Home!

And dog tired! Will do a longer post tomorrow, vis-a-vis both B-HO coming out of the closet ans some mo' gun stuff,

BTW, re: commenters on the .475 TURNBULL, when you start playing with the big boomers, it gets expensive quick. I love my 450-400 3-inch Ruger #1, but every time I pull the trigger it's like shredding $5 bills...$123 per 20 Hornady rounds. The reloading components are equally expensive. Hell, the dies cost about 3 times as much as normal dies! And that's cheap compared to the big Nitro cartridges. On par with shooting .50 BMG or .338 Lapua Match.

The shorter .475 TURNBULL will give you more rounds in a lever platform...mostly it's efficient, a sweet spot cartridge.

Obama Calls For Reintroduction of Assault Weapons Ban

I'm thinking "no."

LOL!

Blogging platforms for the iPad suck!

Big Medicine Indeed

I think Doug Turnbull may have made me a believer about his .475 TURNBULL lever action rifle cartridge. It's a 50-110 shortened and necked down to .475 to take advantage of the plethora of .475 cartridges. Think 400 grains at anywhere from 1800 to 2100+ fps. Ouchies!

Shoots great out of his 1886 lever guns...recoils isn't NEARLY what you might expect from a thumper like this. Brass and loaded ammo from Corbon. Heck of a gun all around!

Sweater Weather!

Yes, it's time to imitate Jimmy Carter (oooooooweeeee, yeech!) and don your favorite fall sweater...of sweatshirt, as the case may be. It's also an excellent time to check out one of my favorite methods for concealed carry -- the sweater holster. Actually, the late Lou Alessi used that phrase to describe a cross draw holster he made for my Colt Mustang decades ago. "Wear it about 2 inches off your centerline," he said. "One of the quickest holsters ever made."

He was right, and I still have that holster. This weekend I put the Sig P938 9mm into service using a Blocker cross draw (24XD Concealment) under a long-tailed "waffle" henley t-shirt...perfect! Hiking, driving, just sitting around, it's like the gun wasn't there.

There are some other excellent "sweater holsters." Pocket Concealment Systems has one based on the Alessi design, and there are others out there. I believe a DeSantis "Sky Cop" would work if it's available for the new generation of little pistols. With the cross draw, extra rounds for the primary go in the left pocket (until my next package for Wilderness Tactical arrives), 2nd gun, the LCP, stays in the right pocket.

Meanwhile, Back @ Winter

I sort of had fantasies about going to the range today and doing a little AR work...cold, wind and rain have pretty much trashed that fantasy. Oh well, I've got about a billion things to do down in the gun room, not the least of which is putting stuff away after a week of filming. I have, BTW, discovered a major difference between green and red lasers. While your average red laser can provide hours of fun for a cat, a green laser drives them (well, at least Pokkee-san the Tailless Manx) bonkers. I can almost get him to run up a wall, which is pretty unusual for a "ground cat" like a Manx. And no, I'm not pointing the gat at the cat...I've got a CT green laser on a G19 frame that's lying around the house waiting for the slide to get back from L&M Machining with its Trij RMR.

I really want to get my suppressed Ruger Charger sighted in — right now it's got an Aimpoint Mini in it. It is a fun gun to shoot, and next spring should contribute to the Ground Squirrel Apocalypse in my Sweetie's garden. Probably would work on the occasional coyote as well. Weirdly, we haven't seen any foxes around the Secret Hidden Bunker for months. There are even bunny rabbits hopping around, something that doesn't usually happen when the foxes are on the job. I haven't seen any coyotes, though, and they usually aren't shy. Maybe a mountain lion prowling around, which sends the foxes scattering.

I note with interest that the Heizer "Double Tap" 2-shot derringer has hit the rocks. The protos were darned interesting little guns, and I hope they figure out a way to get it to market. Stranger things have happened...I would have never figured that the Boberg XR9 would get to market, and I was totally wrong about that.

In Case You Missed It...

The great Walton Goggins (The Shield, Justified) gave the performance of his life on this week's Sons of Anarchy as transexual escort "Venus Van Damn."

TV Guide referred to the performance as "jaw-dropping."

And, ahem, the special effects are...impressive! LOL!

Blasto-Smasho Range Day!

(All photos courtesy Denise Jackson for OUTDOOR CHANNEL)

This is one of our set-ups from yesterday's blasto-smasho day at the range for SHOOTING GALLERY's annual "ballistics" episode. After last season's orgy of ballistic jello we decided to do a follow-up show on penetration. We did a plywood "penetration box," wall segments, car doors, car windows, wheels (tire, rim, brake drum), the "box-o-steel" using mild steel plates, concrete blocks and, of course, the ever-popular gallon water bottles with colored water. All captured at 8000 frames-per-second. If 8000 frames-per-second had been available in the gory days of Haight-Ashbury, hippies would still be watching multicolored water jugs blow up and moaning, "Oh, dude! DUDE!"

For me, the most fun is putting rounds through the .500 S&W Magnum. We used 400-grain Winchester hunting loads and 275-grain Corbon DPX on various targets. There is nothing more fun that launching boomers, even if my hand is a bit sore this morning!

Gonna be a cool show. Last year's ballistic gel episode was tremendously popular.

As far as "what did we learn," that'll be obvious on the episode, but I would like to say that the endless Internet detractors of the Taurus Judge platform need to take a deep breath and get over it. With Winchester PDX1 or Federal 4-pellet buckshot, the Judge is a formidable short-range defensive weapon. Period.

Some Days...LOL!!!

Yesterday we were at Machinegun Tours, Alan Samuel's totally cool gun store outside of Denver, filming 3 builds for SHOOTING GALLERY Season 13 — the TAC2 breakdown AR on the ATI Omni lower, the state-of-the-art .22LR AR on the Spike's upper with a JP lower and a suppressed Ruger Charger, mostly to show how easy it is to mod a 10/22.

Right.

Some days just refuse to go down the simple path we envision! I decided to start simple with the Charger, since I've down so many 10/22s and was using my "standard" parts kit — Volquartsen trigger group, bolt handle and spring assembly, assorted parts. I was also adding a integrally suppressed barrel (mine is a no-longer-manufactured TS; Thompson Machine makes one).

I had read that Chargers can be a bear to disassemble, largely due to the shake-and-bake finish Ruger puts on the Chargers. I have an Accutech barrel pusher that has always done the trick, so I wasn't worried. Short story...3 hours later I got the damned barrel out of the Charger. It took tensioning the Accutech, which pushes against the forward pin that holds in the trigger group, very tightly, followed by A REALLY BIG HAMMER and a steel bar. I then cleared out the receiver barrel channel with fine grit sandpaper. I ended up flat filing the "drop in parts," which have always dropped in for my other 10/22s. I thought producer John Carter and DP Gene Moffett were going to strangle me as the hours ground on and on and I'm back in the shop filing away.

The ARs went together fine. I required help from the shop's gunsmiths, because I'm definitely not a gunsmith...LOL! We have a range date on Thursday, so might get some shooting in then.

A Chilly Sunday

This bout of cold is supposed to break next week, which is hopeful since we have a couple of SHOOTING GALLERY filming days! In between, I want to get a little more range time in before the glaciers move south.

We took the Wonder Beagle on a long hike yesterday, and we had the trail completely to ourselves since it was so cold and wet. Alf looked particularly fetching, BTW, in her red plaid sweater.The neat thing about a day like yesterday is that ice crystals form on the trees and plants, so everything looks like its frosted for Christmas. We even found some ice flowers, perfect flowers of ice remaining when the plants themselves withered from the frost.

In truth, I just grabbed the first gun handy for the hike, which was the Taurus "Slim" 9mm in a Simply Rugged holster. That particular combo carries like it's not even there. The bears are still awake, so I should have probably carried something "thumpier," like one of the .44s, but the Slim was handy. I moved the Ruger LCP to my weak hand pocket, as usual.

I have picked up on one small issue with the Sig Sauer P938 that I probably need to rectify. The gun comes with an ambi safety, which initially I liked based on the idea that the gun could be carried on my left side as a second gun. Generally. I'm not crazy about ambi safeties because, at least on 1911 platforms, they have a way of getting knocked off by carry holsters and in general provide just one more thing to break. The problem with the ambi safety on the 938 is that on speed drills, the offside safety actually pinches the flesh at the base of my trigger finger. Not every time, but often enough that I find myself hedging on the grip...it hurts!  I'm gong to do a little grinding on the offside grip...there's a fair sharp edge where the safety meet the grip and see if that does the trick. If it doesn't, I'll have a talk with Wayne Novak about it, because he knows everything.

I got back my Winchester Model 12 from Ken Griner Gunworks, and I can't wait to take it to the range. As you know I'm a fan of the cowboy action shooting subset of Wild Bunch shooting, using the guns of the movie THE WILD BUNCH,  including major caliber lever action rifles (.45, .44, 44-40, 38-40), 1911s and pump shotguns. Originally, the 1897 Winchester and its Chinese clones were the only pump guns allowed. But in Wild Bunch shooting, the pump guns are loaded up and run like pump guns are supposed to be run (in cowboy, '97s are only loaded 2 at a time). Winchester '97s are sketchy at best — they're old, overly complicated (87 separate heat treating steps) and prone to being pounded to pieces. My friend Gene Pearcey (cowboy champion "Evil Roy")  has always said every cowboy shooter needed 3 '97s — one to shoot, one for back-up, the other at the gunsmith being repaired. When I shot '97s in competition, I found this to be gospel.

The Wild Bunch founding fathers decided — wisely, I think — to allow Winchester Model 12s into the sport effective 1 January 2013. Model 12s, one of the most famous and best -selling shotguns ever, was created to solve many of the shortcomings of the Model '97. Secondly, Winchester made about a billion of the things, and they're widely available at completely sane prices. My local gunstore had 7 of the things in the rack, with prices starting at $250. Cheap at the price! Mine's a 1950s vintage gun (as opposed to my 1903 '97) in excellent shape. Ken cut the barrel to 21 inches or so, took an inch off the stock, fitted screw-in chokes and replaced the worn parts.

I think Wild Bunch has the potential, I believe, to be a major national sport, capturing the good points of both cowboy action shooting and some of the other practical shooting sports like USPSA. 1911s remain crazy popular, and the cool thing about a Model 12 is that I would not be uncomfortable at all using my Model 12 as a home protection shotgun (I would use a '97 if that's what I had, but I would worry). The sport took off like a shot (yep...pun alert), but went though pretty typical growing pains that slowed growth.

On the plus side, the founding father have from the beginning insisted on a greater emphasis on marksmanship...the shots are typically harder than you'd see in SASS (or the Steel Challenge, for that matter), and there are lots more of them.  On the negative side, there are some "artifacts" left over from the sports' cowboy roots, such as loading the 1911 mag with only 5 rounds. Still, Wild Bunch is a fascinating and challenging sport, one that I like a lot.

BTW BTW, Rob Pincus has an excellent article on his Personal Defense Network on choosing a carry gun. The focus of my own video is "simplify and demystify" concealed carry, and Rob's article is in agreement. One of the legacies of gun magazines is an apparently endless assessment of ammunition, guns and gear, in search of that elusive (and nonexistent) "best." Rob's article is definitely worth reading.

Brother Steven on James Bond's PPK

Steven Hunter, writing in WaPo, on James Bond's signature piece:

Fleming presumably made his choice of weapon on the basis of design alone. And indeed, the PPK (in German it stands for “short police pistol”) is a cool little beauty. It looks like Nietzschean poetry in steel, with a thrust of decadent Weimar art moderne to it. And it is Weimar, the latest thing from 1931, with its radical double-action design. It’s light, thin, designed for undercover work, meant to be carried a lot and shot a little. It was already old-fashioned by the time Connery got his in ’62.

You know, I think we might include the PPK in GUN STORIES Season 3 just because I love to hear Steve nail it!

Snow Last Night...

...here at the Secret Hidden Bunker, after a day where the temperature never got above 30 degrees. Tomorrow is supposed to be bitter, which throws into question whether I'm going to get up at O-Dark-30 and go shoot a 3-gun match.

BTW. am posting this om Firefox, which I actively dislike as a browser, because Safari's newest edition has a conflict with Blogger, because Blogger is owner by Google and Apple hates hates hates Google. Sigh.

I was pretty pleased with RAPID FIRE. I think Iain and Mike S, are wonderful personalities and the show moved right along. There are some midcourse corrections I'm going to make to make the show even better.

I did get out to the range with my AR for an afternoon of work, and it was fun. Glad I did because in the last 2 trips the scope has been taken on and off numerous times, and the zero has wandered all over the place. I need to get a torque wrench to keep putting scopes back on guns! I am enjoying shooting the AR more and more, which means there are more 3-gun matches in my future.

I also tried running the little Sig P938 the same way I'd run a larger gun in a match. LOL! Michael need to pay more attention when the gun is jumping around in his hands!

I'm also building up a coupleo of red-dot sighted "practical" pistols...one a Glock 19, the other my FNP-45. Both Mike Seeklander and Chris Edwards from Glock have been telling me that this is the future, and if that's the case, I'm way behind the curve! And BTW, I still got no truck with "USPSA "Open" Division!

RAPID FIRE TONIGHT!

Our new series, RAPID FIRE, premieres TONIGHT! Mike Seeklander and Iain Harrison will absolutely rock your world!

Keeping Things Quiet

Is there any worse curse than approval? Have you ever learned anything new from people who accept the world as it is?

James Lee Burke

Creole Belle

I always read James Lee Burke's "Dave Robicheaux" novels with a sense of dread, as if I'm going to find out some hidden truth that I profoundly didn't want to know. And maybe I do. In truth, at a very low ebb in my life, I read In the Electric Most with Confederate Dead and found something there that helped me keep my head on straight...the movie, however, sucked.

Have been working with the TS suppressor on one of the Ruger 22/45 Lites. I love the set-up, but so far I haven't found the ammo of my dreams. The CCI "Quiet" 40-grain/710fps pills are, well, quiet, but they also won't cycle the gun. My usual fallbacks of Mini Mags will cycle the gun just fine, but they usually crack as the little pellets go supersonic. I say "usually" because the actual speed of .22 ammo is pretty much a crap shoot. Mini Mags are rated at 1235fps at the muzzle, and the speed of sound is about 1100fps at 70 degrees and sea level. Given environmental concerns and the less-than-perfect consistency of .22 ammo, sometimes it cracks and sometimes it doesn't.

I need to sit down with my many different .22 rounds until I find the perfect compromise. I'm hopeful about some of the Federal match rounds, which is what I usually use in RRC competition. They cycle my Mark III just fine and clock out at just under 1100fps. The CCI "Quiets" are going to be real winners in my T/C Contender rifle barrel. I've shot BB and CB caps out of the T/C, and objectively they're not much louder than the 22/45 with the silencer. As soon as I get the T/C barrel back from being threaded I'll let you all know.

Today's a range day, which is perfect since the wind is blowing like about 400 miles per hour. I'll have to shoot everything on the diagonal just to hit the target!

A Cheery Read!

From Matt Bracken, former Special Forces guy and author of the ENEMIES FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC series of novels. Yes, it's grim...read the whole thing:

So, we have millions of men and women with military training, owning rifles similar to the ones they used in combat operations overseas from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Many of these Soldiers and Marines have special operations training. They are former warriors with experience at conducting irregular warfare and counter-terrorism operations in dangerous urban environments. They are the opposite of unthinking robots: their greatest military talent is looking outside the box for new solutions. They always seek to “over-match” their enemies, using their own advantages as force multipliers while diminishing or concealing their weaknesses. These military veterans are also ready, willing and able to pass on their experience and training to interested students in their civilian circles.

A Cool Hunting Story...

...in, of all things, the NYT:

Ms. Pellegrini wants to pay what she calls “the full karmic price” for her meals. In an observation few carnivores will protest, she says, “The duck you pluck will taste so much better than the one you don’t.”

Herding Cats

Spent yesterday either talking on the phone or rounding up AR parts for our SHOOTING GALLERY builds. The ATI Omni lower is pretty interesting. It looks good (and boy, is it light!), but the question remains of how a polymer lower will handle the stress of a lot of rounds. Of course, the gun we're building, the break-down, is not intended as an everyday plinker, but we'll shoot the crap out of it anyway.

Today is podcast day, so as soon as I finish with the blogpost I'll head up to the studio. Couple of other things on the agenda today...at the IDPA Nationals I bought one of the Bob Vogel Glock Trigger from GlockTriggers, and I want to put it into our crash-test-dummy Gen 4 Glock 19. Unless my Sweetie commandeers the Glock for her impending 3-Gun run, it's slated to go out to TSD Combat Systems for a red dot sight transplant. I am convinced that red dot optics on a pistol for concealed carry is a coming thing. I want to set up a Glock and my FNP .45...we'll show you how they work on SG.

I'm also heading to the range when I finish up at the Bunker. I want to put more rounds through the Sig Sauer P938, and I'm breaking in a new pair of cowboy pistols...or, rather, my overhauled pair of .357 Blackhawks I got about a decade ago. They've now got 4-inch octagonal barrels (looks cool!) and a brass front sight blade. I'm looking for a few good seconds here.

Although, to be honest, at least in my cowboy shooting there are seconds to be found with the rifle. I finished in the top-10 again last weekend against some really really good shooters. Once again, I was consistent but not as fast as I know I can be. I went through a spell of missing a lot of rifle targets, and I backed off my speed with the rifle to guarantee the hits. It is darn hard to ratchet the speed back up! Practice practice practice!

A Usual Fun Weekend

Spent yesterday shooting a cowboy match up in Ft. Collins. No scores yet, but I did well. This was a 5th Saturday match, so more prone to weirdness in stage design...which is fun. Once again, am running a little slower, but am dreadfully consistent. In October, I'm going to focus on speed. Interestingly enough, my Sweetie and I will be shooting a 3-Gun match next weekend, the kind with ARs instead of lever action rifles. Should be interesting, and different.

John Richardson (and many others) are at the Gun Rights Policy Conference in Orlando...am looking forward to his reports. I'm glad to see how much the industry has adopted the Gun Culture Ver. 2.0 meme. Just a quick note — I've been credited with pointing out the birth of Ver. 2.0; more correctly, Paul Erhardt and I made the initial observations.

I've been rounding up magazines for the Sig Sauer P938, which is harder than one might think. I bought the only one at Midway, then a couple of more from Sig's online store. A bit pricey, that. I want to shoot the little 9mm in a IDPA Back-up Gun match (the 3-inch barrel is easily under the IDPA 3.8 inch requirement). Am also waiting for extra Taurus "Slim" mags. Have actually been carrying the "Slim" with a CT laser in a Simply Rugged Cuda holster (the same design holster I use for my knockaround Ruger SR22 pistol. I'm pretty much convinced that the mini-9mms are a real breakthrough in concealed carry...yes, they are harder to shoot than both their slightly smaller .380 brethren (from which they sprang) and their slightly larger "compact" sized cousins, but the more I carry them, the more I like them as carry guns. I'm planning on filming my second Panteao Productions "Make Ready With" concealed carry video in March of next year, and the mini-9s will play a big role.

Interestingly enough, I have a Charter Arms 9mm snub on the way for T&E. I've shot the .40 S&W version, but am much more interested in the little 9mm. Shame it doesn't come in red and black...

There's an on-going battle at the University of Colorado in Boulder on CCW for students. You can get a good idea of the shape of the battle from this article in the local dead tree media. A part of me wanted to gear up for an expedition to Boulder to attend Brady shill and professional "victim" Colin Goddard's talk on campus just to ask him how he lives with himself.

I note that Brother Ted has a new series coming on the Discovery Channel. I also hear that several other gun shows are in the works on networks other than the one for which I labor.

Next week is an AR build week. We'll be putting together the .22 LR tackdriver based on the Spike's Tactical Lothar Walther-barreled upper and the JP custom lower (probably MagPul or ACE furniture). Hopefully, we'll also build the ultralight breakdown on the ATI Omni polymer lower and the TAC2 Discreet Carry Kit. Upper is still undecided, although I have a Stag here. Both of these builds will be filmed for SHOOTING GALLERY and our still-hidden-in-the-box Internet project. The suppressed Ruger Charger, sort of a crash tutorial in overhauled the 10/22, which is so easy to overhaul that even I can do it, is also on the menu.

Well, a long blogpost is a good excuse not to address the wreckage in both my office and the gun room, the consequences of too much travel...I suppose I'd better at least try to clean up one or the other!

A Second Massive "WHEW!"

So we now have 10 of the 12 scenarios needed for next season's THE BEST DEFENSE in the can, or whatever the digital equivalent of that hoary film cliche is, and I am seriously relieved. We once again upped the ante with the scenarios, and I and the whole production team believe they are the best we've ever done. Our starting scenario is a neighborhood watch guy who starts following a suspicious person...hmmmmm, where have I heard that before...and we take you guys through every step both tactically and legally.

Coupled with the grueling SHOOTING GALLERY schedule, including the Poland trip, I am simply burned up. I'm going to take next week to spend some time at the range and catch up on a bunch of stuff.

Tough Night!

We finished up our "active shooter in a theater" scenario for THE BEST DEFENSE last night. Man, these "big box" scenarios terrify me...not to mention my Sweetie, who handles show logistics, and producer/director Matt Shults. There were lots of moving parts to this one, and it went off without a hitch. Thanks to our Pod People who came up to be in the "audience," as well as some of our cowboy friends, neighbors we drafted, Mike Janich's students and even the Drama Club at the local high school. Many of them died well...and repeatedly!

I did get about 30 minutes of "WHEW!"...followed immediately by the next crisis de jure! LOL!