Tommy Milner, former Remington CEO has been tapped to head up Cabelas. Meanwhile, Remington has announced that Ted Torbek, formerly of GE will be taking Tom’s place as CEO of Remington Firearms.
Congratulations to both gentlemen, and the best of luck to you in your new roles. Hopefully Tommy will be able to bring the success he had as CEO of Remington to Cabelas (and maybe bring their ammo prices down a hair).
One of the few “good” things to have come out of 9/11 was the Federal Flight Deck Officer Program, which allowed airline pilots to get training from Air Marshalls and carry issued firearms while going about the course of their duties. It wasn’t a perfect program, but it was a step up from fighting off potential hijackers with clipboards.
However, our new president is quitely doing everything he can to kill the program – a program where the officers in it have the best behavior and conduct records of any federal law enforcement service.
The 12,000 Federal Flight Deck Officers, the pilots who have been approved to carry guns, are reported to have the best behavior of any federal law enforcement agency. There are no cases where any of them has improperly brandished or used a gun.
Now, I’m not sure if this going down because the TSA is run by incompetents, or if President Obama quietly issued edicts to shut the program down, however the net result is that $2 million in funds that was to be used to approve and train new applicants has been diverted to hire “investigators” (read: Internal Affairs) that will be looking into alleged cases of “officer misconduct”, which are largely trumped up cases.
Thanks to Sebastian for the link, I have to confess I’m more than a little confused at this one. I mean, why de-fund a government program that you could have poured more money into, especially since this was one of the few successful initiatives of the Bush Administration, enjoying wide public and official support…nevermind, I suppose I answered my own question there.
ParaUSA GI Expert spotted in the wild! Hit the Radio Blog for pictures of the factory model, and links to a pretty spiffy aftermarket modified model at The Firearm Blog.
Tonight’s Gun Nuts Radio will be a little bit of a “mix and match” show. While the main topic of conversation is still going to be AHSA, we’ll be addressing other issues as well, including the fact that it is St. Patty’s day, as well as the recent news that DoD is going to be destroying all once fired brass instead of turning it around and reselling it.
As usual, to join the show live, just hit www.blogtalkradio.com/gunnuts at 9pm Eastern; if you want to call in and share your opinion on the Irish, AHSA, or the current issue with once fired DoD brass, then all you have to do is hit our call in number at (347) 539-5436.
Again, that’s tonight – 9pm Eastern time. www.blogtalkradio.com/gunnuts, be there!
In other fun news, Gun Nuts Radio is one of the “Featured” Shows right now on BlogTalkRadio. If you go to BTR’s home page and click on “Featured“, you’ll find the Gun Nuts Radio logo right there on the page for the whole world to see. I’ve been doing the show now since June of last year – that’s right, in 3 months my little pet project will be a year old. In that time, we’ve gone from having an average of 5 live listeners and 200 downloads to 100-200 live listeners per show, and an additional 2k downloads per show. I couldn’t be more proud of how this has grown in less than a year, and I need to thank our listeners, and my charming co-host for sticking with us as we pound out the rough spots.
Speaking of guns and Mexico, while reading the NRA press release in the post immediately beneath this one, I found a link to testimony from Tom Diaz of the Violence Policy Center, which was delivered at the same hearing that Chris Cox testified at.
After reading Tom’s testimony,I got the idea for a “Brady Campaign/VPC” drinking game. What you do is take testimony like what I’ve linked, and have someone read it aloud. Then, whever the person reading says one of the following words, you take a shot. Here are the “drinking” words:
Now, I should warn you – after wading through all of Tom Diaz’s “testimony”, you might want to play this game with beer shots, as there are parts of that horrible screed where you’ll get slammed with “military-style deathguns”, “cop-killers”, and then “matas policias” (cop killer in Spanish) in the span of a few seconds.
The one thing I don’t want you to miss is how deadly serious this is. The anti-gun lobby is going to use everything they can, whether it’s a civil war in Mexico, or a mass murder in the US to push their agenda. They are utterly shameless, and have no qualms whatsoever about wading in the blood of innocent victims if they feel it will help their cause.
So, by now everyone has heard the new part of the anti-gun dogma, that “American guns are fueling Mexican crime”. I’ve addressed it, others have addressed it, and now NRA has addressed it as well.
The House subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs held a hearing entitled “Money, Guns, and Drugs: Are U.S. Inputs Fueling Violence on the U.S.-Mexico Border.”
One of the people who submitted testimony for the record was Chris Cox, the Executive Director of NRA-ILA, who in his statements quite correctly pointed out that the notion that American guns are fueling the crime in Mexico is patently ludicrous.
Tomorrow (Tuesday the 17th) the Senate’s Judiciary subcommittee on Crime and Drugs will be looking into the issue of the escalating violence in Mexico as well. According to the linked NRA presser, Dianne Feinstien, senator from my former home of California, is expected to use this as an opportunity to blame American gun owners for Mexico’s history of violence, corruption, and their current civil war with the drug dealers.
As we proceed further into this administration, it’s up to us to remain vigilant for moves like this – don’t wait until the new assault weapons ban is proposed, call, write, and email your representatives now and express your opposition to any attempt to further infringe the right to keep and bear arms.
While this might be old info for some, while searching for source infomation on magazine disconnect safeties, I stumbled across some info on how to remove the Ruger SR9’s magazine disconnect safety, which I promptly posted at the Gun Nuts Radio Blog, on SR9 Magazine Disconnect Removal. If you want to shoot the SR9 in competition, or carry the gun defensively, this is a “must have” modification.
I was talking yesterday in The Conspiracy with some of the guys about magazine safeties, and why they suck so much. In my opinion, the magazine disconnect safety is a “safety device” which actually makes the gun less safe for the user and for anyone else around them. Not to pick on Ruger, but I’ll use their SR9 as my example, because it features a magazine safety and were it not for the mag disconnect safety I’d recommend the gun without hesitation.
To illustrate why mag disconnects make your gun unsafe, allow me to draw and example from competition shooting. In USPSA/IDPA shooting, at the end of each course of fire, you (the shooter) are required to “unload and show clear” – meaning that you have to demonstrate to the RO that you have an empty (cold) gun before you can holster. The range commands go roughly as follows:
The problem with a magazine disconnect safety rears its ugly head when you have to dry fire the gun – because you can’t dry fire a gun with a mag disconnect safety unless you stick a magazine in it, the “slide forward/hammer down” step requires additional manipulation of the gun beyond what you’d see with a Glock or 1911. To complete this step, after lowering the slide, you have to insert an empty magazine into the gun to dry fire it – and as an RO/SO myself, nothing cranks up the pucker factor like someone putting a magazine into a gun that’s supposed to be cold.
Now, you’re probably thinking “Caleb, what could go wrong? It’s just an empty mag, surely someone wouldn’t put a loaded mag into the gun while the slide was back and then cook a round off.” You know, I’d like to think that, but the problem is that 1) I’ve seen exactly that happen at .22 matches with a Walther P22, and I firmly believe that the most effective way to ensure that your gun is safe is to make the manual of arms as simple and straightforward as possible.
I was at a .22 only steel match once, and I saw exactly what I describe above. At the command of “slide forward and hammer down”, the shooter put a loaded .22 magazine into his P22, dropped the slide (chambering a round) and proceeded to cook a round off into the berm, scaring the beejesus out of his RO. Now, the RO should have seen the loaded mag and stopped him, but the point remains – magazine disconnect safeties add an unnecessary and potentially dangerous step to the manual of arms for both competition shooters and defensive shooters.
For people who don’t shoot competition, the mag disconnect safety is just as dangerous – because it requires you to put an ammo feeding device (magazine) into the gun when you’re dry firing. That adds an additional element of danger, because it removes the first safety step of dry fire practice, which is remove the source of ammo from the gun.
I probably could have written a much shorter post about this – however the long and short of it is that I utterly despise mag disconnect safeties. I think they’re unnecessary legal masturbation, and add an actual element of danger to the safe handling and operation of your firearm.
This previous weekend, I shot the first IDPA match of the year at Hamilton County Fish and Game. I always have fun shooting IDPA, and this was no exception. The match was six stages, all of which were very much “stand a blast” stages, with limited movement, and the lowest round count being one six round stage. All the other stages were 10 or 12 rounds, and every stage had an opportunity for me to “go fast”.
No pictures of this particular match, as it was about 10 degrees colder than I had anticipated (and I forgot the camera), however in upcoming matches you can be sure as shooting that I’m going to be doing shooter pictorials, both at HCFG and at my home range, Atlanta Conservation Club.
Back to the match, though. I shot well enough to win CDP, but I wasnn’t pleased with my performance. A cursory review of my shooting shows too many points down, and too many make up shots to get my A-zone (I know IDPA does “down zero” and not “A-zones” – ed) hits in. Of course, it’s the second match of the IDPA season, so thankfully I’ve got some time to improve. Hopefully as the season goes on, I’ll be able to tighten those points down up a little bit and get back to being both fast and accurate. Because honestly, “fast and sorta-accurate” isn’t going to put more plaques on the wall.
Pictures of the catastrophic event are at The Firearm Blog. Squib loads are hella dangerous – at the IDPA match two weekends ago, we had a shooter with multiple squibs. Luckily, the RO heard the light round go “pop”, and was able to safely call “Stop” before the shooter fired their second round.
I will say I’m somewhat impressed with the XD in this regard. I’ve seen Glocks that KB’d in the same manner as this XD with a lot more damage to the gun and to the shooter’s hand.
Squibs are dangerous, and they’re why I don’t advocate reloading while doing other activities. The TV should be off, no distractions in the room, etc when you’re reloading ammo specifically because a moment of inattentiveness can cause a best case scenario where all you do is wreck your gun, and a worst case scenario where you’re seriously injured.