After some judicious polishing, I was able to get the trigger pull of the Taurus 82 under 20 pounds. Right now it’s about 15 in DA and 6 in SA, which is about what I’d expect from a factory S&W revolver.
Celebrate diversity
Top row, left to right: two Magtech .38 Special 158 grain LSWC; two DoubleTap .38 Special +P 158 grain hardcast LSWC; two Federal .357 Magnum 158 grain JSP.
Bottom row, left to right: two Federal .38 Special 158 grain LRN, two Federal Gold Medal 148 grain full WC.
All of these rounds could be fired from one gun; while revolvers may be old, their ability to perform many roles from self defense, hunting, and target shooting, is hard to match in a semi-auto pistol.
Ruger Vaquero 5.5 inch .357 Magnum
An ideal choice for when you want to reenact your favorite westerns but don’t want to pay that .45 Colt premium.
Hornady Critical Defense .357 Magnum ballistic gel test
Penetrated over 16 inches, expanded to 0.60. Basically, it did everything you’d expect a modern defensive JHP to do. This is what I carry in my .357 revolvers.
So pretty
Taylor’s & Co makes some really lovely looking guns.
Why the culture of “me first” is spreading Ebola
I get that blaming Obama is the cool thing to do, but what about blaming the people who are actually doing dumb stuff? I mean, that nurse got a plane knowing she had a fever and had been in contact with an Ebola patient. That’s stupid, and she knowingly endangered hundreds of people. Now some clinical worker is on a damn cruise ship, and even though it’s a low risk person, COME ON YOU WENT ON A CRUISE.
And finally, US patient zero. A foreign national who concealed his disease and brought an incredibly dangerous disease to this country for the first time.
The selfishness all these people have displayed is absolutely mind boggling. Some things are more important than your friend’s wedding, your cruise vacation, or yes even seeing your family one last time before you die. A part of individual responsibility is sometimes giving up what you want to do because it’s in the best interests of the people around you. But thanks to people’s selfishness, hundreds of people have potentially been exposed to a deadly virus.
That’s what really bugs me about this. We know that it takes about 3 weeks for the virus to manifest its symptoms, and a healthcare worker of all people should know that. So you put your life on pause for three weeks, and then if you don’t have any symptoms you move on. But that was two much to ask. Three weeks would have meant missing a friend’s wedding or a Caribbean cruise! It’s insanity.
Good work, jerks.bOkay now you can all resume blaming Obama.
The mind of a violent criminal
You probably have not heard the name James Broadnax before. I first learned of his name when the press covered a double murder that took place outside of a recording studio in Texas. Mr. Broadnax and his two accomplices were pulled over in the 1995 Ford Crown Victoria they had stolen from the two murder victims. When the police noticed the wrong plate on the vehicle and ran a check on it, the VIN tied back to the murders.
Here is an interview that Mr. Broadnax did with a TV reporter about the murders he committed. The language you will see in this video is not G rated…but neither is double murder. You’re hearing the unfiltered thoughts of the kind of man who will murder two people in cold blood. Jailhouse interviews with killers are nothing new, of course, but you usually see them done with the more exotic Ted Bundy style serial killers. You don’t often see interviews like this one showing up on those “investigative journalism” shows.
That’s not good fodder for  network crime dramas…not enough twists and turns to the story, no room for heroic struggle, no exotic ritualistic habits by the killer. It’s too simple for all of that: Couple of dudes with relatively minor criminal rap sheets get up, smoke up, get on public transportation and go find somebody to rob. Then for no reason the trigger man moves from robbery to double murder…just because he can.
You can sense the reporter’s struggle with this. She expects Mr. Broadnax to mention something that the victims must have done to provoke his violent outburst, but there was nothing. He spotted Matthew Butler and Steve Swann, strikes up a conversation, asked them for a cigarette, and then shot them both in the head multiple times. The reporter asks him a simple question: Why? I want you to pause the video at 55 seconds and take a hard look at the smile he gives in response to that question.
The reporter, likely what we would consider a “normal” person wants to know why, and he thinks it’s funny. One of his accomplices didn’t seem to be quite so jovial about it:
He didn’t mean any harm, you see…he just set out that day to rob somebody. Just little ol’ robbery, not capital murder. Isn’t it amazing to watch a guy try to downplay a violent felony he intended to commit by insisting he didn’t intend to commit another violent felony? Â This despite the fact that, having watched his cousin blow the two victims to kingdom come, he proceeded to shake down the bodies to see what he could get off of them. Oops! They’re dead! Quick, check their pockets!
As I said earlier, you won’t see this kind of story on Dateline or as a storyline on Law and Order. Because it’s too common. The majority of violent crime in this country is perpetrated by people like Mr. Broadnax. The story arc is depressingly simple. Dude smokes/injects something, goes out hunting, and casually shatters people’s lives. Like it’s nothing…because to him, it really is nothing. This same basic pattern of fact can be matched up to countless other acts of violence. Hell, you could take the stories written about Mr. Broadnax’s crime, wipe out a few specifics and play the most depressing game of Mad Libs ever with at least 1/2 the murder stories that get any news coverage.
Lots of folks interested in the topic of self defense wonder what sort of threat they need to prepare for. Well, here you go. Guys like Mr. Broadnax walking around breathing free air do most of the dirt that gets done. Unlike Mr. Broadnax, though, the majority of them don’t catch the death penalty for the violent crimes they commit.
There, ladies and gentlemen, is the guy who is going to hurt you. Kill you. He’ll do it like it’s nothing. He’ll do it over nothing. And he will grin about literally blowing your head off afterwards. Because, to quote Mr. Broadnax “…better they[sic] life than mine.” Of course, Matthew Butler and Steve Swann posed no threat to Mr. Broadnax whatsoever, but that’s beside the point.
And what about the families of the men he murdered?
“***CENSORED*** they[sic] family too. Both of them.”
Remember: I’m not making this up. There really are guys out there who will kill you in cold blood and then, given the chance, would spit in the face of your grieving family. The judicial system seems incapable of keeping them from committing such crimes. The police, try though they might, rarely ever get there in time to stop them from carrying out acts of violence. Judges and bailiffs can’t even keep these guys quiet enough to let families make an impact statement during the sentencing phase of a trial.
Prepare accordingly.
Don’t give up your revolvers
Revolvers, my favorite tool for self-defense and competition, are obsolete. It’s something I’ve touched on in the past, but the fact of the matter is that for practical self-defense concerns, anything you can do with a wheelgun you can likely do better and easier with a modern semi-auto pistol.
My favorite revolver, the Ruger GP100 is a gun I’ve been carrying for a considerable amount of time now. I like carrying it; and because I actually enjoy shooting revolvers, I’m far more likely to actually train with a revolver than I am a semi-auto. However the reality is that my GP100 weighs about 1,000 pounds, holds a third of the rounds that a similarly sized semi-auto carries, and doesn’t really offer that much more in ballistic advantages. Sure, I can load it up with 200 grain hardcast bullets, but there aren’t a lot of bears wandering around the streets of Sioux Falls, SD.
So while the full size K and L frames, or the Speed Sixes and GP100s may not have as much to offer as they used to, where does the revolver still shine? For regular folk. See, I tend to associate with serious shooters – people who make the shooting sports either their career or their central hobby. Serious enthusiasts, .mil folks, and LE officers dedicated to the craft are going to have an entirely different performance envelope in mind than someone whose primary hobby is skiing, but also wants a gun for self defense.
Now before you people hang me for trotting out the old “just get a J-frame” saw, that’s not what I’m doing. It’s the 21st century, and “just get a J-frame” should be replaced in every possible instance with “just get a Glock 19.” But there’s something to be said for the utility of the small, concealable revolver. Nearly everyone via cultural osmosis knows how to work it. It’s durable, reliable, and can be neglected in terms of care and maintenance and yet still function when called upon.
Yes, it has its drawbacks. It really is the weapon of an expert, because it’s difficult to shoot, has tiny sights, a heavy trigger, it’s impossible to reload quickly for an amatuer, doesn’t carry a lot of rounds and is either too big and heavy for pocket carry or too light for sustainable practice.
But most people aren’t going to practice. Most people who want a gun just want something to stick in their night stand and maybe carry “when they go to a bad neighborhood” – so for those people I say “get a revolver.” In fact, I want all of those people to buy revolvers, and here’s why: in 6-18 months when they need some kind of cash, they’ll sell that revolver, and it’ll go on the used market. Then someone like me will see a lightly used 638 for $300 bucks and go “oh hell yes I need that.”
So there you go. If you’re not really interested in the craft of marksmanship and just “want a gun” don’t buy a Glock 19. There are enough of those out there. Buy a wheelgun, so I can buy it secondhand for a steal.
Cobra!
More Cobra for the Colt fans.
The myth of the temporary wound cavity
The tissue disruption caused by a handgun bullet is limited to two mechanisms. The first, or crush mechanism is the hole that the bullet makes passing through the tissue. The second, or stretch mechanism is the temporary wound cavity formed by the tissue being driven outward in a radial direction away from the path of the bullet. Of the two, the crush mechanism is the only handgun wounding mechanism that damages tissue. To cause significant injuries to a structure within the body using a handgun, the bullet must penetrate the structure. Temporary cavity has no reliable wounding effect in elastic body tissues (emphasis added). Temporary cavitation is nothing more than a stretch of the tissues, generally no larger than 10 times the bullet diameter (in handgun calibers), and elastic tissues sustain little, if any, residual damage.
That’s from the FBI’s study of wound ballistics; and is something that everyone should bear in mind. Temporary stretch cavity is only a significant wounding mechanism in projectiles over 2000 FPS, which no handgun round is going to be able to reach. Why does this matter? Because the discussion of terminal ballistics is fraught with so much myth and nonsense that it’s very easy to lose sight of what a pistol bullet is actually doing. Remember: kinetic energy doesn’t kill, energy dump doesn’t kill, and temporary stretch cavity doesn’t kill. The only wound mechanic of a pistol bullet is the permanent crush cavity, which is the actual path of tissue destroyed by the bullet. For the crush cavity to be significant, it must damage the central nervous system, or cause sufficient blood loss to shut down the body.
Don’t believe the nonsense.