Me

On Shotguns

/ hsoi / 8 Comments

Like many (most? all?) people, I started out in the “shotgun for home defense” camp. For whatever reason, it’s the mantra firearm to utilize in that situation.

However, if you think beyond that towards the actual realm of application, plus if you do any actual work in that realm of application (e.g. a class like Defensive Long Gun), you start to see it’s not the best tool for the situation. For example, consider the longest shot you may have to take in a home defense situation. What if it’s something like 25 yards? Take a look at The Box O’ Truth #20 and notice the size of the spread at 20 yards: from 9″ to 17″. That’s a huge variance. Even at best, can you be sure to get all 8-9 pellets on target and not in an innocent person? Maybe, but maybe is of little comfort when the flag is flying. It’s due to that and many other factors that I’ve settled on an AR for home-defense. It’s the entirety of the platform that makes it a better fit for the context.

But for some reason I still had a desire for a shotgun.

Now, I still keep shotguns for home defense. Why? Easier manual of arms. It’s very simple for Wife or my kids to operate a shotgun, especially if something goes wrong (just keep pumping and shooting, and if all else fails it’s a club). Heck, it’s difficult for my young kids to operate that charging handle on an AR, but they can easily work the pump action on a youth 20 gauge shotgun. Some gun is better than no gun.

A few months ago it was maybe 10:00 PM. We heard a helicopter overhead, which isn’t usual because of medical helicopters. What became unusual was that the helicopter didn’t pass over but stayed in the area. We found a police scanner feed and listened in. Apparently the police were chasing someone and he hunkered down in a patch of woods close to my house. I went Code Orange. The reality was, he certainly could have run and wound up near or in my house. Slim chance? Yes. But better to be prepared and on guard.

What surprised me about my reaction to the situation? My gut response was to grab the 12 gauge, not my AR.

I’m not sure why.

On the one hand, I’ve been very handgun oriented lately and haven’t been practicing with my AR as much as I should. If I have been doing anything with a rifle, it’s been more along hunting or target shooting, not fighting. Monkey brain mode kicked in and brain reverted to “simple point and click interface” of the shotgun, not “OK, gotta figure out the holdover, blah blah”. While the logical part of my brain still buys into the AR for home defense, that night the shotgun just sung to me. In the end I didn’t have to pick anything up, eventually the police scanner provided no more information on the matter and the sounds of the helicopter faded. No idea what happened, doesn’t really matter.

Recently on the InSights Training Center mailing list, someone was asking about the SAIGA 12 for home defense. Now, these guys are big on the AR, but lead instructor Greg Hamilton gave the shotgun its due:

For general civil situations, the 7-8 shot, tube feed, pump shotgun is already more gun than is required to solve the situation. I’ve shot 1000s if not 10,000s of rounds though every type of shotgun over 25 years.  Just shoot pumps now. I have a nice 11-87 that I don’t use and I would like a saiga with a really short barrel but it would just be for fun, as I don’t know what else I would do with it.

The shotgun is still a great weapon especially if you are poor. For $250 you’ve got something that you can take on multiple opponents with, with confidence in the reliability of the gun and in the cartridge. A screw on rail to the forend, weaver ring, and $50 flashlight and your looking good. Throw some extra ammo on the gun someway cheap and for <$400 you are ready to rock. It won’t win any picture competitions on AR15.com but it will smoke a couple scumbags with extreme prejudice.

and that’s what it’s all about.

Granted, this doesn’t take away some inherent limitations of the platform (e.g. those 25 yard shots). But with a little investment of time, money, and ammo, you can do you best to figure it out. For instance, back in that BOT #20 you saw that different ammo provided different patterns. You must take the time to seek which ammo will work best in your gun. Furthermore, if your shotgun has different chokes, try them out and see what difference they make. I’ve tended to lean towards whatever gives you the tightest possible pattern, minimize spread. Furthermore, with some additional way to carry ammo on the shotgun (e.g. side-saddle), throw a few slugs in there.

And practice. Pick up some dummy rounds and practice loading, reloading, getting that one slug in there, and so on. Take classes if you can.

So on that front, I opted to run the Team Tactics course a couple of weeks ago with a shotgun. I just wanted to see.

On the one hand, it was just plain fun to do. 🙂  There’s something viscerally satisfying about BOOM rack BOOM rack BOOM. 🙂  Of course, reloads were slow, but you manage the best you can. Even with a shorter 18.5″ barrel, it’s still cumbersome to move and navigate with the shotgun: an AR with a 16″ barrel and collapsible stock is overall much shorter and easier to move around with. Shooting weak-side (e.g. around the left-side of a barrier) was difficult with the pump, but do-able… just a matter of training those motor skills.

In the end, I’ve softened my “anti-shotgun for defensive purposes” stance. In the end, it all comes down to you and your particular situation — there is no blanket answer. I do look forward to doing more work with the shotgun, classes if I can. Curious to study it more in this context.

I Can’t Tell You Why

/ hsoi

Every morning while I reload ammo, I bring my iPhone to the bench and use it to play music while I load. Nice to have the music while I work.

This morning I listened to The Eagles. Here’s one of my favorite songs, “I Can’t Tell You Why”

Loved that song as a kid, still love it now.

Insert snappy title here.

/ hsoi

Home renovations started yesterday. Things are crazy. The house is a wreck but you can see where things are taking shape. Wife is excited, so I am too. But consequently I’m behind in work and playing major catch-up (we’ve got professionals doing the work, but there’s always something to tend to).

No time to write right now.

But I can say I have upped my daily reloading output to at least 200 rounds a day. I won’t get done soon enough if I don’t increase the daily output. I’m really itching to try 6.8 SPC reloading (or at least, some sort of rifle reloading) and that won’t happen until all the 9mm and .38 Special are reloaded. The sooner they are done, the sooner I can get to rifle work.

Fell asleep at 7 PM last night, woke up at 5 AM. I guess my body needed sleep.

Anyway, I’ll be back later.

Self-document code is anything but

/ hsoi / 3 Comments

If you know me, or maybe you can just tell from my blog, I can be verbose.

It’s how I am. I tend to prefer more information to less. I think you get further in life by knowing more, not less.

But I also know this wears on a lot of people. They just want the bottom line and don’t care why or how you got there. IMHO that’s a pity because then they never truly understand and can never arrive at educated conclusions on their own. OK fine, a baby is made, that’s the bottom line. If you want to stop there and never know more, that’s your business. But in my book, knowing how to make that baby is interesting, and then going through the motions of making that baby even more interesting. 🙂  Like I said, it’s good to have knowledge and information.

I write software for a living. There’s great debate about documenting code, be it formalized documentation apart from the code or writing comments in the code itself. I’ve never jived with folks that say code should be self-documenting and that’s all the documentation you need. Sure, you should write readable and maintainable code. Naming your variable “numberOfObjects” is far better than just naming the variable “i”. But you must have comments. Why? Precisely.

Self-documenting code can tell you what and how, but it cannot tell you why. For that, you must use external documentation.

You must go through the effort of writing comments to explain bits of code. Depending on the code, you may also want to write larger external documents (e.g. in a word-processor) that explain the greater architecture and how all the parts of the code fit together and how to use it all. This is something that cannot be conveyed by reading the code itself, and I just don’t understand those that think this sort of documentation is a waste of time and somehow if you do it makes you “not a real programmer”.

Well buddy, real programmers know the moment after the code is written it must start being maintained. If you can’t remember what you had for breakfast a week ago, can you expect to remember why you wrote this code when you come back to it in 6 months?

Case in point. Just yesterday I was working on a bug in our software where the application would hang. All signs and symptoms were odd but somehow made sense to each other. When our QA guy told me one key point (“looking at the permissions flags, there’s a ‘p’… what’s that?”) it all came back to me. The file was a named pipe and I dealt with this very problem in the past. I went looking in code for where I previously dealt with it. I found it. The comment was dated over 5 years ago.

5 years ago.

When I fixed the problem — 5 years ago — I added copious comments to the source code to explain the problem in great detail; 50 lines of comments. I know many would say that was ridiculous! That it’s just his (annoying) verbosity! Well, thank goodness for it because without it there would have been no way I would have remembered that 5-year-old problem in such great detail and know exactly how to fix it (again) today.

Here’s an article by Jef Raskin discussing the same thing. Jef Raskin would know.

So yeah… people tell me I’m verbose. I really don’t care. I am who I am and I know when to be curt and I know when to ramble on. There are times when comments aren’t needed (don’t tell me what or how), but you do need to explain why and not be afraid to go into detail because the code you may have to maintain may be your own. Do yourself a favor and explain yourself. And if someday that code gets to be maintained by someone else, do them a favor and explain yourself.

I’ve never known anyone to say there’s such a thing has having too little ammo. I feel the same way about code comments and information. 🙂

BP1 & AT-6

/ hsoi

Spent the day at KR Training.

I started out helping with the Basic Pistol 1 class. As always, the class was full. The demographics ran the gamut, as it tends to. I will say there were more women in today’s class than usual, including some younger women (mother-daughter combos, which was cool). The class ran well.

The afternoon was AT-6: Advanced Training Pistol Workout. There were only a few people signed up for the class, so Karl didn’t need any help with it. Instead, he suggested I shoot the drills, which was a good suggestion. I took AT-6 a few months ago, but there’s certainly no harm in extra trigger time. Some of the drills were the same, some were different. For instance, we started off shooting the FBI Qualification test, then moved on to 25 yard group shooting. A lot of strong-hand-only and weak-hand-only shooting. Shooting on the move. You end up working things that you may not like to work, but the only way to get to be the best and a well-rounded shooter is to not just practice the things you like, but to practice the things you don’t like and practice them until you like them (thank you, Brian Enos).

Reading my assessment of the first time I took the class, I’ve certainly improved. In fact, while I was shooting today I was generally pleased with myself. I was calling my shots and knew when I screwed up a shot. One thing I continue to have trouble with is my eyes at 25 yards and finding and holding that solid and repeated point of aim with each shot. My trigger control was alright (we did ball and dummy and I wasn’t seeing any dipping of the front sight when the ball went off), it’s my eyes and what I’m (not) seeing. Speaking of eyes and triggers, I’m still not getting on the trigger soon enough… rather, I distinctly found times where I should have been on the trigger sooner but instead was like: present, find front sight, OK it’s aligned, now press the trigger. But I’m feeling it and knowing what it is. It was only a few days ago that I worked the “fast shooting” to learn what a sight picture with 0.20 second splits would look like, so it’s all just not ingrained in my head… still need to work on learning that and allowing myself to do it. Overall, happy with how things went, I know what I need to continue to work on.

In related news… for today I used my XD-9 with the Springer Precision trigger kit in it. Probably 400-ish rounds today and the gun ran like a champ. It’s still not 100% like the other gun with the really tight trigger, but it’s rather close. I know my head was focused in part on the trigger wanting to see how it felt and how it worked, and I think it did fine; if anything, my focusing on the trigger took my focus away from shooting. It’s one of those “just shut up and shoot” things… “mind no mind” and so on. Just shoot, forget about the rest. And that works out well for me. I’m pleased with the results of the trigger kit. I’ll keep shooting this gun for a while.

Good day. No sunburn. Stayed hydrated. Got some good trigger time. Good day. 🙂

Back from the range

/ hsoi / 1 Comment

30% chance of rain be damned. I’m going to the gun range!

Well, I’m actually back from the gun range.

Chronographing

A couple weeks ago I loaded up variants of my 9mm plinking load. In short, coming to the end of my Remington small pistol primers, and the rule is if you change something in the recipe you need to re-test to ensure all is good. So, I finally was able to get to the range to chronograph it all.

I will have detailed results later (lots of numbers to crunch). But at least a cursory glance over the numbers leads me to believe I’ll be just fine switching to the Federal or Wolf primers… small difference, remains to be seen just how statistically relevant the difference is. More eventually.

Updated: data now posted.

My Work

On the last range trip I left knowing a few things to work on. Karl was kind enough to provide some suggestions. So I did a combination of that.

Started by running the 1 target strings of those same drills. How funny… while at the range I thought that I hadn’t improved any (I was still not pleased with the numbers I saw). Getting home here and writing up this posting, I’m comparing my numbers from last time against now. I did improve! Yea! Across the board I was about a half second faster. For instance, 1 target, 3  yards, 6 shots. Last time I did it in 3.02 seconds with the first shot at 1.54. This time I did it in 2.59 seconds with the first shot at 1.46.

On the whole, my first shot times improved maybe a quarter second… not sure if I’m getting out of the holster faster or onto the trigger sooner. I know I felt like I was really slow on my draw, but generally doing a 1.5 second draw from concealment (IWB holster @ 3 o’clock) isn’t horrible. And certainly, my splits are improved.

So that’s the other thing Karl suggested I do. Just buckle down and shoot fast and put 5 rounds in the target. Just watch the sights and see what they do. The point is to get my brain to learn what that sight picture should look like. Splits in all my shooting (not just this drill) were coming in the 0.18 to 0.22 range, so that’s certainly improved, and I started to burn it into my brain what that sight picture should look like. Will still need a lot of range time to really ingrain it, but I’m starting to rewire my brain.

All in all, I’m pleased to see some improvement. I do still need to work on all of these things, including those fundamentals of reacting quicker to the timer beep, getting the gun out and first shot off (getting my eyes switched from target to front sight sooner, finger working the trigger sooner). A 1 second concealment draw (beep, rip shirt, draw, first shot) would be a great goal to achieve (and not a “gaming” IDPA concealment draw… I’m talking real-world, how I carry every day).

All good. Still much work to do. But, I didn’t want to spend hours there working on me because…..

Daughter’s Fun

Daughter came with me today. She’s been helping me almost every time I’m at the reloading bench, so she wanted to go with to see how all this chronographing stuff worked. And of course, get some trigger time herself.

Main thing we did was work with the Buck Mark .22. I set my cardboard at 10 yards and stapled 3 6″ paper plates in a “stop light” column on the cardboard. We started out just working on sight picture, then trigger control, tweaking her grip and stance along the way. She understands the notion of a “high grip” but a couple of times she got a little too high with her thumbs and the slide bit her. 🙂

After she reestablished her fundamentals, I had her try moving from plate to plate. Then a round of going a little faster (about 1 shot a second). Then a round of trying to put everything through the same hole. I tell you… when she did that? Her first 2/3rds of the magazine went great, but then I could tell her arms were peeding out so the last few shots dropped. Still, little girl is a pretty decent shot.

Take a look:

Ignore the middle target, the 9mm holes, and the .22 caliber holes not in the paper plate (the 9 holes are from me, the other .22 ones are from another gun which we learned has messed up sights… more on this later). The middle plate was full of a lot of me blazing away. So really, the 2 plates to focus on are the top and the bottom. That’s a 6″ paper plate, but that “inner circle” is 4″, and she was shooting at 10 yards.  The combination of all the shooting she did, from the slow at each plate, to moving from plate to plate, to the tight groups. I know you can’t see how each string fared, but little girl did good. She’s not yet Julie Golob, but so long as she’s improving and having fun, all that matters.

Anyway, twas a good morning at the range. I’ll have more numbers later.

Such a fine time was had

/ hsoi

I had a wonderful time last night.

Due to typing in the same programming circles so many years ago (over a decade?), I met a gentleman named Rainer Brockerhoff. We met in person some long time ago at an Apple WorldWide Developer Conference event, have seen each other at various WWDC’s over the years, and have certainly stayed in touch due to the magic of modern technology.

But the past week was a treat. You see, Rainer and his wife often travel together and so this time the plan was to come to WWDC then visit Texas. Last week they came to Austin for a bit and while my schedule was busy I made time to see them for lunch because I had no idea when another such opportunity would come — especially to finally meet his wife after all these years. Folks, she’s a charming and lovely woman and my only regret was that my Wife didn’t get a chance to meet her.

Well, life works out in fun ways sometimes. It seems the Texas heat is far too oppressive and it’s not making for an enjoyable trip, so they’re going to head home early. Due to the way things worked out, they were able to come back to Austin last night. This tells you what a great wife I have because she took it all in stride to get the house in order and prepare a nice dinner for a couple of people she’s never met before. (thank you, honey!). Rainer and his wife came over, we shared dinner and many wonderful stories. Rainer taught the children how to make some paper cutouts (he’s quite good). We all got to drool over his new iPad. Quite a wonderful time, and I’m so happy that our wives got to meet each other.

Life is full of fantastic opportunities, and sometimes it’s best when you just roll with what you’re given. 🙂

Thoughts from Class 8 – Me

/ hsoi

The last BP2/DPS1 class I helped with at KR Training generated a bunch of thoughts in my head. I thought I’d make a small series out of it.

Me

One thing I enjoy about teaching is helping others. One thing I’ve come to learn about myself, it’s that I’ve apparently got some knack for teaching. So I just go with that, and yes, I really like helping folks, especially beginners.

But I must admit. When I teach, I learn a lot myself. It’s probably a big reason why I enjoy going out to KR Training and helping with classes: it’s an opportunity for myself to grow.

I do not attest to being any sort of guru when it comes to well… any subject. Another thing I’ve learned in life is that the more I learn, I realize how little I truly know.

The things I write on this blog? I don’t write it as any sort of authority. I’m just some guy that happens to have a keyboard and Internet access, and for some reason feels a desire to write. For whatever reason, you feel a desire to read what I write. Thank you for it. 🙂

Just note that anything I do write, it comes from sharing what I’ve learned, and how I’m still learning. Many of these “thoughts from class” aren’t so much being written to help you as they are me writing to help myself. I still need a lot of work on my shooting skills. I need to remind myself of a lot of these very things. I’m still trying to grow, trying to improve myself. Still finding my own imperfections and deficiencies and working on them.

My stance on things may change as I learn more and experience more. Very little is gospel. But it’s all just part of the journey, and I guess this is all just sharing the experiences I have and the thoughts in my head… a way for me to remember, a way for me to be accountable, and hey… it’s just fun to write.

But I ask you, kind reader. While I may share “thoughts”, please… smack me if I ever use the word “musings”. 😉

Range Trip

/ hsoi / 4 Comments

It’s been far too long since my last range trip. Weather, life, things get in the way. I dream of having my own private range just outside my  backdoor. Working on that, but it’s going take years. But I digress.

I went to the Austin Rifle Club with Oldest today. Here’s a report.

Me

For the longest time I’ve wanted to shoot these drills. So I figured, why not today. I actually didn’t shoot them all, only the first two groups. Reason is, as I was going along, patterns quickly emerged and my issues were made most evident. So after shooting those I just did a bunch of Bill Drills and everything remained. So what was my issue?

First, the draw. I’m decent at getting concealment out of the way, gun out, and on target. But what was I doing wrong? I wasn’t getting on the trigger soon enough. I would draw, gun out there, then on the trigger. Too much time wasted. But it wasn’t just a matter of the trigger finger, it was also a matter of my eyes. My eyes want to see this proper sight picture, even at 3 yards. But at 3 yards there’s a different amount of what you need to see (read Brian Enos’ book), so really I can and should be getting on things sooner and just trusting myself as to the amount that I actually need to see. So after hearing the start buzzer until my first shot, I was slower than I should be. When I pushed myself I did better but there was some cognitive dissonance because my brain was saying “what you’re seeing isn’t right!”  I just have to work to get over it.

Second, I had good cadence in my Bill Drills, but the split times were not where I wanted them to be. So again I pushed myself faster. I got a little sloppier (i.e. all 6 shots weren’t in the A-Zone, or were wildly spread throughout the A-Zone), I shaved almost a tenth of a second off my split times. But I wasn’t as consistent. But I also know this was truly the place where my eyes were hating it. I know I was slower before because I was always working to get that proper sight picture, not the “good enough” sight picture.

So the key things for me are:

  1. Continuing to work on getting on the trigger sooner.
  2. Allowing myself to have something other than the “perfect sight picture”. That I have the “good enough” sight picture for the distance I’m shooting at.

I can work on the trigger in dry practice. The other will require a lot more live practice. In that, what I’m going to have to do is just shoot faster and see what I see. I have to get my eyes used to seeing whatever they see for that fast and accurate shot so they can start to say “OK, THAT is a normal sight picture for this distance”.

I also started my practice and ended my practice doing slow groups at 25 yards. That’s a good thing, and I need to make that habit for every live fire practice I do.

Anyway, didn’t have to blow through a lot of ammo today to get what I needed to get. So, this was all good. Aside: I was shooting my reloads and about 5 of my first set didn’t want to go bang. The primer would dent, but nothing happened. I’d load and shoot them again and sure enough bang… but I don’t know why these were problematic. Had no problems after those in that one magazine. Not sure what gave. I’m almost through my stockpile of stuff loaded with Berry’s bullets (probably next range trip I’ll be done and into shooting the Precision Delta’s).

Trigger Job

That trigger job? Ran about 50 rounds through the gun, slow and fast. Ran like a champ. Yes, the trigger feels slightly different from the first trigger job, but it’s still pretty good. Needs a few hundred more rounds before I’ll say it’s reliable, but so far so good. I didn’t want to spend too much time on my things because I wanted to give Oldest some time.

Oldest and the Buckmark

Oldest loves shooting that Buckmark. We set up 3 6″ paper plates at 10 yards, stacked in a column. He started with some slow fire on them. I eventually had him try moving between the targets, so shoot at the bottom, then shoot at the middle, then the top one, then the middle one, and so on until the magazine was dry. He liked that. I also had him work on trigger reset and steady cadence. He had a lot of fun and he’s improving. Still not drilling a single ragged hole, but things are tighter than before and he’s getting better in his stance, grip, trigger, and other things. I think we may need to work on sights a bit, but so long as he’s enjoying it and improving, that’s all that matters.

The 6.8

So remember how the last time I took the 6.8 rifle out it shot like shit? I haven’t touched the thing until today.

First, I wanted to recheck the zero. I set up a target at 100 yards. Oldest spotted me. There was a bit of a breeze, but still I grouped about 1.5″ at 100 yards, just to the left of and slightly above center. Good enough for me given the conditions. I hadn’t adjusted a thing since the hunt. So why in the world did I miss so badly at the hunt? Who knows. Maybe I screwed up in figuring out the holdovers. Maybe there was some cosmic destiny to get me to shoot a buffalo (because if I had nailed the deer I’d be eating venison, not buffalo). Who the heck knows. I’m going to chalk it up to me screwing up somewhere (or cosmic destiny). I do plan to take the rifle to the local indoor range and try it out again at 100, 50, and 25 yards to try to get another bead on things. I am also giving thought to changing the zero from POA=POI @ 100 yards to maybe a 50 yard zero or something like 1.5″ high at 100. Something like a RIBZ for 6.8 that would allow me to put the crosshairs center on whatever I want to shoot from 0 to 200 yards and get it within 2″ on either side of that center. Have to do some math.

Second, I wanted Oldest to shoot it. Getting the 6.8 was motivated in large part to have something more manageable for the kids to shoot. Plus, Oldest recently has expressed more interest in going hunting, but he’s gotta shoot something bigger than that Ruger 10/22 if he’s going to do that. In the past he’s expressed the noise as the reason for not wanting to shoot bigger stuff, but he was willing to give it a go.

He only shot 5 shots, but that was enough. He said the noise actually wasn’t too bad, but the recoil surprised him a bit. That’s understandable given it’s the first time he’s ever felt anything like that. He shot off the bench at 100 yards (since we were already on Range “C”) and he was able to get his shots on paper in an 8″ circle, tho certainly at the edge of that circle. For a first time? I’ll take it. I think what he needs is some dry practice to get used to the notion of rifles, plus some work back with the Ruger 10/22 to deal with rifle shooting technique (e.g. inhale, hold it, break the shot, exhale). Adding ear plugs to the ear muffs may help too. I also need to start looking at reloading 6.8 so I can have some inexpensive (relatively speaking) plinking rounds.

Sum

So, it was a good day at the range. I learned what I need to work on. I got to try out the trigger job. I got to check on the 6.8. Oldest got to do some shooting and try out a bigger rifle. And we got to spend time together (and have Sonic for lunch!).

Good times.