Tag: guns

The Gun You Carry

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. . . when you can’t carry a gun.

I live in Arizona. It tends to be a bit warm here nine months out of the year. And (to put it mildly) I’m on the husky side. My preferred carry piece is a 1911, but it’s tough (for me) to wear clothes that will adequately conceal such a piece, whether it’s my full-sized Kimber Classic, my Para USA Commander-sized Gunblog 45, or my Kimber Ultra CDPII.

Well, conceal it and still give me reasonable access to it.

Recently I’ve been toting a S&W Model 60 2″ snubbie .38 revolver in the front pocket of my jeans, but it’s just a little bit lumpy. My (ex-)boss purchased a Kel-Tec PF9 a while back, and I found that I really liked it – 7+1 rounds of full-house 9mm (+P rated, but not as a steady diet) in a pretty tiny package that still offered reasonable sights.

I picked one up a couple of days ago. I still need to do a “fluff & buff” on it, then run a couple hundred rounds through it, but I think this will easily fill the bill for the gun I carry when I can’t carry a gun. Mine looks just like this one:


The slide is hard-chromed on mine.

I Can Haz M14

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I Can Haz M14!

Cue the Mormon Tabernacle Choir for a rendition of the Hallelujah Chorus! Just over a year ago I sent a substantial check to Ted Brown at the recommendation of my readers, and I waited.

And waited.

And waited some more.

I finally got good news. My LRB M25 rear-lugged receiver shipped last Wednesday and should be at Ted’s shop no later than the end of this week. My rifle is next in line for assembly!

I already have a scope (the Leupold Mk 4 LR/T I had on the Remington) and 11 magazines. The receiver comes with a built-in Weaver base:


All I need to get is some LaRue QD rings, I think, and load up some ammo.

I shouldn’t have to wait more than another month or so . . .

You REALLY Want to Come to the Rendezvous

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Mr. Completely has put up a schedule of the activities planned for this year’s Gun Blogger Rendezvous:

Thursday, September 10th

2:30 pm. Leave the Hospitality Room to car pool to Scheel’s Sports Store in nearby Sparks.

3:00 pm – 5:00 pm. Guided tour at Scheel’s Sports and browsing/shopping. Pick up munchies and soft drinks on way back to hotel.

6:00pm. Leave the Hospitality Room to go to dinner. Location to be determined later.

Thursday Evening until midnight: Refreshments and conversation at the Silver Legacy Hospitality room. Bring your own refreshments and munchies.

Friday, September 11th.

8:00am. Leave the Silver Legacy Hospitality room, then downstairs to one of the restaurants for breakfast.

8:45am. Leave the Silver Legacy Hospitality room to car pool up and head out to the Washoe County Shooting Facility, the Pyramid range for rifle and pistol target shooting out to 900 yards.

9:30am – 2:00pm. At the range.

3:00 pm. – 5:45pm. Show-N-Tell at the Silver Legacy Hospitality room.

6:00pm. Leave the Silver Legacy Hospitality room to go to the ground floor to Gecko’s BBQ Restaurant for dinner.

Friday Evening until midnight: Refreshments and conversation at the Silver Legacy Hospitality room. Bring your own refreshments and munchies.

Saturday, September 12th.


8:00am. Leave the Silver Legacy Hospitality room, then downstairs to one of the restaurants for breakfast.

8:45am. Leave the Silver Legacy Hospitality room to car pool up and head out to the Washoe County Shooting Facility, the Pyramid range for an introduction to Steel Challenge Action Pistol shooting.

9:30am – 2:00pm. At the range.

4:30 – 5:15pm. Rachel Parsons of the NRA

5:15 – 6pm. Bill Brassard of the National Shooting Sports Foundation

6:00 pm. NSSF all you can eat pizza feed at the Silver Legacy Hospitality room. After dinner will be the fund raiser raffle for Project Valour-IT and the drawings for the door prizes.

Saturday Evening until Midnight: Refreshments and conversation at the Silver Legacy Hospitality room. Bring your own refreshments and munchies.

Sunday, September 13th.

7:30am. Leave the Silver Legacy Hospitality room, then head downstairs to one of the restaurants for breakfast.

8:15am. Leave for the Virginia City Camel Races Festival and Cowboy Fast Draw Blogger Match.

9:00am – 10:00am. Cowboy Fast Draw Shooting.

The Cowboy Fast Draw shooting is the last scheduled event for the Gun Blogger Rendezvous, but many attendees will be staying Sunday night and returning home on Monday. The Camel Races Festival, The Reno Car Museum, the Downtown River Walk, the new Reno Museum, and a number of other things should be considered for the rest of the day on Sunday.

Note that many of the times shown are departure times. Plan on being there a little earlier than the departure time.

OK, that’s what’s planned. There’s also a FAQ post if you need some more info.

Now, on Saturday night we’re going to have the raffle drawings, and as you should know by now, we’re giving away the Para GI Expert that I’m donating and a $2,000 value training certificate to Front Sight that YOU NEED NOT BE PRESENT TO WIN. (The prizes are separate – two prizes, two winners.) So far we have sold about 175 tickets for these two prizes, and we still have a bit over two weeks to go before those sales stop.

BUT IF YOU ATTEND, there are a myriad of other prizes you can win. (Attendees also have a shot at the GI Expert and the training certificate.) Hi-Point has donated their new 9mm Carbine, and Para USA had promised to donate a pistol as well.

Today they revealed what that pistol will be, their Gun Rights Edition high-capacity PXT P14:

The specs are:

Product Code: PX1445S GR
Caliber: .45 ACP
Rounds: 14+1
Barrel: 5″
Weight: 40 oz.
Length: 8.5″
Height: 5.75″
Hammer: Spurred
Sights: Fiber-Optic Front/2-Dot Rear
Receiver: Stainless
Finish: Stainless
Magazine: PNM45
MSRP: $1,149.00

I’m (obviously) not eligible to win the GI Expert, but I’d LOVE to win this pistol!

So far the attendee’s list is about 34 names long, so your odds will be pretty good!

Open Carry ≠ Public Panic

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Open Carry ≠ Public Panic

Long ago another blogger (I won’t link to it now, but you can search this site if you’d like) said about citizens carrying firearms:

I just…I just blink my eyes in amazement everytime this crops up – actually watching people feel the need to carry a concealed weapon in public…

If I were to take a live, armed weapon and carry it on my person, in public, it would eat away at my sanity just as if it were emitting lethal radiation. To know that I carried an instrument of sure and certain death on my person, available and ready to be pulled out and used at a moment’s notice to possibly kill…a child. A homeless person. An innocent.

Tonight I had dinner with about thirty people at a packed Golden Corral restaurant in Phoenix.

And almost every one of us was open carrying. About half of us (me included) were toting 1911s. At least another third were carrying revolvers of various types, from Single-Action Army models to modern Smith & Wessons. Then there were a smattering of the various plastic-fantastic pistols – Glocks, Springfield XDs, etc.

There was no public panic. Lots of children running about the place. (I damn near stepped on the cutest little girl – so much for my situational awareness in a crowded restaurant! She came around me like John Force at the WinterNationals, only without the blast of nitromethane exhaust to warn me.) Lots of families. No one got shot at the salad bar. No one was winged at the dessert buffet. There were no duels over the last popcorn shrimp. No wild-west shootouts over the last parking space.

No one ran screaming from the restaurant in fear. No one (to our knowledge) complained about all the armed people in the place. The police were not summoned. The FBI did not put in an appearance.

And nobody robbed the place either. (Can you imagine what an epic failure of the victim-selection process that would have been?) All in all, it was a pleasant meal with good company – all members of The Gun Counter. And me. I’m not a member, but I got an invite anyway. It was a much bigger turnout that I expected.

UPDATE – 8/16/09: INSTALANCHE!! Welcome! Please do spend a little extra time perusing the site. I recommend checking out the “Best Posts” on the left column.

<——— (Over there! Scroll down a bit.)

But get a beverage and a snack first. Some of them run a little long. I call them “Überposts.” One reader, for example, said Of Laws and Sausages was a “13,000 word wall of text, but I assure you, it’s worthwhile.”

Thanks for visiting!

OK, How Did I Not Know About This?

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OK, How Did I Not Know About This?

I’ve lived in Arizona now for 28 years, moving here from Cary, NC in July of 1981. How did I not know about the bi-annual Big Sandy Machine Gun Shoot? It’s been going on almost five years!

I don’t own any NFA items, but I will be the first person to tell you that full-auto hardware is the finest mechanism for turning large volumes of cash into noise and smiles. The next shoot is scheduled for October 16-18.

Here’s a short promotional video of the inaugural 2005 event:

http://img.photobucket.com/player.swf?file=http://vidmg.photobucket.com/albums/v99/smallestminority/mgs_2005tzr.flv

Remember that op-ed I fisked a bit back where the moron Marc Rubin asked about privately-owned cannon? I bet he’d leave skid-marks in his drawers if he watched that clip.

I think I might have to take a drive up there that October weekend. It’s only about five hours . . .

CMP Update

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I’ve purchased a CMP Garand, a CMP M1 Carbine, and three or four cans of .30-06 on en-bloc clips from the CMP, so I’m on their mailing list. Things may be finally slowing down in the commercial manufacturing sector, but the CMP is still overwhelmed:

LATEST CMP SALES NEWS:

ORDER BACKLOG. For the past nine months, the number of orders received by CMP for rifles, ammunition, and all other products has been unprecedented.
As of today, 31 July 2009, our Sales Order Processing Dept is up to processing / shipping orders received at the end of Apr 2009, with several thousand orders still to go for May – July. The number of incoming orders has decreased enough so that customers should expect an acknowledgment of our receiving orders about 30 days after mailing the order. However, customers should not expect delivery for 90 – 120 days from date order was placed. We ask our customers to bear with us. We will eventually recover from this surge. The CMP staff thanks you for your support and patience.

COMMUNICATION RESPONSE DELAYS. CMP is still receiving hundreds of calls a day, as well as hundreds of emails. Each morning there are dozens of voicemails from the night before. Because of the large volume of constant calls in the daytime, it may take a few days for response. We have a state of the art phone system for a company our size, but the volume of calls is causing the system to do unexpected things. We apologize for any delay in responding to emails or telephone calls.

—

S&H INCREASE FOR 407-CAN. S&H for orders for 407-CAN received on or after 1 Sep 2009 will increase to $9.95 per can. Other S&H charges will remain as they are until further notice.

OVERPAYMENTS TO CMP. Effective immediately, we will consider customer overpayments of $9.99 or less as donations and will show that on the customer invoice / bill of sale. Any overpayment of $10 or more will be immediately refunded to the customer. The $10 figure was chosen because that is our estimate of how much it costs the CMP to process a refund check. This change will be added to our instructions and order forms at time of next printing.

BAVARIAN CARBINES. The Bavarian marked M1 carbines have all been inspected and graded. However, because of the current 90 day backlog of orders, we will not begin accepting orders for these carbines until 1 Oct, 2009.Prices will be posted on the website at the beginning of September.

CARBINE AMMO 438A. CMP continues to receive monthly shipments of carbine ammo, and are slowly reducing the number of backorders. As of 31 July, we have over 3,000 orders for carbine ammo on backorder. Anyone ordering carbine ammo now should expect a minimum of 120 days for delivery, and possibly much longer.

Thank you for your support of the CMP in these historic times.

Orest Michaels
Chief Operating Officer

“Historic times” indeed! 90-120 days for a firearm, over 120 days for .30 Carbine ammo. Wow.

Justice?

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Justice?

By the time the game warden arrived, Kevin Kadamus was sitting down and holding his 17-year-old son in his lap, a blanket covering the boy’s bloodied body.

“He was trying to talk to his son, encouraging him to hang on,” Warden David Gregory said.

Jacob Kadamus couldn’t hang on. With a 12-gauge shotgun, his father had mistakenly shot him in the torso on the opening day of Vermont’s turkey hunting season. He died at the scene.

Now, Kevin Kadamus must cope with more than remorse and grief. The 45-year-old computer consultant and father of three has been charged with manslaughter.

That’s the opening of an AP piece entitled “Hunting deaths pose challenge for prosecutors”. As one investigator put it, “There isn’t an exemption under the law for family members being charged.”

In 2006, according to the CDC (the latest stats available), 611 people age 10 and up died as the result of an unintentional gunshot wound. The CDC doesn’t break that data down into hunting accidents, but you can see that they are pretty rare overall. Some are called “accidents” and no charges are filed, but as one game warden was quoted, “There’s three distinct actions that have to take place: You have to aim the firearm, take the safety off and you have to pull the trigger. None of those actions are ever accidental. The simplest way to avoid an accident is to identify your target.” Shooting someone accidentally requires multiple violations of the four rules of safe gun handling. It’s not accidental. At the very least it’s negligent.

But is criminal prosecution called for when the victim is a family member? Is the purpose of such prosecution punishment? What punishment can be greater than the knowledge of ones responsibility for the death of a loved one? Deterrence? The incidence is so rare to begin with that I find that idea laughable. Justice? For whom? Who is served?

It’s different when the negligence is that of someone outside the family, as in the case of the two Oklahoma police officers involved in the accidental shooting death of a 5 year-old, or the complete negligent misuse of a firearm such as the moron who shot his wife while trying to use his .22 pistol as a drill.

Or is it? I’m interested in your thoughts on this.

I Can Haz .38 Super?

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Well, I traded in a gun today. My Kimber Eclipse Pro II. Even with the new internal extractor slide I haven’t been all that happy with it, which is too bad because it’s too pretty not to shoot better than it did. It was NOT fond of my pet load that works flawlessly in my full-size Kimber Classic. And that load also works perfectly fine in my other Commander-size 1911, the Para Gun Blog .45.

Still, I’m a happy camper, because I traded it straight across for a brand spanking new EAA Witness Elite Match .38 Super.


Now I’ve got to accumulate more magazines, a fiber-optic front sight, holster, mag pouches, reloading dies and components, etc., etc., etc.

Should be a fun gun for steel shoots. Seventeen round magazines means a LOT fewer magazine changes.

Anybody got a pet load for the 124 grain Gold Dot?