Category: Shooting

Dave Hardy reports, and it seems Texas is leading the pack:

Marsha McCartney, a Dallas volunteer for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said she doesn’t understand why people would buy silencers in the first place.

“It would only be a concern if they were buying them because they are doing something illegal,” she said.

So does this mean Brady would be OK if we could buy suppressors with just a NICS check? It’s been a while since we’ve seen or heard from our old favorite Brady Board member, but I’m glad she seems interested in this idea. Lets face it, suppression of muzzle report is just basic courtesy. You know how nice it would be when shooting an air gun match if we could politely ask firearms shooters on the next line if they could stick a can on that thing so we didn’t have to wear hearing protection? But you can’t do that now because no one wants to bother with the regulations, so they are generally not common. In most European countries, suppressors are about as regulated as pencils.

UPDATE: Our new favorite Brady Board member seems to agree with our old favorite Brady Board member. I’m not honestly sure what the feds thought they were accomplishing by restricting them. They inherently aren’t all that dangerous, and to my knowledge were never that seriously used by criminals (they make the gun much harder to conceal).

Most of what people know about suppressors come from movies, but the fact is, on most firearms, they are just going to make the report of the gun not quite as loud. Most bullets travel faster than the speed of sound, and so some of the crack you hear from a rifle or handgun is the sound of a small sonic boom as the bullet breaks the sound barrier. Even a suppressed .22 is going to make about as much noise as an air gun. Stupid people who do stupid things with guns are going to do those stupid things with or without a can on it, and criminals have pretty limited use for them anyway.

UPDATE: SayUncle has the answer: “Originally restricted to prevent poachers on federal land during the depression.” Can’t have people feeding themselves illegally, I guess.

Cemetery shows us what the clean up job looks like. He recently got an AR-15, and was joking about working up a black powder .223 load. Well, maybe not joking. It’s hard to tell. If anyone was going to do it, it was going to be him. No matter how wrong it may be. But Cemetery is that kind of shooter who thinks if… working up a black powder load for whatever gun you can imagine is wrong… he doesn’t want to be right.

My friend Jason and I got tired of the same old same old, so we took a lunch break this afternoon and went down to the range to shoot some of the new uppers he got for his M11 submachine gun. One upper is from Calico, which uses their helical magazine to give it a 100 round capacity. That’s quite a bit of fun, let me tell you. The other upper slows the M11s famously high rate of fire, making the gun considerably more manageable firing full-auto. When you’re throwing lead downrange 100 round magazine at a time, your target backer looks pretty sad when it’s all finished.

I was also happy I got some Glock and Kel-Tec time in drawing from the holster, which is something I can’t do at my club, but which you can do at Classic Pistol. Out of holster I’m averaging about 2.1 seconds from leather to a reasonably well placed shot on target at 10 yards. That’s slower than the last time I got to do draw from holster, and way slower than the Jeff Cooper standard of 1.5 seconds and from leather to two shots. This is from concealment, but I was only 0.1 second faster with concealment removed. Shooting from pocket I’m about 3.5 seconds with the Kel-Tec.  That wouldn’t worry me too much if my pocket holster didn’t come out still on the gun a few times. Definitely time for a new one of those.

Because of my club’s rules, I don’t get to practice real world practical shooting very much, and it’s showing. I’ve said self-defense and practical shooters need to get involved with local clubs, and become advocates. There’s a whole world of shooting out there many clubs are afraid to try, and they won’t as long as people who do this kind of shooting stay away from them.

It’s really the new trend in shooting, and this coverage is positive. Unfortunately, my club will never run matches like this because it involves drawing from holsters and running with guns, two things which traditional shooters believe is unsafe. Yet clubs and ranges all over the country are running these matches safely.

I’ve done only a few of these matches myself, and while they were a lot of fun, the main thing that keeps me from returning is the amount of time spent sitting around watching other people shoot, which to me is like watching grass grow. Not many clubs in the area are running these, and they are crowded matches. I suspect if our club ever took up some of these newer sports, I’d be more of a Steel Challenge guy than an IPSC/IDPA guy, but I’d like to be able to shoot a match every once in a while without having to go to Central Jersey, which are the closest sanctioned matches.

The latest thing I’m considering starting is Field Target, which is one new sport our club is doing, and looks interesting. Something I should try, I think.

Miguel takes a quote from Massad Ayoob.  Any time I’ve ever shot competitively, I’m generally in the middle of the pack. There’s probably better shooters out there than you, but there’s also probably worse shooters. If you are at the bottom of the pile, it probably means you’re shooting with top notch people, and can learn something.

CNBC is busily promoting a show which will purportedly show the 700 is a dangerous firearm. Remington isn’t taking it lying down. Also see this interview with Cam Edwards on NRA News.

[Video Removed due to autoplay. Here’s a link. Remington, guys, use YouTube. This looks like the same abomination of an app that NRA uses. Bad move.]

It’s well understood when it comes to journalistic integrity, NBC has none. I believe nothing of what the media says anymore without some independent facts to back it up. They’ve been lying to the American public for years, it’s just now they are getting caught.
Hat tip to Firearms Blog.

[Full disclosure, Neither Remington nor its parent company advertises on this site. I just really hate CNBC.]

I had one commenter, and Joe Huffman say they prefer the NRA’s rules more than Coopers. I have no beef with NRA’s rules. If you really try to pin me down, I’m really more in Tam’s “just don’t be stupid” camp. But given that people tend to communicate socially through the use of memes, both rule sets seem like they are well adapted to serve the purpose intended.

NRA’s rules have often been latched on to by our opponents, because they don’t consider a gun carried or kept nearby for self-defense to be “in use,” but I see that as a poor reason to reject them. I’m more interested in winning the mnemonic struggle for safety, so our opponents don’t get to use the stupid against us. I’m not really too concerned with what accomplishes that, as long as the right ideas get across.

Alan over at Snarkybytes takes issue with the four rules. I tend to think of the rules as being a construct to help people understand safe gun handling, more than literal commandments that must be taken at their very word. In that sense it’s kind of like religion — if you get all fundamentalist with it, it loses its point.

We know that there is, of course, such a thing as an unloaded gun. Cooper’s point is more that we should not assume a gun is safe just because we’re certain it’s unloaded. More than a few people have been killed by guns that someone was certain wasn’t loaded. That’s the problem rule one is meant to solve. I’m not sure how concerned we should be about how we accomplish cleaning, dry firing, and smithing conceptually within the framework of rule one, because that seems to be missing the forest for the trees. That ends up getting into debates that go something like, “Well, if you take the slide off, and remove the barrel, is it still really a gun you have to treat as loaded? I mean, if I’m staring down a barrel out of the firearm, how is it different than staring down a pluming pipe?” All reasonable technical observations, and interesting in an academic sort of way, but I’m not sure we need to argue about such things when thinking about promoting safe gun handling.

I tend to think the four rules are fine, but I think they have to be taken for what they are; a conceptual framework for safe gun handling. One could certainly make literal arguments for why they do or don’t apply in this situation or that situation, and where they fall apart if taken literally, but to me that’s in the realm of an academic exercise. I think in terms of promoting safe gun handling, they’ve suited the community just fine.