On January 8, the Brady Bunch suggested a lighting of a candle as a protest to gun violence.
Awww…how sweet.
The 8th, of course, was the one year anniversary of the grotesque mass murder in Tucson, Arizona by Jared Lee Loughner. His most famous victim, left brain-damaged for life, was Arizona Congressman Gabby Giffords. She was clearly his intended target.
The gun-banners made much of the fact that Representative Giffords was shot with a Glock 19 9mm pistol. They neglected to mention that Gabby Giffords had, prior to the shooting, proudly stated that she owned and had a license to carry a Glock 19 of her own. The mass-murderer was put to the ground and captured by courageous citizens, including ARMED citizen Joe Zamudio, who was carrying a pistol of his own at the time, a Ruger P95 9mm.
But lighting a candle will prevent the Jared Loughners of the world from carrying out their monstrous deeds? Good Lord…it’s like the candlelight vigils from the Take Back the Night Movement.
It’s nice to know that people care. Hell, I care. I’ve spent an adult lifetime learning how to ward off monsters such as Loughner, and sharing that knowledge with others.
Some pro-gun bloggers got together and did their own January 8 counterpoint to the Brady thing. I wish I had contributed more to that: all I did was take a picture of some strong women with candles and nine millimeters at a Glock match in Clearwater, Florida on the 8th. (Great match, by the way, and kudos to the Wyoming Antelope Club in Clearwater for putting it on.)
The decades have taught me that women won’t take back the night by marching with candles. They’ll take it back when those who prey on them learn – some the hard and final way – that their intended victims can be more dangerous to them, than they are to their intended victims.
Those you see below have it right.
If some monster tries to rape or murder a woman I care about, I don’t want him to see the flickering light of a candle.
I want him to see a muzzle flash, from the front.
I hate to paraphrase Al Capone, but a candle and a Glock will earn women more safety than just a candle. From left: Gail, Kitty, and Lisa Marie of the Alabama Holster Company’s all-girl pistol team, January 8, at Glock match in Clearwater, FL.
I recently shot an IDPA state championship (under the auspices of the International Defensive Pistol Association, www.idpa.com) with over 140 other good people. One was a damn good sixgunner I had met only the week before at another match, where he almost beat me. His revolver is a fine one, a Smith & Wesson Model 686 specially built by the manufacturer’s Performance Center. At the state shoot, though, he came in dead last. Defective ammunition was the culprit.
I asked him what the heck happened. “I blame it on the idiot who handloaded my ammo,” he replied. I queried who that might be. He grinned sheepishly and said, “Me.”
He’d had the same problem the week before, and if it hadn’t, I think he’d have beaten me.
If bad ammo happens to guns as fine as his, and to shooters as good as he is, it can happen to us all. Heck, not too long ago I was loading a magazine for the Evil Princess at a Glock shoot, when the 9mm cartridge I pulled from my hip pocket didn’t seem to feel right. I glanced down, and saw the problem. It was one of several loose rounds that had been sharing the pocket with a strip of brown pasters for taping bullet holes…and one of the pasters had slipped off the strip and gotten wrapped around the cartridge. Had it gotten into the chamber that way, I would have expected a stoppage. The Evil Princess would have made me pay dearly for that…
There’s also the matter of using the WRONG ammunition. My column on that in the current issue of Backwoods Home can be found at:
I’ve received a few interesting comments on it. I had mentioned in the article that running 3” Magnum shells in 2 ¾” shotgun chambers is not a cool idea. One fellow wrote in that they could indeed be fired there. Yes, they can, but there may be extraction problems, and they may cause cycling problems in repeating shotgun mechanisms designed for the shorter shells.
There’s lots of you experienced folks out there. If you have experiences in this vein to share here in the comments section, it may help someone else from making a very serious mistake.
Left, a strip of bullet hole pasters. Right, a 147 grain 9mm round. Center, what happens when the two get together in one’s pocket…
For 19 years, I served as chair of the Firearms Committee for ASLET, the American Society of Law Enforcement Trainers, and spent a few years on their Ethics Committee as well. ASLET’s motto was Qui Doscet, Disket (hope I spelled that right). From the Latin, it translates roughly to “Who teaches, learns.”
Having been involved in adult education for pretty much my whole career, I can say that truer words were never spoken.
I was reminded of that after returning from a 17-day tour in the Southwest, with a couple of days spent teaching in a lecture environment in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the rest at hands-on Massad Ayoob Group classes in Sierra Vista, Arizona, pausing only to fly east to testify at an officer-involved shooting trial. The brilliant Marty Hayes covered for me at class while I was away at court, for which I will be eternally grateful.
There were lessons of the importance of using the right equipment. One shooter in the first-level MAG-40 class came to grief with constant gun malfunctions, until we determined that he had been shooting reloaded ammo he bought at a gun show. I had to explain to him that gun show reloads are to ammunition what crack whores are to women. Lesson learned for him; lesson reaffirmed for me and the rest of the MAG teaching staff.
One shooter in the second-level MAG-80 class was shooting an expensive Wilson Combat .45 caliber semiautomatic. It worked flawlessly for him with the factory hardball ammo he’d brought for the class. At qualification on the last day, however, he switched to Federal Gold Match mid-range semi-wadcutter ammunition. This is deliciously accurate stuff, and because it’s a soft load, he thought its mild recoil would be an advantage in the double-speed qual.
And it would have been…except that this ammo is loaded so light, it won’t run a standard 1911 style pistol like the Wilson that’s set up from the factory with a recoil spring designed for full power ammunition. Without going down to a 14-or-so-pound recoil spring, it just isn’t powerful enough to reliably cycle the gun. He still managed to qualify despite all the jams he had to clear with the unforgiving clock running, but he lost his chance to be top shot in class. Lesson learned for him, and reaffirmed for the rest of us.
Learning is a lifelong process, and “the gun” is sufficiently complicated a topic to constitute a “life study.” I’ve always learned more from mistakes than from the rare perfect performance…how about you?
I deliberately waited until the furor over the Cambridge incident had died down before discussing it here, now. I figured a lot of folks would assume I was the guy with time wearing a police uniform who would automatically side with the cop.
Nope. It ain’t that.
From President Obama on down, folks saw it as a “racial incident.” I honestly don’t think it was. I don’t even see it as a cop-versus-citizen thing.
This reviewer’s two cents worth is: it looks like a “class” thing to me, in more than one sense of the word.
Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, who happens to be black, comes home to the nice house he has earned the hard way, in a hired limo. The front door is stuck. He and the limo driver try to push the door open. A neighbor sees two men shouldering a door inward, looking for all the world like a break-in, and calls the police. She does not mention the skin color of the men involved: she can’t see that in the dim light. She’s just a good neighbor reporting what looks like a burglary in progress.
Police respond with alacrity. “Contact” officer James Crowley, who happens to be white, asks the professor for his ID. The Prof offers only his Harvard ID: after all, being a Harvard professor is where his ego is invested. Now, no one has ever shown us in the rest of the world a photo of that ID, but I’ve never seen a college ID that had a residential address on it. A driver’s license with his picture and his address that said “Hello, this is MY house, I LIVE here” would have been nice. Something that merely says, “I’m an important, prestigious person from an important, prestigious place” does NOT say that.
The cop, who was a designated instructor in race relations and racial sensitivity, had HIS ego invested in keeping his community, himself, and his brother officers safe. Put yourself in his place. You are the officer called to the scene of a potential burglary (or even home invasion) in progress. The obvious suspect refuses to cooperate and merely screams at you that you’re a racist cop. You KNOW that if you just take his word that he lives there and you leave, and an hour later the legitimate homeowner calls your chief and says “My neighbors told me that the cops were right there with the guy that broke into my house, but the burglar said he was me, and the cop just took his word for it and left!” your badge will grow wings and fly away.
Professor Gates made a career of studying racial hatred, and of fighting it. He can be proud of that. But if his own powers of critical thinking equal the intellectual horsepower that fueled his career, he can’t be proud of the knee-jerk reaction that made him shout “racist cop,” and “I’ll see your mama outside!”
The Cambridge cop, on the other hand, managed his end of things with professionalism and dignity. HE is not the one who automatically defaulted to racial stereotyping, as the Professor did…and as, sadly, the President did.
Race, my butt. It was about status, and societal “class.” The Harvard professor was accustomed to being the alpha in his world, and was not prepared to obey an appropriate command from a lower-class, blue-collar member of society. Yes, face it: the blue collar is at its bluest on a police uniform shirt. And if the most prestigious members of Boston/Cambridge society didn’t follow a “caste system,” they wouldn’t have become known as “Boston Brahmins,” would they?
Beers in the Rose Garden? Barack Obama’s brilliant sense of media manipulation pulled a rabbit out of the hat on that one. But let’s face reality: this was about a privileged member of the liberal elite, who not only knows the President but mentored him, overbearingly “pulling rank” on a public servant who was trying to keep the professor’s home safe. It’s about a member of the Urban Elite who lacked the “ordinary folks’ common sense” to realize he had just done a very convincing imitation of a burglar.
The deepest of my sympathy in this whole cluster-coitus goes to the black Cambridge officer who was publicly excoriated as an Uncle Tom for being honest enough to speak up for a brother cop who did the right thing. Of the players who got the most coverage, my hat is off to the Cambridge cop who made the controversial arrest. He was the same man who helped the physically handicapped professor down the stairs (see photo below) after the brewskis and the media moment were done … as President Obama strode ahead, leaving both the Cop and the Professor more than symbolically behind him.
In the end, it was the cop who showed “class,” in the best sense of the word.
A few entries ago, you were promised that as soon as we got our hands on the latest new Ruger rifle, you’d hear back. Well, we muckled onto three or so of ‘em this past week, so here we go.
As noted here earlier, the rifle is designated SR556, for Sturm, Ruger 5.56 millimeter. It takes standard AR15/M16 magazines, and comes with three of them, produced by Magpul, one of the best makers. It’s the most “vendor-outsourced” firearm this company has ever assembled – really, pretty much everything but the barrel and barrel extension come from outside the factory – but it’s an AR15 clone, after all, and that’s the logical way to make one given the nature of the industry. The trick is to use the best parts.
We toured the production cell at the Newport, New Hampshire plant. Ruger’s switchover to “lean manufacturing” has changed the look of the factory dramatically in the last few years. SR556s were literally flowing off the production line.
But, enough of that: how does it SHOOT?
The subtle feel of the mechanism as it cycles is different from your usual Stoner-type AR15, because the Ruger entry works of a piston design, specifically a proprietary two-piece piston. One of my fellow shooters said, “It feels like a whoosh, not a sproing.” That about describes it, even if it ain’t engineer terminology.
My buddy Russ Lary threw a 6.5-20X variable power Leupold Tactical scope onto his T&E SR556, and cranked it all the way up. Twenty power magnification ain’t much for sophisticated bench rest shooters, but for us meat n’ potatoes riflemen, think “Hubble telescope with crosshairs.” At about 100 yards, he found sub-one-inch groups easy, with Match grade 69 grain and 77 grain loads from Black Hills Ammunition shooting the tightest.
The piston system does indeed run cool. I could race a pair of 30-round magazines through it as fast as I could pull the trigger, and the carrier (bolt) was still room temperature to the touch. I’m told by folks I trust at Ruger that this thing has gone 20,000 rounds without a malfunction OR a cleaning in factory torture-testing. In the several hundred rounds of 5.56mm and .223 Remington that we’ve run through it, we didn’t have any malfs either.
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