Gun Nuts

The NRA-ILA (Institute for Legislative Action) released an article today discussing the concept of being “Good Citizens” of the shooting community. The article addressed both topics of smart guns and the one on everyone’s mind, Texas Open Carry and the recent shenanigans by the OC group. Here is a link to the complete article. The discussion on Texas OC happens about halfway through the article. The one part that struck me as most relevant was this:

The Beretta Px4 Storm Inox finally experienced its first failure to complete an operation cycle at yesterday’s club level USPSA match. Prior to that it had been lubed once, and fired 1695 rounds of various ammo without encountering any issues. I’m on the fence as to whether or not I should chalk the failure up to the gun, user error, or ammo. I’ll break it down for you and let you decide.

I’ve been asked a few times to explain how I built my diy folding gun stand, so I thought I’d do that this morning. Its made from PVC pipe, some nuts and bolts and rubber spray paint. I’m a crafty, tinkerer type, so I didn’t use any directions or plans when making this stand. I hope that you will use this post as a general guide and then make the project your own! Do send pictures!!

This week, we’re going to take a look at the business side of the shooting sports for a while. In this we’ll look at membership trends, championship growth, media coverage, sponsorship dollars, the way each of the major sanctioning bodies are organized and operated, as well various other decisions and actions off the range that will affect shooters directly. We will cover the “practical” shooting sports only, focusing on IDPA, USPSA/IPSC/Steel Challenge, 3-Gun, and in a double feature on Friday NRA Action Pistol and ICORE. Today the series opens with a look at general trends in the shooting sports.

Are you ready? Do you want to learn the ultimate secret to pistol accuracy?

Pull the trigger to the rear as quickly as possible without disturbing your sight picture beyond what’s acceptable for the difficulty of the shot you’re taking.

If you do this one crazy trick every time you shoot, your accuracy will increase by 100,000,000,000%!

All in less than 2 minutes. I’ve been carrying the Nano on and off since I shot this review, and it’s really been growing on me. While I don’t think it will ever replace the Jetfire as my favorite “discreet Beretta” I’m definitely liking its performance so far.

You’ll see that repeated – “fiber optic sights aren’t appropriate for self-defense” for a number of reasons. Hilton at MSW writes about using FO rods in his guns, and how to protect them from breakage. My experience mirrors his – a properly installed and protected FO rod is going to be plenty durable for CCW use, and even probably for LE use.

We loved the original Sin City, which came out nearly a decade ago. The stunning visuals, the cool guns, everything about it was great. That’s why we’re excited for the second film, coming out in August. It has literally nothing to do with this movie poster featuring Eva Green and what appears to be some sort of j-frame. Nothing at all.

One of my favorite driving roads outside of Sioux Falls has an amazing corner on it. It’s like a wee-baby Corkscrew, almost, because you start going up a shallow hill, and then right after it crests there’s a shallow right hander followed by a banked left. It’s a great corner. When I’m driving with gusto, I know that the best way to take the corner is to keep my foot in right up until I hit the crest, the go hard on the brakes as late as possible. But that’s scary, because I’m essentially accelerating up a blind hill that I can’t see the road on the other side of.

Check out this screen cap from the latest Taurus TV/marketing spot. You can watch the whole commercial here, but be warned that it’s pretty terrible. When I first watched it, I got to the 50 second mark, saw what was going on, and had to rewind it to watch it again to make sure my eyes didn’t deceive me. But they didn’t, and in THEIR OFFICIAL COMMERCIAL they show a woman point her own “loaded” gun at her weak hand while simultaneous finger-banging her crappy nylon holster so that she can actually get the gun in there in the first place.

It’s like this one frozen frame of video perfectly encapsulates everything bad about CCW all by itself. Carry On, Taurus. Carry On.

Shelley Rae at the Bianchi Cup Celebrity Shoot-Off. One of the things I personally like about AAC is their merch – their shirts are comfortable and fit really well regardless of which one you order.

This past weekend I shot in my first pistol match. It was a no-frills USPSA club match in north Georgia. It was a last minute decision to accompany my friend, Janna Reeves at this match, when she promised me it would be a “no-pressure” environment. I signed up on Friday night and early Saturday morning I was rushing to the Riverbend Gun Club. As I left my house and got in the car, I was running behind, but even in my haste I grabbed the Zev Technologies Glock 34 that Janna loaned me. I was surprised, during the almost two hour long drive to the range, at my lack of nervousness. It could have been that I did not have enough time to develop butterflies, but I’m sure it wasn’t a feeling of being completely prepared, because I was acutely aware of how little I knew about USPSA matches. I parked my car, just as Janna pulled into the range’s parking lot, and that’s when it hit me; I had brought absolutely ZERO ammunition.

If you pay attention to gun stuff on the web, every now and then you’ll encounter a debate about “point” shooting. The exact definition of “point” shooting varies considerably depending on who is talking about it so discussing things can get sticky as people argue about completely different pictures of what’s happening in their heads. For our purposes I’ll define “point” shooting as any form of shooting that does not involve deliberate use of a weapon’s sights.

Hit the range yesterday for my first post-Bianchi Cup training session. I wanted to get into some of the issues I had at the cup with long range pistol accuracy and see if I could diagnose what caused me to drop such a large number of points on the Practical at this year’s match. To do this, I shot the entire COF twice, but removed the par times allowing for maximum accuracy. By removing the par, I can take all the time I need and focus on getting good clean hits on target.

I love that rifle.

We’ve been talking about Bianchi Cup a lot, and that’s because we love the match. If I could shoot one match a year, it would probably be Bianchi Cup.

It’s very interesting to watch how much the gun moves around under recoil. While shooting iron sights is still much more of a marksmanship challenge, actually watching what the gun does in recoil gives me a ton of respect for the open shooters.

For the second year in a row, the Women’s title at Bianchi Cup came down to a showdown on the Mover. Maggie Reese from Team Colt entered with a slim lead over Jessie Duff and Tiffany Piper, both sponsored by Leupold.

There was another mass killing this weekend. I found out about it on my way home from a pistol match, and as I thought about the events that transpired, I realized that we can’t just keep going on like this. Something has to be done, and we have to be willing to sacrifice some of our Constitutional rights to protect people. It’s time for a change. It’s time to accept responsibility. It’s time to put reasonable limits on the 1st Amendment and restrain the mass media that enables this killers to achieve the fame and notoriety they so desire.

I’m finally back from two weeks of living on the road shooting NRA Action Pistol, which means it’s time to take a hard look at my performance. We’ll start with the NRA World Action Pistol Championship, held May 16th and 17th in Rockcastle, KY. For a detailed look at the match itself, check out the match review. I didn’t have a lot of expectation going into the match, I hadn’t spent much time training for it, but I knew my holds and my gun was pretty well set up for it.