Kriss Recall

Ejector not in spec for the Kirss carbine.

Free fix.

Woot!

McDonald v Chicago

Best gun fer poop and fans.

This topic has been done to DEATH. Even by me. "What gun for...?" usually SHTF. Survivalistblog stirred up some controversy by saying if you could only have one, make it a pistol like a .357 Magnum revolver.

All the rifle guys came out of the woodwork. "A pistol is what you use to fight your way to your rifle!"

Well they sort of prove the point with that statement. You want that pistol immediately. And if you only have one gun... Better than "This spoon is what I use to fight my way to my rifle..."

Even JayG weighed in on it, and his entry inspired this one.

The rifle guys sort of have a point. A rifle IS better. Longer range, more powerful OOoomph when you hit the target, easier to hit a target.

But the rifle guys are missing the point.

There are SHTF scenarios, and then there are TEOTWAWKI scenarios. They are totally different animals

SHTF is 'stuff hits the fan', TEOTWAWKI is 'the end of the world as we know it.'

SHTF doesn't mean it's time to take pot shots at red coats on Breed's Hill.

SHTF is one zombie, not 10,000.

SHTF is Katrina. Or even worse.

SHTF is the Kwik E Mart you are standing in right now is getting robbed at gunpoint RIGHT NOW.

SHTF is 'defense' for good citizens like you.

TEOTWAWKI is war. And everyone is an infantryman. So you better have a rifle. You are on offense quite a bit.

But even soldiers get off the front lines and rest in safe areas when they aren't on offense, personally, right then. And SHTF can happen to a soldier in those safe areas. And it is easier to take a revolver to the latrine or shower than your rifle, so you won't be without when SHTF while reading on the terlet.

Handguns are handy. That positive outweighs a lot of negatives in the compromise of life.

CMP

I'll join the Garand Collectors assoc. to be in a CMP recognized/affiliated club. Plus, I really like Garands.

So I might one day fill out a form, get it notarized, and sent in to CMP with a check and a photocopy of my DD214, in the event I want to get a M1 carbine sent to me…

Yeah, I could be tempted by an M1 Carbine still. Especially if a lot come back into the pipeline from South Korea. A sudden glut of supply might not bring the prices down, but it might hold them steady, I am thinking.

If I really want to do this I should start to get magazines and parts and slings and such now…

Dammit. If I commit to M1 Carbine as my carbine, I have to commit to stockpiling M1 Carbine .30 ammo. Something brand new in my personal bunker. I hope the Koreans are sending back a LOT of surplus ammo, too. Non-corrosive.

But at less than $400 per unit for a rack grade piece of history, I might just fall over that slippery slope. I've fired the M2 Carbine... the full auto version of the M1, and that is a fun machine gun. The only thing going against the M2 is the slight more recoil and the cost of the ammo over something like the 9mm MP40. .30 carbine (or .223) is about the strongest cartridge that I personally think is practical for full auto firing from the shoulder. Unless you get something as heavy as a BAR. Machine guns (full size cartridge) need tripods or bipods or some other sort of mount in my humble opinion.

Other disadvantages? Well, the bullets supposedly bounce off of hordes of Chinese soldier in wave attacks. But what are the chances I will need to shoot at Chinese Zombies in 1950s heavy woolen overcoats in this day and age? I know for certain that I don't want to be hit by a supposedly anemic .30 bullet, and I bet most bad guys feel the same way. And zombie shots should be head shots, anyway.

Kahr

I saw this over at the Firearm Blog.

I’ve heard plenty of good things about Kahr pistols. Brigid likes them, for one, and the reasons she likes them are reasons that attract me to the model. Compact. Well made. Looks like a simple manual of arms. Glock like.

But I don’t like the Mass compliant Kahr that Firearm shows. Specifically, the safety.



It looks like ‘down’ is safe. Up is fire.

That’s their choice, and they aren’t alone at it, but I won’t be a customer to any model like that. Why? I’m already used to the other way. Down is fire. Like the way God intended. It's the manual of arms I know. If I mix it up I'm liable to make a huge mistake under stress when I need it. Same with mixing Colt and S&W revolvers. At least on reload. One you pull to release the cylinder, the other you push. I picture some cop, speedloader in hand, in 1978, trying to reload his Colt Python after 15 years of carrying a S&W Model 10. Trying and failing to get the cylinder open.

Now if I had been exposed to nothing but Kahr safeties to date, I’d prefer the other way and eschew 1911s for the rest of my life.

Can you imagine the horror? Life without a 1911?


Hopefully Maryland won't take a page and continue down the path toward a Massachusetts style feature demand on approved firearms. Maryland is bad enough as it is.


And I don't like the loaded chamber indicator. But only because it is one more thing that can break.


I'd buy a Kahr, but never an opposite-safety Kahr. Or any other gun-makers opposite-to-1911-safety gun.

Spit

I never learned to spit as a child.

Sometime I think I missed out on something important.

Whatcha Gonna Do?

Glad it's not me as Platoon Leader

Careful. There is some foul language...




The point is, to always DO something. Better to take a chance and do something than to sit around with a your tongue in your mouth.

The New World Order

Isn’t coming to get you. There isn’t some cabal of people conspiring behind the scenes looking to enslave the world for whatever ends you can think up.

No, ‘never attribute to malice that which can be explained with incompetence.’

Sure, there are leftists that want power and see a vector to power with collectivism. And that power will eventually corrupt them into malicious behavior. But most people desire collectivism because they are incompetent. They don’t foresee the problems with it.

There is certainly no all-powerful and coordinated conspiracy to slowly envelope you in a collectivist straightjacket. No, you stumble into that jacket. Usually willingly.

Think about OUR side. We are a conspiracy to resist such an end. A bunch of like minded gun bloggers are part of a whole that seeks a return to liberty and first principle outlined by the Founder in our constitution. There are similar groups with similar ends that we don’t even see eye to eye with. (I’m looking at YOU metrocons… Randians… maybe even some 3pers). How good a ‘conspiracy’ are we? It’s not even a conspiracy. But as long as our “leave us the heck alone” sentiment has traction, it ACTS like one. A spastic, incompetent conspiracy for liberty. The danger is apathy. Oh, and lawlessness. All bets are off if the society descends into chaos. That’s like turning the Etch a Sketch upside down and giving it a shake. You don’t know what the picture is gonna look like after that. As long as you don’t hit the Reset Button, or just stop caring, our incompetent conspiracy opposes THEIR something-for-nothing, eliminate-all-want-and-risk, take-care-of-us-Nanny-State, control-the-proles incompetent conspiracy.

When there is a real COORDINATED conspiracy to take over the world, you will hear about it. THEY will tell you what they are doing. Over and over. And they’ll still be incompetent. Just malicious, too.

Oopsie

Some stranger bit MBtGE's wife's arm today. Took out a big chunk. Then he disappeared into the woods.

Sorta shambled off.


She's not too worried. What's the worst that can happen?

Colonel

Jeff Cooper died on Sep 25 2006.

Only 3 years. It seems like it was longer ago.


I was only just starting to read his stuff when he upped and went to the Great Safari in the Sky.

Which blogs did you stumble upon?

All of you reading this at one time sat down at a computer and thought, “Hey, I like guns. I wonder if there is anything on this here internet that I can find and read about related to guns?” And then you stumbled upon gun blogs.

Do you remember what you first ran across?

I do. At first it was a mere handful. A google search lead to Alphecca, Armed Canadian, and Ten Ring. From them, Kim Du Toit and Tam’s View from the Porch.

It just snowballed from there, but those were the originals. They popped my cherry. And you know what? They were gentle. Like they knew it was my first time. And I appreciate that.

Not stopping it after that. Snowflakes, Uncle, and the rest just started poring into view, then others, all up and over the transom, until the bilge pump got swamped. It got to the point I needed to start my own blog just to keep my favorite links straight. (I HAD run across Uncle earlier from a connection with a local blog-TV-news personality named Brittney. But she {or the people around her discussing it} made it seem like Uncle was a bit of a local Tennesee right wing wacko, and that he should be dismissed from my mind. How long will blogs last, after all? So I didn't keep following Uncle, then.)

Canadian and Ten Ring still post, but less frequently. Kim is gone. Alphecca, my first, and Tam are still going pretty strong, posting daily. Uncle and Snowflakes, too...

I wonder if I’d been much different, being a new shooter looking for info, stumbling over blogs… if they had been DIFFERENT blogs?...

Revolution?

Mr. Epstein writes up some near future revolution speculation.

He seems a bit overly optimistic that despite a lot of other people suffering things will turn out ok (read, the way he wants, with his side prevailing) in the end...

Will members of the military refuse to fire on civilians? Yes. He's right about that. But not all will in any revolution scenario. Some will follow their orders.

Will external forces stay away from the continental US after a debilitating revolution? No. And some will interfere ostensibly to help any side and will be welcome. At first.

Will folks Mark thinks competent be riddled with ineptitude? Will folks he thinks incompetent demonstrate surprisingly clever effectiveness? Yes.

Will the end result be better than the 'horrible' situation the Republic is in now? Almost certainly not.

The unanticipated situations would bite this libertarian 'utopia' in the ass. No one knows the unknowns. 'Uninteded Consequences' would be one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The lucky ones would die in the first week.

Never trust predictive utopias.

He might be on to good speculative fiction... but bad policy.

Don't Like S&W Locks?

But you DO want a snubbie that won't snag? Like me?

A possible alternative is the Ruger SP101 spurless DA.






The hammer isn't completely enclosed, and the pistol is a little bigger/heavier than a S&W640. But those may be minor details. Depending on how much you hate that damn Smith and Wesson trigger lock.

Head Shot

I don't envy the person that has to make this kind of shot:


It's from that Law Enforcement Targets website. The one with the zombie targets.

You have to his the Black aggressor target behind, leaving the Orange hostage unscathed? You've GOT to be kidding me.

I imagine only SWAT types practice with these. How many regular patrol officers get presented with this situation.

I can do this shot. Sometimes. That's the problem. The hostage would prefer you being able to do this right 100% of the time. There are people out there that are confident and talented enough to make this shot every time. What percentage of gun bloggers and/or police officers are that good? It's probably in single digits. And the people that ARE good enough still have that fear of messing up to even try this scenarios in real life.

So single digit percentage of shooter that are good enough to make this shot. And single digit percentage of THAT number for people that are crazy enough to actually risk it.

Yowza.

I wonder how many of that target type they sell?

why zombies?

Why concern ourselves?

We study them because they are REAL.

"they represent a level of crisis that we do not have any experience with, and our ability to logically respond to such a crisis"

Yes, that, and they are also real.

Almost forgot!

Talk like a pirate day!

Memory

18 years ago, when I was a wet behind the ears navy officer, I went to a conference. (Not the last Tailhook. I coulda gone to that. There was a C130 with empty seats there. That might have been interesting.)

At this conference I sat next to this old guy. I was minding my own business, but he was chatty. And he talked funny.

Turns out he was talking funny because he was Dutch. And in the resistance in the war.

Their tactic against the Boche was to arrange with prostitutes. If a likely officer was using her services she’d place a candle at a certain spot at a certain window. ‘Likely’ meant ‘alone and WITH his service pistol.’ This old guy and buddies would then ambuscade the nazi on his way back to the barracks by shoving him into a canal. There was no way to climb back out of the water and in the winter the cold would overcome them soon enough. The trick was to get the pistol of the guy out of his holster before you dumped him in the drink. Then you’d have weapon for other operations later.

Kinda cool sitting next to the guy.

When guys DO talk about wartime escapades, they always seem so low key. Like they were discussing the weather.

Like the story my XO (a Marine Colonel) told about how he has to warn barbers not to touch this one spot on his temple because if they do he faints dead away. It was from the time an NVA soldier emerged from a bunker and stitched him up, abdomen, hand, head, with an AK. He always thought those shots weren’t fair because the guy was already dead from the .45 round to the forehead. When the Colonel (then a Lieutenant) woke up in the hospital he still had the frame of the 1911 attached to his hand. The round from the AK had hit the trigger guard and bent it in such a way that he couldn’t let go, so they stripped the parts off they could get to and left it there. The docs were more worried about the head wound to care about the hand injury at the time.

Life Member

My paperwork for NRA Life Membership came in the mail today/yestreday. By-Laws and everything. I'm official.

I even got the free leather jacket. It's pretty thin. Trust me, you are not joing NRA because the swag is worth more than the money you pay in dues...

No, the big money is the payments I'll get for the blogging. I specified "Cash, wheelbarrows full of."

Any day now...

MORE Zombie Targets

Here.

New Stress Test

I think I will stress test my range magazines.

Now that I have them down to where I want them, they are broken in and reliable, I want to test how soon it will be until they start to fail.

How am I testing them? I am going to leave the mags loaded between range trips. Better to find out for myself how quickly the spring or whatever on a mag will go 'bad' in a situation where I am not relying on the mag to perform flawlessly. That will give me a better idea of the Carry-Magazines, and what to expect with them.

Want to know what my guess is on Chip McCormick 1911 bags and Sig P229s? That they will be fine. Compressed for years they will still work without a hiccup. But either way, I'll try to find out by abusing the range mags. The unique thing is never leaving them unloaded for any period of time. Why do I think they will probably be fine? Because of something I read of Jeff Coopers describing MP40 mags bricked up in a wall for 40 years working fine. I've talked about that Cooper anecdote before.


I was a little hinky to load mags at home here in Maryland. The cops don't like ANYTHING firearm related, and the law is less than clear if you are allowed to sport around full mags. But it looks like as long as the loaded mag is separate from the gun and the gun is locked up, I should be fine. [note: I rely on more than just one source of info for my gun law-learnin. I use that website because it is concise and a bit of a one-stop shop. From there I can delve further, usually on the State Police website. But large swaths of the state's gun laws aren't really very clear.] And locked up can include a lockable gun rug in the range bag with the mags right next to it. The pistol might not even have to be locked up if it is in the range bag with full mags and the pistol is in an enclosed holster and the bag, in that case, would even necessarily be locked. An enclosed holster is any holster with a flap or strap to secure the handgun in the holster.

So... gym bag... army holster... and a bunch of loaded mags is fine in Maryland as long as I am going (and can demonstrate) to a gunstore, my property, or formal or informal range shoot. I don't know how I can prove I am going TO a range or informal shoot. I guess if Uncle Trollop on the Eastern Shore of Maryland invites me to shoot tin cans on his farm some Saturday I better have a printed email from him with a date and an invitation and directions. AND while stopping for gas on the way is probably fine, stopping at a stand alone Kwik E Mart for beef jerky and Red Bill is a bit hazy. IF the cops choose that time to lean on me for whatever reason.