Triangle Tactical

With the news that Michael Bloomberg is launching yet another gun control group, this time called “Every Town for Gun Safety”, I thought we should have a look at who is actually promoting gun safety:

Earlier this week I mentioned that I’ve been considering making an extended safety for my S&W Shield 9mm because the standard safety is miserable. The JB Weld that I used to add material to the extra safety lever has mostly cured (I didn’t have a lot of hardener, so it took a bit longer than I expected), and I had time to install it.

I attempted washing brass instead of tumbling it using a recipe I found on YouTube. It was a failed experiment, and I’ll be buying a tumbler now. What a mess…

(Link for Email/RSS readers)

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For some reason, in the last two stages of this seven stage match, I forgot how to stuff a fully-loaded magazine in to my 1911.

Stage 2, the classifier, was the worst of my match. Due to USPSA’s scoring system, a small hiccup on a short stage hurts a lot more than on a long one. So doubling my stage time from sixish seconds to twelvish by not seating the magazine on the reload really cost me in the match.

Half the problem was my half-hearted rack of the slide with the rear serrations. Everywhere else in the match, when I had to rack the slide, I had a good grip on it with the front serrations, but because I derped and used the rears this time, I had to press check the gun to make sure I’d actually racked something in. Fail.

I reshot this one for classification and sucked dramatically less, but for the match purposes, this score stood.

This last stage was one of the more complex ones of the match, requiring you to go down o

I was told a story recently about an incident that took place in the Triangle involving a concealed carry permit holder, some local police officers, and huge amounts of derp. I’m sharing the story with you because its humorous, and there’s a lesson. I was told the story 4th or 5th hand, so I can’t vouch for the complete accuracy of it, but here goes:

Police officers were called to respond to a home alarm going off due to a possible burglary. The officer (or officers?) arrived on the scene about the same time as the homeowner, who exited his vehicle with a handgun in his hand (1). The homeowner was informed by the officers to put the gun down, but before they could act the homeowner was charging toward the door of the home saying something to the effect of “I don’t have to! I’ve got a concealed carry permit!”(2).

The officers being somewhat perplexed be the situation, and probably not wanting to get shot by the seemingly trigger happy homeowner remained outside until they heard a single gunshot from inside the residence.

The officers then enter the home to find the homeowner all by himself, with a hole in his pants. Apparently after determining that his home was safe, he went to stick his pistol into his waistband, and when doing s

If you’ve been reading Triangle Tactical for any length of time, you’ll know that I’ve had a love/hate relationship with my S&W Shield 9mm for some time now. It’s a good pistol, but I absolutely hate the safety. If I had it my way, the pistol wouldn’t even have it, but since it has a safety, I feel the need to use it just in case it were to get bumped into the on position while holstered.

Some time back a reader who is a S&W armorer offered to get me a couple of safeties for the Shield so I could play around with making an extended safety. I’ve been sitting on the extra safety for a while now contemplating the best way to go about it. As you can see below, there really isn’t much to work with. I’ve really been hoping that someone with the manufacturing capability to make an entirely new extended safety for the Shield would do so before I took on this project, but unfortunately that hasn’t been the case.

Just a heads up: A couple days ago I was notified that there was a Google calendar that was the #1 search result in Google for “Triangle Tactical Calendar”. Apparently a lot of people were subscribed to that calendar, and unfortunately it was severely out of date (about 3 years).

I was under the impression that this calendar had been taken down years ago, but that was not the case. This has apparently been the subject of much confusion about matches not being listed on the calendar, among other things.

I’ve deleted the old Google calendar. If you were subscribed to it, I apologize, it is no more. Please bookmark the Triangle Tactical Calendar and use it going forward. It’s now mobile friendly, and I put in a lot of time keeping it up to date.

Sorry about any confusion!

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This time, the problems begin.

To start with, the first malfunction I’ve had in this gun in at least 2000 rounds. Last match season, this gun was incredibly finicky, but this year, it’s just kept running and so I kept “forgetting” to clean it. Eventually, I got bit in the ass, to the tune of adding 6 seconds to what should have been an 18 second stage.

This stage is a bit of a shit sandwich. The malfunction clearance after the first shot was caused by a case that failed to extract. Fearful of a double feed, I dropped the magazine before clearing it, but I would have been fine dumping the stuck casing and letting the slide rack forward. As it was, I had to grab my first reload and rack in a round before finishing the stage.

That was followed by a good reload, knocking down four poppers on the move, another good reload, and knocking down two more poppers coming in to position. But that’s pretty much where the goodne

In this episode we talk about several things that the BATFE has done to make news recently. There’s actually a lot more than we initially thought, and while we were putting together the show, we kept finding more. Specifically, we talk about the following:

• BATFE ruling that shooting a pistol with the Sig arm brace attached, even if using it as a shoulder stock, is legal and does not change the pistol into an unregistered SBR.
• Sig Sauer suing the BATFE over the muzzle brake on the Sig MPX carbine. BATFE is saying that it’s a suppressor part, but Sig is saying that because it doesn’t make the gun quieter, it’s not a suppressor. Does Sig intend to sell the parts to make it a suppressor? You betcha.
• Remember the ‘Plum Crazy’ polymer AR-15 lower receivers? Turns out they didn’t attach the serial number correctly to the lower, and the BATFE is saying th

I’m doing a little behind the scenes work on the website this morning, so if the site seems a little extra slow, or you find something isn’t working exactly right, don’t sweat it!

As you probably notice, I’ve changed the look and layout of the site. It’s much cleaner now, and I’m pretty happy with it. I’m still editing some code on the back end (I’m no coder) so for the next couple hours things may be up or down depending on how I do.

Let me know if you find anything completely borked in the comments below…

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Earlier in the week Andrew Branca was bestowed by a great honor for any gun rights advocate, and that was to get personally attacked by the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence on twitter.

In honor of this, Andrew is offering promo code “@CSGV” in his store for a discount on the book. If you were on the fence about buying it, I don’t think it’s going to get any cheaper than this!

Head over to his site and order the book. It was a good buy at $49, and now with the promo code it’s under $20 shipped. I don’t know how long it’s going to last, so get it now!

The post Law of Self Defense Book Promo appeared first on Triangle Tactical.

Karla from Team FNH just did a writeup on her blog about the Tarheel 3-Gun Challenge which took place just a few minutes drive from downtown Raleigh last week. I haven’t shot the Tarheel 3-Gun Challenge, but I have several friends who are TH3G regulars who have all given me great feedback about the match.

In a sport that’s increasingly morphing towards shorter-faster-burn-em-down stages, Tarheel stands out as a distinctly rifle match. Of the 8 stages, 5 had targets at least 200 yards away; most of those had targets nearly out to 300. There was off-hand rifle shooting at distances to 100 yards on 3 stages. And not to be forgotten, some stages did offer options to shoot rifle instead of pistol at close-range targets.

I haven’t shot 3-Gun in a while (mid 2012) but I think I need to get practiced up to shoot the 2015 Tarheel 3-Gun Challenge. It’s right in my backyard…

The post Guns and Barbells on the Tarheel 3-Gun Challenge appeared first on Triangle Tactical.

How many times have you heard someone say this? “I don’t carry at home, I live in a good neighborhood” or “I only carry when I’m going somewhere I might need it”

A Wake Forest, NC man was kidnapped from his home 5 days ago, and transported to Atlanta where he was being held in an apartment. This morning he was rescued by FBI agents, and it appears from the article that he’s okay.

This line from the WRAL article struck me:

WRAL News has learned that Janssen’s daughter is an assistant district attorney in Wake County who prosecutes gang and drug cases. It was unclear whether his daughter’s work has any connection to Janssen’s disappearance.

Who kidnapped Mr. Janssen? We don’t know yet.

The article mentions the neighborhood where Janssen lives, and I’m very familiar with that area. It’s a nice neighborhood (most of the homes for sale in the neighborhood are going between $400,000 and $500,000 currently) and generally a pretty safe area, but the facts remain that bad things happen in good areas all the time. My own neighborhood had a murder/suicide last year, just blocks from my home.

I’m glad

Sig Sauer is suing the BATFE over the BATFE’s classification of a muzzle brake that Sig manufacturers. The BATFE is claiming that the muzzle brake is a suppressor, where Sig claims that it doesn’t suppress sound at all.

The Seacoast Online article that broke this story doesn’t say which particular muzzle brake is being questioned, but I have to assume it’s the brake that was slated to be released with the civilian version of the Sig MPx.

This “muzzle brake” definitely has a resemblance of the internal parts of a suppressor, but it’s only a resemblance. It’s a funny looking brake, and that’s it. When the BATFE came out with the ruling last week that the Sig arm brace (that resembles a stock) isn’t a stock, even when used as a stock, I don’t see how they can get away with ruling that the muzzle brake is a suppressor when it doesn’t suppress sound, and merely looks like part of a suppressor.

Earlier today I attended Andrew Branca’s speech on the law of self defense at Campbell Law in downtown Raleigh. I’ve had a little interaction with Branca in the past in addition to reading his book “Law of Self Defense”, and he’s very read on self defense law, and how it relates to concealed carry.

Today Branca was speaking to a group of law students and professors, in addition to a handful of us regular folk. His talk centered around Stand Your Ground laws, and what they are, and what they aren’t.

I’ve had a couple of tweets and emails asking for a synopsis of the speech, so here we go. I’m keeping this pretty high level jsut to give you an idea of Branca’s stance on things. His book is most excellent, I highly recommend that you get a copy.

In order to argue a successful self defense defense, you have to prove the following:

Innocence:

Self defense is a defense that is only available

At this month’s match, I really tried to put in to practice the two main things I’d been practicing for the last few weeks: controlling recoil by really gripping the gun hard and moving with a sense of purpose and urgency. Both of these things manifested themselves in this first stage, which is one of the best I’ve ever shot.

A good run on a stage relies on two things: good stage planning and good execution. In this case, I think I ended up with a little of both, and shooting the whole middle section of the stage on the move saved me a ton of time that most shooters spent posting up in multiple locations. I flubbed my stage plan by reloading after the first target in the last port instead of as I was going in to the port, so by no means did this stage feel like a great victory. But when the scores and times came out, it went pretty well for me: second in Single Stack.

The next stage went well in terms of shooting while leaving positions and on the

I don’t generally post these kinds of articles here, but I wanted to share an interesting contrast with this particular case. A kid in NJ was suspended for pointing a pencil “like a gun”

Ethan Chaplin, a seventh-grader at Glen Meadow Middle School in Vernon, was sent home for two days after he allegedly pointed his pencil like a gun in math class, according to News 12 New Jersey.

When I was in 7th grade, we were doing a unit on medieval times and as a project we had to build something relating to the lesson. Most kids chose to build a small castle out of sugar cubes or something. A classmate and I had another idea: We each decided to build scale models of medieval crossbows. When it came time to present the project, we both brought our crossbows to school, presented about them (which included launching pencils across the classroom with enough force to have them shatter when they hit the wall) and then we took them home after school, and that was that.

We didn’t get in trouble, nobody even batted an eye. The fact is that these crossbows were weapons, and we didn’t get in trouble. Matter of fact, I think we both got A’s o

I’ve been interested in getting started in reloading for a while, but the up front investment was keeping me from jumping in. Ben would tell me how nice it was to learn on a turret press, and other people would tell me to dive in head first and buy a progressive. Don’t even get me started on the blue hoard who answer any question about reloading with “Buy a Dillon!” I’d like to, but it’s just not in the cards right now.

So, Saturday morning I made a cup of coffee, and sat down to browse the forums over at Carolina Shooters Club. Low and behold a Lee 4 Hole turret press had been listed for sale just a few minutes before for $50. I jumped on it.

Finally, after much adieu, I bought a reloading press this week. It’s a Lee Value Turret, and yes, I know it’s not a Dillon. It’ll get me started reloading, and the price was right. This week we decided to go through the steps of reloading, from picking up a piece of brass from the range, to loading it, and finally firing it.

You’ll roughly follow this process:

1. Clean the brass (Here’s the Amazon link to that Belkin timer that Ben mentioned in the episode.)
2. Size and de-cap
3. Flare and charge with powder
4. Seat the bullet to the right depth
5. Crimp the casing around the bullet
6. Choot it!

The News:

Otis McDonald of McDonald v. Chicago has passed. At the age of 76 he took on the City of Chicago’s handgun ban, and fought it all the way to the Supreme Court where he prevailed. As law abiding gun owners, we all owe him a debt of gratitude.