Guns

An old gun

/ hsoi

Last week I sold something via craigslist, and the buyer turned out to be a good guy.

I always have some trepidation about selling things that way because you never know who you’re going to encounter. I guess when you hear the doorbell ring you put yourself in “code orange” just to be safe. But this time, as soon as I saw who was at the door I knew I wouldn’t have a problem.

He was an EMT, evidenced by his clothing and badge, and I knew I’d be fine. 🙂

He was a very nice guy. We talked for quite a while about all manner of subjects. In the course of discussion I mentioned “Oh, up around Eagle Peak Shooting range“, which was followed with the “You a gun guy?” question, “Yup” and so merry talk of guns ensued. I also loved his comment of “You gotta love gun folk.” 🙂

He told me about this old gun that he had. I said I’d Google it later as it sounded interesting. To my pleasant surprise later that day he took some pictures and sent it to me, along with an entry from the 2003 Standard Catalog of Firearms. He graciously granted me permission to share it here.

Nifty little gun!

Cling

/ hsoi

Murdoc makes a good point:

Why does it seem like it’s only guns that people “cling” to?

Can we accuse people of “clinging to freedom of speech”?

Well, apparently religion is also clung to. But he makes a good point.

Catalogs

/ hsoi

The kid might grow older but that doesn’t mean the kid has to grow up. 🙂

I remember as a young boy flipping through the JC Penny master catalogs. I don’t know how many pages were in there, but it was a thick catalog; endless pages holding everything you could think of and more about almost any category one could shop for. It was so cool to flip through all the pages with toys, making your list for Santa. Just dreaming about all that could be had. Then you get a little older and discover the lingerie ads, and a different sort of dreaming goes on. 😉

We get older, our tastes change again. Today I received in the mail my Brownells #62 master catalog. And the dreaming shall commence all over again.

But these days I wonder if catalogs are worth all the cost and expense. I’ll never actually order out of the catalog. It’s so much easier to go to a website to search and find things, then to make the purchase via their website. So what purpose does the printed catalog really serve, and could the company be better served by not incurring the costs of making and printing and distributing the catalog and passing along those cost savings to the customers by way of lower prices? They know their business better than I, so I suppose as long as they’re seeing a good return on their investment it’s worthwhile to do.

Besides, it is tough to beat the tactile feeling of sitting on the floor, flipping through pages, and dreaming. 🙂

iPhone impressions

/ hsoi / 3 Comments

So I have a new iPhone 3GS. It’s my first “mobile device” from Apple.

People find it odd that I’ve been an Apple fanboy since my first Apple //e as a child, owning many Macs over the years, and being a Mac software developer (amateur and professional) for nearly 20 years… that with all that Apple-ness in my life, I’ve never owned an iPod or an iPhone.

iPod was simple. I had no desire for music in my ears. I love music, but I also love my hearing. I’ve already done enough damage to my hearing from loud music (either the Walkman in my ears as a kid, or attending loud concerts), motorcycles, guns… all sorts of things that until I had done enough damage to my hearing I didn’t start doing things to avoid damage to my hearing. I just don’t care to do such damage any more. Furthermore, when you have earplugs in you end up tuning out the world around you. I prefer not to do that. I enjoy just listening to the world around me, most of the time. Of course, there’s things like situational awareness too. All sorts of good reasons for hearing things other than piping music into my head. Still, from time to time I thought an iPod would have been useful but never enough to justify buying one.

iPhone was also simple. At first it was cool, but not practical enough. I didn’t have much need for the mobile phone, and the original iPhone’s really lacked in features and support. But now with iPhone OS 3, and the iPhone 3GS, things are finally coming along. I actually think I want the phone more for data than telephone. I’ve had more than enough times where I’ve been somewhere and went, “Gosh, if I had an iPhone…”. One recent incident was buying my Savage 11 hunting rifle. If I could have looked up the specific model information on the Internet from right there in the store, that would have made things very simple. Instead, I had to go home, look it up, then go back. Furthermore, I’ve always felt on long trips to new places that such a device would be useful. Sure there’s the TomTom, but that’s a one-trick pony. Heck, in going to the Hunter Education course, I realized that the directions I had vs. the Google Maps vs. the street signs vs. my own knowledge of the area… everything was actually slightly off and didn’t mesh with each other. I was pretty sure I was supposed to turn at one intersection but opted to go forward a bit just to see if maybe it was ahead. After going a bit it dawned on me that I now had an iPhone. I pulled over, pulled up Maps, noted my location via GPS and realized that yes, that intersection was the correct one to turn at. Just the sort of thing as to why I was happy for an iPhone.

I can’t wait for the next big family road trip. 🙂

So Far

So far, so good. I’ve gotten her all hooked up, updated, synced. I’ve gone through various address books and gotten things updated and in order. I can’t get my work’s POP email to work for some reason, tho SMTP is working. Probably just a configuration thing, despite it matching the config on my laptop. *shrug*  I’ll deal with it in the morning. Plus I’ve been on the App Store and have a bunch of free apps and silly things. Bought a couple little games too.

I’m getting better at typing on it. I’m sure in short order I’ll be rather fluid with it and things will flow just fine.

I admit that I think ringtones are stupid. I just want a basic “ring”. I see far too often when someone gets something they think is a cute ringtone, then their phone goes off around “other folks” and the embarrassed look the person gets on their face as everyone hears their ringtone. It’s hard to find something that’s just plain and simple and won’t sound stupid being played over and over for the world around to to hear while you fumble for your phone. 🙂

The only other bump in this? The physicalness and limits of iTunes.

I wanted to use my personal MacBook Pro as the sync point for the iPhone. Makes good sense. However, I do not have my iTunes music library on this machine; music runs out of another box. I’m trying to find out a way to deal with this… so I can have some music with me. I tried hooking up the iPhone to the other box to manually sync just music, but when I tried that I got told “we’re going to erase everything because this iTunes library isn’t the same iTunes library”. Ugh. I really don’t want to deal with this. It’s just a limitation of iTunes, in that there’s no good way to share music. It’s so one-person/one-computer oriented. I’m not sure how much of that is bug, feature, imposed by Apple, imposed by the media groups. I don’t know, but it really hampers the user experience. I’ll be Googling around to see what I can do on this.

Oh, battery life is interesting. Just having the device sleeping on my nightstand lost about 10% charge… just sitting doing nothing (if you will). That’s nuts. Don’t forget your charger.

To bring a gun thing into this, one of the first gun-related apps I downloaded was SureFire’s ShotTimer. I haven’t had a chance to use it yet, but I can’t wait to. 🙂

I’m an educated hunter

/ hsoi / 4 Comments

To hunt in Texas, you must pass the Texas Park and Wildlife’s Hunter Education course. It tends to be only offered prior to Fall hunting seasons, so to hunt like I did I had to get my license with the course deferment then ensure I took the course within a year. So, that’s all now out of the way. All done, don’t have to take it again.

I wanted to give a review of things, both of the course and my experiences.

The Course

I took the course as offered by the Austin Rifle Club. It consisted of two days: Friday evening and all day Saturday. Most of the material is classroom, and there is a live-fire event.

I took the class with Daughter. I asked Oldest if he wanted to take it, but let’s just say that he’s learning about priorities. It so happened that foo.c was also in the class too. A good number of students were minors; probably a slight majority.

The course itself is overall a good one. It discusses a wide range of topics related to hunting. From firearm basics (e.g. types of rifles), to safety (gun safety, hunting safety, rudimentary first aid), hunting ethics, game identification, and even things like how to field dress a deer. I think the material covered is useful because they can’t know what level of experience people will have coming into this, so they have to start at the beginning. The problem of that however is it then requires a lot of material to be covered. There’s only so much time in the course, thus to be so broad it cannot go very deep. If any topic was explored in-depth, it was hunter ethics, and I think that was a worthwhile thing. Another problem with such a wide amount of topic coverage is if you already know the stuff, it makes the class boring. While I understand some aspects here, it’d be nice if there was a way to place out of this. For instance, me being an NRA Certified Rifle Instructor, it’d be nice if I would have been able to bypass a fair portion of the course material. But again, I understand the course construction and it’s generally fine how they do things.

After a lot of classroom instruction, there is a 50 question multiple choice knowledge test (closed book). Then there’s a short round on the gun range, which appears to be more about evaluating safe gun handling than it does marksmanship or anything else. There is no instruction on the shooting portion… you need to know how to shoot. The only instruction given was if you borrowed one of their rifles, they of course showed you how it operated (e.g. safety here, magazine release here, etc.).

All in all, I thought it was a good course and, while it was long, I was glad that I took it. A lot of the information was stuff I already knew, but I know Daughter didn’t know a lot of the material so it was certainly good learning for her. For me, seeing the video on how to field dress the deer was probably the most informative. I wish that was on YouTube (went looking for it via my iPhone during a class break, couldn’t find it).

I will say, there is apparently a home-study option for this course. If you are a long-time hunter and shooter and know your stuff, you may be better off doing the knowledge portion via home study. For instance, to hunt via the lotteries of some states you must have an education certificate so some folks that normally don’t need to take the course may need to take the course so they can do such things. So if you’ve the long-term experience, that may be less painful for you to do; then just find a way to do the field course. If you have less hunting knowledge/experience, especially for all young people even if they have gone hunting, they certainly should take the classroom course. There’s a lot they will get from it.

Personal Experience

The hardest part for me in the course was just that it was long. The gentlemen teaching the course were very knowledgeable and friendly, but they weren’t the best teachers. They just weren’t that engaging, mostly reading from their notes or the handbook. Every so often they’d break off and talk about things, tell some stories, or some such, and that would be good. But they just didn’t feel like the most engaging of teachers, especially for all the young folk in the class. This isn’t to say they were terrible; they did just fine and obviously the kids got the needed information as I think most everyone passed the test. So, the job was done.

For Daughter, it was tougher. The first night went until 10:00 PM and that’s way past her bedtime. Then having to get up very early the next morning to head back was tough as well. I also wish they could have done the shooting portion first thing Saturday morning instead of at 2:00 PM, when it was 100º+ outside. But they did it how they did it, and thankfully the outdoor portion didn’t last too long in this oppressive heat.

What also made it tougher for Daughter was the test. I recall looking over at her and seeing her holding back tears. At the time I wasn’t 100% sure why she was breaking down, but I just put my arm around her and kept encouraging her to do her best, to go to the next question if that one was stumping her, and just trying to continue to encourage her and support her through the test. I spoke with her afterwards, and the main issue was just testing overload. She just wasn’t sure about some questions and that number of “I don’t know” seemed to stack up against her. She didn’t want to fail the test, so she built herself up a lot of pressure. I will say that was one tough thing about the course (especially for the kids). There was a great deal of information presented in a limited amount of time. Often times the answer to one question might have been covered in the span of 5 seconds and if you missed it you missed it and there’s just no way you could reason your way to the right answer. Furthermore, some questions would be things that were of questionable merit. Does she really need to know what a percussion cap looks like (not is, looks like)? It’s arguable, but I’d say questions about hunter safety and ethics were more important. I watched her mark her answers, and I noticed that the questions that really mattered she did just fine on; maybe not knowing the answer right off the bat, but was obviously able to reason it down and mark the correct answer. She had the most trouble on more esoteric knowledge. But, since you don’t need a perfect score to pass, such questions are able to be missed and still produce a passing score. Daughter did pass, so no real troubles. Once she found out she passed, all her stress over the test was gone. 🙂  In fact, the gentlemen running the course complemented her on her tests (hey, she shot a better group than I did…. she used our scoped Ruger 10/22, I used one of the club’s Winchester bolt action .22’s with open leaf sights).

As an aside, looking back on things, I realize that during our lunch break (written test was after lunch) I should have gone back over the course handbook with Daugther. Problem was simple: with the new iPhone we were both wanting to play around with it and so we did. I’m sure if we spent time reviewing prior to the test, she would have fared much better.

Anyway, long days, but good days. I learned something. Daughter learned something. We’re both certified. And Daddy and Daughter had a lot of good time together.

KR Training August 2009 Newsletter

/ hsoi

The KR Training August 2009 Newsletter is up.

Much talk of upcoming classes, an IPSC match at Austin Rifle Club this Sunday (wish I could do it), various training opportunities, and other things.

All you locals, check it out.

Will a 9mm +P shoot in any 9mm pistol?

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

Being the geek that I am, I like looking at my blog statistical data. One of the more interesting things is to look at the things that people are searching for that leads them to my blog. I’ve been thinking about responding directly to some of them, as I find interesting ones. So, why not go ahead and start.

One that came in my current stats is:

will a 9mm +p shoot in any 9mm pistol?

I’m assuming the person is curious to know if 9 mm (Luger, Parabellum, 9x19mm, etc.) +P ammo can be shot out of any gun chambered for 9 mm.

Short answer? No, +P won’t shoot in any pistol.

Longer answer? Any pistol? No. Some pistols? Yes, but you better check first (and not by trying it and seeing what happens).

The thing is, any ammo that is +P rated means that it’s loaded to a higher pressure than the standard (non-+P) load; generally about 10% higher pressure. Thus, more pressure means more well… pressure and stress being imparted upon the firearm. Take a balloon. It’s only able to handle so much air pressure within it before it pops. But if you inflate it with more air pressure than it’s designed to handle what happens? It pops. More or less, that’s what could happen to your gun if you use ammo in it that it is not able to handle.

Thus, you must know your firearm. You must know if it can handle +P ammo before you use +P ammo in it. If you’re not sure, contact the manufacturer of the firearm and ask them. If for some reason you cannot do that, contact a reputable gunsmith. Yes, you could also try to find things out on “t3h int3rw3bz”, but that can be a crap-shoot; know your source. In the end, it may be safer to err on the side of caution and not use the +P ammo.

Note as well there’s a further variant known as +P+, which means the ammo is loaded to even higher specs. This is another thing to ask about and watch out for. Check this Wikipedia article on Overpressure Ammunition for some details on the topic.

Granted most modern firearms can handle the additional pressure of +P rounds, but it’s still wise to know for sure and not guess. Read the user manual, ask the manufacturer. Know before you do. You really don’t want to be on the receiving end of a firearms failure.

Paired Round Loading

/ hsoi / 4 Comments

I’m working my way through the postings at SnubTraining.com. I just came upon a set of postings regarding reloading your snub. This particular drill about “paired round loading” caught my eye. The background is that while at the range we might always reload our guns to full capacity, in a pressure situation we may not be able to. We may be able to unload the gun then only partially reload, either by choice or by time constraint, and then have to get back into the fight. So this drill is discussing that you may only be able to do a partial reload. Assuming your snub holds 5 rounds, maybe you can only get 2 rounds reloaded (thus “paired round”).

What Michael points out is how/where you do the reload. Chances are, we’re going to reload those rounds side-by-side. He presents some statistics worth considering:

If you were loading to protect your family wouldn’t you have better served them if you had loaded those roundsanywhere other than side by side?  When loading side by side you run a statistical risk of closing the cylinder and having to cycle through three or four empty charge holes (depending on if you loaded a five or six round cylinder) before you hit upon your first live round.  If you had split the loading then your chances for a live round earlier would have gone up to 25% with a five shot revolver and 20% with a six shot revolver.

Quite a good point. Yes with only a partial reload you have to keep pulling the trigger over empty chambers before you get to a loaded chamber, but now with the rounds spread out you’ve got a statistically better chance of getting at least one shot off sooner rather than later.

Furthermore, by practicing this way you give yourself an inexpensive “ball and dummy” drill. It can help you work to eliminate flinching. Load a couple rounds, spin the cylinder so you don’t know where they are, close the cylinder, then go. Work to eliminate any flinch or anticipation.

I’m not saying this is the best way to do things, or the worst. I do think it’s worthwhile food for thought.

Random grossness

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

Actually… I have two random bits of grossness.

Random gross #1

The other day when I came home from the indoor range, I put a tissue up my nose to clean things out. When I pull the tissue out, there’s black on the tissue. Eh? I do a bit more cleaning in and around both nostrils and find more black. I am not 100% sure what it is, but I can only deduce it’s from the indoor range… all the smoke, especially given the guy shooting the muzzleloader in the bay next to me. Who knows what else I inhaled. This is just another reason why indoor ranges aren’t the greatest thing… or that Red’s needs to massively improve ventilation. Rather gross, and unsettling as to what I took into my body.

Random gross #2

The new kitty? She has the most god-awful farts, and has them rather frequently. Or at least, it seems the cause-effect is pick up kitty, get a nasty fart for your troubles.

Joy. 😕