Wednesday, April 30, 2008

The New Baby!

This is my new baby:


I believe it is destined to become the Bedside Blaster of Choice, the ideal handy device to allow one to reach one's battle rifle in the closet. Brother Hans Vang swears he can do a full Vang Comp job on the barrel, although I wonder if this is a vicious case of overkill. Hans tells me a bunch of Federales have his system on their witness protection guns to tighten up the patterns. Are we looking at the future of sporting clays?

Full video report coming up soon, and I'm going to get this monster on the next season of SHOOTING GALLERY, too.

Meanwhile, our aforementioned friend, Larry Correia, has a great post over on his Monster Hunter Nation site on why "one-shot stop" stats are a load of rhino hooey:
...since gun fights by their nature are fluid, dynamic, and always suck, we can also assume that they’re going to be different. To illustrate:

Shooting 1: Subject is 105 pounds, soaking wet. Pacifist. Faints at the sight of his own blood. His book club calls him “Todd.” Has never been in a violent encounter in his entire life. Plays Barbara Streisand records to get “charged up”. Gets shot in the abdomen with a Brand X .32. Bullet lodges in the belly button. Barely breaks skin. Subject faints because of loud noise. .32 Brand X = 100% stopper.

Shooting 2: Subject is 310 pounds of prison hardened muscle. Has a spider web tattooed over his whole face, and his friends call him “Death Train”. Subject 2 is high on coke, crack, meth, elephant tranquilizers, No-Doze, and Cherry Pepsi. While robbing a bank during a tri-state killing spree, Subject 2 engages in a running gun fight with police and is shot through the lung with a Brand Y .45. Subject 2 then carjacks a busload of handicapped nuns to escape. Later has friend who flunked out of Vet School remove the bullet with a pair of barbeque tongs. Subject 2 then goes to 50 Cent concert. Brand Y .45 = 0% stopper.

So from this illustration, you are far better off carrying the Brand X .32 than the Brand Y .45.
Larry has a way with words, doesn't he? Still, you'd be amazed at the number of questions I get about teeny tiny "stopping power" differences. My response is always the same...shot placement...then shoot the bad person/s until he/she/it/them stop doing whatever it was that made you shoot in the first place.

And while we're on the stopping power debate, here are photos and video of Dave Barry blowing up a low-flow toilet. I', afraid I came about a day late to this party, but as a guy I appreciate any exploding bathroom fixtures.

The secret seems to be to fill the toilet up with gasoline before taking a pot shot (HA!) at it...at present gasoline prices, this was, like a $250 explosion.

I also note that David Petzal over on the Gun Nut blog is starting to sound every bit as weird as the rest of us. He was recently musing about a series of Haillary Clinton shooting schools in case her present gig doesn't work out:
The trick to creating a successful franchise is to come up with something unique, and I have been contracted to provide ideas that would set these schools apart. Here are my ideas:

*All attendees will be flown in by C-47, which will make a corkscrew landing at the school airport.

*To create a realistic environment, recordings of imaginary sniper fire will be played at all times.

*All attendees will wear pantsuits.

*All attendees will run (or waddle, as the case may be) between classes to avoid imaginary sniper fire.

*When not actually engaged in classes, attendees will play pinochle.


*Attendees who are selected to shoot first in any class are entitled to whine about it.

*Female attendees whose husbands exhibit signs of incipient mental illness are entitled to a 20 percent discount.
Hey, I'm signing up! If you win the student shoot-off, do you get Chelsea?

8 comments:

Wormwood07 said...

Okay, so inguiring minds want to know - How is BATF classifying "your baby?"

Anonymous said...

Pistol stopping power is pure fantasy. Death occurs for all sorts of reasons and its a crap shoot with pistols. To long to reiterate here, but on my blog a year ago I retold a story of two LEO I worked with that were both killed off the job. One was 350 Lbs and the largest man I have personaly known. Built like a tank. He got in a street altercation, and in the process caught a single .22 round in the armpit while emptying his 357 at the prep. When the EMTs first came to the scene they couldn't figure out why he died. Then at the hospital found the small puncture wound. He bled out on the sidewalk. The other was about 150 lbs soaking wet but a second perp came up behind him while he was fussing with the first bg and shot him in the back.

I also will never forget a Bronx boxer by the name of Bobby Halpern back in 1978 whose old lady took out a contract on him. One of the hit men stuck a 38 in his gut and pulled the trigger 3 times. The 38 rounds didn't penetrate his prison abs. He was 5' 10" 190 lbs and built like a rock.

I have no qualms about using a pistol if nothing else is available. But Correia is absolutely right. When a situation goes bad I would like to have a nice long barrel that looks like a freaking medieval pike. That way I can keep them at bay while I reload. Caliber should be around
.75 or so.

Michael Bane said...

Baby is an Any Other Weapon (AOW), with a $5 transfer fee; it took my paperwork 6 weeks to clear BATFE...

I believe how a person reacts to being shot often is a function of their head over and above even bullet placement, much less the myth of "stopping power."

Look at the Miami FBI shoot-out in the 1980s, or even North Hollywood...cases where the bad guys had, in essence, accepted that they were going to be shot and "programmed" themselves to keep going. In his LFI class back when I took it, Mas Ayoob used to show autopsy photos of a bad guy who took a bunch of 12 gauge slugsin "fatal" areas of the body and kept going like the Energizer bunny.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A MAGIC ONE-SHOT STOP SOLUTION TO YOUR PROBLEM!

We did a series of sims for a SHOOTING GALLERY where you shot a guy, then had to protect yourself for 45 seconds while the assailant took his time dying/stopping...45 seconds is FREAKIN' ETERNITY...

mb

rremington said...

I think it was Clint Smith who said: "Nothing man portable is a reliable fight stopper."

Unknown said...

FTB: "If you win the student shoot-off, do you get Chelsea?"

From what I've heard, only if you're a woman . . .

:-)

Anonymous said...

Having been an EMT Firefighter for 29 yrs, 25 of those as a FF/Paramedic, I've worked on all types from "Todd" to "Death Train".

What's weird is that you don't know for sure which is which until the feces hits the fan.
Of course, type casting is the rule, but you never REALLY know until it's 'game on'.

One 'Todd' looking type took a blast from a 12ga right into his liver. It may have been an accident. The victim came by to pick up his girlfriend after the restaurant closed.
The robber had the muzzle at contact range shoved into the good guys right side and BLAM!, big hole, big problem.

Now he's got a chunk of his liver sticking out a 1.5 - 2 inch hole in his torso.
This guy is asking me, "Am I gonna die?"
I lied and said "No, not on my watch."
I figured he was toast.
Of course we did all we could - which along with a will to live saved his butt.

Damned if the guy didn't make it and walk out of the hosp 2 weeks later minus a lobe of his liver and some pieces/parts but doing OK otherwise.

kmitch200

Anonymous said...

Just how practical is your new "baby"?

I have watched shooters at the local range plow dirt, shoot left, right and high with their pistol gripped Mossbergs too many times to think pistol gripped shotguns are a good idea. Add in the short barrel and it becomes even less of a good idea?

How many rounds are you going to put down range to learn to control the darn thing?

Anonymous said...

That toilet was blown up at Boomershoot this past Sunday in honor of Dave Barry. Unfortunately, Dave wasn't there (so he didn't shoot it himself), but he acknowledged the honor.

Michael, if you haven't attended Boomershoot in the past, you really need to get out there one of these days.

SayUncle has a writeup here: http://www.saysuncle.com/archives/2008/04/30/boomershoot-stuff/