Lack of Judgment

In the throes of a crime wave of national-news-worthy proportions, Baltimore is grasping at straws to try and get things under control.

Are they considering letting victims shoot back? Oh, hell no. That would be horrible! Letting the rabble arm themselves in their own defense? Perish the thought!

No, instead they are grasping at that tiredest of legislative straws, the Mandatory Minimum Sentence.

"Yet this month in Baltimore, the city council voted 8-7 in favor of establishing a new mandatory minimum penalty for individuals caught carrying an illegal gun. The proposed legislation originally would have imposed a one-year jail sentence on first-time offenders caught carrying a gun within 100 yards of places like churches, schools, and parks. After public protest, the bill was weakened to add just a $1,000 fine to existing state law, which already imposes a one-year minimum sentence on second-time offenders. The legislation (in both its original and final form) was backed by the city’s police commissioner, Kevin Davis, along with Mayor Catherine Pugh and Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby—who all also advocated unsuccessfully over the last two years for new statewide mandatory minimums."

The problem with mandatory minimums is that they remove judgment from judgments. Further, this adds a mandatory...no mens rea required...penalty to an activity that's legal barely more than a half-dozen Interstate exits away.

Those of us who live where the state boundaries are farther apart have less of a worry about this, but get out toward the East Coast and up to the Potomac and points north, and you can go from Constitutional Carry to a ban on even having spent brass without a license in one overshot exit ramp.
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Speaking of Hugh Hefner...

The articles really were good. And the interviews were nearly mandatory. The CIA archives have the Playboy interview with William Colby downloadable in .pdf format.

Lemme just download this .pdf from https://t.co/L5EtZ5wlqb, in case they hadn’t already pwned my machine.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) September 29, 2017

Turd World Living Conditions

They told me that when I quit smoking, I'd get my sense of smell back. What they didn't tell me was how much of the world smelled like hobo piss.

Actually, while Broad Ripple does have its small platoon of vagrants, known locally as "Bridge Kids" for their habit of congregating around the bridges over the canal and guitaring at passing strangers for pocket change, they probably aren't the majority of the culprits. Most pee smells one runs across in the alleys and passages of the village are likely from someone who couldn't wait until they got in their car and went home after leaving Chumley's or the Vogue at 0300 on a Saturday.

This is completely dwarfed by the problem San Diego is apparently having with its vagrant population, whose urban outdoor pooping has caused a mini-outbreak of hepatitis A, leading to the city needing to pressure wash its downtown with bleach and water biweekly.

"Health authorities in San Diego have ruled out contaminated food, beverages, and drugs as the source of the outbreak. Instead, they believe the primary drivers of the outbreak are person-to-person contact and “contact with a fecally contaminated environment.”

San Diego’s mayor Kevin Faulconer is now moving forward with a plan to have crews use a bleach and chlorine-solution to pressure wash streets and outdoor surfaces that may be contaminated with feces, bodily fluids, or blood. The sanitary washes started this week and will occur every other week."

This is why we can't have nice things.

So, a couple weeks ago, some dude in Tennessee was carrying his loaded, holstered Chiappa rimfire Peacemaker clone around in a sack. This was legal, because dude had a Tennessee HCP, but as news stories show, just because he was legal doesn't mean he was smart.

Apparently he was unaware that you don't carry a live round under the hammer in Peacemaker clones, because he dropped his sack o' gat and it discharged, putting a round into his abdomen and sending him to the emergency room. ("Lifeflight helicopter"? "Critical condition"? I thought .22's were just bee stings?)

He's lucky, though. Ruger's single action revolvers gained both the transfer bar ignition system and the paragraph of lawyerese on the side of the barrel off of some dude who dropped a 3-screw Blackhawk in .357 Magnum and accidentally offed hisself.
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I have great hopes...

And my new fun camera: #ricohgxr with the A12 Leica M-mount module and #voigtlander #nokton 40mm f/1.4.

A post shared by Tamara Keel (@tamarakeel) on Sep 23, 2017 at 5:52pm PDT

This is something I've wanted to try for a long time... (And that Voightlander is a Leica M-mount in case I suck it up and step up to a serious rangefinder.)
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That worked, too...

Having used the TulAmmo to successfully function the Glock 34, I took another hundred rounds of it to Indy Arms Co. along with the P320C and the X-Carry. I wanted to see if they would share the HK P30's distaste for the weaksauce lot of ammo or if they'd eat it up like the Glock.

The answer was the latter. Incidentally, I need to drift the rear sight on the P320C to the right some.
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Go, underdogs!

As September draws to a close, so does the annual Kilted to Kick Cancer fundraising competition. As usual, we* have tardily waited to throw the Official VFTP Endorsement to an underdog.

This year it's Team Lonely Mountain. Go to the Kilted to Kick Cancer page and make your donation in their name and we'll see if we can't nudge them in the standings some...


*The editorial "we", which I guess refers to me and maybe Rannie the cat?
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I was not surprised...

Poor Man's Roland Special: X300U-A and RM08G on a 34. Do note that the RM08 and a WML go together like pickles and peanut butter, since the light will wash out the tritium-lit triangle without providing enough splash to illuminate it via the fiber optic. This sight is really useful outdoors only.

I took a hundred rounds of that TulAmmo to Indy Arms Co. on Friday morning along with my Gen4 Glock 34 MOS to confirm my suspicions...

Suspicions confirmed. The 34 ate that stuff up like popcorn, without the weird ejection pattern (or, I should say, with an ejection pattern no weirder than normal) which I assume can be attributed toward the P30 being more sensitive to lightly loaded ammo.

So that's an upside...

Remember how one of my pastimes on this blog was whingeing about lower back pain? Turns out that the best medicine I could take for that was 25 pounds of Fatbegone.

Oh sure, I still can get some soreness started up with enough stoop labor, but it's not the near-crippling levels of pain that it was just six or eight months ago. Also, I haven't needed a Tums since the middle of July when before I was going through a bottle of sugar-free antacid tablets a week.

Maybe there's something to this reducing the carbs thing.

I'm about a month away from ECQC and hope to be in a lot better shape for it than I was last year.
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Automotif CXLI...

Well-maintained E30 325i ragtop encountered on a recent walk to The Gallery Pastry Shop. An '85 or '86 model, judging by the extended aluminum "diving board" bumpers required by NHTSA regs (shorter, body-colored units came about in the '87 facelift.)

These things vied with Porsche's 944 for being the Cabbage Patch Kid of automobiles of their day. Miss Christina probably drove a 944 because "325i Cabriolet" didn't rhyme with "pores".
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Tab Clearing...

• My current camera experiment. Amazon's algorithms were like "We noticed you bought a Ricoh GXR and a Leica M-mount lens. Customers who bought these products also bought skinny jeans, home coffee roasters, and Ray-Ban Clubmasters. Would you like to add these to your cart?"


• Beware buzzword bingo in someone purporting to offer defense advice. As a friend once cracked about a commenter here "He has slain Roget's brontosaurus and strewn its guts about the rafters."


• Interesting Vanity Fair piece about Blade Runner.

Autumnal Equinox...

Wunderground says the high around here yesterday was 92°, measured at IND. I know I saw "95°F" on the Zed Drei's thermometer as well as the one in Bobbi's RX300.

It was humid, too. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, too hot to put the top down on the convertible. Dew point at the airport was 69°, and probably 70° in town.

Now, that's what they call "Tuesday" in the coastal South (or all of Florida) but when you've lost your acclimitization to the stickiness, it just sucks. Sweat doesn't evaporate when the air's already full of water, and you sweat copiously in bright 90+° sunshine. I was wiping sweat out of my eyes with the tail of my gun burka and being thankful I hardly ever wear eye makeup anymore.

Bobbi and I walked over to Twenty Tap for dinner, and the joint was already jumping by 6:30, so rather than wait for a table, we sat outside, which was made tolerable by being in the shade and frequent ice water refills...

Today is supposed to get to 91°F, which is within striking distance of the record high for the date of 93°F, set back in 1895 or so, and daily highs in the low 90s are supposed to continue at least through the weekend.

I'm officially ready for autumn.
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"Peace? I hate the word..."

Pres. Trump at U.N.: “We will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea. Rocket Man is on a suicide mission” https://t.co/rGswYlXlxJ

— NBC News (@NBCNews) September 19, 2017

I had a dream last night in which Trump sent Dennis Rodman over to act as an envoy to Kim Jong-un.

Kim Jong-un, apparently overestimating Rodman's importance as anything other than an answer in the Jeopardy category "'90s Pop Culture", took Dennis hostage and staked him out on a giant bullseye painted on a mortar range, threatening him with execution by 120mm mortar fire. This was broadcast on live TV, like something a Bond villain would do.
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Issues...

So, I've run something like four or five cases of TulAmmo 115gr FMJ through various handguns, both personal and review guns, over the last year or so. I've had surprisingly good luck with it. Oh, the Canik and Steyr didn't like the hard primers, sure, but Glocks and 320's ate it up. The XD-E ran 175 rounds of the stuff in testing and the FN 509 saw 300. About the only issue it caused in the Glocks and striker-fired Sigs  was a light strike every few hundred rounds.

I assumed it would function fine in the P30L, so I ordered a case from Lucky Gunner and headed to Indy Arms Co. with two hundred rounds yesterday morning.

This case lot...let's just say that this case lot didn't exhibit quite the same consistency as the last four or five. Where the 10-round chrono string through the FN 509 had a SD of only 10.77fps, this stuff's wildly inconsistent ejection suggested that velocities were rather more varied.

Some rounds ejected normally over my right shoulder while some barely dribbled over the forward left corner of the ejection port to land on the range tray; probably a third arced straight back toward my hat brim or face. Some didn't even have enough oomph to clear the port entirely before the slide closed again...

"Limpwristing!" Yeah, technically I guess this malfunction wouldn't have occurred if the pistol had been hucked up in a machine vise.

At the end of the day, there were three failures to eject and one failure to feed (the gun stopped slightly out of battery, but fed the round successfully when it was reloaded into the magazine.) 

Personally, I'm chalking this up to this lot of ammo, but I haven't gotten a chance to chrono it yet.

The HK P30L has now fired 1700 rounds since it was last cleaned or lubricated with three failures to eject (#1,568, #1,578, #1,606) and one failure to feed (#1,664). 300 rounds left to go.
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I felt a great disturbance in the Force...

...like thousands of hoplophobes crying out in panic and then suddenly silent.

Behold what Silencerco hath wrought:

What you are looking at is an integrally-suppressed .50 caliber rifle that is not a firearm, is fifty-state legal, and can be ordered right off Silencerco's webpage right here.

That sound you hear is Diane Feinstein's teeth grinding and Bloomberg's distal sphincter slamming shut. Glorious!
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Bizarre ad meme?

Yeah, but it's legal to order a pistol over your iPhone, but ordering an iPhone with your pistol will get you thrown in prison. pic.twitter.com/wepbqbNf5W

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) September 18, 2017

Three Quarters Done

Took the HK P30L and a hundred rounds of ammo to Indy Arms Co on Friday morning. My last fifty round box of the Winchester NATO ball (time to reorder!) and a box of standard pressure 124gr Federal HST. I also brought along my freshly reconfigured carbine to get an idea of how much work we were going to have ahead of us zeroing the scope.

The pistol was shot at seven yards. The carbine was pretty close to POA/POI at fifteen, just hammering the trigger in big, goofy three- and five-round strings because WHEEEEE! That Spühr Team Noveske mount is probably overkill for this gun; you could use it to hold up a highway bridge, let alone keep an optic from wiggling under the titanic recoil forces generated by 5.56x45mm ammo.

I'll take the carbine to Atlanta Conservation Club on Tuesday or Wednesday and get it dialed in.

The HK P30L has now fired 1500 rounds since it was last cleaned or lubricated with no failures of any type to report. 500 rounds left to go.
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iUpgrade

Since I paid off the 16GB iPhone 6S that I've been using since last April, and since Apple just released the iPhone 8 and the magic super-duper iPhone X, I figured it was time to upgrade...

So while I was riding in the passenger seat of Bobbi's car today, I used my carrier's app on my phone to upgrade to...a 32GB iPhone 7 Plus.

Again Marko and Mike Grasso were bad influences, just like with the watch. But watching both of them use theirs, I realized that it was still (albeit just barely) shirt pocket size on my gun burkhas and, more importantly, it solved my biggest issue with the cell phone camera: The second lens means I have both a wide-angle (28mm) and a normal lens (56mm) equivalent.

So my phone bill's not going to change...unless I decide to add my old iPhone 6S as a second line. Debating the pros and cons of that.
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QotD: Be Real Edition...

This deserves fleshing out into a whole post, but I'm going to drop it here so I can remember it...

"short of natural disaster or civil disorder it is extremely unlikely that they will either need (nor want) to wear armor, a chest rig, and carry a half dozen magazines for the rifle. After all...if you empty one 30rd mag in civilian world USA you are going to be on the news.....if you empty TWO you are going to be in the encyclopedia......" -Randy Harris

...which in turn echoes the famous SouthNarc quote:

"Personally I think that if a man is naked and is standing in a locked room with ten other naked men, and can't keep at least half of them from raping him, then the last thing he needs is a carbine course." -Craig Douglas

I know people who take butt-tons of carbine classes because, face it, running and gunning with an AR or AK, especially on targets in the 7-to-50 yard range, is fun as hell.

Which is not to say that there wasn't a ton of value in what I spent last week doing, because any time you get a chance to have to think on your feet while armed and move safely around other armed people and make decisions with a gun in your hand is time well-spent. Working tactics in the house is a different animal altogether from doing marksmanship stuff on the square range.

That, and quality low-light training is something I will jump on any chance I get. Especially if there's a force-on-force component.



Do note that both Forge Tactical and Sentinel Concepts offer classes that will let you work in the house with just the pistol in two-person teams. Do you have anyone in your life who carries a pistol also? Do you often find yourself in the same building with each other? Do you know how to move around each other and solve problems safely with loaded guns in your hands? Might this be a valuable skill? I think so, too!
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Triggered!

So that my morning's discussion elsewhere won't be completely in vain...

A lot of Glock aftermarket triggers get sold by the manufacturer claiming "It has a stock (or polished/plated) Glock trigger bar" with the unstated presumption that this leaves all the factory Glock safeties intact.

But that isn't the case.

Now, here are two examples of quality triggers in my own guns that are both using factory Glock trigger bars. Both Glocks are fitted with a Striker Control Device from Tau Development Group. I have used both guns in classes and would carry either one.

This Gen3 Glock 19 has an SSVi Tyr trigger in it. The gun is "cocked" (hold your emails about how Glocks are really only about 7/8th's cocked, Glock nerds.) Note how the Striker Control Device lies flush with the slide as intended.

Here is my Robar'ed Gen2 Glock 17 with a TAC trigger from Overwatch Precision in it*. Notice how the SCD stands just ever slightly proud of the slide. This is because, despite having a stock trigger bar, the shoe of the TAC provides just enough pretravel that the tail of the trigger bar is lightly contacting the SCD.

Now, the ZEV Fulcrum trigger, which I'm not providing a link to because it's garbage and if you use it you should feel bad, also uses a "factory trigger bar". But if I put the Fulcrum in one of these guns, which I'm not doing right now because I'm in a hurry, the SCD would be pushed WAY out. And if you looked up the magwell with the Fulcrum in the gun, you'd see that the trigger bar was so far to the rear, even with the trigger at rest, that the firing pin safety was disengaged.

With that trigger in your gun, your gun is not drop safe. And I don't mean "not drop safe" in the "if you drop it on a hard enough surface at just the right angle from the right height while holding your mouth right" sense, I mean that the gun will discharge with surprisingly little jarring.

I feel bad for ever having that trigger in a gun. I didn't know. Now I do. And so do you.

Fulcrum trigger: Not even once.


*That trigger was sent to me for free for T&E. I liked it enough that I paid retail for a second one.
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