Category: Shooting

Somehow I managed to shoot 33/40 tonight on indoor pistol silhouette. Basically the only thing I changed was to swap out the Millet red dot scope on my Mk.III with a BSA red dot scope that I bought from SayUncle. I don’t know if it’s because it’s heavier, or just better quality optics, or I was just lucky tonight. We’ll see after next week.

I continue to struggle with my Kimber Govt. Model 82. I can shoot into the mid 30s with Bitter’s CZ 452 on a good night, but I have a hard time breaking the 30 point mark with the Kimber. It’s an 11lb rifle, and while it does tend to mute minor muscle movements, when I try to hold steady with it I’m swaying like a skyscraper in a hurricane. I think part of it is that the shooting position that’s comfortable with the CZ has an entirely different natural point of aim with a heavier rifle. It’s probably boils down to needing to practice with the Kimber more, and the CZ less. But I have to admit I love Bitter’s CZ 452. I think by this point I’ve probably shot 100x more rounds through it than she has.

Two stories today which affect the continuing narrative of lead in bullets being a real problem.  Lake City brags of producting 600,000 rounds of green ammunition for the military.  600,000 is a fraction of their daily production.  It’s made from a bismuth alloy.  The only problem with bismuth is that it’s only about twice as abundant as gold, and is only mined as an ancillary to other ores.  In other words, you can’t scale bismuth production to the levels needed to replace lead at any reasonable cost.  With its scarcity, prices would quickly go through the roof.  The devil is in the details, and if we’re attacked along this route, it’ll be tough to speak to the public about the problems of using other metals.  You can bet our opponents will be saying there are substitutes for lead — much like a helicopter can be a substitute for an automobile.

The other is a new study out of Jackson that suggest grizzly bears are being posioned by lead.

JACKSON – Preliminary results of a study by a University of Montana graduate student suggest that lead bullets may be poisoning grizzly bears in the Yellowstone ecosystem.

Tom Rogers sampled blood from 13 grizzlies during hunting season and found nearly half had elevated levels of lead, possibly because the bears had eaten lead bullet fragments in big-game carcasses left behind by hunters.

Here’s a question.  How is the Yellowstone Ecosystem being poisoned by hunters when hunting isn’t allowed within the Yellowstone Ecosystem, and guns aren’t allowed either?

UPDATE: Some folks have corrected that the Ecosystem is a vast area that ecompasses more than just the National Park.  Either way, here’s an idea — aren’t bears busy gaining a lot of fat for hibernation during hunting season?   Wouldn’t that tend to drive the levels of a lot of ecological contaminants higher, including lead?

Tam takes exception to an IPSC detractor who says competition isn’t combat:

Well, thank you for tipping me off to that fact, Enrico Fermi. Here I thought all along that I was training myself for that grim and inevitable mugging by five bowling pins in a sunny, grassy alley some pleasant weekend morn. Glowering at me from their table in plastic-coated malice, they’ll stand in a straight line and… well, do whatever it is that criminally-minded bowling pins do, I guess.

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.

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.

The Firearm Blog links to this great piece on ammunition prices over the past two years, and speculates that the price of ammunition is going to drop sometime in 2009.  I would tend to agree that the ever upward pressure on prices has to break at some point.  If we don’t see an Obama/UN arms treaty, it might be possible at some point for the Iraqi government to sell all that fine ammunition back to us as surplus.

People who shoot large caliber rounds need to grok that those rounds can travel great distances and still remain dangerous.  We don’t need stories like this.  Especially with Obama looking to crap on gun owners.

From Tam, who is thinking of creating her own training method:

That way I make money, and they get to take home a certificate and tell their friends that they’re “trained”. And since the odds of them being in a shootout in suburbia are slim to frickin’ none, we’re all happy. It’ll be awesome. I just need to think up a name for my technique and order some shirts with epaulettes.

There are hundreds of machine gun shoots that happen across the country without incident every year.  It’s a great way for a curious public to come and learn about automatic firearms, and try them out, in a controlled and safe environment.  I’ve never seen someone shoot an automatic weapon that didn’t come away from the shooting line with a big shit-eating-grin on their face.  Done right, I think machine gun shoots are actually a great public relations tool.  But the key to doing it right is “controlled” and “safe”, and pretty clearly what happened in Westfield fell down on both those counts.

Every accident that happens at organized and public shooting events is going to be examined under the microscope of public scrutiny.  All it takes is one tragedy to lose the perception among the public that this is a safe activity.  All it takes is one accident for hysterics and anger to get directed back at the shooting community as a whole.  Other sports get a break.  We don’t.  And on top of all that, there’s a tangled web of legal issues involved, especially when you bring machine guns into the picture.

There is no universe where an eight-year-old kid with little prior firearms experience should be handed a fully loaded machine pistol and told to go to town.  I don’t care if his dad said he had fired guns before.  I don’t care how excited the kid is to try to shoot one.  Machine pistols legitimately are more dangerous in untrained hands than other ordinary firearms.  Most other shoulder fired or mounted automatics are heavy enough that even a novice user can retain control.  Machine pistols are another story.  I once had my friend’s M11, which is similar in size and weight to the Micro Uzi, get away from me while firing it on full automatic.  No rounds were sent in an unsafe direction, but the baffling and armor plating on the range took a hit as a pulled the last round high.  It was embarrassing.  That wasn’t the first time I had ever fired a machine pistol either.  I never fired that gun on automatic again unless I had a death grip on it.  Anyone who’s familiar enough with a machine pistol to instruct with one ought to know that you must use extreme caution in teaching beginners.  There is no way I would let an eight year old handle a machine pistol.

This is a tragedy on multiple fronts.  It’s a tragedy because a child died.  It’s also a tragedy because a family has been ruined.  It’s a tragedy for the father, who is going to have to live with this for the rest of his life.  Finally, it’s a tragedy because there are probably going to be good people, who pose no danger to society, going to prison over this.  There is no way for Justice to prevail here.  There is no wrong that can be righted.  But a child died in a gun accident in Massachusetts, and you can bet that someone is going to be made to pay.  It might not be justice, but it is the law.

… to have a Governor who doesn’t hate gun owners.  Congrats to the TSRA Service Rifle top 20.