pdb

Please make this:

Chambered in this:

Using these magazines:

And I’ll be at my dealer with the money.

Kind regards,
pdb

This Christmas season, the stars and moon aligned and I did something I’ve done only four times in my life.

I bought a new release video game at full retail price.

Well, kinda. I did wait until it was $30 at Best Buy on Black Friday, but I would have happily paid $60 for it.

Me and first person shooters go a long way back, but I’ve been absent from about 2004 to now. I did play some Halo OSDT and Halo Reach, but they’re essentially unchanged in gameplay mechanics since Halo CE. So you can imagine my wonder when I discovered that the players and developers of shooter games have created something truly different and amazing.

I could really go into a tl;dr here about the evolution of FPSs, the new aim mechanics, avoiding the mechanic detour down “Press a button to take cover!” street, the level design philosophy, and how spectacular everything looks. But what really sold me on the game were two things in particular.

First, the balancing of the weapons and classes enables truly spontaneous, organic moments of cooperation between total strangers who’ve never communicated verbally. Yes, I play with a headset, but most people don’t, or are silent, yet the little moments of teamwork that add up to a winning match never get old. Dropping health or ammo, reviving teammates, spotting enemies, planting C4, claymores and other mines, and a zillion other things, all add up to a won match and a ton of points to you even if you suck at that basic game of shooting other players! This is particularly important for geezers like me who seem to have lost their Quake lobes sometime between “getting a real job” and “kids”.

Secondly is those zillion other things. At its multiplayer heart, Battlefield 3 is a tremendously open, spacious sandbox with a broad and deep playset of murder tools, and the goals themselves are fairly loosely defined and can be achieved in any way the player can think of. Instead of fighting against glitchy, predictably repetitive AI, your opponents are just as creative and devious and chaotic as you are. The result is an epically explody blizzard of bullets, rockets and vehicles that has me talking and thinking about the game when I’m not playing it. And that’s rare. The multiplayer experience is a perfect answer to the complaints of the horrid single player campaign, and I feel it is dishonest, lazy, cheap, and ultimately unfair of online critics to judge a game on the single player alone.

If you find yourself confronted with an enemy tank, you can fight it in a tank of your own, or with an RPG or SMAW or Javelin, mine its path, bomb it from an airplane, or shoot it with rockets from a helicopter.

Or, something else entirely, as someone you may know from the internet has demonstrated to awesome music:

I don’t know if the developers intended for players to stick C4 to jeeps and run them into enemy tanks (or into a building wall near the objective and blow myself a new entrance), but you can, and it’s awesome.

I’ve wasted a few minutes of my life delving into the Modern Warfare 3 vs Battlefield 3 fanboy argument, and it’s made my brain hurt. The most common pro BF3 argument I’ve read is that it’s “realistic”. This is a crock of shit, because any game where mortal wounds can be completely healed by taking a 30 second timeout behind a wall, any cause of death from bullets to explosions to tank crushing can be instantly reversed and the victim fully healed via a defibrillator, tanks, fighter jets and helicopters are doled out on a “first come, first served” basis to all soldiers, a soldier can sprint at full speed for miles while carrying: a carbine, 6 magazines, a pistol, 6 pistol magazines, a rocket launcher, 5 rockets, and a plasma torch, and where the M249 SAW never jams, cannot be called “realistic”. No, realism is not the goal. Fun is, and I find it tremendously more fun to be placed on a wide open, destructible, arena with a diverse array of tools and a loose set of goals than hemmed in to a tiny deathmatch map. I did that in 1996 and have no reason to go back.

It feels a little cheap to review something that’s already ancient in Internet terms, but on the other hand, what kind of review can you expect after only a day or two of play? If you haven’t picked up a copy yet, I encourage you to do so. I can unhesitatingly recommend it despite all of the problems with the single player, the irritating PC DRM and the amusing economic fallacy that accompanies every new console copy (a post on that later), and I think that’s saying a lot.

So earlier this week, the little bucolic burb of Candor, NC (pop. 800) went and had themselves an election of town commissioners. A quite routine exchanging of hats, a minor change in a minor town.

And the first thing the new commission did was to fire 80% of the Candor police department (pop 5):

MONTGOMERY COUNTY, N.C. (WGHP)— The Candor Police Department went from five officers to one after a town commissioner meeting Monday night.

The board voted 3-2 to fire four full-time officers in the Montgomery County town of roughly 800.

Officer Eddie Bagwell is the only member of the force left. The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office will help with law enforcement protection.

To which the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office said LOLWAT:

CANDOR, N.C. (WGHP)— Contradicting Candor officials’ statements made Tuesday, Montgomery County Sheriff Dempsey Owens said he never agreed to completely cover the town if most of the police force were fired.

Candor town commissioners voted Monday night to fire four of five full-time officers in the Montgomery town of about 800. No town official has yet to give a reason for the firings.

…

Attempts to speak with Holyfield at Candor Town Hall were unsuccessful Tuesday. The acting police chief said Holyfield slipped out the back door and had someone pick him up. [LOL! -ed]

Jumping back to the first article:

Pierce and the other fired officers alleged the firing is connected to a woman upset about getting a warning from former Officer Grantland Jackson during a 2009 traffic stop.

“She and her husband have managed to, with their money, elect a mayor and two town commissioners, and I think it’s fairly obvious to anyone in this town just exactly what went on last night,” Pierce said.

Pierce alleged Teresa Lamonds, who owns a business along with her husband, John, was not happy with the warning and confronted officers at the police department.

ORLY? Let’s hit the archives of the Montgomery Herald, shall we?

Verdicts vary on charges, Thursday, December 15, 2011

By Tammy Dunn

District court Judge Lee Gavin found Candor resident Teresa Lamonds guilty of two counts of communicating threats and resisting arrest but not guilty of assault on an officer last week. Lamonds had requested a trial rather than plead guilty to the charges or to a lesser charge. Lamonds plans on filing an appeal.

So if you’re somewhat rich and have an oversized feeling of entitlement in Montgomery County, you can ruin the lives of 4 public servants in order to have your petty revenge for the mere price of about ten grand in campaign contributions, your self respect, and making your little town the laughing stock of the state. What a bargain!

While this story is hilarious on a lot of levels, I’m not dismayed nor surprised about The Chicago Way coming down south. We’ve seen it’s disgusting corruption and waste before, and will again. Our politicians are evil, parasitic sociopaths just like all politicians everywhere. The difference is we had them more under control!

The atrocities of the Federal government get all the press, the fact is that your state and local government has much more influence over your daily life and because of the smaller voter pool, your participation delivers a much bigger bang for your buck, be it a vote or contribution or volunteer work. Pay attention, get involved, know their names. Give money to your local organizations! As the inevitable endgame of the Bismarckian welfare state approaches, your involvement in local politics will have a huge influence on what one out of fifty successors to the bankrupt Federal state will look like.

“The essential characteristic of Western civilization that distinguishes it from the arrested and petrified civilizations of the East was and is its concern for freedom from the state. The history of the West, from the age of the Greek polis down to the present-day resistance to socialism, is essentially the history of the fight for liberty against the encroachments of the officeholders.” — Ludwig von Mises

Back in my video game store owning days, I maintained a friendly working relationship with the man who owned the chain of stores in a neighboring town that I’d cut my management teeth on. Even though we were notationally competitors, we were in each others store every week swapping doubles of used games or buying supplies off of each other. One thing that started to irk me in this deal was that every time he set foot in my store, he’d find something to pick on.

“Your shelves look like shit!”
“Your back room is a mess!”
“What are all these games doing behind the counter?”
“Good God you’ve got a lot of PS2s waiting to be fixed!”

Exactly the same stuff he’d rag on me when I ran stores for him!

Well, we drifted apart for a while until about 2 years into my ownership experience when I decided to take a huge risk and move my store to a cheaper, larger location in a strip mall in a different part of town. I moved the store in the dead of night with hired help and we set up in a hurry. The new store was a little slapdash and I invited John out to have a look. He walked inside, took a look around and said the three most crushing words he’d ever said to me:

“Looks great, dude.”

My store was closed 6 months later.

Which brings me to Destinee. I’ve seen her videos get linked to on a few gun blogs, but never really watched. So today I sat through her review of the Beretta Nano and looked at a few others.

I couldn’t help thinking that she hasn’t accumulated the audience she has via her technical knowledge and shooting experience. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this, watching a shooter develop their skills over time can be both entertaining and instructive. But the only growth here is in her wardrobe, like a self dressing Barbie doll with good gun handling skills.

I also want to make clear that I’m not blaming her, but rather her fans. Like the attention mismatch that Tam noted a few days ago where a pretty blonde walking into a prop plane was more newsworthy than 50 some odd Afghans biting it in a car bomb, we can rail against the priorities of “the media”, but the media remains reflective of their customers. Male shooters, almost to a one, are so excited about a girl!!! wanting into our clubhouse that we’re willing to avoid constructive criticism in favor of empty head-patting. Ultimately this is both condescending and counter productive. Without negative feedback, there is no development and the implication is that ladies are both too emotionally fragile and lack the potential to develop as shooters.

How many times have you excused pizza pie sized groups, poor mechanics or safety lapses because the shooter was a girl? How much crap do you hold back that you wouldn’t think twice about slinging at a male shooting buddy?

This is also unfair to women who do know what they’re talking about and can shoot up a storm. How is it that listening to a champion shooter give tips on how to clean a stage gets a tenth of the hits of a scantily clad chick holding a gun and talking vapidly for a few minutes? Is it that they’re not showing enough skin, or are we threatened by competent women?

The wonderful thing about the shooting sports is that gender differences largely disappear when we’re staring over the sights. For the vast majority of shooting and firearm types, sheer physical strength will not make a big difference even with a magazine fed 12 gauge, as long as your technique is good.

I guess it’s one thing to believe in equality and another thing to live it. Withholding criticism because of the gender of the author is just as illegitimate as criticizing the author because of their gender. There’s a lot of space between being supportive and being a condescending snot, but if you’re ever in doubt, just ask yourself: “What would I say if this was a guy?”

TD’s been playing with his shotguns and has some cool posts up.

First, if you’re curious about sending your beat to hell 870 in to Wilson Combat for their Remington Steal overhaul package, you can see what the final results look like here.

And if you’re wondering about those $99 870 fixed full choke 870 barrels CDNN is closing out, here you go. Find the right load and they group like a sumbitch.

I recently ran across this short dissertation on mindset and OODA loops from a somewhat unusual source, and since you’re not reading anything here, I recommend you read it!

So from rural Virginia comes this sad tale:

Father accidentally kills himself in front of children at grocery store

SPOTSYLVANIA COUNTY, VA (WTVR) – A father accidentally shot and killed himself at the grocery store Sunday evening, according to the Spotsylvania County Sheriff’s Office.

The father, a 45-year-old Spotsylvania man, was in his minivan with his children waiting for his wife to return a DVD to the Redbox outside the Giant Food Store in Harrison Crossing when he was shot, said Captain Elizabeth Scott with the Spotsylvania County Sheriff’s Office.

The wife said she heard a pop and when she ran back to the minivan, her husband told her he thought he’d shot himself, said Capt. Scott.

…

She said the initial investigation indicated when the man tried to unbuckle his seat belt, he hit the trigger of his .40 caliber Glock and shot himself in the hip.

It is unclear whether the man carried his gun in a holster or his pocket. The family friend says it likely was loose in his pocket. It has also not been determined whether the man was a licensed gun owner, however his wife indicated to investigators she knew he carried a weapon with him from time to time, said Capt. Scott.

“If you’re going to carry a concealed weapon, put it in a reputable holster,” Capt. Scott said when asked about general gun safety tips.

My heart goes out to these young kids who will now face the rest of their lives without their father because of a preventable lapse in safety. It still isn’t clear if this fellow had his pistol in a holster or not, but either way, modern guns simply do not fire if pressure is not applied to the trigger. Manipulating the pistol, including holstering, press checking, loading, unloading, all increase the chances for an unintentional discharge. Not only should futzing with the gun be kept to a minimum, but your mind absolutely needs to be in the now when you are handling it. Being tired, distracted, or just plain not paying attention is a recipe for disaster.

Just as important is to carry your piece in a quality holster. Like I mentioned here, the two Great Musts in holster selection are that the holster must present the pistol in such a way that the shooter’s dominant hand can obtain a full firing grip without having to move the gun first, and the holster must protect the trigger and safeties from intrusion and unintentional activation. A properly designed holster will have stiff kydex or reinforced leather protecting the trigger and trigger guard. If you must carry leather, do not trust a holster with only a single layer of hide around the trigger.

Every time you put your gun on, take the time to inspect your holster for cracks, wear, floppiness or other damage and take it out of service if you have any doubts.

Gun safety isn’t just the four rules. It’s an approach to life that allows you to go about your business armed to the teeth yet threatening no one that doesn’t threaten you first. If you choose to carry your gun every day, and you should, then do not neglect your equipment or mindset, even in small matters, because when you’re dealing with tools loaded with small explosives that launch projectiles at several hundred miles an hour, there are no small matters.

Did y’all know that HR 822, the national concealed carry reciprocity act, could come up for a vote on Tuesday?

I’m not a lawyer, but this seems like a great bill to me. I was initially concerned about this being a Federal backdoor into dictating CCW requirements to the state, but that isn’t the case. We’ve been making excellent progress in the courts and the state legislatures recently (Hello Wisconsin!), but merely holding the line at the Federal level. We haven’t had a chance to go on the offensive in Congress in forever, and this bill has an excellent chance to pass both the House and Senate. Even if Obama vetoes it, it’s still highly useful for 2012 and future leverage to get a straight up “Are you with us or against us?” vote from our congressweasels. And who knows? If we’ve got a few D’s who need to pander to us in 2012…

So take 5 minutes out of your Monday, look up your Representative and give them a PHONE CALL. Emails go straight into the bit bucket, but they can’t ignore a switchboard full of constituents.

Get off the damn computer for 5 minutes and let’s get this thing passed!

Over the weekend, I enjoyed reading through the comments to this post and this Metafilter thread here. The question of the day was: “What do y’all find quirky about America?”

Having married outside our borders, I was familiar with a few complaints (poor quality of our chocolate), a few praises (meat available at every meal as a main course, not a side dish or flavoring), and a few WTFs (stores expect to leave stuff out overnight and nobody steals it?!), but many were new to me. Anyway, both threads were a lot of fun and well worth your time.

Of course, foreigners being foreigners, some took it as an opportunity to bash Americans, and the old trope of the passportless American speaking only one language and never traveling abroad was trotted out as evidence of our narrow, feeble minds. I think this is a crock of shit for a few reasons, and betrays a larger ignorance about the nature of these United States as well as the usual (by and large) European insecurity.

First, people not living here have very little comprehension about both the geographical magnitude and cultural diversity of the continental USA. Our borders encompass everything from dense urban cities to swamps to pastoral farmland to mountains rivaling the Alps to deserts to tropical paradises and a goddamned rainforest. A family living in Cornhole Iowa can vacation in Miami, Boston, California, Montana or Texas, all by just hopping in their car and going, without showing anybody a slip of paper. All of these destinations are as different from each other as all the usual European tourist traps with the added benefit of no passport required and everybody speaking more or less the same language.

For an American, to travel anywhere that a passport and language skills are required would take an overseas plane flight, and all the expense and hassle implied. So the costs are fairly steep and benefits fairly low.

When it comes to language, outsiders need to consider that an American can travel from the north pole to the south pole and have a reasonable expectation of being able to speak English all the way. If we want to have to speak a different language, we have to go to Montreal or Salinas.

Second, people forget that everybody who lives here is a fairly recent immigrant. Talk to an American for a few minutes and eventually you’ll learn the family’s arrival story, even if it’s to brag about a family tree branch arriving on the Mayflower. This is relevant: nobody came to America because it was working out for them at home. Buried in that story is the reason why we all left, and have little interest in returning.

Implicit in all of this is the plaintive whine of the snooty (usually) Europeans when they complain about Americans: “Why don’t you people care about us? Pay attention to us!”

The bottom line is, the average American can happily go from cradle to grave without any understanding of Europe at all beyond knowing that’s where overpriced and unreliable cars come from, and that’s where most of our military budget went for about 50 years. When Europe does intrude on the lives of Americans, it’s invariably because they need to have their useless asses bailed out yet again.

The average European, on the other hand, is on a daily basis confronted with the cultural and military weight of the United States, and of course resents it. Consider how often you hear foreigners complaining about Americans, yet the only time Americans complain about foreigners is when they cost us lives or money, or they sneak into our country.

So IDPA decided to get all web.2.0 and hit the social media nonsense in a big way, and they picked my friend Caleb to do it.

I can’t think of a better person to front for Berryville. Caleb’s infectious enthusiasm for the sport, ridiculous energy level and relentless work for the 2nd Amendment makes him a natural for the gig. He isn’t a blogger that shoots every now and then, he is an honest to God Shooter who occasionally takes time out to blog something. He’s given more than a few opportunities to me, and asked nothing in return.

IDPA is some of the most fun you can have with a pistol, and I would love to see its membership and popularity grow. The only way IDPA.tv could be better is if he had a hot redheaded shooter chick as a sidekick. Oh, wait!

[FTC: I was paid nothing for this public kissassery, except Caleb did threaten to put me on the show if I didn't. Hopefully this will keep my slow, stumbling ass off the TV.]

If you’re still without a military pattern semi-automatic carbine, you may want to consider this offering from Palmetto State Armory. PSA is one of the new wave of AR clone parts houses and has a short but decent reputation for good parts, reasonable pricing and responsive customer service. I have no personal experience using their parts apart from examining a receiver set and a bolt carrier group in a shop. I am unqualified to judge them on dimensional accuracy, but the fit and finish were even and excellent, and the gas key screws on the carrier were correctly staked.

Anyway, if you’re willing to take the leap, PSA is offering a good to go 16″ flat top AR with a chrome lined, hammer forged barrel, 5.56 chamber, a Magpul rear backup sight, and an honest to Jebus Aimpoint Patrol Rifle red dot on a QRP2 mount and one 30 round GI magazine for $999.99, plus $15 shipping. Check it out.

I can’t honestly fully recommend it without seeing it in person, but you could do a lot worse for more money. I can, however, encourage you to buy one and wring it out and get back to me!

Then please watch this. You’ll thank me later.

Watch Does U.S. Economic Inequality Have a Good Side? on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

I am just as staggered that this interview originated on PBS, as I am amused at the interviewer’s stuttering rage and frustration as this guy relentlessly gores every single last sacred liberal ox. It truly is a thing of beauty.

[h/t: the disgustingly talented yet inexplicably blogless xman]

So TD finally bugged me for a picture of something that wasn’t The Mrs’ rack, and wanted to see my parts bin mixmaster AR-15 after I installed a set of used M16A1 furniture on it:

Before:

After:

Sharp eyed aficionados will notice that my “M16A1″ is wearing not only an A2 flash hider, but an A2 grip. This is half due to laziness, but my hands are just too damn big for the A1 grip to be comfortable. I also ditched the A1 sight aperture and installed an A2 with the ghost ring and 300 yard pinhole. The cotton GI sling is pretty much only useful as a carry strap. The 20 round magazine is a genuine metal follower Colt that I traded a PMAG for from this sucker. I generally use 30 round aluminum USGI or PMAGs, but a straight 20 is very handy for shooting off the bench or prone. If you can’t locate old Colts, I’m happy to report that you can get quality new NHMTG 20s from these guys for $13 a pop!

I’ve shot a few matches with the MuttAR wearing this getup, and I believe I’m going to not change a thing. It’s a light, handy rifle that delivers full 20″ ballistics while looking cool as hell. Every single match I’ve been to with this thing, I get pulled aside by at least one vet who asks me to have a look at it. I’ve never really fully grokked the attraction to the “and everybody at the range was looking at me!” quality of some guns, but I get this. The gun is a genuine pleasure to shoot.

The biggest drawbacks to this configuration are the poor choices for mounting optics on fixed carry handles (but I unreasonably want one of these), and the inability to mount a light or quick-adjusting 2 point sling. Considering this rifle’s shoddy genetics, it will shortly be sidelined as a cool range toy in favor of a 16″ flat top, but that’s a post for another day.

I think building a retro AR of your own would be a rewarding project, but I do not recommend doing what I did! I bought used and low dollar parts off of AR15.com and gunbroker and somehow ended up with a rifle that’s worked reliably without failures over the years, including an 1100 round weekend class shot with steel cased ammo, but it took me along time, lots of aggravation and I probably spent more money than I needed to. The one thing I did right was to source a high quality barrel. I bought a complete big-hole Colt SP-1 receiver and chucked the stupid big-hole receiver as soon as I could, but kept the Colt barrel. It’s good for 2-3″ groups at 100 yards off the bench with good ammo, and that’s more than reasonable. I’m not sure where to get a 20″ light profile chrome lined barrel these days, but I think BCM would be a good place to start.

For information and parts guides, definitely hang out at the Retro AR forum at m4carbine.net, and check out Retro Black Rifle (when it’s up).

If I was building this rifle from scratch today, I’d get my A1 upper and retro styled semi lower from NoDakSpud. Their products are highly regarded and have every variation you could possibly want. No matter what, avoid big-hole Colt uppers like the plague. Sell them to dumb Cult obsessed collectors and stick to standard pin hole sizes!

I bought my A1 stock set from Sherluk in Ohio, but I don’t see that stuff in stock now. A1 furniture is available if you shop around.

The wonderful thing about the AR platform is the infinite variations on configuration that are available. The terrible thing about the AR platform is the infinite variations on configuration that are available, that can keep the first time buyer chasing his tail and wasting money on looks-cool parts without a good idea of what would work best for them. A great way to avoid this issue is to faithfully build a retro AR (or get a plain M4 off the shelf!) and shoot the crap out of it (take a class!) to get a better idea of what features would suit your requirements. That is a strategy I can enthusiastically recommend!

So since everyone else is doing it, (including another member of the clean your damn keyboard club) here’s what manner of knife rides in my pants these days:

It’s a Kershaw Blur tanto factory second that I picked up off a very large auction site about a year ago. I’m really digging the assisted opening even if the liner lock isn’t my first choice. It’s also sharp enough to shave with, and despite me being an all-thumbs retard, I have not yet managed to cut myself with it!

10 years have passed, several thousand servicemen have died, an order of magnitude more Enemy have been killed, including multiple leaders and dictators, two Enemy governments have been toppled, so why does it seem like we haven’t even started fighting yet? Is our lack of progress due to an intractable Enemy or have we hamstrung ourselves by worshiping Politically Correct pieties?

We cannot fly between our cities without being alternately X-rayed and groped, so why does it feel like we’re still as vulnerable as before?

We have voted into power a new and unaccountable surveillance organization, so why is it concentrating more on us and not our enemies?

We have faced larger and more dangerous enemies in the past who have the capacity for taking and holding territory and projecting power, and emerged victorious. Our forces have never been more effective, experienced and professional. Why can we not pacify a culture of rock throwing goat herders?

The problem with appointing a representative government to defend the institutions of a free market society appears to be that government is involved. Can we figure out a better way to keep it under control, or should we strike out for anarchtopia?

I don’t know, I’m not smart enough to know, I wish someone could tell me.

Remember that pistol class review I promised? You can read it at Gunup.com.

My childhood was practically narrated by The Muppet Show, Bill Cosby comedy tapes, and WRKP in Cincinnati. One of my favorite bits, and one my dad repeatedly pointed out to me, was this short scene where Venus Flytrap gives a young ne’er do well a lesson in physics:

But the important part of the lesson isn’t the actual knowledge of basic atomic structure. The real lesson here is that professional teachers and instructors are being paid to impart their knowledge to you. If you’re not getting it, it’s their job to make sure you get it. If you put down your money for firearms instruction and find yourself falling behind or not grokking something, it is your right and responsibility to ask the instructor for help, because that’s his job! If you aren’t keeping up, you’re not going to magically pick it up later by osmosis, the longer you go without asking for help, the further you’re going to fall behind.

Don’t be worried about holding the class up. A competent instructor should be able to cope with a request and keep the class moving at the same time. A very good instructor will be able to not only help you out, but make it a teachable moment for the rest of the class. Also consider that odds are, you’re not the only one with that problem, and even more probably, aren’t the only one who could benefit from another take on that material. And if the instructors just aren’t doing a good job of presenting that material, or if another approach would work better, they need to know!

This isn’t an invitation to get comfy on the short bus. Weekend firearms classes are typically fast paced and people tend to learn better when pushed past their comfort zone into the fail. But if you’re not absorbing the material, you’re probably not the only one, and you’re definitely not doing anybody any favors by fumbling along in silence.

I’ll have a more detailed review up later, but this past Friday I attended a Vickers Shooting Method class down in Salisbury with Defensive Concepts North Carolina. It was a tightly scheduled 8.5 hours that compared to an earlier class I attended, focused on fundamentals while glossing over some of the more add-on tactics. I felt this was an excellent tradeoff and I left with a clearer picture of what I need to work on. The class ran $175 including a $25 range fee, and we shot about 350 rounds each.

Pistols represented included the usual assortment of Glocks, including a fairly customized G34, some S&W M&Ps, a pair of Springfield XDs, and an H&K USP-45F with the LEM trigger. All ran well that I could see. All students carried their guns in some kind of Kydex holster with a couple of law enforcement students using their duty gear. It was strange to be in a shooting class without any 1911s or leather!

Students attending ran the gamut from n00b pistol owners to professional shooters with multiple classes under their belts. One older gentleman showed up unable to keep all his shots on paper at bad breath distance, but was monotonously making headshots a few hours later. A youngster with his XDm just couldn’t keep his support hand finger off his squared and stippled trigger guard, but some friendly ribbing from the instructors fixed his malfunction.

So who was That Guy? Well, if you can’t spot him…

Yeah, I’ve got work to do.

Okay, one thing I’ve seen in a few places, and I’m not naming any names, but it’s really been bugging the crap out of me.

So you’ve got a bag full of useful stuff in case of emergencies. Loss of civil authority due to riots, natural disasters, zombies, what have you. Cool. So if you’re a gun person, and if you’re reading this I presume you are, and if you’ve got a gun on you, and you damn well should, you might want to carry some spare ammo in your bag.

But for the love of Crom, please put that ammo in magazines! What in the heck good is 100 rounds of 9mm going to do you when it’s in BOXES?! I don’t object to carrying a box for topping up magazines, but why aren’t the majority of your rounds in magazines ready to go? Mags aren’t expensive if you shop around and buy in quantity.

Exceptions: ammo carried for guns that are traditionally loaded one at a time such as revolvers, shotguns, and lever guns. For revolvers, a cheap Desert Eagle magazine in .357 or .44 as appropriate makes a great stripper clip. A heavy ziploc of rifle ammo with the air pressed out will generally be quieter, more waterproof and take up less space than a retail box of ammo. For shotguns, a card with elastic loops keeps ammo correctly oriented and drops easily into pockets sized for AR magazines.

Remember, fellow paranoid armed citizens: willingness is a state of mind, but preparedness is a statement of fact!

I think this is the dumbest crock of shit I’ve read on the internet this week. To sum up, the proprietor of a commercial gun blog that is largely boring and unoriginal and generates traffic by copying other people’s original posts, is whining that nobody links to him other than Glenn Reynolds, and therefore he’s the target of an organized but silent boycott.

Taking the points in reverse order, 1) LOL. Have you looked around the gunblogosphere recently? You seriously think we’re organized enough to unanimously join in on and maintain a boycott and keep it secret? I reiterate, LOL.

Secondly, you get linked by Instapundit. One instalink is worth a dozen little links from us nobodies. But on the other hand, if you post about mall ninjas, you get a serious spike.

Like Alan mentioned already, maybe it’s because you suck. I’ve flipped through TTAG a few times and not liked it enough to return. Sayuncle, Everyday, No Days Off, and The Firearm Blog do a better job of the daily link roundup thing, and aren’t cluttered up with SEO nonsense or that whole plagiarism thingey.

Anyway, Robert, please publish evidence of this blacklist, or retract the claim. The accusation that there’s some secret gunblogger cabal preventing people from speaking their minds is insulting as hell.

So, there’s your link. Enjoy!

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So this weekend, Tam was kind enough to point us to a yootoob showing off the stunning martial feats of a bunch of disorganized clownshoes calling themselves American Defense Enterprises. The amount of fail and buffoonery in this single video could be blogfodder for weeks, but I’ll try and keep it short. Hopefully this will help y’all avoid dangerous shooting schools in the future.

This video is in a 3 minute nutshell, every caveat and buyer beware you could want to avoid when shopping for professional firearms instruction. ADE aces my trainer bullshit detection checklist:

- Ratings and comments disabled on YouTube videos, no public forum, or dissenting opinions rapidly squashed on a forum by a gang of uncritical nuthuggers.
- Emphasis on who they have supposedly trained, not whom they have trained under. Legitimate trainers are all constantly learning from each other, as our art is an open, collaborative process, not a secret handed down from the mountain by a guru.
- Excessive guru worship, not invented here syndrome.
- Emphasis on guru qualifications, but handwaving the details. So Bill Beasley was supposedly in the special forces in some manner. When? Where? Who served with him? You won’t find out from ADE!
- Poor or nonexistent range safety.
- Non sequitors or ad hominiems defending poor or nonexistent range safety
- Students running team drills with people they have never met before.
- Emphasis on flashy drills and tactics while disregarding the fundamentals of shooting.

But let’s get to that video, shall we?

[Important update! While the original has disappeared down the memory hole, the internets is forever and a new and improved version lives on here!]

1. Drills Are Not Scenarios, And Scenarios Are Not Drills

The first thing that really puzzled the crap out of me (apart from the 30 year old doctrinal stances, more sweeping than a curling match and many other safety violations) was this curious exercise at 1:05.

As you can see, two shooters are standing facing the target, then all at once, the front shooter drops to the ground, both shooters draw their pistols, and they both shoot the target. Disregarding the obvious safety rule fails here (but I’ll come back to it later), I cannot for the life of me figure out what this drill is supposed to teach. If it’s designed to hone a particular skillset, say, shooting a target after getting knocked to the ground, why is the rear shooter there endangering the life of the forward shooter? If it’s to rehearse a tactic, under what conditions would it be a good idea to drop to the deck in front of a close threat?

This kind of doctrinal sloppiness shows up in poorly run schools with insufficiently thought out curriculum, or cribbed from better schools without a fundamental understanding of the material. There is a big difference between shooting drills and shooting a scenario. We repeatedly shoot drills (which are by nature usually unrealistic in context) in order to develop shooting skills. We don’t expect to have to transition to our sidearm 30 times in a row, but the Meltdown drill is still extremely useful for hammering the rifle to pistol transition into shape.

We then put our thinking skills to the test in a scenario, where we attempt to solve a problem with the shooting skills we’ve learned. Scenarios are sometimes roleplayed by other instructors, or have some element of theater to them. We might also rehearse a common tactic that we expect to use in the future. But the point to a scenario is not to repeatedly run through the test until we get it right, but to run through a test to get it wrong, to harshly show what we need to work on.

Approaching firearms training like a grocery list (“Okay, we’ve done page 1, get ready for the falling buddy drill!”) diminishes the utility of both drills and scenarios by reducing them into rote checklisting. When confronted by a lethal threat, you shouldn’t be running through a menu of options that may apply to the situation but reacting to the unfolding, dynamic situation by applying your learned skills. There are no cookie cutter fights, and “training” like you can pigeonhole your opponents and their actions is setting yourself up for failure.

It’s fun to ace a test. However, we don’t go to school to have fun, but rather to learn something. And we learn more by failing than by getting an attaboy and a cool martial arts title.

2. Safety Is Always, Always, Always Important.

The first redoubt bottom feeding “training” outfits retreat to when confronted with their dangerous range practices is to belittle safe shooting rules as being unrealistic “square range” silliness or to mock the critic as cowardly and paranoid. “There aren’t any range rules on the street, kid!” “We run big boys rules here!”

This is a crock of shit, and I will show you why.

Here we have an event from a few years ago. For reasons of either poor training or inadequate attention to detail, a police officer disregards Rule 3 and negligently cranks off a round into the street right in front of a proned out suspect.

This is of course an inexcusable violation of the rules, and I’m glad that everyone walked away. But what’s interesting to me is that for a few seconds the officer is completely and utterly bewildered and has no earthly idea what just happened. She finally recovers and holsters her pistol, but for a few heartbeats, she might as well have been tasered or flashbanged. If the suspect had not been equally surprised, he had plenty of time to jump up and disarm her. That single moment of carelessness nearly turned a routine arrest into a tragedy, and not directly because of the bullet she unexpectedly launched, but due to her reaction to it..

If you’re in a hostile confrontation and unintentionally fire a round, or even worse, fire a round while disregarding your muzzle direction and drill a family member, friend, or uninvolved innocent, do you think you’ll be able to recover from the shock and confusion before your opponents act on your hesitation?

The Four Rules aren’t just for practice or the range. They’re even more important in a self defense situation because the stakes are so much higher. Your safe gun handling means the difference between life and death, not just for the people downrange of you, but for yourself as well. Legitimate trainers understand this and will begin instruction by emphasizing safety and enforce safe habits throughout the class. Frauds won’t let a little matter like range safety get in the way of puffing up into Billy Badass.

3. Quadruple Decker Stack of Failburger.

Receiving instruction in superficially cool but ultimately irrelevant skill sets is one of the biggest clues that you’ve crossed the border into mall ninja territory from the land of sensible. There are many reasons for instructors to run their students through drills such as stack and entry, Australian peels, bounding and other fancy team drills, none of them good. Some schools, insecure in the quality of their instruction, ratchet up the coolness arms race in search of prominence. Or the forbidden fruit turns into irresistible marketing (“We teach you the ninja skills others won’t!”).

Now, I’m not going to blanket condemn the teaching of civilians whatever skills they want. A person may reasonably expect to fight in a building, and the techniques of pie slicing, and light and space management used in house clearing might come in handy. Why shouldn’t someone want to engage in training with friends or family he expects to be around a lot? But these are specialized concerns and when you find yourself being pitched these goods in the marketing for a fundamental level shooting class, alarm bells should go off.

When instructors use team tactics to increase the cool level of a class, you can be quite sure that you will be instructed wrong and probably dangerously, because the point of the exercise for the instructors is the cool, not the team tactics. You’re being sold the sizzle when you’re seeking the steak. Ask yourself, self, why am I rehearsing this with people I’ve never seen before and will likely never see again?

Postlude: The Big Problem.

I believe my readership is more firearms savvy than the average dude who ends up filling out a 4473. I say this not to brag, but to point out that while you and I and pretty much everyone who’s commented at Tam’s aren’t likely to be fooled by ADE’s antics, the videos are slickly produced and look cool to the uninitiated and clearly have entrapped more than a few suckers.

The firearms instruction business has gone from one school in the Arizona desert to hundreds of independent instructors all over the country. This is both wonderful and terrible, since while you no longer have to travel across the country to seek training, you now risk choosing the wrong school and not only learning the wrong things in the wrong way, but potentially putting your life in danger!

So how are we to separate the legitimate teachers from the hucksters? And more importantly, how is the newbie supposed to even know that he has to beware of fraud? While you and I can immediately recognize ADE as being dangerous incompetents, to someone new to the whole gun thing, ADE and Gabe Suarez and Front Sight look pretty much the same as legitimate schools.

An industry certification process would probably help, but I think that like every other consumer good or service, ultimately those who know have to speak loud and long and spread the word about what is good and what is bad. As we see dangerous, fraudulent, stupid asshats like ADE and others pop up, we need to call them out on it. The fight against idiocy is one of constant vigilance, not a single decisive battle.

Bonus! General WTFery:

Mmmm yeah, honey, work that business. Come to pdb. I’ll clear your malfunction.

BLUE STEEL!

Put that thing away. I said PUT THAT THING AWAY. Why are you holding it there? PUT IT AWAY. (He didn’t put it away).

Fix your grip. I said FIX YOUR GRIP. FIX YOUR GRIP GODDAMNIT. (She didn’t fix her grip).

Yes, everybody is shooting here. I mean, at this point, why not?

What, are those ninja knives? Are you kidding me? Weren’t you just holding a gun? Wait, but… Jesus, forget it, just fuck off.

So now it’s my friend Caleb’s turn to point out obnoxious point-shooting fail. I know I keep telling you people to pony up for some pistol training if you carry regularly, but not all schools are created equal. Picking the wrong school can be even worse than getting no instruction at all.

Let’s have a look at that video, shall we?

First, notice the lack of trigger finger discipline by the student. This is just plain unacceptable and should be taken care of before the student handles live rounds on the line. Also, they have the student shooting into the gravel at five feet with NO EYE PROTECTION. If you see something like this go down at your class, this is where you ask for a refund and leave quickly.

That’s just the safety problems. Note that the student’s grip, arm position and footing are limp and highly variable as she shoots. You can’t count on having the time to assume a ideal stance and grip in a confrontation, but it’s foolish to practice as if you can’t.

This is the biggest problem with training to shoot unsighted fire only. The traditional, industry standard method of focusing on the fundamentals of maintaining a correct sight picture via a strong consistent grip, rigid arm position and rehearsed footwork is a far better platform to build on than point shooting because a mastery of these fundamentals gives you all the tools you need to shoot without sights. If you are a fast and accurate shot with your sights, you can do coarse yet fast shooting without your sights by using the body index and grip that you’ve learned.

The body points, the eye verifies.

Point shooting, on the other hand, does not lend itself to a later concentration on accuracy. You literally can’t get there from here. It is a developmental dead end. (Note the video never shows us her paper groups).

Like I said before, there are no shortcuts in learning how to shoot. It’s not even that big an investment! A total n00b can get a thorough grounding in the fundamentals in a single weekend of competent instruction. Hone that with a couple evenings a week of holster presentations and dry fire, and a few boxes of ammo a month, and you’ll be ahead of the game.

Shortly after posting my review of carrying a G19 with a Streamlight TLR-1 flashlight concealed, Iain Harrison of Crimson Trace emailed me and asked if I wanted to have a look at a new pistol light they were developing. After he promised not to lick my head, I agreed, and my copy arrived a couple weeks ago. I’ve been messing with it since, and here are my initial impressions. Part 2 will be the shooting review, then Part 3 will be after I have a holster built for the G19 wearing the light and have carried it for a bit.

Anyway, the Light Guard is a super slim pistol light that assembles around the trigger guard and is activated with a momentary contact pressure switch that sits under your middle finger when you grip the pistol. It’s made out of a durable plastic and assembles onto the gun with a couple of super tiny screws that thread into steel inserts that are molded into the plastic. There’s also a master on/off slide switch at the front of the light so you can store it without the light getting inadvertently activated.

The light itself is a LED that’s powered by a CR2 lithium cell. It’s impressively bright, and casts more of a wide angle flood than the focused beam of the TLR-1:

The light took some fiddling to get onto the gun, but once on it is pretty secure. It should really be thought of as a semi-permanent addition to the gun, not an accessory that you’re going to be putting on and taking off a lot. I’m still skeptical about the durability of the tiny screws, because you’ll want to take the light off to replace the battery once a year at least. But I was unable to make the light budge on the gun either by grabbing it and twisting. I also banged the light on the kitchen counter hard enough to leave marks on the plastic, and it was still functional and securely mounted.

As you can see, the light is very narrow, even more narrow than the Glock’s slide. It is a LOT smaller than the TLR-1 and should be much easier to carry.

The Light Guard should MSRP at $149 when it becomes available.

So far, my only misgivings are the mounting screws and the light activation. Since the light is turned on every time you grip the gun properly, you either have to become accustomed to the light being on every time you draw, or get good at using your middle finger to control the light. This seems possible after dry firing at home, but I’ll know more after a long range session with it.

Which should be shortly! Stay tuned.