Overheard in Front of the Television...

Television Person: "...and it's time for gingerbread and eggnog flavored coffees!"

RX: "No, it is not time for gingerbread and eggnog."

Me: "Whatever it takes to end the awful pumpkin season."

Fall Colors

In Indiana there is no requirement to de-gun to enter a polling place. However, my polling place is in a school and don't nobody without a badge carry in a K-12 school, so I park a block away and leave the heater locked in the car.

Yesterday in Indianapolis, the 22% of eligible voters who could be arsed to go to the polls selected the dudes who will make the rules that Naptown residents will have to decide whether it's worth risking jail to break over the next four years.

The signs out front of the polling place were no more colorful than the backdrop provided by Mother Nature.

Seventy-something degrees in early November and a wonderful day for a stroll.

BOOM! Headshot!

The squirrels have made a head canoe out of the neighbor's jack-o-lantern. Time for the inflatable snowman to go up down the street, I guess.
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Upside Downside

Well, the GOP candidate in Naptown's mayoral race took a twenty-five point pasting in the polls last night. Considering that the well-funded winner had been running blandly upbeat TV ads for months while I never saw a Brewer commercial until a couple weeks before the election, this wasn't entirely unpredictable.

On the upside, Mayor Elect Hogwarts has the sort of name that lowbrow amateur pundits like myself love, like that actor guy, what's-his-face... Bandicoot Cucumbersnatch. I'll get a lot of cheap and easy mileage out of mistyping Mayor Hogswatch's name over the next four years.
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That time of year...

Well, there are people voting at me down the street, so I reckon I may as well wander over and vote back at them.

The GOP and Dem candidates for mayor seem pretty interchangeable. They both think the city should have less crime and more businesses and money and they both hate them some evil cronyism.

I think I'm going to need to vote for the GOP guy because he at least tugged his forelock ceremonially to the RKBA by pressing the flesh at the Indy 1500 gun show. That, and while Dem Prosecutor Terry Curry has thus far done the right thing on armed self-defense, I want to make sure that he doesn't have a squishy anti-self-defense type in the mayor's office to embolden him.

(Meanwhile, in Lafayette, the GOP appears to have taken a dive in round one, effectively throwing the election.)
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*pops popcorn*

The Germans are always using war in the Balkans as a pretext for *something*. https://t.co/7y23NGH73k

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) November 3, 2015

Glockin' in the Free World

Took Glock's small-frame big-bore to Marion County Fish & Game for some chrono work in the pistol bays today. I brought the last ten rounds of that Hydra-Shok and a box of Magtech 230gr FMJ that I purchased from Lucky Gunner.

I set the chrono up at nine feet from the muzzle. It was 63°F and 54% humidity at about 720 ft ASL according to weather.com and the map.

Federal's 185gr Low Recoil Hydra-Shok load is... well, I'd be interested to see what the "high recoil" stuff is like. The box flap claims an average muzzle velocity of 1090fps. From the Glock 37's 4.5" barrel, the numbers were as follows:

LO: 1049
HI: 1089
AV: 1075
ES: 39.58
SD: 13.92

First, that's good consistency. Second, that's crowding the numbers for 10mm loadings from non-specialty manufacturers. Sure, boutique houses like Double Tap or Cor-Bon will load a spicy Ten, and Federal loads a hotter Trophy Bonded hunting bullet, but that's zippier than Federal's own 180gr 10mm Hydra-Shok.

The Magtech 230gr FMJ was a lot more pleasant to shoot. It was downright docile, in fact, and it was easy to nail 8" plates with fast, repeated hits at thirteen yards. Numbers for the Brazilian ball ammo were:

LO: 762.1
HI: 847.6
AV: 810.8
ES: 85.49
SD: 24.43

Note that the fastest and slowest rounds of that ten-shot string were separated by nearly 100fps, and that the standard deviation was nearly double that of the Federal Premium stuff. In case you were wondering what the extra money for premium self-defense ammo gets you, other than fancy bullets, there you go.

Compared to the last .45ACP 230gr FMJ I chronoed in a 5" 1911, this stuff only gives up 10fps, and it's running in a half-inch shorter barrel.

Should we run 2,000 rounds through this thing? Well, we're already 140 rounds in since the gun was last cleaned or lubed, with no malfunctions, so we might as well. 1,860 rounds to go...
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#FightTheDerp

The eternal struggle continues.
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From elsewhere...

On the goofy Jet Li "steal the slide" Beretta disarm as seen in Lethal Weapon 4, which is for some reason taken as an instruction video in certain corners of the internet to this day:

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #137...

Glock 37 chrono day at the range.

QotD: Future Perfect Edition

In an interview with William Gibson, the interviewer brings up the oft-stated idea that he is somehow prescient about the technological future, to which he replied:

"But I know intimately that it's not what I do. Say there's a 12-year-old who's reading Neuromancer for the first time. If she's really smart, she gets 10 or 15 pages into it and she's thinking, "Okay, it's got to be about what happened to all the cellphones." I mean, that's what I would have done. Because that's weird! They don't have any cellphones. And what was for a while one of the coolest moments in the book hinges around the bank of payphones in an airport in 2030. And you can't even find a bank of payphones in an airport in 2015!"

I know those feels. My long-dead attempt at cyberpunk-ish noir, which was going to be a sort of near-future Heat-meets-Count Zero, now finds itself set a couple years in the past. And it begins with our protagonist's pager going off and him walking over to the pay phone to call the number.

It's funny, because by 2012, payphones were already pretty much a reliable sign of a bad neighborhood. And a pager? Who has those anymore?
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R.I.P.

The nation just lost 20% of its strategic hippie-punching reserves. https://t.co/EBpZfRvHw3

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) November 2, 2015

Meet the new Permanent Latrine Orderly...

Yet another thing Skippy is no longer allowed to do.

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Glockity

Ran fifty rounds of 185gr Speer Lawman through the Glock 37 at work on Friday afternoon. The witness holes on the back of the magazine are amusing. The UpLULA proved invaluable as always for getting the last couple rounds in the Glock mag.

The top ten rounds are where I let a coworker try running a magazine through the gat. The center rounds... All of those forty rounds were fired at seven yards, most of them at about a .5-second split clip. Like I wrote elsewhere:

"I came off the range feeling like an evangelist today. The pace I was shooting, with an unfamiliar gun, in the past would have had bullet holes scattered all over an 8" radius with a notable tendency to hit in the low left of that zone. By applying One Crazy Trick, I shrank my group size by two thirds. I literally did something today I couldn't have done before taking that Langdon class. I'm on Cloud Nine."

Seriously, getting off the trigger as fast as possible and letting it reset during recoil so that I can be prepping it as the sights settle back on target is the single biggest game-changer for my shooting since... I dunno, learning how to hold the gun right?

Anyhow, this makes eighty rounds fired through the gun since it was cleaned or lubed. No malfunctions. 1920 rounds to go.
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Tab Clearing...

• Tom Givens mentioned my blog in the November '15 Rangemaster newsletter!


• Sending a juvie in with a note to rob pharmacies is in style again.


• Prepper Fashion for Winter '15: Oil's down, silver's up, ebola's out, Supervolcano's in.

Two Americas...

"What Really Goes On At A Gun Show" reads the panting headline at CNN Money.

To me, the article sounds about as exotic as "What Really Goes On At A Flea Market" or "What Really Goes On At The Comic Book Show", but apparently to the writer and his soft, cud-chewing co-workers it's as titillating and exotic as "What Really Goes On In The Slave Bazaars On The Dark Side Of The Moon".

And the funny thing is, in the opening paragraphs, they acknowledge that gun shows are common, that they occur in droves every weekend from coast to coast, and that people throng to them. Then they go on to explain what happens at a gun show without stopping to think that, you know, a sizable minority, maybe a third, of the people reading your breathless little hit piece have been to a gun show and you might as well be explaining what goes on inside of a supermarket to them.

Speciation is well underway.
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1700

You ever fire a Ruger .22 pistol until it was so gunked up with caked-on powder residue that you could watch the bolt cycle? And then you just squirted more lube on the bolt and kept shooting? Well, that's about where we're at at the 1700 round mark. Except without the "squirt on more lube" part.

Put another hundred rounds of PMC from Lucky Gunner through the 1911 yesterday after work.

I can actually feel the round clattering through the feedway as the slide eases itself shut, and it's not making it all the way there about twice in every hundred rounds now. A thumb on the back of the slide pushes it the last little bit into battery, but this gun wants oiled badly. It's not going to get it, however, for another 300 rounds.

This brings the total rounds fired to 1,600 since the weapon was last cleaned or lubricated, with eight failures to go into battery (rounds #356, #1,085, #1,247, #1,492, #1,514, #1,578, #1,627, #1,663), a failure to feed on round #513, a failure to feed a round of Hornady Critical Duty +P on round #927, and a failure to eject a round of Hornady Critical Duty +P on round #930. 300 rounds to go.

1600

Another 100 rounds of Lucky Gunner's .45ACP ammo through the 1911. The gun is increasingly dry, the Slip2000 EWL having been applied  almost two months and a case-and-a-half of ammo ago.

Unlike a lot of current polymer guns, where the slide and frame are only sort of flying in loose formation, the former only retained on the latter by tiny nubbins of sheet metal "rail", the frame rails of older designs like the 1911 or CZ75 have a lot of bearing surface. This makes them a lot more sensitive to lubrication or, more accurately, the lack thereof.

This brings the total rounds fired to 1,600 since the weapon was last cleaned or lubricated, with six failures to go into battery (rounds #356, #1,085, #1,247, #1,492, #1,514, #1,578), a failure to feed on round #513, a failure to feed a round of Hornady Critical Duty +P on round #927, and a failure to eject a round of Hornady Critical Duty +P on round #930. 400 rounds to go.

Magic Wand For Sale

The devices marketed to people who are scared to death of criminal violence and yet at the same time don't want to actually hurt anybody, even criminals, range from the merely sad to the hilarious.

The latest one I've seen is the "SALT", which stands for...well, I can't be arsed to find out, really...and is a CO2-powered pistol that fires .68" balls filled with some natural blend of eleven herbs and spices designed to incapacitate your attacker.

If this sounds like a paintball pistol shooting OC-filled balls, that's because it appears to be one. Why a five-digit Indiegogo campaign is needed to obtain off-the-shelf Tippmanns and resell them at a 33%+ markup is beyond me.

Paintball guns firing pepper balls are used by law enforcement specifically as less-lethal weapons in situations where lethal force is not necessarily called for; dispersing pre-riotous mobs, for instance. But whenever cops deploy less-lethal force, it's always backed up with the threat of the real deal. Pepper spray might deter someone committing a crime of opportunity on the jogging path, but selling it as a home defense weapon? Look, someone who is forcing entry into a dwelling they know is occupied can be hard to deter by making their eyes all burn-y and watery. In fact, it might make them mad.

My favorite part of the whole fluffy ad campaign is this:

Well, there's your problem! If you'd stop using black powder and shift to smokeless like the rest of us did in the mid-1890s then you'd clear that right up. Go check the page out; there are plenty of opportunities to sprain your eye rolling muscles there.

This is just another in a long line of use-of-force tools marketed to people who know nothing about the use of force and, indeed, view it as somehow distasteful or degrading. Calling this thing retarded would be an insult to honest, upstanding mental defectives.
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Dear Media...

"Direct Action" is a term of art within the U.S. military that has a specific meaning. While you are running around with it like a puppy with a new chew toy, mangling it into "Direct Combat" and "Ground Action" (two terms I've heard so far this morning on NBC alone) understand that it doesn't mean "general ground combat" or the other thing it likely triggers in your squishy little Eloi noggins.
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From Comments Elsewhere...

Comment to a post here:

"The Euros have a proven zero-to-jackboots time lower than just about anybody on the planet. The migrant muzzies might want to think about what happens when they get Hans and Pierre feeling good and scared and backed into a corner.

The last time the Jerries had a populist demagogue with bad hair campaigning on a nationalist platform, he was no Donald Trump."

The situation there seems to be building to a denouement.

Oh, and they might start shooting each other in the Balkans again.
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Overheard in the Kitchen...

Me: "I'll have a couple strips of that bacon, but don't bother frying me an egg. I think I'm going to have bacon and yogurt for breakfast."

RX: "You are the most repulsive person in the history of repulsion."

Me: *walks toward refrigerator singing* "♫Bacon and yooooguuurt...♫"

RX: "Get out of this room right now you vile creature."

Automotif CXVI...

Spotted this nearly-pristine... 1974? 1975? ...Mercury Montego MX while walking home from lunch today. The lady behind the wheel certainly could have been the original owner. It reminded me quite a bit of my first car. Nothing like a gray and drizzly autumn afternoon to set off the nostalgia; wet leaves and wood smoke does it every time.
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