Awww…how sweet.

The 8^th, 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 8^th. (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.

And here, more guns n’ candles…

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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:

http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles2/ayoob130.html

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…

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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?

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