The family is headed out for a camping trip in the not so distant future up in the UP of Michigan. You know, where all the bears are. That always makes me a tiny bit nervous and the news about a bear attack in Yellowstone isn’t helping.
I know they’re not likely to interfere with humans. I get that. I really do.
But I’m still going to pattern some 1oz rifled slugs at 25 yards out of my coach gun this weekend.
Ed Friedman has some info on its development
For the record I’ll admit that I never thought the design would be approved by the ATF, not even after they initially approved it. Obviously I was wrong and I’ll own up to it. This thing really looks like it’s going to hit the market sometime soon and that makes me happy.
I hit Chick-Owa Sportsman’s Club tonight for another “action pistol” shoot. My recap on the last shoot can be found here.
This one was a single stage that we ran through a few times each. Two “good” hits required on 3 different cardboard silhouettes with a steel spinner obscured by a hostage at the end was the whole stage. Shoot well and it’s only 7 rounds.
I cleared my first run with 24 shots. Had a little trouble with that steel spinner at the end there. Total time: 73 seconds. My 3rd run was down to 19 seconds which was about par for the course. The winner came through in just over 11 seconds but he “cheated” a bit — no use of concealment, firing on the move the whole time. Nothing wrong with that though. Just a different way of solving the problem at hand.
On my 4th run I had a couple of malfunctions with my Glock 23C. Basically it’s due for a cleaning. I’ve been letting it slide on purpose, opting to carry my 1911 while I let the Glock get gunked up. I’m not sure if it was a premature slide lock or if the feed ramp is getting too dirty for those flat-nosed .40S&W rounds to glide up it. What made me happy there is I cleared the first malfunction with a mag change without thinking about it and the 2nd one, where I had no more mags and could see brass, did a quick tap-rack-bang without any thought. That was a bit comforting but I should have just done a tap-rack-bang on the first one. That was a mistake.
But, in the end after doing two of these shoots I’ve learned that I mostly need to work on:
Yeah, about the only thing I really feel up to snuff on is safe handling. And I’m OK with that, for now.
Oh, and I will admit that I was the only one to put any holes into a “no shoot” target. Shooting the course “as designed” had you putting holes into a bad guy about 15 yards away with a “no shoot” just to the right of that halfway down range. I pulled two shots to the right and winged the “no shoot” guy. My bad. I think he’d have lived though.
Some shotgun steel plate shoots are coming up in my area and I’m hoping to improve my performance at these compared to the one I attended last year.
In an attempt to do that I’ve gone and, possibly, upgraded my 870 Wingmaster a bit. I slapped a TacStar 6 shot side saddle onto it. Last year I was fishing shells out of the same pouch I use to hold shells for trap, skeet, and sporting clays. Not exactly high speed.
Installation was easy. Just drift out the two pins holding in the trigger guard and replace them with the screws and washers provided in the package:
The flip side:
Note: The slide is pulled completely to the rear here and I’ve got plenty of clearance. That was nice because heaven forbid I’d have to take some sandpaper to that pristine foregrip you see in the picture, eh?
Here’s how the whole thing looks:
The barrel you see on it is a Mossberg made clearance special that I found for about $90, 20 inches long, cylinder bore, with rifle sights. The rear leaf folds down and I just use the front post much like one would a bead, though it is a bit high. Works well enough for 15 yards and under.
Of course, it’s not the hardware that makes a good home defense shotgun. It’s the software. I’ve run thousands of shells through this gun in the old configuration. Now I’m going to have to start drilling reloads off the side saddle before it becomes of any practical use.
One of the things my wife decided on very early is that we’d go with Baby Led Weaning to get our daughter on solid foods.
And boy howdy is this fun!
Since we started this she’s had: tomato, pork ribs (I’m not kidding, that was like the 3rd thing she ever ‘ate’), watermelon, honey dew melon, nectarines (she loved those), a beef and spinach lasagna (mega love), cucumber, baked chicken marinated in teriyaki sauce (huge hit!), pineapple, broccoli, avocado, asparagus, yogurt, hummus on toast, and tonight a pickle.
I did the pickle as an experiment. While at work today a coworker told a story of his son grabbing for some very spicy food one night, taking a taste, and screaming in pain. Another guy piped up that he’d imagine a baby wouldn’t like a pickle either. So I tried it out.
She liked it! A lot!
This evening I did my first “action shoot” over at the Chick-Owa Sportsman’s Club in Zeeland. I was expecting an IDPA-lite match but that wasn’t what the organizer had in store for us.
We shot the Federal Air Marshal Qualification Course instead and it was pretty darned fun! And eye opening as far as just how damned slow I really am with a pistol.
Drawing from concealment (under a polo shirt) and getting a round on target was happening in 2.1-2.2 seconds for me. Not horrible but not good. Magazine changes were painfully slow. Part of that was taking a good 0.2 seconds to get the gun back into running order after slamming the fresh mag home but mostly it was because I was fishing the fresh mag out of my front jeans pocket.
Yep, I don’t own a single mag carrier. I think it’s time to change that. Not just for pistol games like this but for when I carry too.
And my accuracy sucks. The only event I was really happy with was the 6 shots in 3 seconds from low ready. I came in at 3.01 on that event and the group was the size of my hand. On nearly everything else I was concentrating too much on going fast to get good hits at my skill level.
But, it was fun, and I’m going to keep working on my pistol skills during the weekends. Next shoot is a month away and I hope to see some improvement.
I hit the range today for a quick workout with a pistol trying to get a better handle on my sight picture before an informal “action pistol” match this Wednesday. I’m really looking forward to it.
I started to pack up when another shooter came to the pistol range. I watched him fire a five shot string semi-one-handed. He was using a common hold, but one I’ve never seen taught anywhere, where you grip the pistol with the strong hand and hold the weak around your wrist. First shot is 3″ low and 3″ left of the target. The next shot is right near it. And the other three drifted further to the left and ever lower ending up about 6″ down and left.
Pretty much textbook poor trigger control with a case of the flinches. Been there, done that, and I’m sure I’ll do it again. But not with that goofy hold. Where does that come from!?
As I got into the car I observed him to be, at least from my vantage point, tinkering with the location of the rear sight on his pistol. I presume to drift it to the right. And that reminded me of Tam’s post on acquiring a pistol with a high rear sight that had been drifted all the way right. To quote her:
Looks like someone was seeking a hardware solution for a software problem.
And I’m pretty sure that’s what I saw today.
I try not to do too much geek blogging here, but it’s really what I am. So you’re going to get some of that in this post.
A buddy of mine checked out Split/Second the other weekend from the local library (yeah, you can do that!) and we gave it a spin. It’s fun. So I snagged a copy.
It’s an arcade racing game. So it’s not realistic at all. It’s a lot like the ATV racing game Pure in a lot of ways there which makes sense because it was done by the same studio.
The basic premise is you’re driving a car on a reality show and to make it entertaining for the folks at home there are explosions. Lots of explosions. You build up the ability to call up these explosions (“power plays”) by drafting behind other cars, drifting around corners, and getting your car airborne. But you can only call up explosions in some areas of the track (they’re usually no more than 10 seconds apart) and if you fire a “power play” on a car right in front of you, well, you’ve got to deal with it too. Some common power plays are helicopters that drop a depth charge looking thing, blowing up a semi-truck and sending the burning truck into the track, or collapsing a building onto the track. Once you’re up in 1st place all you can do is drive like mad and start dodging everything that the other players are tossing in your path.
It’s pretty simple to learn too. One trigger for gas, another for brake, steer with the analog stick, another button to call out a power play and one more to call out a “super” power play. That’s it — you don’t use half the buttons on a 360 controller. Once you go through the 5-10 minute tutorial at the very beginning you’ve got everything you need to know to start having fun.
The design is simple but lends itself to fun quite well. It’s a lot like the Mario Kart games in that if you can see the leader you’ve at least got a chance. Also, completely wrecking your car only puts you back 2-3 seconds in the race. So there’s no real reason to hold back and drive super cautious which keeps the action high.
One thing I don’t like are the shortcuts that you can activate using your power play points. The track will change temporarily (like a garage door opens or a bridge is lowered into place via a crane) and it goes away shortly after the person that ordered it up passes through. In multi-player this is going to heavily favor people that have played through the entire game a bunch of times. That’s not something I want in a dumbed-down arcade racer. I want it to be easily accessible by folks that don’t play often.
My other gripe is also related to multi-player. You’re pretty much going to have to play through all of the single player mode to have any regular fun with it because you need to do that to unlock all the cars. Pure is a lot the same way. Sure, you can jump online with the crappy default cars or ATVs in both games, but you’re not going to find many people in the same boat as you. So you either wait for ages finding players that are willing to play with crippled vehicles or jump into a game that you can’t possibly win. At least the single player mode is still fun, but you still have to put many hours into it and those hours aren’t always there for a guy that wants to just pop it in on Sunday evening to play online with his friends. Which is exactly what I bought the game for. I already know we’re going to have to restrict ourselves to the lowest level of vehicles when we play together because of that. Which is OK because it shouldn’t reduce the overall fun factor but it’s a bit annoying to pay for a game and have it not let you do everything possible in the multi-player world.
I was OK with that kind of thinking when I was like, 12, but gamers are getting older and the old tricks that used to work to keep us entertained and playing the game for hours on end are getting tired. Just put in a menu option to let us skip around the silly “locked” crap. All cars, every track, all race modes, all there right out of the box if we so choose.
But, that’s just me.
I set the DVR to record Top Shot on the History Channel tonight and picked it up after it aired.
So far I’m OK with it. It doesn’t appear to be as big on the drama factor like other reality shows are and they don’t spend any time dumbing down the gun stuff for non-gunnies. They just breeze on past it and if you get it you do, if you don’t you don’t. I like that.
The worst example of dumbing it down has to be R. Lee Ermey’s Lock and Load show. Holy Hell. They stop every 4 minutes for a stupid info-graphic that trots out for bits of info that takes 2 seconds to cover and they draw it out to 15 seconds with stupid graphics. And half the time the shit is wrong, or misleading, with regards to range. But I digress.
So, I like the format of the show. It balances nicely with my inner gun nut and it wasn’t intolerable for my wife even though I pointed out a couple of time that I kinda-sorta know that one guy on the show.
But, now, let’s talk about the actual show that aired tonight. If you haven’t watched it yet consider this my SPOILER ALERT.
I don’t know squat about the shooters, aside from Caleb, except for what they’re showing on the show. I’m only going off what I see on the screen, and I may write poorly of them based on that when it might not be justified. With that out of the way:
Nevermind. I’m scrubbing what I originally wrote. I still have no idea how the first man eliminated managed to miss what looked like an 8″ target at 100 yards after 30 shots, but given that he’s a known high-power shooter he obviously knows what he’s doing. Bad day? Bad rifle? Bad ammo? No idea.
Guy shot himself in the testicles while carrying at a Lowe’s.
I’d bet money that he was carrying a Glock in his waistband sans holster.
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