Michael is Slacking...

...I came off the road yesterday and I felt like hammered shit...hot, flushed, feverish, blah blah...I thought that 3 months of utterly lunatic travel had finally caught up with me. I felt so crummy and ground down that since I'm going to Deadwood next week I thought maybe I'd just go to the Number 10 Saloon, order a whiskey and sit with my back to the door and see what happens.

Instead, I watched the season finale of Justified on DVR (great, BTW...will be talking about it on next week's podcast), took a handful of over the counter stuff and went to bed. I feel pretty good today, but still ground down. Hopefully, tomorrow I'll feel like shooting a cowboy match, if it's not cold and raining. As a friend of mine said today, it's great that summer came on a weekend! Wanna shoot .357s tomorrow...hopefully, this weekend I can finish up the belt for my dual Schofield .44 Russian rigs and I can shoot them after Hell on Wheels this July 4. BTW, if you're a cowboy shooter (or a DRTV Forum member) and you're going to be in Cheyenne for Hell on Wheels, look me up Friday and let's see what's up for the evening. If there's enough of us, I'm buying.

Good piece on NRO from John Lott on mass shootings in the gun-free paradise of Europe and England:

Large multiple-victim public shootings are exceedingly rare events, but they garner massive news attention, and the misperceptions they produce are hard to erase. When I have been interviewed by foreign journalists, even German ones, they usually start off by asking why multiple-victim public shootings are such an American problem. And of course, they are astonished when I remind them of the attacks in their own countries and point out that this is not an American problem, it is a universal problem, but with a common factor: The attacks occur in public places where civilians are banned from carrying guns.

Read the whole thing, of course.

BTW BTW, I'm really excited about my friend Caleb from Gun Nuts Media in his Quest of IDPA Master Class with a Ruger SR9c compact and a Comp-Tac holster, to be chronicles on both Gun Nuts Media and DRTV. I like my SR9c compact a lot...at Ruger's request I've been carrying it (in an Galco Yaqui Slide and a Wilderness Tactical SafePacker) and I'v very happy with it. I got a Streamlight compact gun-mounted light for the little gun when it's the bedside gun in hotel rooms, which is a good companion for that Laser Genetics handheld green laser that has become my "go-to" light.

BTW BTW BTW, have I mentioned that I agreed to accept a slot on the Board of Advisors for the U.S. Concealed Carry Association? I met Tim Schmidt, the head guy ay USCCA, at the Second Amendment March in Washington D.C., and he impressed me. Last week I got a surprise invitation to join the BOA and I accepted. Hell, I'll probably do some senior stuff for them!

Meanwhile, I got a notice from Cimarron that their Open-Top Navy in .44 Special was on big-time sale...

...probably because I'm the only guy they could think of who'd want an open-top brass frame Navy (the lower gun in the pix) in .44 Special. The bastards! Sure, I know it won't run on a bet, but Bob Munden has a reputation for making open-tops work and he talked to me a while back about doing a gun for me. And I don't have any open-tops...get thee behind me, Satan! No...no...don't touch the checkbook...

And while I'm resisting temptation, consider this...a man open-carrying in Milwaukee got himself robbed...kids, kids, kids, when a stranger comes up to you and asks for a cigarette, for a ligh, for the time, for a dollar for his or her starving children, whatever, you are being "interviewed" for an attack! Good morning! Wake up and smell the coffee! If your awareness fails it doesn't matter if you're carrying a suitcase nuke and a pack of marauding Mongols in your  pants — you lose!