The Gunternet: “Why doesn’t Smith & Wesson bring back the 3rd Generation Autos?”
Me, A Scholar: “Well, in 1990 the MSRP for a Model 1066 was 730 bucks, which translates to 1700 in current money. How many 1700 smacker blasters did you buy last year?”
In a way, this makes the introductions of pistols like FN's new High Power or the Dan Wesson DWX important. Marketing types keep an eye on things like this. Tooling up for an all-new metal pistol ain't cheap. The market keeps saying that they're bored with yet another plastic striker gun and they want some classic metal-framed action...but if people don't buy them, they aren't going to make more.
So the Kakhovka dam has collapsed, flooding towns and cities downstream on the Dnieper. (Its impoundment was one of the fifty largest reservoirs in the world, comparable to Fort Peck Lake in Montana.)
Ukraine claims that Russia destroyed it. As of this writing, I don't think Russia has claimed that Ukraine did, but give them a minute or two and they will.
As likely a culprit is the damage caused by Russian attacks last year combined with the fact that the Russian army is probably as terrible at operating a dam as it is at fighting a war.
Anyway, it's ugly.
Russian terrorists. The destruction of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant dam only confirms for the whole world that they must be expelled from every corner of Ukrainian land. Not a single meter should be left to them, because they use every meter for terror. It’s only… pic.twitter.com/ErBog1gRhH
— Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) June 6, 2023
I absolutely guaran-damn-tee you that his original text read "...I'll take his share of sixguns..." but whoever copyedited the piece was like "Nope, only one clichéd synonym for 'revolver' per sentence" and proceeded to remove the one that made the rest of the paragraph make any sense at all.
Left unexamined are Mr. Workman's opinions of nineguns and tenguns.
If the editor did their part, the correct way to have pruned the piece to an acceptable cliché accuracy level would have been "One of my colleagues in Florida who has been a semi-auto guy probably from day one admits he’s not that adept with a revolver, which is fine, because I’ll take his share of sixguns … and the ones with five, seven or eight chambers in the cylinder as well."
Craig Douglas explains the reasoning behind why the draw is structured the way it is. Not flagging yourself or anyone else with the muzzle is important.
Optimizing the presentation for confined and crowded space to reduce the possibility of flagging. Live fire practice should only be conducted under the strict supervision of a qualified instructor.
Boy, if you really want to see a post's engagement get crushed flat on Facebook, include the words "terror", "bombing", and "Muslim", among others.
I talk about gun stuff all the time and get lively threads on self defense topics, but these particular keywords just make the algorithm freak out, like I'm recruiting for ISIS or something.
If you're like most Americans, including me, the events of the Global War on a Noun that spun out from the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks have kinda taken your mind off the Balkans.
In 2001, when we changed the channel from the former Yugoslavia to southwest Asia, the Serbian military had been chased by a NATO bombing campaign from the breakaway Serbian province of Kosovo, where they'd been busily oppressing the majority ethnic Albanian Muslim population.
NATO troops, including the U.S. military, set up a peacekeeping operation known as KFOR, to make sure the Serbian military didn't come back.
Now that the credits have rolled on Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom, it...uh, appears that The KFOR Show is still up and running and is in its 24th season.
For those of you who need a synopsis of what's been happening while we've been tuned in elsewhere, Kosovo officially declared its independence as a country back in 2008, and it's been recognized as such by 101 of the 193 member states of the UN. Serbia, of course, does not. (Serbia is also the only country west of Minsk that's all buddy-buddy with Moscow.)
The more recent, and serious, incident was caused by ethnic Serbs boycotting recent municipal elections in the northern parts of the country. Since these areas are heavily Serb, it meant Albanian Muslim mayors winning elections...that saw only four percent turnout.
The Serbs rioted, claiming that these elections were illegitimate. The government in Pristina retorted that if they didn't want Albanian Muslim mayors, then maybe the Serbs should have, you know, showed up at the polls.
Rioting injured some NATO peacekeepers, and the peacekeeping mission is getting staffed up.
Stay tuned for the next exciting episode of The KFOR Show!
A fairly early-production Smith & Wesson Model 639. The serial number prefix would seem to indicate that it's from the first year of production, 1984. It's old enough that it still has the round trigger guard, but not so early that it has the wide extractor.
When someone says “but it’s a dry heat”, there’s a quick and easy way to tell if they’re talking out their ass or not: Go sit in the shade someplace with a breeze.
Out of the direct sun, as long as your perspiration can evaporate and carry away excess heat like it’s supposed to, you can get well into the ninety degree range without being too miserable. Bump that humidity up enough so that your body’s built-in swamp cooler stops working, though, and even the high 70s are awful.
That's one Harel Shapira, sociology prof at UT Austin, writing an OpEd piece at the NYT.
Seeing as how they run in the same academic circles, David Yamane knows Shapira and wrote a counterpoint to his column.
Since Prof. Yamane's takeaways from his study of America's gun culture aren't as hip and trendy as Prof. Shapira's, he's had to publish them on his own blog (which just celebrated its eleventh blogiversary; an eternity in blog years) rather than the OpEd page of the Gray Lady.
For a long time, subcompact CCW autos were either cut-down duty pistols or little single-stack guns. Then came this wave of purpose-designed small high caps that started with the SIG Sauer P365 and now includes the S&W Shield Plus, Springfield Armory Hellcat, FN Reflex, and (arguably) the Glock 43X.
Not only are these more concealable, but because they're friendlier to people with smaller hands, a lot of them sprouted versions with longer slides and grips that make them attractive alternatives to duty-type pistols for people with tiny mitts.
You want Duran Duran to sing at your birthday party or Flo Rida to perform for your kid's bar mitzvah? All it takes is dough, according to this fascinating article at The New Yorker:
