Happy Boxing Day!

I'm sitting around this morning watching LOTR, as I do this time every year, hoping for some scrap of inspiration for the new year to face whatever edicts slime out of Mordor-On-The Potomac or the Wolf's Lair in New York. Tomorrow my Sweetie and I are going to visit the new Secret Hidden Bunker, which is being forged deep beneath the ground by dwarves. We're excited...am hopeful of finding a wizard or 2 to cast some spells of protection and high Nielsen ratings.

I wanted to catch up on a couple of things this morning. The new little Glock 4 has been outed on the Boomershooter Forum:

It appears to be a single stack .380, a bit smaller than the G26 9mm in most dimensions (5.94 inches in length for the .380; 6.41 inches in length; 4.13 for the height; 4.17 for the G26). Of course the real difference, of course (aside from 9mm vs. .380) is the width...the porky little G26 is 1.26 wide. The new .380 is only .836 wide, approaching my ideal dimension of .75 inch. The size is closer of a Kahr CW9 9mm or the Ruger LC9 than the current generation of .380s, making it — if the leak is correct and not a false flag — more along the lines of the Ruger LC380.

I would suspect a 9mm will follow pretty quickly. I'm surprised a 9mm wasn't the first offering, since the .380 gold rush seems to have given way to the mini-9s. No doubt Glock will sell a zillion of them. You note I don't mention pining away for mini-40s...that's because I think they suck.

Amazingly, read Time Magazine's latest cover story (part of it on the website is behind the subscription firewall): America's Pest Problem—It's Time To Cull the Herd:

Too many deer, wild pigs, raccoons and beavers can be almost as bad for the animals as too few. This is why communities across the country find themselves forced to grapple with a conundrum. The same environmental sensitivity that brought Bambi back from the brink over the last century now makes it painfully controversial to do what experts say must be done: a bunch of these critters need to be killed.

Yes kiddies, it's a very pro-hunting article where you'd least expect it. It comes at a time when anti-hunting forces are ramping up, aiming for the "weakest link" after the antigun mega-fail this last year. Paul Erhardt and I have been talking for the last couple of months about the new convergence of hunters and shooters. After more than 20 years of diverging (which, I'd like to add, Erhardt and I were the first to point out and document), shooters are moving from competition and training to hunting, and, in fact, see the 2 activities as one in the same. This is being driven by Gun Culture Ver. 2.0, who came into the gun culture through shooting, as opposed to the generational transfer through hunting that was common in Gun Culture Ver. 1.0 (I'd also like to point out that Erhardt and I were the first to identify and quantify Gun Culture Ver. 2.0).

Last week while filming SHOOTING GALLERY I outlined 3 additional trends that were all intertwined with the profound shift on hunting:

• Feral hog hunting, which has given the hunting industry a massive shot in the arm.
• Returning veterans, who are helping reshape Gun Culture.
• The rise of (and final ascendency) of the AR-15 as a hunting platform.

I could have added the "localvore" phenomenon, which is huge here in the People's Republic of Colorado. There are a lot of implications for all of us in the industry with this market shift