Gun Nuts

Editor’s note: today’s guest post is by Cecil Burch, renowned martial artist and self-defense instructor. You’ll see his posts appearing here on Gun Nuts from time to time.

I was busy on the range most of the weekend. Saturday evening after returning home after a long, sunburned day I find out that a free speech event had been attacked by two AK-wielding islamists intent on murdering everyone there. It was just a couple of weeks ago that I was in a class with Greg Ellifritz and William Aprill that covered the possibility of active shooters and suicide bombers…and some people invariably questioned the validity of covering that material in an open enrollment course. Is it possible to look at what happened in Texas…or Oklahoma, or Boston, or New York, or…and still believe that the course content has no application for the average Joe/Jane?

A ported Deagle brand Deagle? Yes please. Can you imagine how rad/stupid this would be with an Aimpoint H1 in a low mount clamped on to the forward rail? Plus, this one is a .357 Magnum, so you know with that weird brake/porting assembly up front it’s just going to shoot fire everywhere, be loud as f***, and completely retarded and totally awesome.

Ever since I made the Tanfoglio cool by shooting it at Bianchi Cup in 2012, the Stock/Elite line of guns has been taking off in USPSA Production division. But it hasn’t really been adopted by IDPA shooters, partly because it weighs approximately 1.8 million pounds and was hard to sneak under IDPA’s weight requirements.

Fear no more! The Tanfoolgiadkoiua Elite Limited Pro is here to save the day! And best of all, it’s available in my favorite pet cartridge, the .38 Super. Come on, you know you want to rock this at an IDPA match in SSP. “What’s that?” some Glock toting vest enthusiast will ask you. “Why, it’s a Tanfoglio Limited Pro…in .38 Super. It’s a little obscure, but it’s the Gun of Champions.”

Plus it’s a .38 Super! And those are just better.

If you’ve been paying attention to the news lately, you’ve doubtlessly seen images of carnage and destruction coming out of Baltimore. You may have even heard the mayor of Baltimore let this little gem fly:

Do you think they could survive getting shot with a .223 right along the spine?

We all have that moment – the sun is shining, birds are singing, your sights look good, the trigger feels just right, and you shoot better than you’ve ever shot anything before, or maybe ever again. I’ve seen guys at that moment, and I was fortunate to capture my personal experience with that moment on video.

To this day, that Tanfo Stock II in .38 Super is the best pure competition gun I’ve ever shot.

That beard though. And also the part where you can see bits of the battery and stuff fly out the back of the phone.

Tom Givens of Rangemaster fame recently sat down to do a podcast with Mike Seeklander. I suggest you listen to it as many times as you need to digest the wealth of practical information contained in it.

Back on April Fool’s Day I ran a joking “review” of the UMP45 where I pulled all the gun’s data from Battlefield: Hardline. I had fun writing it, but what I didn’t touch on is the fact that I’m utterly stupid for the UMP45 and would move heaven and earth to get one.

Among HK cognoscenti, what I’m about to say is blasphemy, but I prefer the UMP45 to the MP5. That’s not based on any practical, real world application mind you – I’ve never operated operationally with either gun, but I have shot both, and the UMP just kicks me right in the gigglebox. “THUMPTHUMPTHUMP” goes the .45, and that makes me happy. Maybe it’s a video game thing, maybe it’s a .45 thing, but I don’t know. When it comes to Kraut buzzguns, the UMP45 absolutely nails it for me.

I’ve spent a fair bit of time in this space discussing the disconnect between the way criminals approach the world and the way normal people (people like you) approach the world. Self defense is a matter of problem solving…but I don’t think there are a lot of resources that do a truly good job of explaining the problem that the law-abiding citizen is going to have to solve. The average Joe/Jane who carries a firearm does so to have an effective means of defending themselves from criminal assault…but very few have any understanding of how criminal predators actually function. Criminals, the vast majority of them anyway, are not random. They are not like a meteor falling out of the blue and hitting you on the head. As I tried to demonstrate with the series of previous articles, criminal attacks exhibit process, planning, training, deliberation, and application of past experiences to present circumstances.

Here’s something you can file into the “Good idea” category from Bushmaster. A simple, no-nonsense 16 inch carbine with a chrome lined barrel that comes from the factory with a red dot optic and streets for less than a grand.

I like things like this. I like it when companies do whatever they can to lower the bar of entry for people looking to get into shooting without having to shop around for a million different things. In the future, I envision a sales model where Aimpoint partners with Smith & Wesson to sell M&P15 MOE carbines with Micro H1s on risers direct from the company shipped straight your FFL of choice.

A boy can dream…

Let’s face it, revolver fans. We’ve all spent time on youtube looking for videos on how to install this part or that part in our gun, and a lot of time we end up settling for some dimly lit, out of focus garbage video with some dude’s gross toenails. Fret no more, because Jerry Miculek, the definitive expert on S&W revolvers has produced a simple, easy to follow video on doing exactly that. Without gross toes!

When handling firearms we layer safety procedures because doing so is the best way to prevent maiming or killing someone by accident when handling a lethal weapon. Unfortunately people do not often observe all of these rules carefully…especially when performing what we often refer to as “administrative handling” of a firearm. Administrative tasks like loading and unloading a firearm are, believe it or not, one of the chief vectors for accidents involving firearms. Often this is because of people doing foolish things like trying to manipulate the weapon with their finger on the trigger. Every now and then, though, your finger doesn’t need to be on the trigger:

I’d wager most readers of this site own a firearm at least in part for self defense. I’d also wager that most of you who own a firearm for self defense have sort of an idea in your head about what a self defense scenario looks like. I’ll venture further out on a limb and posit that the picture in most of your heads doesn’t look anything like this: