See, now this is an intelligent contribution to the safety discussion.

I don't regularly follow John Farnam these days, but he remains a valuable observer on tactics, technique and attitude, in much the way that I recall Mas Ayoob used to be.  And so I just ran across this post from Farnam, on the use of the rifle's manual safety, specifically within the context of the hot range.

It's worth reading, and considering.  Unlike anonymous commenters who try to suggest that Onlier Operatorer types are somehow above Cooper's safety rules,  Farnam has documentable street cred, and a known capacity as an analyst.

And so:

Most modern pistols (Glock, XD, M&P, SIG320, Walther PPQ, H&K VP9, FNS, Ruger AA) don’t have manual safeties, yet we still routinely move with them in our hands during training exercises, relying mostly upon a strong “register” position of the trigger-finger to prevent NDs. Still, we don’t prevent them all, no matter how careful we try to be!

Can we do the same with our rifles, or do we insist students keep the manual safety in the “on” position except when in the process of firing intentionally?

My answer to that question is:

Yes!

I accept it either way, but I teach the former.

Of course, I tell students that I want the manual safety “on” when the rifle is slung, and I want them to check it frequently. Scant argument there.

However, when the rifle is in their hands, the position of the manual safety becomes optional.

The whole article is worth reading;  one of Farnam's particular eloquences is his ongoing defense of the hot range (as ultimately safer than the cold range), and you get a lot of it here.

This discussion of the rifle safety is interesting.  For a rifle with a truly ergonomic safety, like the Steyr Scout's tang-mounted roll switch, I don't really think I could be any faster one way or the other, as with a 1911 pistol.  Many other boltgun safeties are nearly as good as that (e.g., M700, M70, Sako).  But most "battle rifle" and "battle carbine" safeties I've met are not ergonomic to engage;  one has to shift hand positions to do it, and that does take time.

And there is this:  I suspect that Farnam's point is both in acknowledging a measurable raw speed value, and also in the attitude surrounding the use of the manual safety.  We should remember that one can observe all Four Rules with a cocked and unlocked piece;  none of the Rules makes any mention of a manual safety anywhere.  Presentation of the piece for firing always, always includes disengaging the weapon's manual safeties, if it has any.  For any drill that has the student randomly in and out of his sights, this doesn't need to change:  whether or not he re-engages a safety in between, every time the gun comes up to fire, that safety gets wiped off.

So, the discussion of when to re-engage any manual safety becomes intentionally decoupled from the discussion of when to dis-engage...and that does seem like an important observation to make.  There is no need to use a manual safety as any sort of bolster to Rule Three, and in fact it might be too easy to rely on it, however slightly, as a separate "proof" of a safe condition.

If it's really the attitude, and not the hardware--as we all love to say--then Farnam makes a good point here.  I'm happy for the reminder.

This item may indeed be of interest.

I've never really considered the idea of a 9mm 1911 before (what, exactly, would the point of that be?), but since the arrival of Browning's magnificent little 1911-22 for small hands, my thinking has evolved a bit.  And so when I got wind of Springfield Armory's new full-slide, full-grip EMP 9mm pistol, I thought it might be a good idea to get a peek to see if it might be something interesting.

Got an unexpected chance to meet one in person this weekend, and dang, it is.

The point of the EMP, originally, was to scale the 1911 down slightly, to 9mm dimensions--most importantly, in the grip length and width dimensions.  I never paid much attention to it at first, because for me, it's not enough smaller than a slim-lined .45ACP model to make an appreciable difference in size, and all other things being equal I'll always take .45 over 9.  And I admit I've never been a fan of super-stubby 1911s anyway, in any caliber.  (I've long preferred the "Commander slide, LW Officer's frame" arrangement as the best balance between size, weight, and shootability.)

But looking at it with different eyes now, I see much to like.  It absolutely is smaller in the hand, and for smaller hands that is going to make a big difference.  It is all 1911 in operation, and with SA's reputation I'd expect it to run as well as anything out there.  It's a 10+1 9mm of moderate weight, and may well make a splendid training or working gun for whoever's hand it fits.  It's spendy (street price as I saw it was $1050), but then again it already has everything on it you'd want to put on a working gun.  9mm is cheaper to run than .45, and if you can arrange the right loads, it seems to be "enough" for defensive use, even if some of us simply like to use more.  (Hell, the real reason I favor larger calibers isn't because I doubt the 9x19 at its best.  It's because of the worst-case ammo supply scenario:  I know that any old thing I can stuff into a .45 or even .40, that will make the gun work, will do decently well.  That's never been true of the 9.)

Anyway, I'm starting to visualize a set of training guns for people that would employ the 1911 platform, but be sized for hands appropriately.  At the bottom end of the scale is the Browning 1911-22 or 1911-380, at the full-sized end is the slim-lined and then the standard 1911...and dang if in the middle isn't this slightly reduced frame that just may have a solid niche to occupy.

Now, if I could just figure out how to solve the financial problems and start putting all these dang ideas to work!  :-)

Another fun shop installment.

Worked a fun shop visit in to our business today, and wanted to document a few observations.

Mossberg MVP boltgun

This one wasn't the "scout" model that I still hope to meet some day, but it was the same turnbolt action on which the "scout" model is based, and I'm happy to have learned what I did.  As expected, extraction is (very small) sliding-plate and ejection is boltface plunger, so boo, but other than that, it was actually pretty nice.  Loading/ejection port access is actually not as restrictive as I would have guessed, even with the Weaver rail straddling the receiver rings.  Bolt operated smoothly, with a convenient bolt stop and friendly cocking effort.  The safety was ergonomic and pleasantly positive;  I'd prefer that it lock the bolt as well as prevent discharge, but that seems a minor point.  I'm not a fan of "open" rear sights on rifles, but this one was well-done, and hey, kudos that the rifle has them at all, in an age that seems to automatically presume conventionally mounted moonscopes. 

I'm happy to say that the trigger is no joke.  No, it's not a Savage Accu-Trigger, much less a Mannlicher Scout or Blaser R93 trigger, but it's good enough that you'll not need to improve it.  Presuming the rifle runs reliably and durably, it seems like a reasonable platform, and I look forward to seeing the "scout" trim, both the glassed and glassless models.

Mossberg 464 levergun

Now having met this piece in person, it seems to be just exactly what I figured it might be, and I think I may need to add one to my stable some day.  It feels just a hair long with the fancy flash hider, but it balances like a '94 levergun, which is always a win.  I'm happy to say that the fore-end is slimmer than I was fearing, and the rail segments seem to be integral with the fore-end composite.  Presumably they can be either replaced with a separate fore-end, or simply cut off, if like me you prefer keeping things as compact as possible.  (I might keep the bottom one for a sling attachment point, although it does seem rather grandiose for that simple purpose....)

The tang safety works, and is a welcome addition to a levergun which is to serve "serious social purposes" as well as traditional hunting ones.  (I could tolerate Condition Zero in an urban levergun if necessary, but would prefer Condition One if I could get it.  The tang safety makes that possible.)  The sights are excellent, but again as on the bolt, why bother with an "open" rear sight when the 464's receiver has a beautifully placed rearward ring in just the right place for a compact ghost-ring aperture?  I simply do not understand why anyone would prefer open sights to an aperture:  the latter is superior in every way that matters.  (And then, of course, the top of the fore-end could get its own rail space for forward mounting of "scout" glass or dot sights.)

The buttstock is exactly what it should be, and the quick adjustments are very nice to have.  An excellent feature for working with noobs, especially the smaller-statured.  Action seems smooth enough, and presuming it runs--it's a '94, and should work well.

The trigger...is rough.  Nearly painful, actually.  Consider all the bad press you've heard about levergun triggers before;  that's because of triggers like this one.  Okay, so it needs work. Theoretically, with a '94 action, gunsmiths should know how to do that--and the effort would be worth it.  With a crisp trigger in the 3-4 pound range, this seems a seriously useful rifle.  As a 6+1 in .30/30, it really is a full-blown rifle, limited mostly by the range limitations of iron sights, not horsepower.  I still think it would also be worth offering as an intentional carbine, chambered in .45 Colt, .44 Magnum, or even .357 Magnum, with a 9- or 10-round capacity.  Again, within the limitations of iron sights, these revolver rounds have surprising reach, and more thump than I'd have guessed.  And if we ever sort out The Great And Pointless Rimfire Shortage, there is the idea of this levergun as a 14-round .22...

Browning 1911-22 pistol

Wanted to check this fit in the 6yo's hand today.  Glad I did.  She can get a good grip, with thumb on safety and no H-gripping, and the pad of her trigger finger is within a quarter-inch of right on.  Essentially, she's ready, ergonomically.  She's also strong enough to rack the slide, properly.  Squee!

Great.  Now I just need to get the whole "earn a living" problem sorted out, and find some .22 ammo, and add this lovely little piece to the stable.  

Ruger LCP pistol

6yo very sweetly requested to see an LCP accoutered in pink camo, and an LC9 in solid purple.  Very well then!  She learned a little about ergonomics when she tried to rack the wee slide on the LCP, against the DAO hammer, but this gun fit her hand nicely if she consciously took a high grip.

The LCP seems okay.  .380 doesn't thrill me, but with the right ammo and the right attitude, I'd sure use one over throwing rocks.  It doesn't seem that much smaller, to me, than the Diamondback DB9, which I still see here and there, and I'd take the DB9 in a heartbeat for the pocket gun role.

Ruger LC9 pistol

I was a little less impressed with the LC9.  In 6yo's hand, trigger reach was much too far, and sizewise, the piece seems right in there with the Kimber Solo, DB9, Kahr, G43, etc., designs, all of which have better ergonomics.  Well, now I know!  :-)

Kimber Solo pistol

Dang if I don't continue to like this little pistol, even though I've heard some unflattering things about it here and there--that I haven't fully vetted one way or the other.  Trigger, at least on this sample, was really excellent, with a somewhat long but positive reset, and despite the diminutive size, controls and ergonomics are very nice.  Sights are excellent.  The manual safety design in particular seems outstanding, and perfectly intuitive to 1911 aficionados.  It seems to be right on the cusp between true "pocket pistol" (such as DB9, DB380, LCP, etc.) and "subcompact" (such as Kahrs, G43, S&W Shield, etc.) and with a lightweight frame, would become my instant first choice in a 9mm pistol.  (It's not exactly heavy, even with a steel frame, but its weight does exclude it from the sub-one-pound class.  Suffice it to say that if I were to choose a 9mm based on weight and size alone, it would be the DB9, and if I were to choose the best shooting subcompact--suitably small but still requiring a holster for support--I'd probably go to the Solo.)

Kimber Micro 380 pistol

This was unexpected.  Got to see Kimber's mini-1911 in .380 ACP;  more than anything it seems to be exactly the sort of update to the Colt Mustang that I always hoped for before the Browning 1911-22 and 1911-380 came along.  It's small.  It's 1911ish, but with pivoting trigger, slightly different safety lever, and the full-on Kimber treatment.  Looks promising in many ways, but again, .380 does not thrill me, and there is now the 1911-380, which may be the superior choice for most uses.  

Will keep an eye out, and look again as .380 options become more immediate for up-and-coming kids.  :-)

S&W Shield pistol

The "what mood will Shield be in today?" effect continues.  I continue to like the general ergonomics, and the price point is actually pretty compelling too.  But today, this one's trigger had horrible backlash and a mushy, very un-positive reset.  Hm.

Still, I like the piece in general.  The safety still works every time, despite its diminutive appearance.  Grip comfort is conspicuous.  It has a reputation for running without fuss.

S&W M&P pistol

I wanted to renew my acquaintance with a standard M&P pistol frame, mostly because I am intending to go this route with airguns.  (A separate topic for another post;  suffice it to say that I needed a core design among the polymer-framed, striker-fired, doublestack guns to go with, and the S&W is getting the nod based on several factors, including ubiquity of models across the spectrum of pellet guns, BB guns, and Airsoft guns of multiple powerplants.)

After a few minutes in the hands, I think it's the right choice.  The M&P frame is pretty comfortable, for a double-stack, and otherwise ergonomics are plenty good enough.  Trigger on this one was surprisingly good;  perhaps a bit heavier than ideal, but with a very nice, positive reset, and without the noticeable backlash problem of the Shield.  

I'll be posting more about M&Ps as the airgunnery experiment unfolds.  Given that I don't like doublestack designs as a rule--on simple account that they feel like two-by-fours in the hand--M&P is definitely one of the friendlier ones.

Springfield Armory XD-S pistol

Picked up one of these again, just to compare it on the same day with Shield.  Glad I did, too:  it confirmed that I really like this pistol.  Ergonomics suggest a much bigger gun, but XD-S is slim and compact.  This one's trigger was crisp (for a striker gun), reasonably light, and with a notably positive, short reset.  I still think that the XD-S "4.0" is the logical heir to the Colt Lightweight Commander, for the working man's general purpose pistol.  Now having seen probably a dozen examples each of XD-S and Shield, I think I'd always opt for XD-S first, for my own purposes.

Colt Commander CO2 BB pistol

Saw this in blister pack on the way out of the gun section.  I hadn't come to look at airguns today, but it caught my eye, and I'm considering this piece as a possible training/education tool anyway.  It's a reasonably faithful 1911 reproduction, powered by a CO2 12-gram cartridge contained in the detachable magazine (which also houses the BBs), and is developing a decent reputation for accuracy ("accuracy" being something you have to adjust your thinking to, with smoothbore round-ball shooters like 'BB guns' and Airsoft guns).  The gun does "blowback" on firing, which is good in a trainer to disrupt your sight picture, and in general the manual of arms is nearly straight 1911 firearm.  It's really only missing a ducktail grip safety among the most common updates, and with the minimal blowback of a CO2 BB pistol, I suspect it won't be the problem it is with a .45 ACP anyway.

So there it was, and I took a second to look at it.  It is indeed "full metal", as weighty as a steel 1911, with good sights, functional safety, and in general looks well-built.  I look forward to trying one out, especially with some of the new low-ricochet plated BBs that have become available.  

Until next time, then.  Much cogitation to do.  :-)

derp

I know I've said this before--please forgive the vent--but I just can't get over the sheer amount of derp in the manual safety design of the Benjamin Marauder*.  I keep thinking about the idea of building a "school set" of air rifles for students to learn on and train with, and the basic Marauder design (reliable boltie 10rd repeater, internally suppressed, adjustable power, hand-pump friendly PCP reservoir, topflight trigger, conspicuously accurate barrel) keeps coming up as being almost the obvious platform choice.  

But seriously...just look at this:

Yes, you can click to make it bigger, but why would you?

So...what you're saying is that in order to on-safe my loaded piece, I stick my finger inside the trigger guard and pull the lever to the rear.  

derp derp derp 

Look, I know I'm a pain in the ass about gun safety, and about gun safeties, and ergonomics in general...but at least there is a consistency to my own neuroses, and I'd like to think that a design like the above would have been laughed into oblivion before ever even coming up for serious approval, on the simple account of maybe, just maybe, the ergonomic action to make the loud noise and the ergonomic action to prevent the loud noise SHOULD NOT BE THE SAME.  But this damned thing actually made it out of committee and through legal!

The Garand safety is bad enough, but at least there you can say that the on-safe motion is outside the trigger guard.  This...I just don't know if I could ever see using it as a training tool--unless I just ignored the safety lever entirely as a...well, a safer option.  I still think that it wouldn't take too much effort to build a dogleg connector to a more ergonomic lever or button, and then the M-Rod would be nearly authentically there as a platform, lacking only iron sights, a short LOP, and if optics are important, a means of mounting an IER glass forward over the shroud.

Until then...well, I keep wondering how to turn a Benjamin Discovery into a repeater with sound suppression, or if it's possible to drop a Marauder pistol (which uses a simple trigger-blocking cross bolt safety...crude, but at least not idiotic) into a rifle stock.  

Grrr.  So close on the whole...and yet for training, so completely unusable.

___________________

* Not to pick on the M-Rod specifically;  the basic trigger group/safety design was around well before the Marauder was launched, and lots of airguns, especially spring-piston breakbarrels, use some variation of the damned thing.  (I suspect it is probably a very economical way to get a complete trigger/safety group into a stock with minimal cutting.)  I harp on the Marauder because it is such an otherwise outstanding piece of kit, that the derp hurts that much more.

Fun shop research.

Got a few minutes today to stop in at a local fun shop;  a few items seemed worth recording here.

Benjamin P-Rod airgun.

I had remembered that this place had carried a P-Rod before;  since this "pistol" uses the same bolt mechanism as the M-Rod rifle I've been considering for the Scout-Rod concept, I thought I'd put it to shoulder with that in mind. 

Yeah, that bolt throw is really short.  I was hoping it wouldn't feel that much so, but it does.  That's just not going to be an honorable trainer for a real turnbolt centerfire.  I suspect there's still a lot of value in the "Scout airgun" concept, but I may want/need to modify my thinking a bit on it.  Boltwork is important.  (Maybe when--if--my financial ship comes in and I can fully go at a new custom project, I'll try to convince someone like Tom Gaylord, or a Dennis Quackenbush, or some other innovator in the airgun space, to work with me on a concept piece.  I still think that some sort of slow-indexing cam is a worthwhile pursuit, to get a faithful bolt function.)

Conceivably the not-fully-optimized airgun could be thought of more as an adjunct piece to a carefully plan, that includes both live- and dry-fire of the centerfire Scout, live-fire airgun focused on singles, and/or live-fire rimfire.  After all, so much useful work can be done dry, with a manual repeater, and of course that would be the very bolt to practice on...  okay, set cogitate mode on.

I do still want me a P-Rod, though.  The carbine length is nice, and with the right sighting arrangement it should be a nice workhorse.  Downside:  the dang stock is too long, and doesn't lend itself well to shortening;  there is an AR stock adapter available but believe it or not the shortest LOP is still too long.  (I suspect there's a good answer available, but haven't found it yet.)

Benjamin Discovery airgun.

This air rifle is what I think I'd go to, if asked to put together a "classroom set" of noob training guns.  Since they had one, I thought I'd look at it in that context.

Yeah, okay, I really am on to something here:  the Disco is impressive.  It looks heavier and bigger than it really is, and should prove most useful for working with the small-statured.  Stock is workable wood, which means shortening LOP and adding Ching sling studs will be simple.  It shoulders naturally, and in this age of insistence on carbine-style vertical pistol grips it actually feels like an honest-to-goodness rifle.  Safety is indeed acceptably located--would be better at front of trigger guard rather than rear, but it will do.  Rear sight seems plenty good for an open sight, but of course I'll discard that and put a ghost-ring on instead, and probably replace the front with a solid square post.

The bolt seems solid enough. but the action is not "positive".  As a reliable teaching rifle, it is probably perfect.  I'd love to see positive clicks and snaps, but that is really just preference talking.

I like the Disco more and more the more I learn about it.  It may not have the repeating mechanism or the sound-suppression of the Marauder, but its safety is vastly superior to its upscale brother, and it is both lighter and shorter besides.  It's quite possible that the route I will take may not to go to the Marauder at all, but rather to have a custom Disco with sound suppression.  Will think further.

Kel-Tec KSG shotgun.

Ah, the storied and famed KSG.  And now I've met one in person. 

It is indeed luxuriously short.  (Muzzle blast must be impressive to the shooter.)  Short enough that I admit I have, somewhat surprisingly, a visceral hesitation to it.  Sure, it's probably irrational, but I can't deny that it's there.  Sight radius will necessarily be limited.  The forward sling stud would necessarily be right there at the muzzle.  And I believe the horror stories about shot hands after shearing off vertical foregrips during chambering.  (I'm not a vertical-foregrip kinda guy in the first place, but still.  This is a pump shotgun, after all;  one works the action briskly, and the idea that your hand winds up right out there at the end of the stroke is somewhat sobering.  One might reasonably observe that the pistol is even shorter, but the pistol's chambering stroke is away from the muzzle, not toward it.)

And yet there is much to like about the piece.  It is, if nothing else, ingenious.  Controls seem reasonably sized, positive, and easy to reach.  14 rounds of 12-gauge in a package this compact is impressive to my "size efficiency" aesthetic.  It doesn't feel nearly as heavy as it really is. 

So, jury's still out.  But I'm glad it's here.

Glock G43 9mm.

I happened to notice one of the new Glock G43 single-stack 9mm pistols in the rack, and of course had to see that.  No, I've never been a Glock guy, but really, that has been mostly because of two very specific personal reasons:  1) they just feel like two-by-fours in my hand, and 2) the trigger has always caused my trigger finger to nearly go completely to sleep over the course of 20 shots or so.  (I first noticed that on my ex-wife's G23 a lot of years ago, and every Glock I've shot since then does the same thing.  I really wanted to like that G23, but I kinda need to retain sensitivity in my trigger finger, ya know?)

Anyway, the G43 does indeed dispense with the "feels like a two-by-four" problem, and that makes me happy.  It's not the thinnest of the breed, and it won't displace my interest in Kahr, Shield, XD-S, and Solo, but it is certainly of the breed, and that will probably make it the Glock I'll go to when I want to get serious about Glock-fu.  The rest of the gun was...Glock.  Which means it seems well-built, simple, logical, and probably runs like a top.

Counter-jockeys.

Le sigh.  I think I've run into this particular counter-jockey before;  he'll make you work to avoid having to tell him how full of shit he is about...oh hell, a lot.  His ignorance about airguns is nearly weapons-quality, and he shows no sign of being really interested in learning otherwise.  His gunhandling was awful, as was his attention;  he didn't even seem to notice me repositioning myself nearly constantly whenever he was handling something.

He insisted I look at a PX4 Beretta for how "comfortable" and "safe" it was;  I said upfront I could guarantee I wouldn't like it, and that my safety was between my ears.  Fat in the hand, DA/SA fire control, decocking slide mounted safety, and size inefficient.  I'm sure it runs fine, and some might like it, but after hearing me working over the G43 and discussing what it was about that piece which interested me, one would think he could manage a little less tone-deafness than this.

Perhaps I should have made it a point to make a point, but honestly it's frustrating that one should have to do that, and given the reasonably clear signals he ignored in the first place, I'm not sure it would have made much difference anyway.

The fun shop...should be, damn it.  But sometimes, research can be painful.

One of those 'because Claire' bookmarks.

"What are we as a society going to do?"

With Claire*, you don't get a magnum opus, you get a lupine opus.  This is one of those, not so much because of the size of the response, but because it just seems like it's all in there.  Nothing is perfect, but it's good enough that it becomes very difficult to quote it merely in part.

So, RTWT.

One feels a bit sorry for the original "first-time" commenter, who at least implicitly gets fairly savaged by the force of the article, and then by the Commentariat.  Claire does a perfectly fine job of declaring that she's speaking to attitudes rather than singling out ad hominem (she's better than most at this), but still...whoosh.  (I admit, full disclosure, that I am familiar with such criticism myself, and perhaps I make more of it than I should.)  Truth is, unless he speaks up again (and as of this writing he doesn't appear to have done so), we may never know what his actual intention was.  In one way that's a bit of a shame, but on the other hand, if someone really does need to learn this particular lesson, it's probably gonna leave a mark anyway.

Anyway, that aside, it's a truly excellent summary statement on the question, and what the question usually implies in society-as-it-is-now.  Duly bookmarked here, because I have a feeling I'll want to refer back to it.


_________________
* Claire Wolfe.  Get it?

Outsourcing empathy: what could go wrong?

A Facebook friend--a good man, let me be clear, and one who is a bit of a personal inspiration to me regarding outlook on life--asked, today, after hearing of another hive-publicized shooting incident which may or may not have much in common with other mass shootings:

Again? My friends who are responsible gun owners--what's going on? Sorry, I don't want to put you on the spot (as in, you don't really have to respond), but something has to change, I think.

He then amended;

I guess I didn't state that right: Just because you have a gun, you don't have to know what's going on. I'm just curious what people have to say. I think I'm at the tipping point where I think we have to have some kind of licensing process.

I thought he deserved a response.  He's no sort of hard-core state bootlicker, and is more thoughtful than most.  And so, privately, I sent him the following.  It seemed worth posting here.

Hi, [S].  Thought I'd give a more thoughtful answer to your "what's going on?" question in the backchannel.  It is offered respectfully;  I know you to be a thoughtful person, and I'd not bother if I didn't think you would listen.  

Full disclosure:  I speak strongly.  I am contemptuous of all politics.  And I seem to say things that most people don't want to hear.  That said, I can assure you that I do not argue from ignorance, and I try to speak to attitudes rather than ad hominem to people.  (And so, for example, any reference to "you" in here isn't directed at you personally, etc.)  

With that in mind, here you go:

I don't think "tipping point" is a rational concept here. The core argument for gun rights, to the extent that even has any logical relation to today's shooting case (the few details available now don't suggest persuasively that it does), is not a statistical one, but a moral one. To wit: there is no magic statistical threshold that, once crossed, will suddenly make it morally acceptable to impose forcible prior restraint on people (gun owners, in this case) who have harmed no one, and never will.  The reverse, of course, is equally true:  gun controllers will never be persuaded by any amount of evidence that guns in the hands of the peasantry save more lives than they take.  For all the grandstanding to the contrary, the notion that either gunnies or gun controllers actually care about "performance" statistics is arguably the biggest fiction you'll ever hear on the subject.

What I find most depressing, though, is that so many otherwise intelligent people are convinced that gun control schemes will somehow do what they are advertised to do, despite all of history and basic human nature. The salesmanship may be stunning and slick, but the "performance" has been abysmal and even counterproductive (which, an uppity peasant might observe, makes it no different than the War on (some) Drugs, imperial warmongery, domestic surveillance...). And so after all the worst mass shooting disasters, we eventually* find out that 1) the site was already a de jure or de facto "gun-free zone", 2) there were other laws in place already that also failed to protect the innocent, and 3) none of the gun-control proposals on offer to fix the problem would actually have prevented the incident in the first place...oh, gee whiz! And it really doesn't take a whole lot of analysis to figure out that the "gun-free zone" is a much preferred site for a sick creep to work without interruption.

And yet somehow, the only socially acceptable remedy is more of what has (QED, each time) demonstrably failed to perform as advertised. Because simply entertaining other options is somehow prima facie evidence that you would spit-roast your own children for another box of ammo. "What's the matter with you cousin-humping redneck ammosexuals, who would rather hug your rifle than your kid? Why won't you have that 'national conversation' with us?" It's hard to get more tone-deaf than that, and yet most control-freaks I've met consider themselves far more subtle and nuanced than the rest of Us The Unwashed.

Adding to the chutzpah is the more recent sentiment that gun-rights supporters are getting too in-your-face and (buzzword alert) "extreme". Yes, more and more are exercising their rights with less than elegance. But the gun-controllers own this "problem", because they produced it from nothing. Who really thinks, seriously, that the gun-rights folks just up and decided one day that they needed to start carrying carbines to the local coffee shop to make a point? That's a politician's logic**, not that of a rational person who can see simple cause and effect. The aggravating displays we see now are an absolutely natural consequence of having been hounded, marginalized, and even dehumanized for decades by people who absolutely would NOT leave them alone, despite their never having harmed or threatened anyone, and despite having been promised many times along the way that "all we want is..."  Consider the pious (and very vocal) "reasonableness" of the idea that we must deny guns to "the mentally ill":  this is certainly designed to sound unassailably agreeable, but consider that these same people are also pushing the idea that simply wanting a gun is evidence of mental illness in and of itself.  (This is a great strategy, of course, because the disarmers can argue both that any pushback means that you must somehow want to hand carbines to the insane, and also that your obvious paranoia at being thus persecuted must be indicative of a pathology of your own.)

The disarmers' outright lies, the deliberate misdirections, the procedural shenanigans, the manufactured "stats", the nearly continuous astroturfing...and above all, the sanctimonious insistence that you, simply because you are a "gunnie", are somehow responsible for the actions of others and an enabler of future evil... All this, simply to provide empty absolution for a mind-set that cannot conceive of a non-political approach to a social problem. 

Jeez, I'm frankly amazed at how polite the gunnies have remained, for all these years.

Yes, something has to change. The concept of gun control, as forcible prior restraint on those who haven't harmed anyone, is morally repugnant on its face.  As "crime control" it is an absolute bomb, despite what you may have heard from the propaganda factories. And as any sort of "solution" for the disaster of mass shootings, how is it not the absolute height of irony and cynicism to advocate further disarming the victims when it's clear to anyone paying attention that the perpetrators simply ignore the law entirely?

Given all that, my own question is this: for anyone who believes in gun control as a deterrent to crime, where does your faith come from?  I mean seriously: why, exactly, do you think that anything that is proposed now, will somehow accomplish what the thousands of gun laws already on the books have failed to do?  Is it because a politician told you so? Is it because you believe that the NRA is hopelessly politicized and in it only for itself, while the Brady Center, SPLC, and Everytown for Gun Safety have only the best public interests at heart? Is it because you suffer from the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect, or perhaps a simple hatred of The Other who you don't understand?

Which, ultimately, brings me back to the beginning. The biggest problem we have--as a society--is that we have created a world in which people outsource their empathy, and their morality, to others, rather than retaining it for themselves. That "we" are willing to outsource these core functions of our humanity to politicians, is chilling beyond words to anyone who has studied the history of genocide and mass atrocity. (And to be clear, here, a whole lot of "gunnies" do that too--drives me crazy to see it.) In such a world, an event as incomprehensibly nihilistic as Sandy Hook, or UCC, or Columbine, seems not only plausible but inevitable.

How to turn things back toward sanity?

Well, trying to remove, reduce, or control guns is doomed to failure, and will just get more people killed. And it does nothing to strike the root.

Arming the peasantry may well help a little by giving people a chance to fight back in desperate circumstances, but in and of itself that is not going to reverse sociopathic nihilism either. At best it will displace it, with an elevated threat of tactical failure.

Ultimately, the problem is in our minds. No law, no rule, no attempt to control other people against their will, will ever fix it. We have to take our empathy back, each one of us, and not let it go again.  (I think it was Jung who said "The salvation of the world consists in the salvation of the individual soul."  I'm no sort of religious man, but I don't think you have to be, to recognize the truth in that.)

Some say this is impossible, that it would be too much work, and in the end people will sooner accept devolving into civil war. Well, maybe. It sure looks that way some days. But I can't let myself believe that it has to be that way.  If nothing else, I have to answer to my daughters, and I want them to see me trying to build the world as I want to see it, from the ground up. 

____________________
* This information is usually available right away, but is drowned out underneath all the sanctimonious grandstanding, and is often never reported in the mainstream at all.
** You know, politicians:  those folks who dream of a day when their approval ratings might make it up to their hat size.

File this under "Do you understand?"

Sure, we've long known that the Establishment propagandizes for the Establishment.  But this Greenwald article does make the case in a way that should be digestible by a larger audience of fence-sitters than I'd ever be able to reach.

We’re bravely here to report that these two incidents perhaps coincidentally occurred at “about” the same time: There was a hospital that blew up, and then there was this other event where the U.S. carried out an airstrike. As the blogger Billmon wrote: “London 1940: Civilians throughout the city were killed at about the same time as a German air strike, CNN reports.”

The entire article is designed to obfuscate who carried out this atrocity. The headline states: “Air attacks kill at least 19 at Afghanistan hospital; U.S. investigating.” What’s the U.S. role in this incident? They’re the investigators: like Sherlock Holmes after an unsolved crime.

This, too, pretty much says it all:

Now, if only we could get more folks to remember how this all works when the subject is "Plebes with gunz, ZOMG!", or "Working within the system is the only way to get results."

(That includes you too, Glenn Greenwald.  You may be better than most, but you too have your blind spots.)

A metaphysical lament. When those who say they get it, don't.

As I was writing this, I had already been thinking about making it into a post of its own, because the topic seemed to be worth it. The following was inspired by one of Mama's insightful comments, and once Blogger told me it was too long to be a comment, it was reasonably easy to say, "okay, Blogger, fine...I'll make it into its own post."

As a "contextual continuity clue": the following relates to several posts I've got here at Rifleman Savant, in which something relating to a Jeff Cooper topic--scout rifles, Ching slings, gunhandling technique, etc.--struck me as so far off the mark of what Cooper actually said or intended, that I felt the need to vent about it. Mama's comment got me thinking about that, and I responded as follows:

Maybe it's just a normal phenomenon that accompanies middle age, but I am really starting to grasp the wistful frustration that I so often read as a younger man (without really understanding) in Jeff Cooper's work. Or, maybe it is a natural outgrowth of a long-cultivated appreciation of deliberate design. (And really, I suspect strongly those two things are quite related.) But whatever the reason, it seems like the "...how often they do very badly at it" observation comes frequently in recent years.

I'm certainly not without my own history of jumping in to something before fully understanding it, but I like to think that I am learning that it always--always, without exception--fails to achieve full value, or at least full synergistic value. Probably these days I go too far the other way, where the biggest risk is in missing the window of time for which the whole idea has currency.

With something like this [a "scout rifle" missing critical features or implementing others badly], or like my recent lament about misunderstanding the technique of the speed sling, I wonder if the bigger problem is less the people whose well-intentioned exuberance carries them into a place they do not understand, and more the problem of chest-thumpery among those who purport to know, but don't. How do the consciously ignorant know that they are not following the unconsciously or willfully ignorant?

The position I'm in myself is a real challenge, in this regard. Anent the observations and teachings of Jeff Cooper, I tend to minimize how much I actually know, since 1) it's kinda my personality in general (I like being underestimated), and 2) I don't have a CV of "official" credentials that say I know what I know. But know it I do, both because I have long paid really close attention to matters of design and the history of design, and because I have tested nearly all of it myself and understand why it works from that perspective. And so when something misses the mark, it jumps out at me like nails on chalkboard, and I can both quote chapter and verse, and then defend it extemporaneously.

But who am I, really, to speak with authority on it in the first place? I only met Col. Cooper, in person, once. I have never "been in a gunfight" (and am quite happy about that, no joke). I'm no sort of master marksman, nor particularly fast. I've never got into formal competition, and I get quite a bit less trigger time than it would require to impress a good number of people. And so I try, at least, to minimize my own authority, because I can't really argue that I have it. Shooting, for good or ill, seems to carry an expectation that "experience" equals "analysis".

On the flip side, I am reminded of how much I really do know, and at what level of explication and depth, pretty much every time I engage with someone else, even those with years of shooting experience. I couldn't even tell you the number of people I've met who know simply astonishing minutiae about how to wrest a tenth of an inch of group size from their precision fitted boltgun, at exactly 100 yards, from a bench--who have no idea how to use their own body, much less a shooting sling, to shoot from an unsupported field position with any stability; or how to zero their rifle to optimize a "maximum point-blank range" for what they will be most likely to encounter in the field; or how to manage their ammunition supply without looking at it; or even how to run the bolt from the shoulder... It's a little better for pistolcraft, but not a lot. There's been a depressing resurgence in the concept of unsighted pistol fire, usually declaring loudly a complete non-understanding of the flash sight picture. The "high-speed, low-drag" tactards have convinced far too many that "two to the chest, one to the head" is nothing but a speed drill, rather than the observation-and-problem-solving technique that it is. The "cold range" mentality, as understandable as it can seem, continues to retard any general improvement in safe field gunhandling. And so on.

It's hard to say simply that people need to be more observant, although that seems like an obvious part of the solution. "Try it yourself, before you believe or disbelieve" would seem to be another obvious one, as would "go to the source, after you hear it second-hand". But a really substantial part of the problem is also those who stand up and loudly say "Lookit me, I know!", and then don't. When it comes to things that Cooper taught (both the gold and the stuff that really does need re-thinking), I usually know, immediately, when someone is wrong. But does that make me right? I struggle with that, but I also don't want to see such an immense reservoir of knowledge and history simply forgotten, or worse, revisioned by people who didn't really understand it in the first place.

Sorry. Metaphysical lament.

The unexpected hazards of an air rifle match.

Had a delightful afternoon providing a bit of assistance at a small 4-H air rifle match about 80 miles up the road.  It was held at a gun club that I may have to look into further, as they do have bona fide facilities to run rifles at a distance (meaning:  300m plus), which is oddly missing around here.  For this event, we were in a pistol bay, with a tow-strap-in-the-sand firing line and a rather clever clothesline-style target apparatus at the 10-meter line.  Add in an unusually sunny, brilliant day, and things were looking good.

A lot went wrong.

The poor fella running the match (who I know to be both perfectly competent and a genuinely nice guy) just couldn't catch a break.  One by one the rifles (Daisy Avanti 888 Medalists, powered by removable 2.5g CO2 cylinders), ran out of gas, and of course the refill tank was with someone else.  It got down to one working rifle, and thus one shooter working at a time, before the ability to recharge arrived--and even then it was not a slam-dunk.  "Recharged" cylinders...weren't.  Some didn't seat correctly.  A couple of new shooters repeatedly dipped muzzles into the (very fine) sand on the prone mats.  The same sand found its way into bolts, making it a challenge for some of the kids without well-developed hand strength.  Once new cylinders started making it properly seated into rifles, sights needed to be adjusted for the fresh fill of gas (normally this wouldn't be much a problem as the CO2 is largely self-regulating, but there is a difference between a cylinder at exhaustion and a completely-topped-off one).  And of course what to do with a shooter who was interrupted by a failing rifle in the middle of her string?  Some of the kids are good enough shots that it doesn't seem fair to handicap them with erratic equipment.

Oddly enough, I had recently been thinking about what I'd do myself, with what I've learned about airgunnery, if I were asked to build a "school set" of rifles to handle a wide variety of conditions.  The 888 Medalist certainly seems a nice rifle, but the dependency on specialized fill equipment seems to make this sort of problem inevitable at some point.  Personally, I find the 888's trigger spongy, the bolt a little awkward and stiff, and the loading tray a challenge for the tiny .177 pellets.  And I admit, I just do not care for target aperture sights--I can't stand not being able to see around what I'm shooting at--but this is probably just part of the game and not something I'd have much influence over.

What I'd do is go with the Benjamin Discovery, instead.  For about the same money as the 888, you get the "Disco" rifle and a hand pump to feed it!  I'd spend a little more, though, and find a simple receiver sight to replace the open rear that comes on the gun, and replace the fiber optic front with a plain square post.  With this slight upgrade, I think we have an outstanding training and match rifle which can be entirely self-supported.  The Disco is renowned for being durable, accurate, and easy to work with.  The fill pressure is much lower than most PCPs, and so almost anyone can operate the hand pump.  It can still be filled from a tank, of course, if need be, but I rather like the idea of having each shooter fill her own rifle prior to stepping up to the line--knowing exactly how much air is in the gun on account of having just put it there.

Especially with a ghost-ring aperture in the rear, the Disco is a much more suitable rifle to learn and train on, than a specialized 10m competition gun.  I think we do people a disservice to start them on a sight system so specialized that it deliberately obstructs everything around what you are supposed to shoot at (honestly, how can you even observe Rule 4 when all you can see is the bull?), and then wire it so specifically to that precise little bullseye that it's essentially useless for anything else.  Sure, maybe I'm a slave to practicality, but I also know that I am very little, if any, better with target sights than I am with general-purpose sights, and the latter is far superior to the former in every realm other than formal competition.

And besides, I remind myself, I am not looking at the 10m competition as the end point, but the starting one.  Once you can get shots in the bull at 10m, it is time to start a) going faster (acquiring position), b) going farther (effectiveness of position), or c) both.  This is what will develop you beyond basic mechanics, and which will set you up to appreciate the use of efficient sights, shooting slings, and good ergonomics, along with understanding why the technique is what it is.

Which then segues into the Scout-Rod* concept all over again.  See?  There's at least a convergent consistency to my geekery.  :-)


______________________
* And the Scout-Rod, at least at this writing, is modeled on the Disco's refined descendant, the Marauder, which takes many of the Disco's nice features and adds to them (e.g., a bolt-action repeating mechanism, internal sound suppression).

A little more chrono love.

I think I figured out, today, how I can rig up a chronography session so as to shoot off my front porch, mostly rested (right elbow unsupported), and shoot through the chrono at a measured distance (15') enroute to a target at a measured 10m (the de facto airgun standard).  This can be the basis of combined chronography and accuracy work for the relative quick-testing of new pellet/powerwheel combinations.  Notably, after setting chrono up at the further distance, I no longer had any errors from it.  Sure, it was a sunny day today, but I think I learned something and will go with it.

I continue, as well, to learn about the Caldwell Ballistic Precision app that I'm using on my smartphone.  It's got its quirks, but it's proving to be pretty handy.  Apparently it's set up so that you can designate (upfront, not after-the-fact) a "saved group" and capture a bit of metadata along with your shot string (e.g., temperature, humidity, distance to chrono, pellet used, etc.), including a photo of the target grouping.  I suppose I should start carrying in my pocket a dime and a quarter, which are often used in airgunners' pictures to give context to the group size.  (Airgun hunters speak of the one-inch "kill zone" for most quarry, which is just about the size of a quarter, and of the 3/4" zone for some critters, which is just about the size of a dime.)

I'll have to develop the practice a bit, to arrive at a consistency in picture framing, naming, and repeatability of setup, but I think this is going to be workable.  The distances are known, and at the 10m target distance one can probably successfully weed out which pellets just aren't shooting as well as others.  Check out these two strings, in the context of my first experiment with the powerwheel set as low as it could go.  This string was shot with the wheel set at "2.1":

#     FPS  FT-LBS

12    794      43.43
11    806      44.75
10    820      46.32
9    817      45.98
8    831      47.57
7    830      47.46
6    844      49.07
5    853      50.13
4    839      48.49
3    845      49.19
2    811      45.31
1    775      41.38
Average: 822.1 FPS
SD: 23.0 FPS
Min: 775 FPS
Max: 853 FPS
Spread: 78 FPS

Note how much more consistent this string is, than the other one.  The deviation and spread are much tighter, and the velocities begin to drop off steadily at the end of the string (once they do this, you can stop shooting, as you've got the answer you came for).  Based on what I've learned from Tom Gaylord, I believe I can "read" this data as suggesting that this configuration is good for about 10 shots (#2-#11) where the spread is even tighter, and since there is only one shot before the valve "wakes up" into that ideal series, that means that the starting pressure of 3000psi is pretty close to ideal.  (Sometimes, if the string starts to tighten up after several shots, it may suggest that the ideal fill pressure is not the 3000psi max, but maybe something lower, like maybe 2700psi.)

This string was then shot with the wheel set at "4.10":

#      FPS  FT-LBS
11    803      44.42
10    812      45.42 
9    832      47.69
8    847      49.42
7    859      50.83
6    870      52.14
5    881      53.47
4    884      53.83
3    886      54.08
2    880      53.35
1    885      53.96
Average: 858.1 FPS
SD: 30.5 FPS
Min: 803 FPS
Max: 886 FPS
Spread: 83 FPS

Now in terms of statistics, this one is starting to look interesting.  In particular look at how tight those first five shots are, with a pretty steady decline thereafter.  This one seems to suggest that the fill pressure is right on.

And at this point I had just figured out how to set the target in the right spot to get a group while chronographing.  This is what the final ten shots of the string did at 10m:

That's just about a quarter inch, center-to-center.  (The black dot is my crude aim point.)  Hey, I'll take that.  The rest was improvised, my right elbow was unsupported, and I wasn't exactly bearing down for these shots.  Looks like it may be worth trying at 25, and possibly even 50.  Especially since the power level seems more than acceptable.

At this point I decided to adjust the power wheel to 6.10 and shoot a few more shots, to set the valve for a full test at 6.10.  These were just fun shots, not chronographed;  they each clanked with a satisfying smack on the rimfire spinner at 25 yards.

When refilling after this series of about 20 shots (which took it down to about 1200psi), the behavior of the Hill pump seemed a little quirky.  I will have to pay attention to how it behaves going forward!

No, Rob, that is not how you use a Ching Sling.

Grr.  I have thus far found some things to like about Rob Pincus, especially his general educational style, and I find myself wanting to find more to like.  Today, purely by accident, I happened across this link to a Personal Defense Network video which is titled "Scout Rifle as a Self or Home Defense Weapon".

Well, wouldn't that be cool.  Let's watch!  And there he is, displaying what is clearly a custom rifle on what looks like a Rem 700 action, complete with Ching Sling, intermediate eye relief glass, reserve irons, and even a butt cuff.  And he launches into an explanation of the Scout concept in his own presentation style, even leading with Jeff Cooper's name as the principal force behind the concept.  Cool!

The geek in me - sure, call me a Scout fanboy if you will - cringes a little at a few of the details, but they're mostly minor.  He stumbles through the utility of a fixed magazine within a concept that values compactness over capacity, he holds the rifle like a carbine, he only runs the bolt from the shoulder when intending multiple shots, and he never even mentions the ability to reach way out there.  Okay, so he's primarily a "defense" guy, and tends to stick to his primary audience.  I understand that grousing on things like that would be more fanboy than fundamental.

But I must conclude that he has absolutely no idea what the point of the Ching Sling is.

At about 3:40 on the timeline he starts the demo of the sling, taking pains to point out the "extra connection", and then...he simply ignores it entirely, using exactly the textbook "hasty sling" technique that the Ching Sling was conceived to improve upon.

Jeff Cooper often wrote about how surprising it was to him, to discover how few people actually understood the shooting sling at all any more.  A true shooting sling, to him, was more important than  a glass optic on a rifle, because "the glass only helps my seeing, but the sling helps my holding".  I can remember first reading that as a young man, and going to the trouble to test myself with what he said--and it is true.  I can hold fully a third better when locked up with a sling, than from the same position without one.

The shooting sling works because it steadies the "gun mount" that is comprised of the ground, your body, the sling, and the rifle.  Anatomically, the most effective way to do this is to take responsibility off of muscles, and give it over to bones.  A "hasty sling", in which the arm is simply snaked around the rifle's carry strap, provides a small amount of tightening, but it is absolutely not the same thing as having your skeleton locked so tightly to your rifle that you can relax all muscles without your sights moving.

And only certain positions work with slings.  (Offhand is not one of them.)  In order to get a solid lockup, both elbows must be supported--remember, bone, not muscle.  Prone is obvious, and sitting;  the one that is not obvious but is surprisingly effective is the squat.  (Kneeling doesn't get full value out of the sling because the strong-side elbow is still flying around in the air under muscle power alone.)  The thinking here is that if you really need the precision of a sling, then you have time to get into a steadier position;  if your need for speed is truly such that you don't have time to loop up, you probably shouldn't be bothering with a sling at all.

Which brings us back to the Ching Sling.  It is the pinnacle of design for a shooting sling that can also be fast.  (Hell, the old-fashioned military loop sling provides excellent lockup, if you take the time to get into it.)  The key to effective lockup is that you must have the sling pulling exclusively forward on the support arm, as high up on the tricep as you can get it.  Then, with the support arm elbow both under the rifle and resting on the ground (prone) or knee (sitting, squat), and the strong-side elbow resting either on the ground (prone) or knee (sitting, squat), with a properly adjusted sling and a good position, you really can achieve a lockup that will allow you to relax the muscles in both arms without moving the sights.

There are still people around who understand the military loop sling and the lockup it provides.  It's no joke, right?  But it's not fast, even with competition cuffs, and an ideal sling would be both convenient as a carry strap, and fast as a shooting sling.  IIRC it was in the 1980s that Cooper first happened upon the idea of a "speed sling" from his friend Carlos Widmann in Guatemala.  (Here's an American Rifleman reprint of his essay on that discovery.)  Its only drawback was that it was clumsy to move back and forth between shooting mode and carry strap mode:  for a shooting sling that could lock up essentially as fast as you could acquire a position, it was a shame to have to pick between modes.

That is what Eric Ching solved with his invention of the sliding-strap Ching Sling.  You have the lightning-quick, solid lockup of the two-forward-stud Widmann system, and the carryability of a main strap spanning the two conventional studs.  Its performance really is rather remarkable, and Cooper was rather forceful in specifying it as part of the Scout concept.  A Scout is a rifle which can be used either across the room or hundreds of yards away, and way out there, any of us can benefit from a little help holding steady;  the Ching Sling makes it possible to get a loop-sling quality lockup while you are getting into position.

So it's a bit perturbing to see someone as trusted as Rob Pincus discussing the three-point sling on a scout rifle, with apparent reverence...and demonstrating instead a two-point conventional hasty technique.  In a position that doesn't really benefit from a sling in the first place.

He's right that the Scout concept never caught on in the mainstream.  Thing is, I suspect that at least some of the reason why that is the case, is that so few people seem to understand the concepts.  "It's too short;  it won't work at range" say the riflemen.  "It's not semiautomatic," say the tactards.  "Scope's not powerful enough."  "Looks funny."  "Won't shoot as far as my specialized sniper rifle."  "Won't shoot as fast as my specialized tacti-carbine."  And, "What's that short strap thingy for?"

Indeed.

We know what it's for.  Cooper wrote about it many times.  It's all right there in The Art of the Rifle.  It's no secret.  And yet it's no wonder that it hasn't caught on, if this is the way it's presented.


Anyway, harumpf.  I was hoping for better.

It begins.

After all the crazy that has been happening around here of late, I sniffed a chance to do something meaningful with the girls in the short space between naps and making dinner.  So I rounded up the Air Venturi Bronco, the girls got their safety glasses, and we went out onto the porch for a bit of "chicken-and-sheep".  That's the game in which one of the girls calls a target, and from Standard Ready I mount and hit it.  (It started with two rimfire spinners at 10m, one a chicken, the other a sheep...and now it has expanded to include a second spinner sheep at 25y, self-sealing Newbold targets at 10, 25, and about 40, a paint can lid and a few soup can lids hanging in the spruce trees.)

Both girls got chances to load and call, and then we wound up with a variation in which each girl called which target they wanted me to hit at the same time, and if they didn't call the same one, I had to hit the target closest to the midpoint between them.  A good mental processing exercise, with that many targets available!

After a bit, the 3yo decided to go back inside, and the 6yo then got her first chance with a manual stopwatch, timing my shots from her call to the hit, which she seemed to enjoy.  And then I offered her the chance to take her first shot.  She got a bit wide eyed and said sure.

Conditions were good.  Vibe was good.  We rested the Bronco's fore-end on the railing of the front porch/deck in my right hand, and she got pretty comfortably behind the rifle without having to lift it. We went through exactly what she was going to do with sight alignment, safety, and trigger, and I provided whatever elevation adjustment she needed with my right hand as she figured out how to look through the aperture and hold the post on the big yellow disk.  Okay, ready?  Breathe.  Safety to Fire position. Back on post.  Find trigger blade without pressing.  Still on post.  Okay, now start slowly pressing while staying on post, a little wobble is okay, slowly more press, slowly until--POP-THWAP--the trigger breaks.  An obvious hit at the 10m line.

Finger straight.  Smiles.  She even asks me if we should put the safety back on before opening the action.  (You do neither with this spring-piston breakbarrel design, but still, "A" for attitude!)  We conclude and she goes in to tell Mom.

And so it begins.

Excellent!

In case I needed a reminder that "private skool" is still "statist skool"...

Seen on the banner sign for Cook Inlet Academy private school today:

Every time you receive a benefit
a responsibility is incurred

Look, sure, I understand what they're getting at with this, and they may mean perfectly well by it all, but this is not the same message as TANSTAAFL, and I think the distinction is important.  It is both the idea that somehow the receipt of a benefit automatically implies a debt, and (more importantly) the idea that the benefit somehow causes the "responsibility", that got my teeth grinding:  neither of these are the ideas of free people;  they are, conversely, essential thinking for proper State minions.

If a benefit automatically implies a debt, then there is absolutely no point in philanthropy any more.  Now, I've often wondered how much more philanthropy there might be, if so much of it weren't "required" by law and the armed mob that makes it, but the truth is that there is still much that people can do for one another that falls outside "the law", and it is one of humanity's more compelling plusses that a lot of day-to-day philanthropy is yet done, despite the best efforts of the polypragmatoi to forcibly extract all the remaining fun there is in doing it.  And so the idea of actually conditioning it out of ourselves, at the very level of its definition, is simply horrifying.  Take away the beauty and magnificence that humans are capable of, and you'll be left only with the base, the brutal, the beastly.  (And I should be kinder to the beasts, there.)

And just as a free person understands that there is a difference--a massive difference--between "life is liberty" and "liberty is life", so (s)he would understand that there is a difference between the idea that one takes on a responsibility in order to gain a benefit, and the idea that simply receiving a benefit somehow produces a responsibility.  The former is always voluntary, but the latter quite often is not--and it certainly seems to be a favored authoritarian trick to manufacture dependencies, debts and "responsibilities" simply by producing arbitrary "benefits" that Authoritah may then value and assess to its own advantage*.  Is this not the basic thinking behind "luv it or leave it", "healthcare is a right", "my country, right or wrong", "only working within the system can produce positive change", "died defending your freedom", "unions protect the little guy", "but who will build the roads", "if you don't vote you have no right to complain", "if you see something, say something", etc... (Jeez, one could pretty much put up the entire statist hymnal, with similar results.)

Anyway, so presumably this message is supposed to be "food for thought" for the kids and families that go to this school.  This private school.  This outfit which is ostensibly outside the limitations and dogma of the public school system.  And yet I'm not sure I could come up with a more insidiously authoritarian idea than the one on that sign.  Arguably there are others which could match it, but I'm not sure anything could best it. 

Not a cheery thought.  A bummer within an otherwise lovely day.


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* Or by simply defining certain things as benefits, and then demanding "responsibility" for them.  Among other examples, this pretty much fully explains Harrison Bergeron's predicament, doesn't it?

Notes from the fun shop.

Just documenting a couple of things for future reference.  (There will probably be more on most of this at some point.)  Some erranding with the girls today in Soldotna yielded some useful intel.

To wit:

• Holy freakin' cow.  It's here.  (Browning's 1911-22 in modern trim.)
• I actually found five boxes of 16 gauge buckshot on the shelf today.  Which means that I bought five boxes of 16 gauge buckshot today.
• .22 availability is still stupid.  Stoopid.  (Are regular people even buying .22s any more, with no way to feed them?)
• Availability of other ammo and components actually seems to be improving.  It's ridiculously expensive, sure, but it's there.
• Got a chance to meet an XD-S 4", in person.  This one had a distinctly sweeter trigger than the one I met the other day (another data point), and more importantly I got to look at the extension magazine.  In short:  I was impressed.  I'll keep looking every time I see one, but the "new Commander" appellation seems to be very appropriate for the Springfield.

More later, of course.  Deadlining in other areas, and playing Mr. Mom for a week, I do have to put off the fun of writing this all up properly.  (Maybe it'll be after neighbor C. and I get some range time together.  Another find today was a stash of Buffalo Bore ammo for his 460 Rowland 1911...I can be an enabler sometimes...  :-)

There will be more on this.

A jaw-hit-floor moment today while erranding in Soldotna with the girls.  I was not expecting to meet one of these:

Click to embiggen The Awesome.

To be more accurate, I didn't even know these existed yet.  Apparently they do.  (Look closely, sports fans.  That's a Browning 1911-22, in modern trim.  And they even offer it in "Commander" length, too.)

No, of course it's not perfect.  The worst news is that the lawyerphobes put a friggin' magazine disconnect in it.  The trigger on this sample was...rough.  And of course, what's the point of  even buying a .22 these days, when ammo is nearly as expensive as reloaded 9mm--or would be, if normal humans could find any.

Still...triggers can be improved...stupid gizmos can be ignored...and at least in theory the ridiculous hoarder-caused drought will end someday...  And I held this in my hands, today;  it's here, now.

Not only that, but I had my five-year-old with me, and in placing her hand on it properly, I suspect it will actually start to fit her hand within a year's time.  Wow!

There will be more on this, but it'll take me a bit to get around to writing it.  This is just the initial squee working itself out.

Squee!

Here's a question for fellow gunnies...

Several times now in recent months, I've had different counter-jockeys hesitate to let me dry-fire a piece I'm looking at, to try the trigger.  (I always make a point of explicitly asking for permission to try a trigger, just as a courtesy.)  I've even had a couple of people now try to tell me that it will damage the firearm.  (It's always a centerfire that I ask about.)

Is this craziness now happening everywhere?  And for how long?

Okay, so the people that seem to do this are almost always young enough that maybe they just don't know.  Okay, maybe.  But still--this isn't something that they're going to come up with on their own.  Someone has to be telling them this, else they probably wouldn't say anything at all.

So: who is that?  Is it maybe the same corporate brainiacs that won't allow you to do so much as remove a bolt from a bolt rifle to look down the bore?  Is it gungrabbers, wanting to plant the seed that guns will fall apart if you use them?

Any wisdom there?

The Airsoft adventure begins.

A box from Pyramyd Air is a happy day.  The one that came a few days ago is additionally significant because it marks my first step into the world of Airsoft, which I've been anticipating for a bit now.

A few notes for now, just to document.

The order contained two guns, a spring-piston design Walther PPS and a gas blowback Commander-length 1911 from WE.  The choice of the PPS was a bit arbitrary, based on the fact that I wanted to try a spring-piston powerplant, and I wanted something as close to my Kahr CW40 firearm as I could get in design and size.  Now...Kahr has put its stamp on a spring-piston Airsoft gun of its own, but it's the "TP" frame size, which just seems stupid to me.  If you're going to put only one of your designs out there, put out the design you started with, for crying out loud, not the least popular among everything you make.  Jeez.  Anyway, the PPS is nearly identical in dimensions to the CW40, and with nearly the same manual of arms.  I admit, if I didn't already have the Kahr I might seriously consider the .40 caliber PPS firearm for the role.  Anyway, here's what that looks like:

We had an inauspicious start, but are improving together.  I'll have more to say about this soon enough, but suffice it to say that if I can keep the crosspin in the buttstock from falling out of the gun (!), this may wind up to be precisely what I thought it might be.  Not bad for under $20.

The 1911, of course, was the primary objective.  As you might imagine there are competing manufacturers of gas blowback 1911s, and I wound up going with the WE brand primarily because they offered a Commander-length single stack, and I wanted to be able to use it in both my 5" leather and my 4" leather.

Again, more details to follow, but initially at least it seems pretty impressive.  I haven't shot it yet, the box having come earlier than expected and my not having yet acquired the light silicon oil that you add to the propane, but we'll get that squared away soon.

Thus far it seems like there are a few things to watch out for, including one potentially serious one, but other than that, and presuming it runs, I suspect this experiment is going to stick around a while.

Manual of arms is indeed just like the firearm, with one potentially problematic exception:  the slide release does not cam down when you run the slide fully to the rear.  You actually have to push down on the slide release to release the slide, and this is contrary to my training.  Hm.  Of far lesser importance, the thumb safety isn't as positive as I like them, but it works.  (All springs are conspicuously lighter than you're used to on firearms.)

The magazine has a short "tower" above where the topmost cartridge would be on a firearm magazine, to elevate the BBs in line with the chamber;  this will make reloads more technically difficult, but otherwise the magazines are very impressive (they're even weighted similarly to a full firearm magazine), and I suspect that the tower on the magazine will actually encourage if not quite demand the proper technique for magazine inserts, so I'm not even sure that tower is a "bad" thing.

The trigger is exceptional, nearly a bit too light for training for the street, but I'll make do.  :-)   The grip safety is functional and most other details are nicely done.  All in all, now that I've met the piece, I want even more for it to do what I'm hoping it will do.

Also in the box were two bags of Airsoft BBs, 5,000 rounds apiece.  The "biodegradeable" ones (I plan to test that to see what they actually do up here) came in white, and the plastic "competition ones" came in black.  The multi-color thing turned out to be a good idea since both bags decided to burst somewhere along the way, and nothing quite says "welcome to the world of Airsoft" like 10,000 co-mingled BBs loose in your box.

Yeah, I'm excited about this.  Testing will commence soon, and hopefully I'll document a lot of it here.  :-)

Not-so random notes.

Well, not to me, anyway.  :-)

I wanted to document, if for no one other than myself, a couple of interesting resources.  In doing some not-quite-random research in the YouTube landscape, I've managed to run across two people that I have found unexpectedly interesting.

It's hardly a secret that I've been a Jeff Cooper -phile for about thirty years, and part of that is a cultivated distrust of high-profile shooting experts.  I'm especially distrustful of the gonzo, high-speed-low-drag, tacticool "operator" crowd, so much of which loves to--vocally--treat all that came before it as obsolescence that absolutely will get you killed on the way to the john in your own home.

But there is the competing interest in continuing the learning process, as well, which nobody can ignore and still call himself a serious student.  (The irony in this, of course, is that Cooper would have heartily approved of this.  Most of his detractors love to focus on his obstinate resistance to a few specific things*, and conveniently forget that even the Modern Technique evolved over time--and, that at its core the Technique itself was an evaluated combination of both old and new, discovered elements.)  And so, in attempting a very informal overview search, while I've found some truly horrifying content out there, two people have started to stick out at me as being worthy of further interest.

The first is Rob Pincus of Personal Defense Network.  In short, I find myself liking his style.  As I see more of his work, I continue to be impressed by his presentation as an instructor, and often by the thinking behind what he is discussing.  There are certainly some points I can't quite find agreement with yet, but overall I find him worthwhile enough that I do intend to try even those myself, and give them a chance to play out with my eyes and hands.  Who knows, maybe he's right.

Consider this clip of Rob explaining one of his standard drills.  The principles seem generally sound, and I like that it's even more about the problem solving than it is about the shooting.

Here's another, a solid discussion of balancing speed and precision that seems like it would lend itself to personal practice on a square range.

And speaking of square ranges, I rather like this expedient of using the figure-8 motion with fixed targets...

Anyway, I'll continue looking at PDN and see how it goes.

The other person of interest is Ron Avery of Haley Strategic.  For me, the jury is still out on Travis Haley himself.  No doubt he can shoot--that's obvious--but I'm not sure yet I see him as a master instructor.  But Avery, now, he just sorta jumps out at me.  Haley Strategic seems to market him as "the scientist", and from what I've seen so far, that seems an apt description.

Here he works with a student on the draw stroke.  As an instructor his style is beautiful;  he quickly goes beyond the simple mechanics of the draw and spends most of his time in the psychology of the draw--with immediate and attendant results.

Today I ran across Avery discussing the "triggerstripe drill", and I'm going to bookmark it here as Something Important.  This is a very simple diagnostic concept, and Avery just thrashes it into something that is easily understandable.  Part 1:

 
and Part 2:

Now that's impressive.  I will have to seek out some more of Avery's work, and see if this impression holds.

Okay, documented.  More research to come.



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* Oh, and it's certainly true that Cooper did not always manage these well.  He did seem to suffer at least a bit from becoming his own institution, and thus falling victim to the tendency of all institutions to self-ossify over time.  Nearly all his serious detractors dispense with any further context, and exploit the "old and in the way"** card to its fullest extent.

** Yes, that is a bluegrass reference.  :-)