Archive for the 'Firearms' Category

I want one.

Jim Wilson writing for American Rifleman:

In some circles the pistol-mounted light has become quite popular as a personal-defense tool. The theory in the use of such lights is, of course, that you need to be able to identify the person as an actual threat before you employ deadly force. Further, we find that when we light up the target at night or in poor light, we can deliver our hits with much greater accuracy. However, there are some problems that can arise with the use of pistol-mounted lights that the defensive shooter should consider before making the transition.

Armed citizens often have two problems when considering carrying the defensive handgun. The first is that a suitable pistol, in a substantial caliber, often seems heavy, especially when one has been wearing it all day long. The other is that this same pistol can be more difficult to conceal. Unfortunately, mounting a light on the defensive handgun makes it even heavier. And it makes it more difficult to properly conceal the handgun.

Another potential problem that occurs when a person is using a pistol-mounted light is that he is tempted to use the pistol as a flashlight. I know of several cases in which the defensive shooter shined his light—and loaded pistol—on people and things that he had no intention of shooting.

We’ve dealt with this issue before of a light on the front of your handgun, and the lack of police officer discipline causing negligent discharges because of the trigger-like actuation of the light (pressure switch near the trigger guard, along with the fact that officers stupidly go around with their finger on the trigger of their weapons while pointing them at people and things).

Don’t do it this way, and keep your finger off the trigger.  Simple discipline solves that problem.  Lack of time, discipline and training also causes sympathetic muscle reflex responses like it did with poor Eurie Stamps (Jesus was that my rifle?).  But in general I am a huge fan of pistol-mounted lights for the right reason and under the right circumstances.

I think I’ve told the story about my purchase of one, but it bears repeating.  Before my wife’s grandmother passed away, I had to work on her house, oftentimes late into the evening on the weekends, and oftentimes not getting started until after dark.  The home was once in a great neighborhood, but it had turned for the worse because of gang activity, and it was in another town so we couldn’t be there except for me on the weekends.

There were also reports of ne’er-do-wells hanging around, and visual evidence of home entry when we weren’t there (along with electronic evidence such as unexplained power bills).  The home was left dark in order to minimize power bills, and every time I had to begin work after dark, I had to perform a sweep of the entire home.  Sometimes I had my Doberman, Heidi, and I was always safer and happier to have her.

But sometimes I didn’t have her with me.  The first time I ever did entry and sweep of the home, I did so using the hand over wrist method for holding a weapon in one hand and light in another.  The home had many rooms, many closets, multiple bathrooms and a garage as well as exterior structures.  I swore I would never use that method again.  It led to exhaustion and loss of fine motor skills associated with use of my hands and arms.

Before the next time I got a weapon mounted light and haven’t looked back.  I did entry, sweeping and room clearing using proper grip technique and without exhaustion.  I’ll grant the point that the handgun is unable to be concealed, and it’s a bit too heavy to carry without a rigger’s belt.  With a rigger’s belt and the proper holster it isn’t a problem, but you don’t usually carry a rigger’s belt, holster, firearm and weapon-mounted light to the grocery store (I wish we could all do that without people freaking out).

So my gun with the weapon-mounted light sits under my bed.  I’ll carry it in the car on trips, and sometimes I’ll carry it backpacking.  Otherwise, I do the classic routine of carrying a gun and tactical light (separately) with my other weapons.  You get something, you give up something.  No solution is perfect, and one size fits all doesn’t work with firearms.

I use this exact grip, but I find it natural and comfortable.  Others may not.  I also find .45 1911 natural and comfortable, while I do not find 9mm natural or comfortable (nor do I find double-stack magazine guns natural or comfortable compared to the 1911).  It may come down to choice if a shooter doesn’t come to terms with this grip, but it isn’t trivial that all the top competition shooters use this grip.  It does have a number of advantages.

Houston Chronicle, the history of the open carry bill in Texas from Texas Senator Joan Huffman.

There is also a misconception that the Legislature did not listen to law enforcement or care about their input on open carry legislation. It is true some police had objections and opposed the law, and most made it clear that if open carry of handguns were to become law they strongly requested that a license requirement remain and that a holster requirement be made part of the law. Texans must still be licensed and can only openly carry a holstered handgun.

I fought hard in the Senate to remove a House amendment to HB 910 that law enforcement groups strongly opposed. This amendment would have prohibited a peace officer from making a simple investigatory inquiry or other temporary detention to see if a person openly carrying a handgun in fact has a license. I worked with law enforcement to ensure the amendment was removed before HB910 finally passed. It was removed, much to our relief.

The permissive, licensed open carry of handguns has been the law for almost a year now, and I believe there has been little or no effect on law enforcement. In fact, it appears so far the right to openly carry is rarely exercised. I am currently conducting a written survey of the heads of law enforcement around the state asking about their experiences regarding the open carry of firearms. The Legislature will continue to monitor these important policy issues to ensure that public safety remains at the forefront of our discussion. The causes of these tragedies will continue to haunt us. But there is no benefit in blaming a law, a political organization, a political party or a person – other than the killer. I think we can all agree that the answers are much more complex than that.

Well, Joan wants to straddle the fence and keep one foot in the liberty pasture, with another in the collectivist field.  But it’s good to know just who was responsible for what, yes?  It supplies you with better optics when the enemy self-identifies.

Her assertion that the open carry bill has had little or no effect seems to be tied to the notion that this is a rarely exercised right.  The corollary is that if people actually exercise their rights, then it would be unsafe and the police would be adversely effected.

We’ve covered this before in the context of the Dallas shootings.  The fact that an open carrier had his picture posted on Twitter is completely irrelevant and didn’t hamper law enforcement in the least.  The officers who responded were fighting for their lives as they engaged in CQB with the shooter.  What Twitter did or didn’t say wasn’t even remotely part of their thinking.  That was all done by different officers, and by the way, if a shooter was going to kill multiple police officers, do you think he would post his picture on Twitter?  Really, people.  Do I have to come teach LEOs basic common sense?

As for what law enforcement wants, I couldn’t care less.  Communist Art Acevedo (who assisted and supported federal agents conducting forcible, random blood draws at a DUI check) won’t be happy until everyone is in shackles and chains wearing the uniforms of slave labor except his own department.

American Hunter:

I have been guiding brown bear hunters and fishermen and bear photographers from our homestead within Becharof National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska for 33 years and have had numerous close encounters with bears. Until now, I have never had to shoot an unwounded bear to protect either myself or clients, but the other week an event occurred and my good fortune changed. When it happened, I was fully aware of what was going on and how big the bear was. I also managed to stay aware of where my clients were, even when the bear was directly between us. The woman I was guiding said that while she did not remember smelling the bear’s breath, it was close enough to her face that it could have bitten her!

I have killed enough bears to know how important shot placement can be, even with large-bore rifles. I was well aware of the limitations of my 9mm pistol, even with Buffalo Bore ammo. I was aiming for a vital area with each shot; because it all took place between 6 and 8 feet, they were not far off. But hitting the head and brain of a highly animated and agitated animal is a difficult shot.

You can read his justification for leaving home with a single stack 9mm.  I’m glad everything worked out for him and everyone except the bear.

But I have to tell you, I just wouldn’t carry a 9mm on any kind of expedition into the Alaskan wilderness.  That just seems like you’re asking for trouble.  What if his shot placement wasn’t so good?  On the other hand, I suppose you could ask that about any cartridge.

According to Todd Hubbard:

GUNS are awesome machines.

Built with great precision, advanced over generations, they are powerful tools for their purpose. Practicing with them brings the pleasure and satisfaction that comes with honing difficult skills. The enforcers of our laws use them to stop the criminals who threaten our lives and property. Our military uses them to kill and contain the violent enemies of our nation. As with any fine machine, looking at a gun, possessing one or working with one is exciting and empowering.

This is what guns are not:

In the hands of civilians, they are not protection from crime. Unless you wear a uniform with a badge or a service patch on it, the gun you carry is more likely to kill you or someone you know or love than it is to kill anyone who threatens you or your loved ones. The “good guy with a gun” who will protect us, rather than threaten us, is the man or woman who has been screened, trained, authorized and empowered by us to do the job. Anyone else, no matter how well-intentioned, is an amateur at best and a hazard to the rest of us at worst. The past 40 years in the United States has been a massive experiment in the theory that a highly armed citizenry will make us safer, and the experiment has been an abysmal failure.

In the hands of civilians, guns are not a bulwark against tyranny. If you believe that guns are a remedy against an oppressive government, then you are on the side of the black man who perceived “his” people being abused by government agents and chose to strike back with a gun. You are on the side of the troubled white man who, 52 years earlier, wanted to bring down the elected government he viewed as corrupt. Dallas is what Second Amendment remedies look like in practice: dead police officers, a dead president.

Many of you, my friends and family, own firearms. I do not want you to surrender your guns. I do not want the government to confiscate them. But I do want you to help address the problem of so many deaths caused by these awesome machines. An informed, engaged electorate is what protects us from tyranny. Stop pretending this problem does not exist or that the only solution is more guns. Do not hide behind “originalist” arguments about the Constitution’s Second Amendment.

Oh good heavens.  So let’s cover this one more time for the dense or stolid listener.  Mr. Hubbard, who apparently is an attorney, is engaging in lying, and any considered assessment of his behavior would conclude that it approaches malfeasance because he knows better.

In the 1981 decision in Warren v. District of Columbia the D.C. Court of Appeals concluded that it is a “fundamental principle of American law that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any individual citizen.”  In Castle Rock v. Gonzales (2005), the Supreme Court declined to expand any requirements for protection and ruled that the police cannot be sued for failure to protect individuals, even when restraining orders were in place.

Mr. Hubbard knows these decisions, and also knows that even if it was commonly accepted that the police were required to protect individuals, it would be impossible.  They cannot be there all of the time, and they cannot even promise any particular timely response to your calls.  The police can literally eat popcorn and watch while a woman is raped, as long as they effect an arrest after the fact.  They may be fired for failure to follow a department procedure, but they will not be charged with a crime.  “To protect and serve” is a sweet campaign slogan for Sheriffs who are running for office, but it’s a lie – it’s always a lie – and Mr. Hubbard knows it.  The police are there for stability operations and security of the government.  Understand that.

You must be your own protection, and if you are a morally righteous man who cares about his own life and the lives of his loved ones, you will have means of effecting that self defense.  If you don’t you are negligent in your God-given duties.  By negligent, I mean more than that you simply don’t know better.  I mean you know better and willingly choose to neglect your duties.

We know that it’s claptrap to say that it’s impossible to effect this self defense, just like we all know that the rate of crime hasn’t gone up as a result of guns.  But we also suspect that Mr. Hubbard knows about fourth generation warfare, and that guns are indeed means of amelioration of tyranny, and that genocide is always preceded by gun confiscations.

We don’t “hide behind” the second amendment.  It doesn’t grant us the right to own weapons.  God does that Himself.  The constitution is a covenant between men for how they will live together.  Like all covenants, there are promises and curses.  Mr. Hubbard doesn’t want to endure the curses of failure to live according to the covenant to which we are all bound, including the second amendment.  Mr. Hubbard would do well to ponder that fact.

CBS News:

The video surveillance from an Albuquerque motel shows it clearly: A man paces the corridor; a woman exits her room to get something from her car, and then returns.

“And from out of nowhere this guy came back around the corner,” recalled Lynne Russell, “and this time he had a gun and he was pointing it right at my abdomen.”

At that very moment, Russell’s husband, Chuck De Caro, emerged from the shower. He recalled: “He then moved the gun from pointing at my wife to pointing at me, and he said, ‘I need your money.'”

But the gunman did not know that Russell, a former CNN anchor, and De Caro, a former CNN reporter who trained as a Special Forces soldier, habitually travel with guns that they are licensed and trained to use.

Russell was able to slip her gun from the nightstand into her purse, which she handed to De Caro, telling him “‘Take a really good look inside here; see if there’s anything you can find that we want to give the man.’ And Chuck looked and he said, ‘Yes, there is.”

And, they say, as the suspect started to shoot, De Caro fired back: “And I killed him,” he said.

“But you got shot yourself?” asked Braver.

“Well, that’s the nature of the game,” De Caro replied. “It’s called combat.”

[ … ]

But Dallas Police Chief David Brown, speaking after five officers were shot and killed, says these “good guys” actually complicate matters for police: “It’s been the presumption that a good guy with a gun is the best way to resolve some of these things. Well, we don’t know who the good guy is versus who the bad guy is if everybody starts shooting.”

The police would rather you be disarmed so that it makes their job of mopping up the remains and going home after their shift easier.  But is it actually possible to protect yourself?  We keep hearing the progressives say that it’s impossible, an argument that disproves their point since they never logically extend the argument to disarming the police.

Well, let’s see.

AZ Family reports that police arrived on scene to find 27-year-old Frank Taylor in the parking lot, suffering from a gunshot wound. He was rushed to a hospital, where he died from his injuries. Witnesses told police that Taylor held a gun to 23-year-old Carol Miracle’s head and demanded money. Miracle told police that “Taylor tried to rob her at gunpoint near the store.”

Glendale police officer Tiffany Smith indicated that investigators “learned that Taylor pointed his gun at Miracle’s head.” Smith said, “She then drew her own handgun that was holstered on her hip, and shot him one time while she was in fear for her life.”

Smith said the evidence recovered at the scene is “consistent” with eyewitness testimony that Taylor had a gun to Miracle’s head.

You mean without all of that super Ninja warrior stress control training LEOs go through she was able to defend her life?  I’m shocked.  Shocked!

She didn’t have all of that Ninja assassin training she needs.

Perhaps if the “terrorist attack” has to do with knives, or gun, or trucks, a person like her would be effective against it.  She seemed pretty cool under pressure to me.  If it involves a battalion of Ninja warriors, she may need some help.  It’s best, then, if everyone carries guns.

C. J. Chivers writing for The New York Times has an extensive piece entitled Tools of Modern Terror: How the AK-47 and AR-15 Evolved into Rifles of Choice for Mass Killers.  I recommend that you read it.

Chivers has the usual (for him) admiration for the AK-47 as a weapon that never fails.  “The Kalashnikov line was shorter and lighter than traditional rifles. It was inexpensive to manufacture, built for durability and reliable to an extraordinary degree. With few moving parts, and a design that made its disassembly and reassembly almost intuitive, its basics could be mastered by all manner of combatants — from traditionally instructed conscripts to almost wholly untrained guerrillas — in very little time.”

But fail it does.  I blogged on OIF and OEF long enough and had enough friends and acquaintances who had done combat tours in Iraq or Afghanistan that I heard some horror stories about AK-47s that wouldn’t fire more than a round or two and have a FTF / FTE, and that a shooter couldn’t hit the “broad side of a barn” with it.  I’ve shot one, as have you, and those complaints may be exaggerated, but they are about as exaggerated as the complaints against the AR-15.

Chivers focuses some of his time on the initial failure of the Stoner weapon system in Vietnam, while not spending much time on the Molly-Chrome or Stainless Steel barrels found today in AR-15s.  With upgraded buffer springs, enhanced extractor springs, etc., that make the M4/AR-15 weapons so reliable today, we really do have the professional soldier’s weapon that can be used by the masses, or in other words, the tight tolerances, accuracy and recoil-along-the-axis design (as opposed to coupling around the shooter’s hand with the angled buttstock) that makes it such an admirable carbine for shooters of any skill. We’ve had virtually every imaginable torture test, and the high end AR-15s outperform not only AKs but the Garand and Garand variants (M-14).  My Rock River Arms AR-15 could be beaten with a sledge hammer, soaked in paint, and dropped in sand and it would still eat and shoot everything I fed it.

But it’s true that the AK-47 found ready acceptance among terror-producing nations and peoples, and Chivers makes no attempt to diagnose why that is.  Take a long look at his maps of AK usage versus AR-15 usage.  Neither does Chivers make any attempt to diagnose any other element of weapons and terror, such as the possibility that use of the AK or AR for such things marks a shift to CQB versus standoff sniping as with Charles Whitman (with a bolt action rifle).  In other words, what if the problem isn’t the AK or the AR, but the heart of sinful mankind that causes these things, with the weapon of choice being a function of tactical choices the shooter makes?

Chivers disappoints me with this paragraph.

Governments have done little to stop the spread of this class of weapons. Often, as in the case of the United States, they have contributed to it. Acts of crime, terror and oppression with Kalashnikovs and AR-15 descendants, endured by civilians under withering fire, have been hard-wired into our times. There is no end in sight.

“Stop the spread of this class of weapons.”  As if stopping the spread of any class of weapons among peaceable people who need means of self defense is a bad thing.  Chivers is a legitimate military journalist who did a wonderful job on coverage of the campaign in Afghanistan and is a voice for the men in uniform.

But with this one paragraph it appears to me that he has placed his politics squarely on the side of gun controllers who believe that laws, regulations, governmental actions and policies effect behavior and catalyze moral righteousness.  Matthew 15:15-20 teach us that weapons don’t defile the man, any more than alcohol makes a drunkard.

But from the end of the gun comes self defense, and Chivers would do well to consider the millions of men, women and children who have been slaughtered as a result of not having means of self defense.

First of all, Jeff’s grip is odd since there is no thumb on the slide for his opposing hand.  I wonder if this “revolver-style” grip is normal for him (it is for some people), or if it is a function of the smallness of the gun frame?  I don’t do nearly as well shooting small frame guns as with large frame guns for this very reason.

Second, for all of my M&P-owning readers, take a simple test.  First of all, unload your M&P.  Do it.  Including the chamber.  Make sure.  Now.  Look at the end of the slide and the gap between the slide and the frame.  Take two fingers and put them on the top of the slide and the bottom of the frame near the end of the barrel.  Press together.  Why does this gap (and play) exist?  What possible engineering justification can there be for that kind of tolerance?  This is true of every M&P I have ever touched.  Every one.  There is rattling at the end of the frame because of the play between the barrel and frame.

Third, in the comments section of  YouTube, Jeff remarks that S&W is made in the USA, while Springfield Armory XD/XDm is not.  Whatever.  If you consider Massachusetts the USA.

Fourth, my son Joseph has an M&P Shield and likes it very much.  Granted I don’t shoot 9mm so I cannot make a good comparison, but Joseph is very discerning and critical.

I still think I’m in the market for another concealed carry gun, a compact 1911, probably a SA Range Officer Compact (RO Compact).  But I don’t have one yet.  So there’s that.

See:

Why you shouldn’t clean your rifle bore before a hunt

How often do you clean your guns?

I have difficulty believing that a dirty rifle barrel produces any significant gain in accuracy, and I would love to hear what some precision shooters have to say about this.  What is your experience?