Mr. Completely is having some health problems.  Here’s wishing him a speedy recovery.
Month: November 2008
Actual Kel-Tec P-3AT Review
Some of you remember my lamentations over Kel-Tec’s customer service. Well, my barrel finally arrived in Friday, with a nice 2007 date on it, so it’s not like Kel-Tec was behind in manufacturing, they just take a while to get around to looking at service send backs.
So I put the new barrel in and took the gun to the range. I am able to hit a 7 circle pretty reliably with it at 10 yards. In that sense, it does what it’s supposed to do. A few things though:
- Damn, is it brutal to shoot! I sent 60 rounds through it and I got a blister on two of my fingers from where it contacts. Any pocket .380 is going to have this problem, though. With almost no size and weight, the impulse as to go somewhere, so it goes into your hand. With not much to grip on to, even with a death grip you have to readjust your grip every round to fire a comfortable shot. But I did rip through a few magazines just to make sure I could do it, and land on target, and I can.
- It really needs to lock back when empty. I like my pistol telling me when it’s empty. The Ruger LCP improves on the pocket pistol design by providing this.
- It beats up the brass something fierce. I’m not sure any of the .380 I recovered is reloadable.
- The pistol is reliable. I didn’t have any malfunctions.
- With Corbon JHP rounds, the flame from the barrel is pretty noticable. This could be problem in low light use.
- Cleaning the pistol takes all of 10 minutes. It’s a pretty simple design.
Overall, it’s living up to expectations so far, though I wish I could have gotten it up and running a bit sooner after purchasing it with a defective barrel.
iPhone Shot Timer
For those of you who want to measure your shooting speed, if you have an iPhone, Surefire has made an iPhone based shot timer. I’ve installed it, and will have to check it out at the range next time.
Nothing to See Here
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette apparently thinks we’re all a bunch of deluded paranoids for buying up guns like the President Elect Obama is proposing gun control or something. The only thing that scares me more then the fact that voters don’t pay attention to what’s actually going on, is the fact that reporters don’t seem to much either.
The Four Rules
SayUncle had a negligent discharge of his Walther P22 over the weekend, but because the four rules were being followed, no one was hurt. One thing I need to get, and I would say anyone who handles firearms a lot needs to get, is a clearing barrel. Every time you load a gun, there is a small chance that the round could slamfire, either from a problem with the gun, a misseated primer, or what have you. There’s also the chance of human error. A clearing barrel makes sure no one gets hurt, and you don’t end up having a hole of shame in your floorboards. It’s one of those things that over time, statistics will catch up with you, as they did with Uncle, so it’s best to be prepared.
And The Gun Owner Was Racist
This article in The New York Times focuses on my local district, and of course the gun owner has to be the racist one:
Early on Election Day morning in the Philadelphia suburb of Levittown, Pa., Joe Sinitski, 48, stood in a long line inside a school gymnasium, inching his way toward three blue-curtained voting machines. He wore jeans, a sweatshirt and a National Rifle Association baseball cap. He said he would vote for Barack Obama, a choice that some months earlier he could not have imagined.
[…]
“For a long time, I couldn’t ignore the fact that he was black, if you know what I mean,†Mr. Sinitski, the heating and air-conditioning technician, told me. “I’m not proud of that, but I was raised to think that there aren’t good black people out there. I could see that he was highly intelligent, and that matters to me, but my instinct was still to go with the white guy.â€
But he voted Obama anyway. As much as I want to blast the New York Times for pointing this out, it’s a fact that many of the NRA members in this area are working class tradesman and Union members. It’s also a fact that many of them reflexively and habitually vote Democrat. In this area, it makes my job very difficult, because I have to appeal to them to vote on the gun issue. I’ve had difficulty getting cooperation with clubs, because, if you can believe this, supporting NRA endorsed candidates is controversial, because here they are pretty much universally Republican. In a place like Texas, this might not be so appalling, but here, Democrats running at the federal level, and in the Southeast at the state level, are typically reflexively anti-gun. I can bet you that Joe the Racist here voted for Patrick Murphy too.
If you want to understand why Pennsylvania, which has a per-capita gun ownership rate that is close to Texas, and who issues 1 million hunting licenses per year, and 600,000 concealed carry licenses, can consistently vote for anti-gun Democrats at the federal level, I give you Joe Sinitski. It’s not pretty, but it’s the truth, and it makes the life of gun rights activists in this state very difficult. Particularly in my area.
Article on Dan Cooper in Missoulian
This article in the Missoulian quotes me:
“I don’t think Dan’s ousting is fair or right, it just is. I didn’t ask for people to call for his ousting. I did tell people to write Cooper Firearms and express displeasure, and encouraged them to not purchase the company’s products. It was Cooper Firearms and the Board that ousted Dan in response, because they felt that was the best thing to do for their business. Both sides in this case were acting separately in their own self-interest.â€
Read the whole thing. Bob Ricker is still saying the NRA boogeyman is behind this. Having once worked for NRA, you would think Bob would know that NRA has difficulty moving at Internet speed, except that he has a vested interest in painting this picture.
One interesting thing is it looks like Cabelas and Sportsmen’s Warehouse cancelled orders with Cooper Firearms. They said that was a business decision though, because the rifles weren’t selling. I’m wondering, at this point, if perhaps we just gave the Board of Directors of Cooper Firearms the excuse they needed to get some better business management at this company.  Read the whole thing.
Arrested for Wearing a McCain-Palin Shirt?
Check out the video at Bucks Right, of a guy in Philadelphia getting cuffed and hauled off because he wore a McCain shirt outside of an Obama rally. I always disclaim that these things don’t often present a clear picture, and it could be something happened that offered the officers justification to arrest that we didn’t see. But this appears to be something to look into at first glance.
Gun Sales Video
Cemetery points to a Nightline video talking about the brisk post election gun sales.
UPDATE: Looking over the video, I have to offer kudos to Nightline for presenting a pretty good story here, and getting our perspective across as to why we’re all stockpiling guns.
Why Do We Need So Many?
Joe Huffman offers a graphic and powerful response to someone questioning, “Why do we need so many dang guns,” after reading about gun sales spiking ahead of an Obama presidency.