Scraping the bottom of the barrel.

While it's fairly common to use the "boneyard" of Davis-Monthan for spare parts, it's a little less common to use it to source entire aircraft, as the USMC is doing in order to get enough airframes to keep a modicum of readiness while the F-35 procurement drama drags on.

""Today, there are not enough flyable aircraft -- our 'ready bench' -- if our nation were subjected to a crisis," Davis said. "Today, I could fly 43% (443 of the 1,040) of the aircraft I should have on my flight lines."

A lack of spare parts and maintenance personnel trained to repair damaged aircraft are two of the main factors contributing to the lack of operational aircraft, according to military brass."

It's got that whole Carter Years vibe about it, doesn't it?
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Speedbump...

So, I'm sitting on two semi-snakebit pistol tests right now.

First is the Steyr C9-A1. Okay, there's a known extractor issue with the pistols, and Steyr has released an upgraded extractor to solve it. But I don't know if my pistol already has this parts fix or not. I'll contact them for the part, but... The fact that I talked to one of their service guys in Louisville in May and got told the "Well, now, it's a precision European pistol and you don't want to feed it junk ammo," was disheartening. Especially since the weaksauce Blazer Brass 115gr stuff that gave the Steyr such fits was devoured happily by a certain other Austrian pistol that's every bit as European.

Euro-manufactured ammo is less likely to suffer from being underpowered, but tends to have harder milspec primers, which give the Steyr's striker-fired ignition setup fits. (And at a much higher rate than noticed with the similarly striker-fired Glock 19 or Sig P320.) If I'm going to try and gallop this thing across the finish line, I'm going to need to source myself a case of Fiocchi 124gr or similar and cross my fingers.

Meanwhile, you might have noticed that you haven't heard much about my Glock 32 lately...

Well, Tuesday last week I took it and a hundred rounds of ammo to Indy Arms Co. for the typical morning range session. Fired the hundred rounds without any malfunctions. At the end of the trip, I decided to pull the gun apart and LocTite the guide rod. The slide needed to be beaten off the pistol with a rubber mallet again, and the guide rod turned out to be bent like a banana.

100rds at 10yds. Yes, I know the sights are off.

On the advice of a couple of pretty Glock-savvy friends, I went ahead and ordered a White Sound Defense non-captive guide rod to avoid this problem in the future. I would have dropped the factory recoil spring assembly back in there to keep shooting the gun in the meantime, but it seems to have gone air-soluble. (Note To Self: Order a small handful of factory Gen 3 19/23/32/38 RSAs.)

This makes it 1629 total rounds fired since the firearm was last cleaned or lubricated, with five failures to go completely into battery (#63, #78, #126, #748, #1,503*), five failures to feed (#221, #224, #282, #734, #1,529*), and one failure to eject (#1,033). 371 rounds left to go.
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Tell us what you really think.

Jesse Benn, last seen discussing the moral necessity of rioting when a political party picks a candidate you don't like, dropped this gem in a recent column:

"Naturally, bootlickers across the globe are unquestioningly celebrating the slain officers as heroes, innocents, and protectors. But what if one of those dead cops was a white supremacist—is he still a hero? And I don’t mean a white supremacist in the sense that all cops are enforcers of a classist white supremacist order, which they are."

Boy, putting that in your opening paragraph just screams "unbiased journalism ahead", doesn't it?
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Well...

Today was pretty much a complete write-off.
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Be strong, Tam!

It's Amazon's big sale day (Prime Day!) today. I am sure that all kinds of fabulous stuff I don't need will be dangled in front of my nose at prices too good to pass up...
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I do this for a living, Max.

My Vocabulary Size is about: 【30500】! What about you? https://t.co/Ld5uE99Mtn #NLN

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) July 12, 2016

Presented Without Context...

Interlocutor: "Something I heard once was something to the effect of 'If you ever read about an ancient war and one side uses elephants, that's the side that loses.'"

Me: "Rome's biggest success was in emulating Alexander by sending intelligence operatives posing as war elephant salesmen to plague the procurement bureaus of their foes."

From Facebook at 0400...

"I have *got* to bust caps tomor^h^h^h^h^htoday, and do laundry, and write...something? Blog...thing maybe? Column? Check notes...
But Roomie worked the bizarro shift and I power-chugged a bunch of Mello Yello Zero to make sure I could stay awake until 0mygod30 to walk her out to her car in the alley...and now I can't sleep. This is wack. I was nodding off at the keyboard at 8:00PM and now I'm wide-goddam-awake and the cat-feeding buzzer goes off in barely over two hours.
I'd start laundry now to get a jump on that but, sure as God made little green apples, I would nod off and find a washer full of mildewing clothes at lunchtime tomorrow..."

So, I stayed up and ran two loads through the washer (yay!) and got to bed about 0630. *yawn/stretch* Anything blow up while I was sleeping?
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It's easy to forget...

...that, like whitetail deer, alligators were once pretty much extinct over much of their natural range.

When Disney World opened, the alligator was on the Endangered Species list. When I was little, it was still kind of a big deal to see a whitetail deer in the wild. Forty years later, driving the I-64 corridor from St. Louis across Illinois and Indiana to Louisville, the shoulders of the highway looked like a Bambi abattoir in places.
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Artiste.

So, I'm browsing CNN.com and I find this video of a little 4BR fixer-upper for sale in Manhattan. The fixer-upper in question happens to be the 16th-floor penthouse apartment at 1185 Park Avenue and it was apparently put on the market at a price of $1,000,000/floor-of-elevation.

That's right: A $16m apartment in need of complete renovation. At least it's in Manhattan, so you wouldn't have to worry about where to put your gun safe.

Anyway, the hook to the video is they've got this creative designer type wandering about, sharing his visions of how things should look. This guy is obviously trying to cultivate a personal zen of being intensely laid back, and so when the camera pulls out, I have to chuckle. I've never before seen anyone wearing tailored suitcoat and weskit (but with coat unbuttoned and tie raffishly loosened) and...casually torn-up blue jeans.

I am almost willing to bet that there is a company that sells very expensive used jeans that they have paid people to tear up in actual use, because jeans that have been deliberately shredded would be inauthentic. These would be artisanally distressed.
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Gimme Shelter

Gimme Shelter from mike Sabbagh on Vimeo.

I'm sorry.

I was up way late last night.

I've been trying to think of something to type.

Nada.

I'm going to the range.
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The march of CCW...

Fascinating post on the inexorable (thus far) march of the Right to Carry movement in America over at Weaponsman, complete with charts and graphs and color 8x10 glossies with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back...

1. For the first time since our 1986 data horizon, May Issue declined, but it was because May Issue states are increasingly adopting unrestricted Constitutional carry.


2. No state has gone from Shall Issue to one of the two more restrictive categories in these 31 years.


3. The only state that went from Ban to May Issue (Tennessee) proceeded to Shall Issue within 5 years.


4. At least three states (Mississippi, Alaska and Arizona) went from outright ban to Permitless carry in two stages, first going Shall Issue.

Things I Don't Get: #what the hell ever number we're on now...

So, there you are, confronted by a couple cops all up in your grille for (at least by your lights) not doing anything wrong. The downside is that you know you're rolling dirty; if they find the gun in your pocket, you're in deep s#!t.

How do you think this situation is going to play out any better if you physically don't comply? Is there some point where you think the cops are going to just shrug their shoulders and walk away? Say "Oh, hey, you wrestle good. You can go home"?

By the time you've gotten to the "Yeah, buddy, actually you are being detained" portion of the conversation, you ain't winnin' anything there by the side of the road. It's going to take a lawyer and a judge for you to have any hope of coming out of that situation on top. So what is the possible potential upside of wrestlin' with the po-po there in the parking lot?

I just do not get that.
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Neat-o!

Mesmerizing gun video...
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At least he's honest about it.

"If you think it’s important to avoid “condescending” to white working-class voters in order to persuade them to vote for Hillary Clinton, you are living in a time when Democrats were afraid to say the words “gun control” or “minimum wage.” Those days are over. The voters you romanticize are not persuadable, and they haven’t been for a very long time. The Democrats don’t need them, they shouldn’t want them and they should once and for all stop coddling them."

Actor, writer, and sometime Progressive pundit Peter Birkenhead basically comes out and says that non-college-educated white folk* are automatically racist and the Democratic Party should just not bother worrying about their vote. Apparently only a thorough rubdown with a liberal arts sheepskin will get the taint of racism off your cracker hide and get you thinking (and voting) right.


*By which he apparently means white dudes. Of course, looking at his biographical info, I can see why he'd be nursing a bit of a rageboner against white dudes. I'm not saying that there are daddy issues here, but wow...
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Sunday pics...

Shootin' Buddy showed up at 9:00 on Sunday morning and we drove through drizzle into Broad Ripple proper for a tasty breakfast at Public Greens. I had the pork hash: smoked pulled pork, sweet potatoes and caramelized onions all fried together, with toast and eggs. Then it was back into the truck and over to Indy Arms Company for some pew pew pew.

I wasn't planning on a long range session; just some blasting before going to the movies. I had the Wilson Tactical Carry Professional and the Nighthawk Kestrel with me, along with a box of ammunition for each.

Shootin' Buddy put a magazine through each. He carries a Les Baer Thunder Ranch Special every day, and he preferred the Nighthawk.

The remaining 82 rounds were just blasted away by me for the fun of it. Winchester 124gr NATO through the Wilson and Federal 230gr RTP ball ammo through the Nighthawk. Incidentally, the Wilson has now fired 450 rounds without a bobble since being taken out of the box.

After the range trip we met up with Shootin' Buddy's dad to go see The Free State of Jones, best described as "The Wookie-Suiter's Civil War Movie" by a blog reader.

We were the first ones in the theater for the Sunday matinee showing and, as the place started to fill up, I couldn't resist leaning over and whispering "Was there a coupon in this month's AARP magazine?" to Shootin' Buddy, who replied "Stand up and say 'Does anyone have pictures of their grandkids?' I dare you."

Let's see how this works.

While there was no clear evidence of intent to speed, officer, I handled the task of observing my speedometer with extreme carelessness.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) July 5, 2016

Tab Clearing...

Four wiki tabs open at the moment, some I can't even remember why...

• Isle Royale


• Jewish diaspora


• Panthera leo spelaea


• Gentrification

Snakebit

I put another Glock 32 range trip in this past Friday. Another hundred rounds of Remington 125gr .357SIG was scheduled to go downrange.

Long about round number seventy or so, the slide travel started to feel funny. Rough. Kinda...graunchy? On round #73, the slide didn't go all the way into battery and so I locked it to the rear to take a look at what might be the problem. The aftermarket Lone Wolf recoil spring guide rod seemed to be missing.

I looked downrange, thinking it would be out there someplace and I'd have to see if they could call the range cold, but it wasn't there. I looked at the floor between my feet, and there it was.

The Lone Wolf rod has a threaded cap on either end, and the rearmost one had backed out, allowing the rod to fall out. Note that, until that one failure to return to battery, the gun had fired most of a magazine with no guide rod in it.

I borrowed a rubber mallet and knocked the slide off, then enlisted the much appreciated help of one of my former coworkers to thread the head back on the guide rod while I held the spring compressed with both hands.

Then I went out to fire off the last couple magazines.

On round #99 of the day, the quality control of Remington's .357SIG FMJ ammo reared its ugly head again. This is the second sideways primer I've seen in five hundred rounds of the stuff. Also, this round failed to feed; I don't know as I can hold that against Remington, though...
 

Should read "99 rds" instead of "50 rds".

For the cherry on the icing of the cake of my day, the guy on lane five managed to put a bullet through my target.

This makes it 1529 total rounds fired since the firearm was last cleaned or lubricated, with five failures to go completely into battery (#63, #78, #126, #748, #1,503*), five failures to feed (#221, #224, #282, #734, #1,529), and one failure to eject (#1,033). 471 rounds left to go.
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