Saturday! Yeah!

Am trying to catch up with sleep and doing a darn good job of it! We did manage to get to the range for a bit yesterday for a day of "dot" practice, shooting at 1-inch dots from various close-in distances, with the single action revolvers. It's a focus drill taught by lots of instructors, from Blackwater to Evil Roy.

I first shot the dots back in the early 1980s when I was John Show's uber "crash test student" for what would become his Mid-South Institute. John wouldn't let you move back from the close distances until you could shoot a 5-shot group with all the holes touching.

Great drill for identifying problems with trigger control! Once you can shoot the dot group, you can move on to multiple dot drills, double taps, whatever you need to practice. We finished up with some movement drills against a timer.

I note the 4th Gen Glocks have formally been announced, initially the compact 19s in 9mm and 23 in .40 S&W in the rough textured frames. I also hear from Glock insiders that the long-rumored Glock carbine is, well, somewhere, but nobody's seen the darn thing. I've been surprised that Glock hasn't jumped hard on the .380 small semiauto bandwagon. They do have a .380, the G28, not available in the U.S., but it's the same size as the 9mm G26.

Good read from Clayton Cramer on the PajamasMedia "Armed & Female" blog.

A recent article in the Telegraph discusses the rise of “ladies-only gun camps.” Why ladies-only? The article doesn’t say, but I know that similar training efforts have been sex-segregated because some women feel a bit intimidated by the inevitable “let me show you how it’s done, little lady” behavior that some guys exhibit — as if there’s something intrinsically masculine about shooting a gun.

Of course, there isn’t. Nor should this be a surprise.

He questions the need for "women's only" camps like those run by my friend Deb Ferns. I tend to disagree on that point...I think the women's only camp serve an important need. In fact, my Sweetie's first training class at GUNSITE was a women's only class, including instructors.

And speaking of armed women, Tam at View from the Porch is steaming mad at some of the Ft. Hood statements, and she says it better than I can:

The more I think about it, the more pissed off I get at the "this is our home" comment from the completely unsat and hopefully about-to-fall-on-his-sword General Cone.

Sure, General, your troops were "safe at home"... in a war with no fronts.

They were every bit as safe at home as the crews of the USS Cole or the battleship Arizona. Safe at home like the Marines in their barracks in Beirut.

An army at war does not have the luxury of "safe at home". Do you think the bomber crews of the Mighty Eighth landed in southern England after pasting the hell out of the Nazis and called out "Olly olly oxen free! We're safe at home now; we'll be putting on our slippers and lighting a pipe. No fair bombing us 'til tomorrow, Adolf!" or do you think they made sure that there were plenty of slit trenches, anti-aircraft guns, and armed guards on the base?

Do our people need to wear full battle rattle to go to the infirmary? No, but the idea that our highly trained all-volunteer army should walk around in condition white with empty holsters and bull's-eyes taped to their backs during a war and right in the middle of what is, to be honest, quite a tempting target is delusional at best and a grave insult to our troops at worst.