Gun Thread: After Thanksgiving Edition!

Howdy, Y'all! Welcome to the wondrously fabulous Gun Thread! As always, I want to thank all of our regulars for being here week in and week out, and also offer a bigly Gun Thread welcome to any newcomers who may be joining us tonight. Howdy and thank you for stopping by! I hope you find our wacky conversation on the subject of guns 'n shooting both enjoyable and informative. You are always welcome to lurk in the shadows of shame, but I'd like to invite you to jump into the conversation, say howdy, and tell us what kind of shooting you like to do!

I hope you all had a nice Thanksgiving! Not much happening here post-Thanksgiving wise. Work is starting to ramp up for year-end which always seems to cut into my relaxation and Organic Tree Farming activities. I'm hoping to get down to the farm this coming weekend to take care of some neglected chores and maybe even do some shooting!

With that, step into the dojo and let's get to the gun stuff below, shall we?

Range Time
For many of us, the holidays present an opportunity for spending some quality time at the range, and if you're like your ol' pal Weasel, your friends and family are only too familiar with your "hobby" involving the shooting sports. It has always been an important tenet of WeaselDoctrine to find every opportunity for taking shooters, especially new shooters, to the range and showing them what its all about. For me, there is no greater reward than the smile on the face of someone who is connecting with a target for the first time, or perhaps working on a target at previously untried distances.

If you're able, take a new shooter or a young person to the range this season. You may just be the inspiration for a lifetime interest in shooting sports. Be prepared to pay for their range time and ammunition and keep the first trip short, say no more than 30 minutes, and stop before they become tired and lose interest. Keep it fun, which may just keep them coming back for more. For God's sake, don't go with the intent of showing off your mad .44 Magnum rapid fire skillz to Aunt Gertrude who has never handled a gun before. Nothing pisses me off more than seeing this at the range, and unfortunately it happens all too often. Instead, take along smaller and easier to shoot calibers which typically offer a greater chance of success. It's your job to make sure they have fun, and not the other way around.

I think it is especially important to work with people who do not have a long-term interest in guns or shooting as it provides an opportunity to demystify and even destigmatize some of what the gun and shooting culture is all about. Providing an introduction with basic safety and fundamental marksmanship techniques is almost always a winning combination. Afterward they may not have any interest, and that's okay. There will always be plenty of sources for anti-gun rhetoric out there, why let them have the only voice?

There's a reason why one of the many nicknames for it is "thumb buster." This example does NOT have the slicked-up action required for the gunfights you see in westerns.

The recoil using .45 Long Colt 255 grain FMJ from Precision One Ammunition is pretty mild. I tried shooting the Colt SAA one-handed at 10 and 15 yards with the results you see here. It's not Wyatt Earp accurate. But it demonstrates that shooting the Colt SAA with one hand is not a complete figment of Hollywood.

This Colt SAA still has the original (if worn and beaten up) box and the instructions from Colt. It also has a Colt letter stating that it originally shipped to a sporting goods store in Bangor, Maine, as part of a group of six in March 1956, making it one of the first "2nd Generation" Colt SAA to ship after Colt revived SAA production in 1956.

Very nice! Thank you Ed L!!

Any thoughts on doing a thread on night-shooting? This is a big and, regrettably, little-practiced concern for LEOs as around 60% of shooting encounters occur in low-light/nighttime conditions. Topics would be target identification, flashlight vs gun light, target focus/target lock, and my favorite would be illusory movement cause by cruiser lights.

At first I thought about tossing it 'as-is' into the thread for group discussion, "filler" as we professional Gun Thread writers call it, but in a rare moment of clarity it occurred to me that this was in fact a very worthwhile topic and certainly worthy of some additional work on someone else's part. So I asked Xenophon if he'd be interested in doing a write-up and he obliged with the following:

So the human eye is not so good at night stuff. We're designed for doing daylight chases of gazelles over the veldt in Africa. Once the sun goes down, we lose a lot of range (depending on ambient light), we typically lose color vision down to white/black/gray, and even if (sometimes especially if) we're using night scopes we lose depth perception BIGLY. It takes around 20 minutes or so to become dark-adapted, and a single flash (or burst of light from a particularly big muzzle flash) can disrupt that.

The solution has been brighter and 'cooler' flashlights, some you can tan with, some with strobe effect to see who has undiagnosed epilepsy. Two big problems with this. First, if you got target focus/tunnel vision before in stress situations (the mind has a tendency to focus on the threat to the exclusion of peripheral vision, so that if you're looking at one bad guy his buddy can literal walk up next to you and brain you with a brick) in daylight, it's ten times worse at night with a flashlight. Second, if you're using a gun light, you flag everything you're looking at.

Solutions to this are to mindfully keep scanning (left, right, behind), to not have the light on continuously. A light source in a kinetic situation is a big bullet magnet; bad guys and sadly, sometimes good guys will shoot at what they can see and to use various different light holds (FBI, side by side, canted, etc...) we teach an entire course on just use of light in shooting.

The other joyous challenge our mind puts on us is that in any environment when you have flashing cruiser lights, the effect of red light splashing on one side of a threat and blue on the other makes your brain think the bad guy is stepping from side to side. He's not. Aim at one, but only one, and you'll hit him.

For the folks at home, I would follow the precept of the three things a man always has (a light source, a knife, and a gun) and keep a light within reach of the bedstand, even if you have a gun light. There's a special horror at the thought of accidently hurting a family member.

The true terror of every police officer (not the cosplayer who draws a government check - there's too many of those already) is shootin' somebody who don't need shootin'. But that's a whole 'nother rant. A good, strong light source has stopped more fights and more bad stuff than I can count, believe you me.

So Xenophon raises some very good and interesting questions! I have always made a point of suggesting that shooters incorporate a variety of elements into their training rather than simply always standing in a brightly lit indoor range at 7 yards endlessly practicing the same drills. Question is, how do you add low light options? Range owners might be hesitant for getting too creative in setting up challenging scenarios for liability reasons, and buying your own outdoor range where you make the rules can get expensive. Ask me how I know.

Nevertheless, this is a great topic and one worth exploring. Thank you Xenophon! What do you all think? Any suggestions or recommendations?

The Douglas A4D Skyhawk

Cigar of the Week

This week let me suggest you take a look at the Cain Maduro 550. I typically don't like "sweet" cigars, as the linked description implies, but haven't really noticed that in this well constructed and full-bodied Nicaraguan beauty from Olivia. About $6 each online before tax and shipping.

Here is a Cigar Vixen with a humidor review.

I have had one almost identical to this (link) for several years and it runs silently does a really good job of maintaining temperature and humidity. I have even added some wireless temperature and humidity sensors to my various humidors which allow me to keep an eye on interior conditions without opening them up. I especially like the ability to set high/low alarm ranges and be notified in the event a problem develops. Very handy. Check them out!

Here are some different online cigar vendors. You will find they not only carry different brands and different lines from those brands, but also varying selections of vitolas (sizes/shapes) of given lines. It's good to have options, especially if you're looking for a specific cigar.

Cigarsinternational.com
Cigarpage.com
Famous-smoke.com
Cigarsdaily.com
Neptunecigar.com
Smallbatchcigar.com
Bobalu Cigar Company
Cigarbid.com

A note about sources. The brick & mortar/online divide exists with cigars, as with guns, and most consumer products, with respect to price. As with guns - since both are "persecuted industries", basically - I make a conscious effort to source at least some of my cigars from my local store(s). It's a small thing, but the brick & mortar segment for both guns and tobacco are precious, and worth supporting where you can. And if you're lucky enough to have a good cigar store/lounge available, they're often a good social event with many dangerous people of the sort who own scary gunz, or read smart military blogs like this one. -rhomboid

Anyone have others to include? Perhaps a small local roller who makes a cigar you like? Send me your recommendation and a link to the site!

Ammo Link-O-Rama
I'm really very seriously not kidding around anymore. Buy Ammo
AmmoSeek - online ammo search tool
GunBot - online ammo search tool
SG Ammo
Palmetto State Armory
Georgia Arms
AmmoMan
Target Sports USA
Bud's Gun Shop

This week's mailbag entry is from our pal Dr_No. Very sadly true. How about we switch these around?

Please note the new and improved protonmail account gunthread at protonmail dot com. An informal Gun Thread archive can be found HERE. Future expansion plans are in the works for the site Weasel Gun Thread. If you have a question you would like to ask Gun Thread Staff offline, just send us a note and we'll do our best to answer. If you care to share the story of your favorite firearm, send a picture with your nic and tell us what you sadly lost in the tragic canoe accident. If you would like to remain completely anonymous, just say so. Lurkers are always welcome!

That's it for this week - have you been to the range?

posted by Weasel at 07:00 PM

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