Gun Nuts

I had plans to write about something else but yesterday’s events have left me unable to think very much about anything else. If for some reason you haven’t been paying attention to the news, yesterday during a live TV interview reporter Allison Parker and her camera man Adam Ward were murdered by a former employee of their television station. After murdering them he fled in a rented car and was active on social media while on the run, making the ridiculous claim that Allison and Adam were “racists”…which is something of a pattern for this pile of human garbage. His favorite pastime seems to have been blaming his shortcomings and difficulties on racism and hostility from other people. In a new twist on this sort of horror, he used his cell phone to record video of the murders and posted the videos to his twitter and facebook pages. The video is…horrible.

“Welcome to the jungle it gets worse here every day
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Way back when, a guy bought a SIG P220ST at a local gunshop.  He then took that double action/single action (DA/SA) .45ACP and famously “tore down the house that 1911s built” at the 2003 IDPA National Championship and won the CDP title.  Never an organization to be so inflexible enough to not ban pistols other than 1911s in the CDP division, IDPA changed the rules, making the P220ST illegal for the CDP division due to new weight restrictions (a newer, lighter P220ST was released shortly thereafter by SIG coincidentally).  Personally, this ranks right up there with the time the Army Marksmanship Unit (AMU) showed up at Camp Perry and used M16s to beat the Marines’ M14s handily as “a moment in time in which I wish I could have been there to laugh with much gusto.”  This guy’s name is Ernest Langdon and he is one of those oddballs in the firearms world in that he is a combat veteran and a shooting champion, proving that the tactical and competitive worlds are not mutually exclusive.

August 13, 2015
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A few weeks ago Baxter wrote a piece on the release of The Gadget, a device that allows someone using a Glock pistol to block the striker mechanism when holstering the weapon. I ordered two Gadgets through the IndieGoGo campaign and in the future I intend to keep a Gadget on any Glock pistol I’m using.

Last week an interesting story with some important lessons on self defense received significant media coverage:

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that last week four Marines and one Sailor were fatally wounded in what a large chunk of the political and media “mainstream” has labeled a “senseless” attack. It has become rather common place to hear political figures and people on TV describing acts of violence as “senseless”, especially when the act has arrested the attention of the nation or the world. It’s almost rote at this point…someone commits some heinous crime or act of barbarism and immediately “senseless” gets glued to every description of the act that goes out over the air waves or the web.

  
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Handguns are machines made up of a number of individual parts all working in harmony to achieve a particular goal. If we use these machines with any frequency, sooner or later some of those parts are going to wear or break to the point where they stop working in harmony with the rest of the parts and the gun ceases to function. The magazine of a semi-automatic firearm is also a machine and is the component of your semi-automatic firearm that is most likely to fail.

  
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Apparently June of this year set new records for firearms sales. I’ve mentioned before that I have encountered a surprising number of people with a very recent interest in buying a gun and self defense in general. The sales numbers would seem to indicate that my experience is not exactly novel…but where do those newbies begin? Self defense is a rather complicated matter requiring knowledge and training in several different disciplines. Some of those disciplines are sufficiently deep that you could spend your entire adult life chasing mastery of them. Wouldn’t it be lovely, then, if someone compiled the majority of the information you absolutely need to know from relevant disciplines into a single easily digestible resource?

The Glock 17 burst upon the world pistol scene in the 80’s. Chunky, inelegant, having a polymer (“PLASTIC?!” the purists cried) frame, and…..lacking an external safety but for the tab on the trigger.  Naturally, everyone kept their boogerhook off of the bangswitch and everyone lived happily ever after, right?

Courtesy Air Force Times

  
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If you are a regular reader of this space, you may remember mention of the name Tom Givens from previous articles, but you probably don’t know a whole lot about Mr. Givens or why a guy like me would hold him in such high regard. Now I finally have the opportunity to tell you about the best defensive firearms instructor you have probably never heard of.

You may have heard recently that at least one relatively high profile firearms instructor essentially banned appendix inside the waist band carry from some of his classes. That announcement has led to a lot of discussion of AIWB carry…some of it useful, some of it so unbelievably stupid that I felt a bit dizzy and asked myself “Is this real life?” In the hopes of furthering the useful discussion and stopping the stupidity, let’s separate the fact from the fiction.

…even if you are handling a dangerous item that isn’t a firearm:

Stock photos: The 4chan of the photographic world. Of course, if one plugs the word “firearm” into any stock photo site hilarity is sure to follow. I had to make sure other people suffered with me after browsing through one such site the other day, thus I am subjecting you to the below photos.

In the last few months I’ve spent a lot of time looking at sub-compact/pocket/Rule One guns to aid in making a purchase decision for a family member who needs one of these pistols for carry. As many good points as the Glock 42 has, the tendency to get lateral push and the requirement to pull the trigger to disassemble the weapon made me uncomfortable giving that my recommendation for this situation. That prompted me to go out and look hard at a segment of the handgun market that I hadn’t really given much consideration.