened on the rail. This makes 850 rounds of full-house .357SIG muzzle blast that have failed to cause issues.
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