The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
On the Ground in Phoenix
I’ve been here for about an hour and 15 minutes. I made it to the plane, but my luggage (with my checked firearm) caught the next plane. I’m waiting for it to hit the carousel. Then I have to take the bus to the parking lot, find my truck, get it out of hock and drive an hour and a half home. My body says it’s almost 2:00AM.
I think I’m going to be late to work tomorrow.
Apparently Atlanta is stacked up. We were supposed to push back from the gate here in Norfolk at 4:01PM local time, and arrive in Atlanta at 5:50. Now they tell us that we’ll depart about 5:30, and nobody knows if our connecting flights will still be on the ground when we get to Atlanta or not.
So I just paid $9.95 for a 1Mbps wireless connection so I could get back on the ‘Net and do some surfing. I’m on Boingo. I’m not impressed. When I logged on it immediately gave me a chat screen and a perky salesperson who tried desperately to convince me that I needed to sign up for the $6.95/month service rather than the $9.95 single-use. It was tough to convince her I really didn’t need it. Until I mentioned I was a blogger.
I need to learn to control this power . . .
I think I’m going to be late to work tomorrow.
If I get there at all.
The power of blogging is very limited in scope.
This is one of the high-capacity scenarios we shot Saturday afternoon. The drill was to advance with your partner, firing three shots each onto a stationary plate. Pass through the “doorway” and then split, left and right. Engage the falling plates and put two rounds onto any “mover” that came into your field of vision. On the ground behind the barricade where you can’t see it in this video is another fixed plate you had to shoot twice, then shift to the end and shoot the stationary plate there six times, again putting two rounds onto any mover that entered your field of vision. All reloads had to be done from cover. We were uniformly bad at it, but damn, it was fun!
OK, I have to go to the airport now. No more blogging for a while. Maybe tomorrow.
. . . goes to Joe Huffman, who caught me in full recoil, brass freshly ejected, with the pistol about halfway back into battery when I was shooting the 8″ plates at 35 yards. And I’m using the proper grip!
Many more good photos at the link.
I’m gonna build one of THESE:
That’s the shoot house we played in on Sunday. AR500 plate walls, movable interior walls also lined with AR500 plate with a plywood skin on the surface, hollow-core doors, and portable bullet traps:
These are constructed of AR500 plate with a piece of what looks like rubber conveyor belt over the open side of the box that traps the splashed particles of the bullet after it penetrates.
If I had unlimited wealth, I would have a shoot house on my property.
This is Gunsite’s logo, right?
Well, up in a tree a couple hundred yards from the shoot house was a fairly large bird:
That then did this for about ten minutes:
I suspect Ninjas were involved . . .
. . . as to who was wearing sandals at the range:
I just realized I hadn’t done so. My mother would be appalled. So, copying Sebastian, I’d like to thank everyone involved in getting us to Blackwater to shoot Para-USA’s guns and IPCC’s ammo:
Thanos Polyzos, CEO of Para-USA – the guy who signed off on the idea and had his factory build us a run of really cool pistols. We’re not worthy! We’re not worthy! But we’re very appreciative!
Kerby Smith, Director of Communications for ParaUSA. Sorry about the t-shirt joke, Kerby!
Todd Jarrett, who put together and taught the course. He even tried to get us time on the Blackwater track driving their cars, but I told him it was OK that hadn’t worked out. If he’d pulled that off, I’d have to worship him as a God.
Michael Bane, who sent his film crew for DRTV and The Shooting Gallery, and who was, I think, responsible for the idea in the first place.
Patrick Harlan, Internet Marketing Specialist for Crimson Trace who supplied us with laser grips. Seriously – buy some Crimson Trace grips. You will be AMAZED. They’ll do a lot to teach you what you do wrong.
All the folks at Blackwater USA. Sorry about the sink. And next time, do you think you could open the Pro Shop for us? I just want to see what Blackwater sells in their Pro Shop. Shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles? Backpack Ninjas? Sharks with frikken laser beams on their heads?
All the folks at Blackhawk, who supplied us with SERPA holsters and rigger’s belts, shirts and goodies, and the bus that took us to and from Blackwater. You’ll be getting a knife order from me soon, and possibly an order for another SERPA holster.
Dan Smith of International Cartridge Corporation, who supplied us with all our ammunition needs. I’m sorely disappointed that we sent him home with some full cases. But mostly I’m just sore.
I’ve posted once before on the subject of “green” ammunition. It seems the U.S. Army wanted to switch to a non-lead projectile due to the incredibly high volume of ammunition fired during training contaminating their ranges, so they chose a tungsten/nickel/cobalt alloy – lead free! Unfortunately in laboratory tests where tiny grains of the alloy were surgically placed into rats, this produced a fast-moving cancer in 100% of the rats in pretty short order.
Oops.
As I understand it, the Pentagon has dropped that idea for the moment.
The ammunition we shot this weekend at Blackwater is also “green” but it contains no tungsten, nickel or cobalt. It is sintered copper and tin. Sintering is a process by which powdered metals are bonded together under carefully controlled heat and pressure conditions. By controlling the process, the final physical characteristics of the sintered metal can be manipulated. Sintering is being used in industry for everything from piston engine connecting rods to decorative gee-gaws. Now they’re using it in projectiles.
And they work.
I shot several hundred rounds of International Cartridge Corporation’s 155 grain .45ACP Green Elite TR non-toxic frangible flatpoint (loaded to 1,150fps) through my Para Tac-S this weekend without a single failure of any kind. I popped 8″ steel plates with it from 35 yards, and I did full magazine dumps on a steel plate from a distance of about three feet without anything splashing back on me but some dust. I didn’t have to worry about pieces of jacket coming back and sticking me (which has happened at distances considerably farther than three feet), nor did I need to worry about lead exposure.
In addition to their training ammunition, ICC also makes a line of Duty ammunition. It’s still frangible, but by controlling the sintering process it is not as delicate as the training ammo (which, as far as Robb Allen and I could tell, blew up on impact with the plywood interior walls of the shoot house without penetrating.) The duty ammo is the same weight and velocity as their training ammo, but it performs entirely differently. The bullet design is a hollow point, and the forward section of the bullet is designed to fragment, much like the “prefragmented” ammo we’ve all heard of. The base of the bullet remains intact for deep penetration but if the bullet strikes a hard surface it disintegrates like an frangible should, reducing the possibility of hitting a bystander. They even manufacture pistol ammo capable of defeating a Level II vest, that still performs as though it never hit the vest at all. (But not in .45 ACP. Not enough velocity, I’d imagine.)
This is all very tacticool, and I appreciate the need for such ammunition, especially at places like indoor ranges and Blackwater where so many rounds are fired in a very short period of time. However, I’m more than a little disturbed by the fact that California has outlawed lead projectiles for hunting, that the Violence Policy Center is going hard after lead as a pollutant on public shooting ranges, and, according to the rep, California’s law is going to migrate to Arizona.
This stuff is not (at present) available as a component. The bullets are, as you might imagine, brittle. If improperly crimped, the bullet can break just as if it were ceramic, so they don’t sell anything but loaded ammunition. I would imagine the same is true for other manufacturers of similar technology – the physics of sintered metal technology makes the bullets rather fragile (though they stand up to being dropped on concrete with no evidence of damage.)
If “Green” ammunition gets a good running start at the legislatures, then handloading is in trouble. I don’t have a problem with new and better technologies, but I do have a problem with legislatures destroying old ones.
Quote of the Day
It looks like Jackson Pollock threw up on the walls. – Tam, commenting on the effects of multiple Simunitions hits on the interior walls of the shoot house.
Runner up for QotD is this one, posted by SayUncle.
UPDATE: Here’s a shot of one of Pollock’s lesser efforts:
