The guy or girl who holsters a .45, or a Beretta, or a Glock, or an M&P, or a Chief’s Special five-shot revolver, for that matter, and closes the book on pistol selection can get on to the more serious business of pistol training and practice. The principle resource that satisficing can buy you is time, which is the one resource you can’t buy or produce more of, and the one resource that is ever in short supply.
If during the time you were reading the latest “stopping power” article you were instead practicing to save your life you would be far, far ahead.
You should spend far more of your time and money budgets on training and practice than on your equipment. I know this is difficult and it’s easy to run down the equipment rabbit hole but try to avoid it.—Joe]
Powder: 3.9 grains of Bullseye
Primer: WSP
OAL: 1.132
10 shots over the chronograph from 10 feet away.
Minimum velocity: 814 fps
Maximum velocity: 864 fps
Mean velocity: 838.1 fps
Standard deviation: 15.5 fps
Power Factor: 150.86
The water filled milk jug test was to determine if the bullets would expand at this relatively low velocity. The 0.401 bullet expanded to just under 0.6 and retained nearly 99% of it’s mass:
This is very good.
Brother Doug was a little worried that with the lower velocity perhaps a non-expanding bullet would be better for self defense because of the better penetration. Would it penetrate deep enough to “do the job”? I didn’t have any ordinance gelatin but my guess is that it penetrates just fine. They fully traversed three one gallon milk jugs filled with water. This is just under 18 inches of water.
I didn’t expect it would penetrate that far and for my first shot I only used two jugs for depth and put one on each side of the rear jug in case the bullet didn’t go straight after hitting the first jug:
It fully penetrated the two jugs and I was unable to find the bullet in the berm.
The second time I changed the configuration to just three jugs lined up in a row:
Again the bullet penetrated all the jugs but I found the bullet just sitting on the ground behind the jugs.
I didn’t load quite as many rounds as I expected I would this month. I have about 400 practice rounds left over from the class I took and enough match ammo such that I’m not feeling any pressure.
Saturday I went to a steel match at the Holmes Harbor Rod & Gun Club on Whidbey Island. It was raining in Bellevue when I left home but as I got on the ferry the rain had stopped, the fog was lifting, and the cloud cover was breaking up. I had forgotten my coat and was extremely pleased with the change of weather.
As is usual the stages were well done and interesting:
My .22 worked well. I had one failure to feed but other than that it was great.
My STI DVC Limited gun broke the ejector and when I took the slide off to clean it Friday night the ejector fell on the floor. The front peg had broken off flush with the frame. I didn’t have a spare ejector so I ordered an ejector, ejector pin, and a special ejector drill bit from Dawson Precision. Of course I wouldn’t have it in time for the match the next day so I had to use a backup gun. It worked fine until the fourth stage when it locked up and wouldn’t cycle. I removed the slide but couldn’t see anything wrong even though, at first, it wouldn’t work right even with the recoil spring and barrel removed. Then it started working, I put it back together and finished the stage. Then on stage five the hammer started not resetting. The first time it happened I racked the slide again and continued without incident on that string. Then on the next string it happened twice and I just thumb cocked it. It was almost as if I were shooting single action in a cowboy match—without ever practicing that way.
Yesterday I cleaned and examined my backup gun. I think the disconnector was worn so I replaced it with a spare I had. I’ll take it to the range and test it soon.
Even with the gun problems I shot well enough to win in both classes (I was the only shooter with a iron sighted rimfire pistol, so that doesn’t really count even though I had a good time):
RF-RI-O: Rimfire Rifle Optics
RF-O: Rimfire Pistol Optics
RF-I: Rimfire Iron sights
PCC-O: Pistol Caliber Carbine Optics
RF-RI-I: Rimfire Rifle Iron sights
CF-I: Centerfire Iron sights
PCC-I: Pistol Caliber Carbine Iron sights
In the video below I only included one of the better runs for each class of gun I shot on each stage except for when I shot the string cocking the hammer by hand. I edited one string of fire to included a comment from the Range Officer after I finished which Barb liked. I’m hoping this will be a more interesting video and not so long and boring. Also seeing things mostly done correctly is probably better than seeing a lot of errors.
Idaho depends more on the gun industry than any other state, according to a study by the financial website WalletHub. Idaho ranked No. 1 among states and the District of Columbia based on firearms industry activity in the state, gun ownership and overall prevalence, and gun politics — specifically, contributions by gun control and gun rights groups to members of Congress.
Do you realize that Obama has more time at the White Board diagraming Saul Alinsky’s “Rule for Radicals” than he has Trigger Time?
Bubblehead Les
February 2, 2013 Comment to Quote of the day—Sebastian
[After spending 20+ hours (about 2000 rounds in the Intensive Handgun Skills class) of “trigger time” this last weekend my mind is stuck on “trigger time”. I’m constantly amazed at how fast, and accurately, people can put lead downrange.
At Boomershoot people can and do put bullets into seven inch square targets at 700 yards on nearly every shot. I know people who can hit eight inch steel plates 25 feet away at a rate of six to seven rounds a second—with a 12 gauge shotgun! With a pistol (concealable, as opposed to a long gun) people put bullets into different eight and 12 inch circular targets from 25 feet away at the rate of two to three rounds per second. At conversation distances it’s eight to 10 rounds per second.
Every day of the week during normal wake time hours you can go to the local range here in the Seattle area and see people practicing. On the weekends and many week days you can find competitions where people hone and display their skills to levels that are mind bogglingly sharp even by my standards of being a competition shooter for over 20 years.
There are roughly 80 to 100 million gun owners in this country. That “extremist organization”, the NRA, has “more than five million members”.
People “White Board diagraming Saul Alinsky’s ‘Rule for Radicals’” as they plot to destroy our freedom don’t realize just how dangerous a fire they are playing with. As I pointed out in this post about the number of Al Qaeda members:
Since allied forces in Afghanistan haven’t “finished the job” after more than a decade against less than 1000 poorly trained and funded fighters which side do you bet on if they were fighting a few million well trained and well funded fighters? If the would-be tyrants push us too far, just how much trigger time do each of five or 10 million people, skilled with the tools of freedom, need to put an end to the threat? Do the arithmetic.—Joe]
As I mentioned a couple times before Speer makes a self-defense bullet intended for lower velocity loadings. They call it “Gold Dot® Short Barrel®”. I needed these for handgun students with difficulty handling factory loads. I loaded 301 rounds (I purchased three 100 round boxes and ended up with 301 bullets) over 3.9 grains of Bullseye and delivered 100 rounds to one of my students last Saturday.
Here is what the 180 grain bullets look like in .40 S&W:
I’m expecting a velocity of about 850 fps at the muzzle with my STI DVC (5 inch barrel). This compares to about 1025 fps with 180 grain Winchester Rangers out of the same gun. The difference in recoil is significant.
I’ll run them over a chronograph and do some water jug testing (only valid for simple expansion testing) the first chance I get.
I participated in a steel challenge match today. It was raining but there was no wind and it wasn’t very cold so with the right clothes it wasn’t bad even if looks really bad in the pictures.
Stage 1: Smoke and Hope
Stage 2: Four Corners
Stage 3: V for Victory
Stage 4: Force Awakens
When practicing recently I have been shooting my “new” .22 that I have had all the problems with for so long. As of yesterday I had shot about 500 rounds, without cleaning, with only one failure to feed near the end of the sequence. And most of that was with standard velocity ammo (the manufacturer recommends high velocity 40 grain ammo only). With that sort of success I figured I could shoot a match with CCI Mini-Mags (recommended by the manufacturer) and have complete success. The first two stages I shot (Stages 3 and 4 below) it functioned perfectly. On Stage 1 it had two failures. On the last stage I shot, Stage 2, it again worked fine. Of course it happens on the only stage used for classification purposes with SCSA.
I was the only participant in Limited division but for a Steel Challenge match Production division is very close so for comparison purpose I mentally inserted myself in the Production results which put me in second place. Again this was behind Christian.
Also of interest to me is that my centerfire gun malfunctioned with failures to eject on two rounds. One of those was, again, on Stage 1 just like with my other gun. Both guns were cleaned and lubricated the night before. Both guns had shot many hundreds of rounds without failures in the week prior. But as the RO asked when I whined about my malfunctions, “When you shot all those rounds without any failures were you shooting on the clock?” Yeah. I know. That has to be the reason. It was important to me so they malfunctioned.
Yesterday she and her husband went to the range with Barb and I. She shot a Ruger SR22* with a suppressor and did great. She shot it without the suppressor and did great. She really liked the Ruger Mark II. And she shot my gun I have had all the problems (also here) with. With about 100 rounds through it yesterday there was only one failure to feed.
Her husband tried the .40 S&W with the two different light loads. The 148 PF (in my gun, probably less in theirs) worked fine. The first round of the 131 PF loads failed to cycle but worked okay after that.
She wanted to shoot the .40 S&W. I had her shoot my gun with the lightest loads. She did fine. No nausea. And her hits stayed on target although they weren’t quit as accurate as when she shot .22s. She tried her gun with the 131 PF loads. She had nothing but failures to extract even when I had her hold the gun more rigid. Moving up to the 148 PF loads fixed the problem although the ejected shell casing just barely popped out of the ejection port. She handled it fine. And I had her shooting at silhouette targets and around corners all without difficulty before our range time was up:
I sent them home with 100 rounds of the 148 PF practice ammo. And now I’m going to load up some of the self-defense Gold Dot Short Barrel bullets in a similar load for them.
Barb handled the 131 PF loads in my gun just fine too. I might load up a few for her self-defense needs as well.
* The SR22 wouldn’t cycle when using CCI Quiet-22 ammo. But it worked great with Standard Velocity. But wow, was it ever quiet.
Last Saturday, January 23rd, I went to Whidbey Island for the steel match. It was a rainy, dreary, day as I road the ferry to the island but I had rain gear and was dressed warm enough to be comfortable.
The weather wasn’t any better at the range and we put up a canopy to keep things a little drier for our little group of die-hard shooters:
I shot my Ruger 22/45 for the iron sighted rimfire division and did okay with it.
With my STI DVC Limited gun I had changed out the sear spring and adjusted it for about 4.75 pounds of trigger pull rather than the 3.5 pounds it came from the factory with which I have never really gotten used to. It worked fine in practice and I was looking forward to using it. It worked fine some times then on other shots it had a much harder trigger pull. The pull was probably something on the order of 10 or 15 pounds. It was sometimes hard enough that my hands shook from pulling the trigger so hard to get it to fire. My times for centerfire pistol sucked.
Name
Division
Time
Steve Mooney
RF-RI-O
47.66
Steve Mooney
RF-O
57.63
Joe Huffman
RF-I
67.12
Bruce Barchenger
CF-I
91.92
Rev Barchenger
RF-O
92.36
Joe Huffman
CF-I
111.91
Jim Dunlap
RF-O
112.08
Scott Bertino
CF-I
123.44
67.12 seconds for five stages works out to an average of 3.356 seconds per five shot string. I’m okay with that.
Here are four of the five stages we shot. They started tearing down the fifth stage before I got around to taking a picture:
On January 10th I shot a steel challenge match. I took video and have been meaning to edit it and post it on YouTube but I just haven’t got to it. Virtually no one watches (40 to ~100 views each) them anyway. So I’m just going to link to the results and tell you want happened.
The overall, all divisions, results are here. There were 34 participants and I came in 11th in iron sighted rimfire pistol and 13th in iron sighted centerfire pistol. My times for the four stages were 67.80 in rimfire and 76.58 in centerfire.
I shot my new rimfire gun that I have had all the problems with. It worked fine in practice and on the first stage our squad shot (Go Hawks). Then on the second stage we shot (Focus) it started jamming again. I went back to the Ruger 22/45 for the remainder of the match.
As implied by my last post about the overloading of the NICS system I have been noticing how crowded the indoor ranges are around here. A couple weeks ago, about 2:00 PM, on a Saturday, I was stopped at the local range to practice before a match. The parking lot was full. And it’s not a small parking lot:
Every place you see parking lines, or cars, and on the street in front of the building had parked cars. I drove by the front door and looking into the lobby to see it was packed. I just drove on home.
Recently I’ve been visiting the range at lunch time and while I don’t have a problem finding a parking spot the range has been crowded. The only time it hasn’t been crowded recently was when I went to a different range (because I was in the area anyway) and it was during a Seahawks game. I was far from the only shooter in the place but it wasn’t packed.
Another item of interest is that I ordered a holster and magazine pouches from Kramer Leather yesterday. They quoted me a delivery time of seven to nine weeks.
My speculation is that it’s the threat of more gun control that has people hitting the range and the gun stores in mass again.
I’ve moved so many times in the last 10 years that many of my boxes still are unpacked. But in the last few days I’ve been making some progress. Here are some of my Insights Training certificates of achievement which I put up on the wall:
I have several others but some are in boxes and the frame glass is broken in still others. Today Barb got prices on replacement glass so those will be going up soon.
The certificate in the upper left is for Intensive Handgun Skills. The certificate is dated nearly 20 years ago, October 25-27, 1996. I signed up to repeat it on February 20-22, 2016. I figured I need a tune up after so many years.
The other day I was cleaning out a box of old stuff and I found this:
It’s some very old primers. I’m pretty sure I bought these in Moscow Idaho about 1975. This was long before I was into guns or had ever reloaded ammunition. I think I was going to use them to make an Estes rocket into some sort of missile with a “warhead” for the 4th of July. I never got around to it and all the primers are still in the package.
I found a bad primer when reloading some more ammo over the weekend:
This is the second time (out of nearly 70K rounds reloaded) I have found a bad primer. The first time was less than a year ago. Again it was a Winchester Small Pistol (WSP) but it was a different lot this time:
This primer was very obviously bad and would not have inserted into the shell casing without difficultly had I tried.
