Aug 2008
FRIDAY SURPRISE: Dive! Dive! Dive!
Many years ago, I worked with a fellow who'd been raised on the east side of London. His stories about the Thames were romantic and intriguing: you could, he swore, walk along the banks of the river and pick up small items - clay pipes, etc. - that dated back four or five centuries. That wasn't surprising, he said, in a land where a 300-year-old house might be the new one on the block.
I never made it to England to find out if what he said could really be done, but there's no doubt of the history of the country. In our little land we get excited about something that is a mere century old, but in England that probably wouldn't rate a yawn.
Given that the Thames is so historically important, and that it flows through one of the most densely populated areas of the planet, its treasures should be well known. That, however, is not the case. A recent salvage expedition in the Thames Estuary - which is the area where the Thames runs into the North Sea - netted some seven forgotten shipwrecks, ranging from 1940 all the way back to 1665.
The interesting thing to me is that the operation was carried out in waters "up to" 16 meters deep - that's only about 50 feet. You'd think that some of those wrecks would have presented navigational hazards over the years, thus charted and hardly in need of discovery. It's when you combine the size of the Estuary (it's huge), the water visibility (roughly zero), and the extreme tides (up to 13 feet!), you begin to see how such things might get lost.
Check out the article in the UK Daily Mail.
-=[ Grant ]=-
|
GUEST EDITORIAL: John Bickar
Friday, August 29, 2008 Filed in:
Competition, Shooting
industry
Thanks for the response, Grant. I have a lot of respect for you for seeking differing viewpoints.
Different people can view the same situation in different ways. (And seven years later, I admit that my recall of the entire weekend may have holes in it as well.)
I helped organize and run the Rapid + Action camp in 2001, and I can assure you that Bob Mitchell said nothing like what you attribute to him. It's no secret that he can rub people in the wrong way (and he and I have had our run-ins). However, my recollection is that he didn't say they weren't good enough so much as he said, "Sorry, guys. We can't fund your run to the Olympics."
Unfortunately, although some of the top shooters such as Todd Jarrett, Bruce Piatt, Don Golembieski, and Bruce Gray did compete in some rapid fire matches after the camp, it boils down to economics. These shooters make a living by the gun, and there's not enough money in Olympic shooting to enable anyone but the most elite (e.g., Matt Emmons) to pay a mortgage and put food on the table.
I saw Bruce Piatt at the Bianchi Cup in 2003 and said, "Hey, when are you going to come back and shoot rapid fire?" He said something along the lines of, "Sorry, I can't do it and stay married." The market for international pistols in the US is too small for manufacturers to make a profit, let alone sponsor shooters.
The truth of the matter is, the path to the Olympics is open to anyone who would like to walk down it. Paradoxically, one of the contributing factors to the limited success that the US has experienced in the Olympic shooting sports is that there are so many other shooting sports to try within the United States. In many countries where private firearms ownership is severely restricted (or banned outright), Olympic shooting is the "only game in town".
My takeaways from the entire experiment were very positive. It led to a high-six-figure sponsorship of USAS (from Kimber), and I forged some strong relationships with a number of action pistol shooters whom I never would have met otherwise.
I hope you'll rethink your decision not to support USA Shooting and the Olympic Shooting Team.
Respectfully,
John Bickar
US Shooting Team
Comments on this blog
Wednesday, August 27, 2008 Filed in:
Blog stuff
Certain behavior is expected of guests, both in my home and on my blog. When using the comments feature here at the RLA, only two things are required:
1) You must include your name and a valid email address. I post openly; I expect my guests to do the same. Just because this is a firearms blog does not mean that "snipers" are allowed!
2) You must not use derogatory or profane language, toward me or any of my other guests. There are many blogs and forums on the world wide web whose standards allow for such behavior, but this is not one of them.
That's it. Feel free to disagree with me all you want, as long as you can do so in a civilized manner.
Now, if you'll peruse the comments from yesterday's post (and many others), you'll see that I don't moderate opinions that disagree with mine. (Mr. Pilkington's taunting, I must admit, had me wavering in my commitment!) i like presenting a well-rounded picture when I can, as I feel it's in the best interests of my readers. Moderation around here consists of reading the comment, thinking "she's got a point" or "he's entitled to his opinion", pressing the "approve" button, and continuing on my merry way.
I was forced, however, to delete two comments from yesterday; one was an anonymous post which amounted to a "drive-by shooting", while the other could not make his point without profanity (and was nearly incomprehensible to boot.) I invite both of you to repost, mindful of the guidelines above.
(There was one other post which I didn't delete, but hasn't been released, either. It was a thoughtful comment from a distinguished guest, and we're currently in talks to present a much longer version as a separate blog article. I'm hoping that it will come to fruition, as his recollections and opinions are most interesting.)
-=[ Grant ]=-
Prime(r) time
Wednesday, August 27, 2008 Filed in:
Ammunition, Reloading
I'm not sure what's up with Winchester these days. No one seems to have Winchester primers in stock, either walk-in or online, and backorders aren't being taken. On the other hand, CCI primers are (at least in my area) available in quantity. Odd.
(Something else odd: I rarely see Remington primers around here, and it's been that way as far back as I can remember.)
Anyhow, every reloading resource I've ever seen is quite adamant about the need to retest a load whenever anything changes - including primers. I know many people who do not heed that advice, assuming that a primer is a primer is a primer. (It's usually about the time they say this that I make a mental note to stand well behind them when they are shooting.) I, on the other hand, am desirous of maintaining my appendages in full working order. Thus when anything changes, I test thoroughly.
Because of the difficulty in obtaining my favorite Winchester primers (which I've used exclusively for nearly two decades), I've been reworking some of my loads to accommodate CCI primers. This is more of a pre-emptive move than anything, as I still have Winchesters on the shelf. Doing this before I need to allows me the luxury of testing side-by-side, using the same powder lots.
I've found something interesting, and not at all what I expected. The Winchester primers are "hotter" (producing higher velocities) than the CCI, but the CCI primers are more consistent (smaller spreads in velocity from shot to shot.) This appears to be the case in both pistol and rifle sizes.
Example: a 170 grain load in the .30-30 cartridge. Using CCI primers, I could not achieve factory-level velocities without loading "over book" (putting in more powder than specified by the reloading manual.) I have many load manuals, and both the bullet maker and the powder manufacturer pretty much agreed on what was a maximum load. Even at their maximum, the CCI primer still produced a load that was 150 fps under factory ammo velocities.
(Before the emails start: I tested factory loads in MY gun so that I had a real benchmark. Factory velocity data is not to be relied on.)
The Winchester primers produced a load which easily matched the factory offering, but both the extreme spread and the standard deviation of the load increased markedly. This indicates that the primer is not as consistent as the CCI equivalent. (Remember: same powder lot, same bullet lot, same brass from the same lot. The only change was the primer.) This should translate to lessened accuracy for the Winchester primer, but results from a lever action rifle using flat point bullets are so far inconclusive.
When I get around to it, I'll be doing the same test with my .308 match loads. I'll post the results of the accuracy tests, where I expect the CCI to clearly best the Winchester.
Stay tuned.
-=[ Grant ]=-
Have you ever wondered....
Monday, August 25, 2008 Filed in:
Shooting
industry, Competition
...why the United States doesn't dominate Olympic shooting? Note that I didn't say "do better in", I said "dominate." You'd think, given the high penetration of firearms ownership in this country, that we'd make a far better showing than we usually do. With so many shooters, we should have at least a couple of medals in darn near every event!
Yes, we've done pretty well in the shotgun events (of the six medals at this Olympics, four of them came from shotgunners), but outside of clay birds, medals are few and far between. Given the circumstances, that's a pretty sad showing.
What makes the situation even more galling is that a disproportionate number of shooting medals are awarded to competitors who live in intensely anti-gun countries. Some of those countries prohibit the private ownership of firearms altogether, yet their athletes are winning medals. At the risk of being labeled as rabidly jingoistic, those are medals which, logically, should be going to the people who are most familiar with shooting: Americans.
As it happens, the source of the problem may be right under our noses. Let me tell you a little story....
A number of years ago, a bright fellow got the bright idea that perhaps some of our best competitive shooters - people who have competed in venues other than Olympic shooting - might be called upon to join our Olympic team. The concept was simple: pinpoint a specific shooting event, figure out what other shooting discipline might require similar skills, then recruit the best shooters available in that discipline and see if they could adapt to the Olympic event. (Hey, it worked for basketball!)
The event picked for this experiment was the Rapid Fire pistol course, where we've struggled even to make a showing. Olympic Rapid Fire involves shooting 5 tiny targets at 25 meters with a .22 Short pistol, in very short periods of time. It's a demanding event, requiring speed, accuracy, and phenomenal consistency. Now, just who might be able to do that kind of shooting?
It was decided to recruit our best "action" pistol shooters, people who were used to shooting handguns quickly and accurately, and have them practice for the Rapid Fire. People like Doug Koenig, Mickey Fowler, Rob Leatham, Todd Jarret (the whole list reads like a "Who's Who" of pistol shooting) were invited to a training camp with our Olympic team, where they'd see if their skills would transfer over to the Rapid Fire event.
According to someone who was actually there, the week-long camp proved that these professional shooters were quite capable of competing in Rapid Fire. They performed better than anyone had hoped, and they even demonstrated that their skills, forged by decades of practice and tempered by competition at the highest levels, held promise for several other Olympic disciplines. This was shaping up to be something great.
Then the bomb dropped.
(At this point I'll pause to explain that our Olympic shooting teams are the exclusive province of USA Shooting, which is the national governing body for the Olympic shooting sports. You can't get on our shooting team without going through USA Shooting. Period.)
Back to the story...at the end of that week, enthusiasm was high. The participants, both the recruits and their Olympic team hosts, were excited at the prospect of a shooting "dream team". The experiment had been a success, and it seemed as though nothing was standing between them and multiple medals in the Rapid Fire event.
Nothing, that was, except USA Shooting.
As the week was winding down, the Executive Director of USA Shooting stepped up to the podium and declared that the "new shooters" weren't of Olympic caliber. He said that these people - who between them had won a dizzying number of national and international titles - "lacked focus and discipline." No one would be able to get on our Olympic shooting team, the Director continued, unless they came up through the USA Shooting farm system.
According to my source, the speech went downhill from there. No "outsiders" were going to be allowed on "his" team, no matter how good they might be. And these guys were very good.
That, folks, is why we again failed to medal in the Rapid Fire event this year. And every other year. And in many other Olympic shooting events, as well.
The country most steeped in firearms use, the home of the "gun culture", isn't able to field a whole team of shooters that can truly take on the rest of the world. Not because of a lack of talent - because of an entrenched bureaucracy that steadfastly refuses to believe that anyone not in their clique could possibly be any good.
As it happens, last week - flush with Olympic enthusiasm - I had actually decided to write a check to USA Shooting for the support of our team. That is, until I learned what you just learned. I didn't send that check, and I'm not going to.
When USA Shooting drops their nose-in-the-air exclusivity, I'll give them money. Not before. I hope you'll join me by telling them the same thing.
If enough of us do that, maybe they'll get the message that we expect our shooting team to represent the United States, not the local country club. When that happens, perhaps we'll start cleaning up in Olympic shooting.
Just as we should.
-=[ Grant ]=-
FRIDAY SURPRISE: When General Motors Was Dreaming
Back in the 1950s, General Motors was at the top of their game. Their cars were selling well, and many consider 1957 the peak of their design and marketing prowess.
At lot of that was due to their concept or "show cars." Like today, those were vehicles built to show their prowess and to gauge consumer reaction. Some of their design details would make it to production, some wouldn't, but they were all interesting to see - even a half-century later.
Check out this slideshow from the New York Times.
-=[ Grant ]=-
Guns are not magic wands.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008 Filed in:
Self defense, Techniques &
Training
There is a perception amongst a large percentage of the gun-toting public that guns are magic wands: one shot and the bad guy flies backward, landing in an unconscious heap at the bottom of a wall or tree.
Think I'm exaggerating? Spend a few minutes at a gun counter sometime. Random samples would tend to support the supposition that the majority of people carrying guns get their information from Hollywood, not Paulden.
This incident from east Texas should serve to remind us that real life ain't like "reel" life.
There are, of course, a number of unanswered questions: was the good guy's gun not adequate for effective defense? Was he not able to draw and shoot in time? Did he make an effort to "get off the X" or did he simply "stand and deliver"?
We don't know. Sadly, we may never know. All we do know is that something went horribly wrong, leaving the good guy six feet under and the bad guy getting three hots and a cot.
Let's review how to avoid the same fate:
1) Select a gun and cartridge that are suitable for self defense. (At the risk of tooting my own horn, read my series on this topic.)
2) Learn how to be aware of your surroundings (it most assuredly does not come naturally to modern man); study and memorize the precursors to violent attacks.
3) Practice drawing and shooting from your holster; don't carry your gun in an unaccessible place, and carry it the same way all the time.
4) Break the habit of just standing and shooting; learn to get off the axis of a violent attack. (This is not the old "take one step to the side and shoot" exercise - it is far more dynamic. Love him or hate him, Gabe Suarez has been preaching this for many years, and only now does the concept seem to be gaining traction.)
5) Understand that one shot is quite unlikely to do the job, and that the old "two shots center of mass, then evaluate" doctrine may just give your opponent the opening he needs. Learn how to quickly put multiple, accurate shots on target - while moving.
6) Understand that you can do everything "right", and still lose. This is a concept that seems to be lost to even the best instructors: luck plays a huge role in survival. Do everything you can to put as much of it on your side as possible.
Be careful, stay safe.
-=[ Grant ]=-
Preventing barrel leading
A reader asked me to comment on successfully shooting lead bullets in revolvers. It seems that he's been getting indifferent accuracy coupled with severe leading, and would like to know the "secret" to using lead in his gun.
I thought I'd covered this topic once before, but a thorough search of the archives failed to turn up the expected article. Guess I'll have to do this from scratch!
Please note that I'm not a "hardcore" cast bullet shooter. I don't cast my own, which means that I'm dependent on commercial sources for my projectiles. As a result, it's taken me longer to learn this stuff than it would have otherwise. Thus I'm no expert; but Ed Harris, who sometimes checks in here at the RLA, is - hopefully he'll see fit to comment. (Ed, if I get anything wrong please drop me a note - I'll make your response into it's own post.)
The first thing to understand is that your lead bullets need to fit the chamber throats of your gun. If, for example, your throats measure .358", your bullets should be no smaller than .358, and no bigger than .001" over that measurement. Smaller bullets won't be as accurate, and will let the erosive combustion gases blow past the bullet causing severe leading around the forcing cone.
(Many bullet makers will size their products to your preference; if they don't make that service obvious, just ask. A surprising number are happy to oblige, usually at no extra cost.)
The forcing cone of your gun must also be in good condition; roughness in that area will result in leading at that point.
Assuming that the gun part of the equation is in good shape, and the bullets are of correct size, the hardness of the bullet becomes the critical issue. Most bullet makers advertise really hard bullets as being the "cure" for leading. It sort of stands to reason, doesn't it? A harder lead won't smear as much as it goes down the barrel, and will leave less residue - right?
Guess what - it isn't true. In fact, it's completely off base!
Think about this: you probably have a .22 rifle hanging around. Most .22 LR bullets are plain lubricated lead - very soft lead, no less. Compared to your average hard cast bullet, a .22 slug is almost like butter - soft as can be. Yet I'll bet that if you looked at the bore of your rifle, you probably won't see much leading - if any at all. My .22 rifles will fire a thousand or so rounds between cleanings, and I've never seen lead in my bores despite the bullet traveling at 1,200 fps.
What's the reason? Obturation.
A bullet, under great pressure from the expanding gases behind it, grows in size to fit whatever hole (chamber throat, barrel bore) it is being shoved into. This phenomenon is called obturation. As the bullet obturates it seals the hole, and keeps the gases where they belong until the bullet actually exits the barrel.
If the bullet doesn't obturate, the very hot gases will rush past while it is in the bore. The lead where the gases pass is melted and deposited on the barrel's walls - producing leading. This kind of leading is the most difficult to remove, as it really "sticks" to the bore - as if it's been soldered there. In fact, it has!
It follows that we need to make sure that they bullet obturates in our bore. In order for a bullet to obturate, the metal used needs to be soft enough to deform easily under the amount of pressure being applied to it. If the bullet is too hard, it won't obturate and there will be no sealing.
So, the bullet has to be soft enough to obturate. Why not just make all bullets out of super soft pure lead - won't that cure the problem? No, it won't; a bullet that's too soft will also cause leading, as it won't be strong enough to maintain the necessary seal in the bore. It also won't be resistant to the heat generated by the friction of travel down the bore. Both result in lead left in the barrel.
The bullet has to be hard, but not too hard; soft, but not too soft! The variable is the amount of pressure generated by the firing cartridge.
The higher the pressure, the harder the bullet needs to be to resist excess deformation - but remember that it has to be soft enough to obturate properly. A mild .38 Special target load needs a softer bullet than a fire-breathing .357 Magnum in order to obturate; putting a too-hard bullet in a mild cartridge is as much a problem as a too-soft slug in a hot one.
Bullet hardness is rated on the Brinell (BHN) scale. Pure lead is 5 BHN; "hard cast" bullets can be close to 30 BHN. Somewhere in that range is the ideal bullet for any given cartridge; how do we find it?
As it happens, there is a way to determine the optimum bullet hardness. First, you need to know the amount of pressure your load develops. That's easy - your loading manual will have that information. (Pressure is listed in either CUP or PSI; they are slightly different, but for this particular question either will be close enough to get the answer we need.)
There are two formula: one for the ideal hardness, one for the maximum hardness.
Ideal hardness in BHN = Pressure / 1,920
Maximum BHN = Pressure / 1,422
Let's say it's a .38 Special using 4.5 grains of Hodgdon Universal Clays and a 158 grain SWC bullet. The pressure for this load is 16,700. Our formulae look like this:
16,700 '/ 1920 = 8.69 BHN ideal hardness
16,700 / 1422 = 11.74 BHN maximum hardness
You can (and should) round those to the nearest whole number. Thus, for this load I want a bullet of around 9 BHN, but no more than 12 BHN for best results.
For a heavy .357 Magnum load, using the same bullet, the numbers are dramatically different:
33,600 / 1920 = 18 (rounded) ideal
33,600 / 1422 = 24 (rounded) maximum
Big difference! If I buy bullets of 21 BHN for my Magnum, and use them in the light Special loads, they won't obturate properly and I'm likely to get leading.
Guess what? That's exactly what happened! It wasn't until I bought some bullets of a nice 10 BHN for my Special loads that my leading problem was solved. As I said at the beginning, it doesn't seem logical that softer bullets leave less residue behind - that is, until you understand the physics behind the problem.
With this information you can now go bullet shopping with confidence. You'll probably find that purveyors of "cowboy" bullets are your best choice to get the alloy hardness that you need to keep the lead where it belongs: on the target, not in your barrel!
-=[ Grant ]=-
FRIDAY SURPRISE: You think you know someone...
If you're over 40, you know the woman in this picture. Not in the sense of personally knowing her, of course, but you know who she is.
Don't recognize her? I'll give you a hint: 1976.
Montreal.
Romanian.
Perfect 10's.
Famous theme named after her.
If you haven't already guessed, that's little Nadia Comaneci - now 46 years old, and married with children.
Her rise to dominate Olympic gymnastics was stunning. I remember watching the broadcast (back then it was on ABC) and being amazed that this little girl could seemingly come from nowhere and beat our own American athletes. With perfect scores, no less!
The whole event was darned near unbelievable. It seemed that her life was charmed; that she was on top of the world.
How little we knew. Romania in the late '70s was far from a paradise; Nicolas Ceaucescu ruled the country with an iron fist, and that included Nadia and her career. I won't give away the rest of the story, but it's a tale I knew nothing about until I read this article in London's Daily Mail.
-=[ Grant ]=-
On Taylor Throating
I recently received an email asking my thoughts on Taylor Throating - the procedure where a reamer removes the rifling for roughly a half-inch past the forcing cone, and the edges of the lands are chamfered to match. The concept is to make an area that allows the bullet to 'stabilize' after jumping the barrel gap, but before entering the rifling.
Taylor Throating is somewhat controversial, with some holding it to be the greatest thing since peanut butter, while others claim that it is pure snake oil. In the interest of full disclosure, I don't offer the service - even though I've invested in the equipment - simply because I remain agnostic regarding its value.
Reports of miraculous results seem not to have occurred under controlled conditions. By that, I mean tested on a gun without any changes other than the throating. The glowing reports tend to be from those who had a lot of other work done at the same time, including timing and forcing cone changes. It's hard to say if the positive reports are in fact due to the throating, to other work, or to something subconscious on the part of the shooter doing the testing.
I've experimented with Taylor Throating on a properly maintained Dan Wesson .357, using several 6" barrels, and shot by two different people (one of whom was your author); the results were inconclusive. When a barrel with just the throating was tested, there was a slight increase in accuracy - but it was not consistent, nor large, enough to rule out normal shooter performance variation. A barrel prepped with a proper crown and an 11 degree forcing cone (as pioneered by Ron Power) achieved a definite positive result, roughly equal to what is said to be expected by some Taylor advocates.
My preliminary opinion, based on my admittedly limited experience with the technique, is that a proper forcing cone and a perfect crown still produce the most noticeable accuracy improvement. Of course, this is assuming that the gun is in perfect condition (timing, cylinder/barrel alignment, etc.) to begin with.
There are a couple of specific conditions where Taylor Throating might prove useful as a salvage technique: when the barrel/cylinder alignment is just a hair off in the vertical axis, or where there is a noticeable constriction in the area where the barrel screws into the frame. In those cases accuracy changes in excess of what would normally be expected have been reported, and may be legitimate. There are also some indications that it may extend the useful life of a severely worn barrel, where replacement is difficult or economically unwarranted.
Some specific downsides have been identified, however. If the throated area is even a tiny amount bigger than the chamber throats (or the bullet diameter), lead bullets will suffer "blow by" and gas cutting - severely leading the barrel, and definitely decreasing accuracy.
In the end, it's your choice. I'm not ready to call it a fraud, but neither do I see a definite positive benefit to having it done. When I come up with solid evidence on either side, you can bet I'll report it here!
-=[ Grant ]=-
Monday Meanderings
Something old, something new - all are borrowed, and one makes me blue!
---
Marko over at the munchkin wrangler (who, for all of his talent, still hasn't figured out what the caps key is for) has penned another winner: "tales from a gun-free society." It's a personal look at the societal effects of wide scale disarmament. (My general rule is that if Marko wrote it, it must be worth reading. This is yet another validation of that rule.)
---
If the name "Gecko45" means nothing to you, then you've missed out on one of the funniest things on the 'net - the rise of the Mall Ninja. Sadly, the original postings on GlockTalk that led to the coining of the term are long gone, and the mallninja.com site is no more; luckily for us, someone recognized the historical importance of Gecko45.
His (her?) whole posts - along with some good background and explanations - can now be found at Lonely Machines. If you're new to the Mall Ninja phenomenon, it's a must-read. If you remember the original, it's a hilarious blast from the past. In either case, go. Read. Laugh.
---
Gecko45 is a classic, no doubt. It's hard to beat such comedic genius, and how many people can lay claim to inspiring a new term? Well, Larry Correia's got a candidate of his own: the original "HK: because you suck. And we hate you." essay. You can read it - along with his hilarious followup - at this link. (If you're a rabid HK fan, it's guaranteed to raise your blood pressure. If you're not, it'll make you squirt milk out your nose.)
---
Happy Monday!
-=[ Grant ]=-
FRIDAY SURPRISE: Up, up and away!
I've previously mentioned my appreciation for the work that NASA has done over it's 50-year history. NASA grew up right along with me - or me with it - and NASA was always doing the exciting stuff boys of that era were smitten by: Astronauts. Fast planes. Rockets. The Moon.
(It wasn't just spectacle, though; NASA was the catalyst for technological progress that continues to be felt today. A surprising number of the things we now take for granted can be traced directly back to some NASA project.)
We learned about the exploits of the engineers, technicians and astronauts through NASA-supplied pictures in the magazines of the day. My early interest in science was kindled by those pictures, and some of them I still remember.
NASA documented everything, but not all of their photos were of general interest. A large percentage of their images were never seen by the general public because the media was understandably reluctant to publish anything of interest only to nerds. Through the magic of the internet, however, we now have ready access to some of those great pictures.
The agency has launched a new site just for NASA images. You can search or browse and download your selected pictures, drawings, and illustrations - some of them of quite high resolution. You'll find lots of astronomical images, of course, but you'll find all kinds of other things too.
Two of my favorites from the 1969 launch of Apollo 11, taking the first men to the moon:
Saturn V rocket FTW!
If you're a science buff like me, you can spend large amounts of time on their site. I recommend that you not try this a) at work, or b) when your significant other expects you to be paying attention to him/her/the kids/household chores/your dinner guests. You have been warned!
-=[ Grant ]=-
"The Rest of the Story"
Wednesday, August 06, 2008 Filed in:
Techniques &
Training, Other resources
A couple of weeks ago, I linked to the story of a thug who showed no remorse about killing a couple of musicians.
Well, it seems that there was more to the story, and Jim Jacobe (www.jimjacobe.com) sent me a link to an article on the U.S. Concealed Carry Association website. It's the "other side" of the incident - the mother and the instructor of one of the victims.
It is a must-read. (You'll have to scroll down their page just a bit for the article, titled "No Safe Places", by Don Myers. It's worth the effort.)
-=[ Grant ]=-
REVOLVER ALERT: Non-lock S&W revolvers for sale!
Monday, August 04, 2008 Filed in:
Revolvers
Regular readers know that I'm not a fan of the internal locks on current Smith & Wessons, and I refuse to personally carry a gun so equipped. I've documented far too many cases of spontaneous lock activation, which renders the gun inoperable in the middle of a string of fire, to ever feel confident in that mechanism for self-defense applications.
If you have the same opinion, you'll be excited to learn that Smith & Wesson has released a very limited run of Model 642 Airweight Centennials without the internal locking system! These are new production guns made with "leftover" non-lock frames, according to S&W. In addition, these guns have the traditional screwed-in barrels, as opposed to the sleeved liner type that the company is now using.
They were able to put together approximately 4,000 of them, and there will be no more.
The unexpected availability of these guns makes it possible for the person who wants a "non-lock" gun to get one new in the box, as opposed to hunting gun stores and gun shows for an example in decent shape. I urge anyone interested in an Airweight Centennial to pick one of these up.
RSR Group is the exclusive distributor of these revolvers. Their stock number is SW103810FC, and as of this morning they had 1,136 left in stock.
RSR Group is a distributor, not a retailer, and require an FFL and a dealer account with them to order a gun. Ask your local dealer to contact RSR and order one in for you - chances are that there will be more than yours in the package, as the dealer will probably want one for personal use too!
Folks, these won't last long. You'll need to move fast if you want one!
-=[ Grant ]=-
FRIDAY SURPRISE: The pitter-patter of little feet. LOTS of little feet.
Friday, August 01, 2008 Filed in:
Friday
Surprise!, Completely
irrelevant
Let's say you have a million dollars or so to spend, and want a home in an exclusive neighborhood. You'd expect a certain level of amenities in the house, with good restaurants and shopping close by.
Oh, and neighbors whose properties were as pristine and aseptic as yours.
Right?
Not in Pacific Palisades, California.
Yuck.
-=[ Grant ]=-
I do not think it means what they think it means.
Friday, August 01, 2008 Filed in:
Current Events
I wasn't going to comment on the story about the decapitation on the Canadian bus, but something bothers me about the whole incident.
A Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) spokesperson characterized the actions of the passengers - who ran screaming from the horrific scene - as "brave".
Now do not misunderstand me here: running away from danger is a normal, human reaction. Saving oneself is a perfectly legitimate response to a life-threatening situation, and is nothing to be ashamed of.
But it's not "brave."
"Brave" would have been tackling the murderer and beating him senseless; "brave" would have been hopping on the lunatic's back and holding him from stabbing while someone else pulled the victim to safety.
Running away? Not so much.
I'm not sure just when our society lost track of the true meaning of words like "brave" and "hero", but I for one am tired of the trend.
-=[ Grant ]=-