I Am Shill of Blackhawk. You Will Be Assimilated.

I just ordered a SERPA holster for my P220. That might sound a little . . . whorish, but I'm buying mine through www.tactical.com with my own money.

Why? Well, several reasons. I'm buying from Tactical.com because I assume the name alone gives me added tacticality points. Also, they're based out of St. Louis, so I'm hoping I can have my holster by Thursday so I can use it in my next IPSC match.
I'm buying the SERPA because I used my old FOBUS last week and it's just not cutting it anymore. The SERPA version makes reholstering far too easy and positive to go back.

Once the Gun Blog .45 arrives, I'll probably start using it more--but that will be awhile. I don't know when they'll ship the things, but even when they do, I still have to serve a three-day waiting period from the time I pay my FFL--and nowadays, it's apparently three business days. So for the next couple of weeks I'll be using the SIG, and even when the GB.45 arrives, I don't foresee that the SIG will never see use. The P220 has gotten me through the tough times. It's been there for me when I needed an accurate, reliable friend. It deserves a good holster.

Gustav Is Going . . . . Well?

It's hard to say this about a hurricane, but from what I can see on my teevee news, it looks like Gustav is not as bad as we feared. There's a lot more to come, but a few minutes ago it was reported that all the pump stations are up and running, and damage didn't look too bad so far. It seems that Gustav actually weakened before it hit, where a lot of people were afraid it would strengthen, so that it hit land as a Category 3. It had been a Cat4 and I'd heard predictions that it could reach Cat5 before landfall.

We still have to see how long it's going to go on, and the storm surge is predicted to be 10-14 feet, but it doesn't look to me (from afar and with no expertise) as if we're looking at the destruction of New Orleans this time.

Which is all well and good, but then we come to the case of BayouRenaissanceMan. I don't know what's happening where he is, and he worries me. He doesn't get around as well as he used to, and he was unable to cover his windows. I hope he's staying safe! He's keeping up a pretty good running commentary, actually.

Search Term Safari

Shamelessly stolen from Marko:

"I'm 27, I'm single, I'm a schoolteacher, and that's the pits"

Sadly, Google returned no results for the phrase in quotes. However, two of my pages popped up as alternate results, because if Google can't find what you're looking for as a phrase, it'll search for all the words. I'm betting this is a line from a movie, but I can't for the life of me tell you which one.

girard, IL whirl a whip

Ah, the Whirl-A-Whip. It's like something out of a John Cougar Mellencamp song. Jack and Diane could have gotten their chili dog at the Whirl-A-Whip, except that it doesn't rhyme with "knees." A small, family-owned ice cream and burger stand with outdoor tables under a tin roof, the Whirl-A-Whip offers homemade goodness. If you order a chocolate-chip-cookie-dough-ice-cream milkshake at the Whirl-A-Whip, they actually break open tubes of Pillsbury cookie dough and spoon chunks into the vanilla soft serve. The cookie dough is actually soft when you eat the thing, and therefore actually tastes like cookie dough. Cookie dough submerged in ice cream. Highly recommended if you're ever passing by Girard, which you will be if you ever travel Old Route 66 through Illinois.

symbol for teacher tattoo

That's actually a good question. I've been thinking about a set of grips for a pistol with some kind of teacher symbol on one side and a Star of Life on the other. I figure a lamp of knowledge is probably the technically correct choice, but personally, it's not something I'm interested in looking at for the rest of my life. Good luck. Think twice, tattoo once.

how do you tell a good knife from a bad knife

It really depends on you--what your needs are, how and why you're going to use the thing, and so on. I generally check to make sure everything on a folder operates smoothly. Both folders and fixed blades should be checked for flaws before you plunk down your lucre. And personally, I want to know how sharp it is. If it's not sharp, I generally sharpen it and do some cutting. You can save a lot of time by sticking to quality names. Case, Camillus, Benchmade, Spyderco . . . . and about a thousand others at the moment. This doesn't mean you won't get a lemon, but it means you're not starting out looking at junk.

NEVER pay money for anything marked "Pakistan" "4XXJ" or "surgical." Ditto "United."

Collectors have their own criteria, but often they're not looking for a "good" knife so much as a "collectible" knife.

how do i pick my video card

Hell if I know. Boy, did you bark up the wrong tree.

purse guy illinois

Hey, hey, hey! I'm a lot more than that! However, my purse is a Maxpedition Jumbo VersiPack, and it is awesome.

It's Not Whether He's Willing to Hug You . . . .

It's how big a knife he's going to put in your back while his hand is back there.

Apparently the Illinois Democratic delegation to the DNC (Motto: "We hate each other almost as much as we hate the rest of you.") has been mending fences, at least in public. Jesse Jackson, Jr. (yes, the son of THAT Jesse Jackson--when you hear people talk about Reverend JJ shaking down Budweiser, the payoff was a beer distributorship for JJ Junior) surprised everyone by apologizing to Bobby Rush (yes, that Bobby Rush, of Black Panther fame--Chicago politics are nothing if not entertaining) for offending him--after Rush had just sat down from a speech in which he described JJ Junior as one of the "lesser birds of the sky, looking for a way to take the eagle's place." From there, it snowballed.

JJJ hugged Rush.
Then he hugged Debbie Halvorson, another Democrat who hates him.
Then Dick Daley joined in and gave JJJ another hug.
But the big moment was when Blagojevich and Mike Madigan hugged each other without inserting any knives. Frankly, it's a little creepy. Imagine if you happened upon a pit of horrible, cannibalistic monsters which had always been too busy eating each other to come out of the pit after you. . . . and they were cooperating. And building little ladders. Not good.

Of course, as spooky as it is to see Illinois Democrats tolerating each others' presence, there's not much reason to think it will go on. We shall see.

Blackwater Blog Weekend: Daily Motivation III

This is a pretty good demonstration of what everyone's been talking about with the International Cartridge Corporation frangible ammunition we shot at Blackwater. Dan Smith, VP of Operations at ICC, shot with us all weekend and helped run the range quite a bit.

Of course, that's not why we loved him. We loved him because he'd show up every morning in a Suburban riding low in the back from the weight of cases of ammunition. Then he'd put a few cases on a table and we'd fall on them like swarming predators. Dan was our free ammo guy.

So am I going to say nice things about Dan's ammo because he gave me a bunch of it for free? No. But I am going to say good things, because my experience was good. That might make me sound like a shill, but I think you can ask anyone who was there and they'll tell you the same things I'm about to tell you.

First, I know some of the others were dreading the frangible ammo. Caleb in particular had used some early version in the military and hated it. Personally, I had no idea we were even being offered frangible; they told me they were paying for the ammo, and I promptly turned my attention to other matters. Once I hear the words "free ammo" I don't really care what comes next. You could follow those words with "for anyone willing to eat these buzzard testicles on camera" and I'd never know the difference. Let's pause for a moment here and think about this logically. What do we need from our ammunition? It's got to be reliable, first and foremost, right? That means it needs to fire reliably, and in a semi-auto it also has to cycle the action reliably. It's got to be accurate, too. How accurate depends on your purpose. We needed to be accurate enough to hit targets down to the size of the head on a standard IPSC cardboard target, so that was my standard. It needs to be safe, and if we're being honest with ourselves, it needs to be affordable, too. How does the ICC stuff stack up?

Let's talk about accuracy. My accuracy at the beginning was about what I expected--not great, but grouping more or less where I wanted with the occasional ugly flyer. As time went on, the groups tightened, but I never shot to the potential of the gun over more than 2-4 shots. In the shoot house, oddly enough, I shot tighter double-taps than I'd been able to do anywhere else, even putting one double-tap through the same perfect hole from across the room. I'd been sure both shots hit when I'd fired them, but during my walk-through, Todd Jarrett had to assure me that he'd seen them hit the same hole, too. He, of course, was putting entire magazines into very small groups, although he wasn't as superhuman and flawless as I think some of the blog posts have implied. More on that later; I think it's an important topic for reasons I will make clear, but it's not really relevant to the ammunition question.

OK, it's accurate, but is it reliable? Well, I figure we each fired around 1,000 rounds, maybe a little less. Call it 800 to be safe. There were 11 bloggers, three Para employees, two from Crimson Trace, and two from the film crew, all shooting. That's 18 shooters x 800 rounds apiece for a total of 14,400 rounds give or take a few. I don't know of any hiccups, either failures to fire or failures to cycle the guns. Not bad.

Safety? I'm glad you asked, because this was what I really enjoyed about the ammo we used. We all got the experience of standing in front of fixed steel plates and emptying our pistols from a retention position (we really spent zero time on tactics, but this position was being taught as the middle portion of the correct draw) into a plate we could have reached out and touched with our hands. As advertised, the bullets disintegrated completely and left us untouched, if a little dusty. From further away, I did occasionally feel a larger chunk of the sintered metal hit me. It wasn't sharp like a piece of torn jacketing, but it was there. I think you'd have to take one directly to the eye to be annoyed by it, though.
Thanos Polyzos told us that Para-USA uses the ICC frangible ammo exclusively to proof-test guns at their manufacturing facility, which allows them to run a lead-free range right in the factory. We all noticed how nice it was not to have to line up to scrub lead off our hands before we could have a sandwich in the mess hall!
On a personal not, there's one more safety issue that I expect ICC to help me solve. My "home" range, Abe Lincoln Gun Club, was founded in 1946. A few years ago, a pushy land developer from nearby Springfield decided to buy land downrange. Then he decided to build a house on a hill. The hill is so high that they say, in the winter, that you can look out past the 200-yard berm and see the roof among the trees. Of course, he began complaining about the club immediately, even though it hadn't moved in 60 years. Bullets were whizzing over his head, skipping off his pond, and striking his house, he said. He even once showed recovered bullets to a sheriff's deputy, who told the officers at ALGC that they'd first become suspicious when they noticed that all the recovered bullets were loaded into commercial cartridges with shiny brass. In any case, the club took several steps to mollify the big crybaby, and one of those steps was to double the height of the berms and bring in fill dirt to raise the shooters on the 200 yard line so that they have to fire down into the base of the berm. Another step was to outlaw any and all steel or metal targets. They're afraid that a round will ricochet over the berm and get the whol place shut down. The ICC ammo simply vaporizes against steel, so that would solve that problem. The hard part is going to be convincing anyone in charge to let me use the stuff. It's a key club, and there's no one on the premises most of the time, so once the steel targets are out there, it's not hard to imagine some goofball deciding to shoot 'em with his steel-core SKS ammo.

If the ICC round has a weakness, it's the one you've probably predicted: price. There's no way to make this stuff price-competitive with lead, plated, or jacketed bullets. The process of making the bullet itself involves precise mixing and sintering of copper and tin, and the loading process is further complicated by the brittle nature of these bullets. I found the 155-grain .45 we were shooting for $22-$23 per box of 50 online. Of course, Winchester white box goes for $18.99 at my local range for the same 50-round size, so it's not like this stuff is terribly out of line, but the expense is there, especially if you're using it as practice ammo. There's not really much of a way around that; it will be a deal-breaker for some shooters, irrelevant for others, and most of us fall somewhere in between. The catch is that you've got to evaluate the price in the light of what you're getting. This ammunition does do things that the cheap box of 230gr FMJ on the shelf just can't do--it eliminates the issue of lead/jacket splatter, allows training against steel at arm's length and closer, and makes a lead-free shooting environment possible.

Blackwater Blog Weekend: Daily Motivation II

The camera man above, looming above the safe-backstop steel walls of the shoot house, is the guy Todd Jarrett lovingly refers to as "Convict Mark." He's got a few piercings and a few tattoos, and he played the part of Bad Guy Who Gets Blasted By Todd Jarrett in a recent Crimson Trace promotional video. But this guy is a serious shooter and an all-around fun guy who did everything we did that weekend, often better, while also doing his job. He'd shoot us shooting, shoot whatever he needed for Downrange TV, and then put the camera down and go shoot steel. Rough life, huh? He also told the best stories; he and I traded tales of talking our wives into gun purchases one night in the lodge, but I couldn't keep up with his tales of trying to spin $7,000 trap guns from Olympic shooters as "bargains."

Don't worry; he didn't stay above those walls while we were shooting, as that would be unsafe.
He followed each of us through the shoot house instead. That scared the hell out of me, and I was the one with the gun. Now, I was moving so slowly that it was probably more like following the Titanic, so if I turned "suddenly" there was a lot of time to figure out where he was going to go. Not everyone was taking things at such a leisurely pace, though, and after one shooter who will remain nameless, Mark came out of the shoot house with wide, frightened-bunny eyes to declare "I saw Jesus!"

And here's what he did that I might not have: that was only the third or fourth shooter of the morning, so he went right in behind the next guy not five minutes later.

My favorite Mark the Convict story was the tale of the stuffed suit at an NRA convention who actually told him to leave and threatened to have him thrown out. At the time, Mark told us, he'd had purple hair, and I'm sure he had all his tattoos and piercings. He also had credentials and was actually doing his work at the convo, but that didn't impress Suit Guy, who stated with authority that "You don't represent what the NRA is about and we don't want you here."
(Remember, this is a guy who shoots with Todd Jarrett and Olympic shotgun athletes and Michael Bane . . . .)
The situation was resolved, apparently, when cooler heads told Suit Guy that he was risking The Displeasure of Sandy Froman. This apparently has the effect of raising the room's temperature to approximately the melting point of bluster, because he calmed right down.

I couldn't stop thinking how much Oleg would like to get this guy in front of a camera, but he was a little shy. Actually, he told me that if I put this one on the internet, he'd hunt me down and put an end to my internet foolishness. But mediocrity is its own reward; no one at Para or Blackwater seems to realize I even have a blog, so I doubt he'll see it, and if truth be told, I'm a little proud of it as portrait work.

My Newfound Enthusiasm for McCain

Expressed succinctly by Sharp As A Marble: