Guns

The pain of training

/ hsoi

I admit it. I’m human.

That means in my core I seek pleasure and avoid pain. It’s just how living things behave. However, as humans we have this ability to think and reframe things. We may undertake “small pain” if we know it will help us avoid “large pain” and there is some pleasure-seeking in such behavior. For example, giving a small child a spanking because they ran out into the street, that’s a small pain to help them learn to avoid the bigger pain of getting hit by a car. Letting your child turn in a term paper late and getting a failing grade is a small pain compared to the bigger pain of perhaps losing their job because they never learned how to work under deadlines. One advantage of studying a martial art that spars is you learn what it’s like to get hit and how to deal with it, a small pain compared to the first time getting hit being when someone is attacking you bent on taking your life. We can learn how to take small pain if we know it leads us towards a better end.

That said, the small pain is still pain, and at least speaking for myself, I still don’t like it. 🙂

I was reading this quip from John Farnam about training. It helped me reframe my mindset.

Good training is ever scary, demanding, and makes you feel inadequate and stupid. When you finish and ‘feel good about it,’ you probably weren’t pushing yourself hard enough. Learning takes place when you fail, not when you succeed!

I disagree that learning can’t take place when you succeed, but the overall point remains valid.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve felt inadequate and stupid during training. I didn’t shoot well enough, I got my butt handed to me, I got choked out, I totally botched this, I feel embarrassed about that. People learn who I am and due to my résumé/credentials think that I should be some badass, but then I get out there and while afterwards others may tell me I did great I still feel like I suck.

Next month I’ll be participating in a weekend-long seminar. It promises to be very intensive both in terms of shooting skills and hand-to-hand skills. I admit, I’ve been a bit anxious about the class because I know the teachers are demanding yet some of the best in the business. I know my skills will be pushed to the limit. I want to do well in the class, but I think my measure of doing well was “succeeding” at things: that I would shoot in the top 10% of the class, that my empty-hand skills would always lead me to victory in all the drills. After reading the quip, I have reassessed my measure of success: how much I learn. Even if I wind up at the bottom of the heap, that tells me what I need to do to improve. Deep down I know this, but being human, I guess there’s some need to satisfy ego, some need to save face and not look like a total doofus out there. I just have to make a bigger effort to be, as Bruce Lee said, “be a doll made of wood.”

Thus, any training worthy of the name is going to be both frustrating and ‘dangerous,’ no matter what safety procedures are in place. But, failing to train is even more dangerous, and the consequences ever appalling and irrevocable. Ask any commander who has lost a battle!

That’s the more important thing. To get out and train. To push myself beyond my limits. Allow myself to be humbled and embarrassed, so long as it means I’m learning something about myself. The only external opinions I should care about are those of the instructor, but then only so far as it takes to allow me to continue to learn. As a human, it’s tough to allow yourself to go through these small pains. I just have to keep reminding myself that the small pain will help me alleviate the bigger pain. 🙂

More questions from stats

/ hsoi / 10 Comments

So, more questions from my blog stats:

do or do not dry fire a .22

Generally no, you should not dry fire a rimfire gun. It will eventually lead to damaging the gun. However, it is worthwhile to ask the manufacturer. For instance, Ruger’s 10/22 specifically says in its user guide that you can dry fire it — certainly more the exception than the rule. On my Buck Mark, it didn’t say either way so I called Browning’s customer support to ask and they said no.

That said, you could use snap caps, but I’ve had a hard time finding .22 LR snap caps. There are some that claim to be, but online reviews say they’re too short and thus may not feed right. Probably not a problem if you have a .22 revolver, but in things like the Ruger 10/22’s rotary magazine they won’t work. YMMV.

how to accurately shoot a 9mm pistol

Slow down. 🙂

Seriously. Accuracy and speed are somewhat of an inverse relationship. Granted as you get better you can shoot both faster and more accurately, but ultimately one will have to be sacrificed somewhat for the other.

You can check out my posting about how to correct handgun shooting problems for some target helps.

I would also recommend attending a reputable school and obtaining training. Having a good teacher does wonders.

why 9mm so expensive 2009

Short answer: Obama.

Longer answer: Obama got elected US President, and a Democrat-controlled Congress. It has long been established that Obama is no friend to gun owners and gun rights (his actions speak clearer than his words). People felt once he got elected that resurrecting the “assault weapons ban” was going to happen so there was quite a run on guns and ammo. The run on guns seems to be quieting down since people are tapped out for money. Ammo is still trying to regain stability but signs are pointing towards things improving (both prices dropping and stocks building).

are guns free on tax free weekend?

Probably not, but I guess it depends how you interpret that question.

Guns will likely not be free on any weekend, or weekday for that matter. Someone somewhere wants to make money and just won’t be giving them away. 🙂

What tax free weekend? Here in Texas when you say “tax free weekend” it generally refers to the sales tax holiday used to help kids get ready for back-to-school. Guns are not on the list of approved items; in fact, not a lot of stuff is. Generally sporting goods are not considered necessities for schooling (e.g. cleats, helmets, pads, rollerskates, etc. aren’t tax free).

Or if you mean maybe a sales tax holiday for guns, earlier in this 2009 Texas Legislative season, Sen. Jeff Wentworth proposed one, but it went nowhere.

preferred shotgun for home defense

There isn’t one. 😉  To paraphrase John Holschen: AR, AR, AR.

That said, if you really want a shotgun, most any will do so long as it is reliable and works well. I’d prefer one with a shorter barrel, e.g. an 18.5″ or 20″ vs. say 26″ or so… dealing with navigating in the tighter confines of hallways and such. I’d prefer 12 gauge, but 20 can be fine too. Buckshot (00 for 12 gauge, #3 or #4 for 20 gauge). Use reduced recoil loads, if possible to make it easier to fire and fire again. Semi-auto may be more finicky and require more maintenance, but it will be a lot easier for the untrained to operate vs. a pump, whereas a pump is likely to be more reliable and run whatever you feed it but you gotta know what you’re doing; consider who will be using it. Make sure you pattern your gun and your load, and go through various loads until you find the one that works best; change chokes if needed too. Read this to see why patterning is important.

Check this.

And practice, practice, practice.

District 9

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

Went to see the movie District 9 tonight.

I won’t say much, as I don’t want to spoil things.

My overall take was that it was an enjoyable movie. Not what I was expecting… a level of emotional involvement happened to me, and I didn’t expect the movie would have such a thing. I thought that was good tho, given how the movie works out. A little slow to start, but they have to do that to build everything properly. It works. It didn’t feel labored or extraneous. Yeah, you have to do a little belief suspension and not try to put logic into every last little detail… just shut up and enjoy the movie for what it is.

That all said, the gun nut in me just loved the movie. Man… guns everywhere. Gratuitous use of 1911’s and AK-47’s, M-16’s, a Beretta 92, shotguns galore, probably a bunch of other things that I missed or couldn’t identify in all the firefights. Plus the alien weaponry. Gun nuts are going to love this movie. 🙂

Good stuff. Check it out.

Concealed Carry 101

/ hsoi

Howard Nemerov gives a brief overview to the legal concealed carry of a handgun in the United States.

I’ve previously looked at legal requirements for handgun purchase and concealed carry, and what that says about such a person.

Guns on campus – one year later

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

One year ago the Harrold (Texas) Independent School District did something groundbreaking: they allowed teachers and staff members to carry concealed handguns on campus, in the classroom, and — gasp — around children.

Here’s the story of how things are, one year later.

In short:

In the year since that historic decision, a gun was never brandished or fired at the school. There were no problems, [HISD Superintendent David] Thweatt said.

Granted that doesn’t mean that guns in school kept bad things from happening, but it does show that after a year with guns directly in school that nothing horrible did happen. The guns didn’t cause immediate death of all the schoolchildren. There weren’t any problems with teachers whipping out their guns to keep the kids in line. Nothing. Life just went about as normal.

So why have the guns in school? Response time, as a matter of practical importance towards keeping those kids safe:

However, one week after school began, police busted a methamphetamine lab set up in an abandoned house that sat 50 feet from the school property.

A deputy had peered inside and “saw something in the walls and windows and called for backup,” Thweatt said. “They made it to the abandoned house in 15 minutes. We had figured it would take 18 to 20 minutes in a typical situation.”

Had that been an armed intruder at his school, response time would have been too slow.

“We’re the first responders. We have to be,” Thweatt said. “We don’t have 5 minutes. We don’t have 10 minutes. We would have had 20 minutes of hell” if attackers had targeted the school.

So what did the kids think about the policy?

Harrold students, who grew up on ranches and in the middle of the North Texas gun culture, were unperturbed by the school district’s new gun policy.

“The kids just laughed about it,” Thweatt said.

It’s no big deal. Kids aren’t phased, everyone went about life as usual.

But if it is life as usual, why do it? Thweatt explains:

When a London reporter asked Thweatt to explain why so many kooks go into schools looking for a body count, Thweatt said he couldn’t explain such a devolution of society, but he did know a simple way to stop it — the same solution he chose for Harrold ISD.

“Good guys with guns — good,” he said. “Bad guys with guns — bad.”

There’s cool stuff in Austin

/ hsoi

Waterloo Labs has more details. National Instruments is here in town. So is Stunt Ranch.

Who says Austin isn’t home to fun gun stuff? 🙂

And why not try this at home with real guns? Of course, as long as you can do it legally and safely. Add this to the long list of reasons why I want a lot of land.

Sometimes violence is the answer

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

Matthew, over at Straight Forward in a Crooked World, has an entry titled “Failure to Comply.”

It’s a compelling read, and you’d do well to take a few minutes to read it, then a few minutes more to think about what he wrote.

There’s one thing he wrote that really caught my attention:

We are taught early on and reminded as adults constantly that violence is bad and that it never solves anything, and that no one wins in a fight. This is simply untrue. In fact it is horribly untrue. This is the result of political correctness infesting everything. It skews how we set and train our minds to win.

Violence does solve problems.

Reactive violence can and does routinely stop evil offensive violence. When you are left (regardless of your sex) on the ground and fighting to win to keep your life violence is the answer…and it is the only answer. And you should not apologize nor back peddle for that.

It made me think about my children and what I teach them.

When I started my parenting career, we opted to do the “no hitting” thing. There was no spanking, we taught Oldest not to hit, period. Basically, violence was completely frowned upon for any and every reason, in every context, every angle, you name it.

It didn’t take long before we abandoned that to a small part. Spanking came around. Why? Because you can’t reason with a 2 year old; they just don’t know enough about life to understand greater things. We didn’t and don’t beat our children, but all living things respond in a simple manner: seek pleasure, avoid pain. We saved a swat on the behind for those times when you really needed to enforce a negative consequence to some action. That is, spanking was not the general punishment; it was reserved for times when you needed to make a strong negative impression because there was no natural negative consequence of the action. For example, child runs into the street; that could warrant a swat on the behind because there’s no question there could be tragic consequences of that action — it must not happen again. However, the action itself has no natural negative consequence (apart from the undesirable of the child getting hit by a car), so you must impart a negative consequence so the child will not undertake that action again. The child must know that action leads to painful consequences so they will avoid partaking in actions that lead to pain. Political correctness compells me to say that we also are into positive reinforcement; frankly that garners a lot more compliance and a happier household. But sometimes, a spanking is the right and only answer. Heck, even my old college roommate just went through a little “my son got whacked” situation. He’s still of the “no spanking” camp, but there’s no question the little whack his son got straightened him up and made for a better long-term experience.

When I started getting serious about self-defense, martial arts study, firearms study, I realized that when our kids hit each other, to condemn them and lay down a rule of “no hitting, never” was not correct. Here I was studying all sorts of violent things because I know that sometimes violence is the answer, and now I’m telling my children never to use violence? That didn’t jive, and I had to correct myself.

I teach my children differently now. I teach my children that yes, sometimes violence is the answer, but you must know when that is. If your sibling took your toy or is being annoying, violence is not an appropriate response. If someone is attempting to harm you, abduct you, your sibling, your friends, your Mother… then yes, violence can be an answer. I do what I can to teach my children the proper contexts, to know how to respond in these contexts. I wish my children to live peaceful lives, and while I know the world has mostly good people, there are enough bad people out there that we have to take care and be prepared.

Some months back I posted about guns and church and reconciling Christian doctrine against violent activity. It doesn’t preach it, it doesn’t desire it, but even it acknowledges that sometimes yes, violence is the answer.

It’s not pretty to think about, and it’s far from politically correct. But where do you choose to live? In fantasy or reality?

Time to rock out

/ hsoi / 4 Comments

I have not read Monster Hunter International. In fact, I don’t know much about it other than Larry Correia wrote it, and gun geeks are all silly happy about this printing.

But TXGunGeek opted to take it further. There’s now a songwriting contest.

I think that’s pretty funny. I need to read the book first, for proper context.