Say Uncle linked to this article on improving the Glock trigger.
That’s actually a pretty good article, but I found this article describing Jeff Cooper’s “El Presidente” drill, and this article about the “Fitz Special” Colts, just a little more interesting.
I was tied up with some other things on Saturday, and didn’t make it to the Austin 2nd Amendment rally, but I welcome comments from anyone who did make it.
Happy National Buy a Gun Day. I usually extend this out to the weekend, just because it is almost impossible to get out to the gun stores during the workweek.
Lawrence suggested I blog this: guy gets 20 years in prison for selling community service hours to people on probation. The coke they found in his pocket didn’t help much, either: he got 15 years for that. (The Chron doesn’t say if the sentence runs consecutively or concurrently.)
The Astros are now 0-8. I was holding out on blogging again until they reached 0-10 (if that happened) but noting the Astros record gives me an excuse to link to this article about the 1983 team, which started out 0-9.
Edited to add 2: Darn, they finally won a game. At 1-8, that puts their winning percentage at .111, which projects out to 17.982 games over the 162 game season.
Edited to add: Tragic news out of Louisana. Production on “Steven Seagal: Lawman” has been shut down. Apparently, the sex slave charges are just too much of a distraction for the department.
Lawrence pointed me to this article over at /dev/why!?! about possible reasons why Apple doesn’t want to support Flash on the iPhone.
Meanwhile, Sebastian has a good post up on the NRA’s crappy Flash-heavy website.
And Other Brian sent me a link to this Downfall parody.
The UT Students for Concealed Carry on Campus are offering a CHL class this Saturday, April 17th.
The cost is $45, including your DPS packet, gun and ammo, range fee, notary, photo, fingerprints, and lunch.
I support and endorse KR Training; I encourage everyone to take classes from them, especially concealed carry classes. However, I realize some people are cost sensitive, so I’m passing this information along. I don’t know anything about the classes or instruction beyond what’s on the website, and you should contact them with questions.
(Hattip: Howard Nemerov.)
Edited to add: Digging a little deeper into the registration page, it looks like this offer is only open to UT facility or UT students, not the general public. (It isn’t clear to me if it also applies to non-facility staff.)
While browsing Wikipedia for unrelated reasons, I discovered that today is the 40th anniversary of the Newhall incident, which was a contributing factor in the start of the officer survival movement.
Ayoob’s summary of the incident doesn’t seem to be available online, but can be found in Ayoob Files: The Book
Edited to add: Obit watch: Wilma Mankiller, former chief of the Cherokee Nation.
Mankiller met snide remarks about her surname — a Cherokee military title — with humor, often delivering a straight-faced, “Mankiller is actually a well-earned nickname.”
…”Perhaps this will refresh your memory.” The District Attorney suddenly thrust a heavy automatic at the quiet figure on the witness stand. “Have you ever seen this before?” Walter Mitty took the gun and examined it expertly. “This is my Webley-Vickers 50.80,” he said calmly. An excited buzz ran around the courtroom. The Judge rapped for order. “You are a crack shot with any sort of firearms, I believe?” said the District Attorney, insinuatingly. “Objection!” shouted Mitty’s attorney. “We have shown that the defendant could not have fired the shot. We have shown that he wore his right arm in a sling on the night of the fourteenth of July.” Walter Mitty raised his hand briefly and the bickering attorneys were stilled. “With any known make of gun,” he said evenly, “I could have killed Gregory Fitzhurst at three hundred feet with my left hand.”
—James Thurber, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”
Back when I was a teenager in the suburbs of Houston and dinosaurs roamed the earth, I would practice “practical shooting” in my back yard. I’d spend a hour a day, two or three days a week, practicing drawing from a holster and trying to hit shotgun shells from 25 feet away. These were the glory days of the Second Chance matches
I hadn’t met Karl yet, so my ambition was to be as fast as Jeff Cooper. Or as fast as this guy:
(The curly haired guy with the shotgun is Jim Zubiena, actor and IPSC shooter. That’s not visual trickery; the fast draw is for real. And, yes, I was out of high school by the time Miami Vice came on the air. What of it?)
Anyway, stuff happens. I didn’t get my first pistol until November 7, 2000. (I remember that date for a reason.) And I didn’t shoot a formal sanctioned match until this past Saturday.
The NYT “At War” blog gives a rundown of some reasons why the Taliban are poor rifle shots.
Short summary:
(Hattip: Say Uncle.)
Thanks to a tip from someone at Tex-Guns, we have video of Rick Perry responding to the Austin gun show controversy.
(Tex-Guns is the official purveyor of fine weapons to Whipped Cream Difficulties. Remember, the right to buy weapons is the right to be free.)
Texas Gun Shows says their next show will be the 20th and 21st at the “Old Target Building” (6405 S. IH-35: Google map.)
As I recall, this is where the TGS shows were before Saxet left Austin and TGS took over the North Austin space. The TGS website does not state (as of right now) that only licensed dealers will be able to sell at the February show.
I didn’t find out about this until 6:30 PM last night, or I would have gone and covered the event for my loyal readers (all three of them; and I’m counting the guy with the tapeworm twice).
Lawrence was on me today about doing some reporting of my own on this situation; after all, the Statesman isn’t going to. (And would we really want them to, given their track record on gun issues?)
One of the reasons I haven’t done so is that Howard Nemerov is all over the story like poorly tattooed Asian MySpace dwarf slut Tia Tequila on a camera. He’s posted a followup story today. I’ll pull one key paragraph here (stuff in [brackets] I’ve added to the quote to clarify who’s who):
According to [APD Detective T.J] Vineyard, the prior tenant, Bill Mitchell, subleased to Saxet Gun Shows. When Mitchell lost his lease, Saxet apparently approached [Andrew] Perkel [of Austin Marketplace, who subleased the space from HEB and who did the booking of events] when he took over the space previously leased by Mitchell. Perkel, having previously rented another part of the building, said he was aware of the nuisance problem that began with Saxet and refused to lease to them.
There was another arrest at last weekend’s show, of an illegal alien attempting to purchase a firearm from an unlicensed dealer. Nemerov’s article has more details on this arrest as well.
And it looks like that arrest was the final straw for HEB and Austin Marketplace; the TGS website states they are looking for a new Austin location.
One aspect of this that should be explored is; why Austin? As far as I can tell, Saxet hasn’t had this kind of problem in San Antonio. (Saxet did move locations at the first of the year, but I’m not sure if that was just a matter of needing a larger venue; based on their websites, the San Antonio Event Center is larger than Freeman Coliseum.)
I wonder if this is why Saxet stopped doing gun shows in Austin:
Austin police said that last year, while assisting federal agents in combating the sale of guns to undocumented immigrants, they recorded a number of illegal transactions. The repeated offenses at the site — a former Sam’s Club location on North Lamar Boulevard — prompted police to refer the location to the department’s nuisance abatement unit, which works with owners to reduce the number of crimes on their properties.
Police officials said they met last week with representatives from H-E-B, which handles the lease of the property, and with Boedeker, during which they outlined recommendations for reducing crime at the site.
The suggestions included permitting only licensed gun dealers to sell firearms, providing private security to prevent parking lot gun sales and defining a process for people other than licensed dealers who want to sell a gun at the show.
Edited to add 1/21: Say Uncle was kind enough to link to this post along with posts by Howard Nemerov and Sebastian. Nemerov’s post in particular adds considerably more background than was reported in the Statesman. This statement caught my attention:
While TGS was not the promoter during last year’s investigation which led to a possible abatement proceeding
Also, this statement in Sebastian’s comments:
The “multiple arrests” that were the basis for a “nuisance” complaint were 12. Over 12 months. During which 12 gun shows were held.
(I’m aware of one arrest that got a lot of publicity at the time; a local boxer was arrested for having his girlfriend purchase a gun for him. I’ll see if I can dig out a link later. Edit: link here.)
The New Jersey Nets are on a pace to win a grand total of six games this season. The NBA record for futility is the 1972-1973 Philadelphia 76ers, who went 9-73. Could the Nets beat the record? The NYT speculates.
I note this only because it will fill Lawrence’s heart with delight: Frank Gehry has withdrawn from the project to design a Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem.
Saturday’s Statesman has a longish article recapping the Triton Financial story, highlighting the firm’s ties to the Mormon church.
Church members and others describe the concentration of Triton executives and investors from the Mormon church as a possible example of “affinity fraud,” in which people looking for money often go first to those they know, either personally or through social organizations.
A $1,000 iPhone app that’s not I Am Rich.
Non story of the day: U.S. Military Weapons Inscribed With Secret ‘Jesus’ Bible Codes.
I don’t think I’ve mentioned this, so; I’m back in school one night a week (and not even meeting every night on the schedule). So blogging is either going to be light or heavy as I avoid schoolwork.
Obit watch: French New Wave director Eric Rohmer. I’ll update this space with the NYT obit and anything Roger Ebert has to say, once those are posted.
Edited to add: NYT obit. Ebert appreciation.
Jayson Williams has apparently decided to plead out to an aggravated assault charge, instead of going through a retrial for killing Costas Christofi.
his personal life in shambles
I’ll have to contact some of my friends at IBM and see how that project to build a tiny violin out of xenon atoms is going.
Congrats, Warren St. John.
The Statesman has decided to share with us our local constabulary’s list of “most frequent bars for suspected drunken drivers“. I, personally, am a little bit shocked not to see my own favorite Austin bar on this list.
The Gilbert Arenas story is being well covered elsewhere, but I’d like to note that the NYT is all over this story like a hungry man on an all-you-can-eat buffet. Three stories today, in addition to yesterday’s coverage? For a non-New York team?
Firings: Jim Leavitt at the University of South Florida, who allegedly hit a player.
Breaking, by way of Lawrence Person, who provides the following:
When the GM says “Goodbye”
And everyone knows good and why
Edited to add: from the linked article, “Seattle was decimated by injuries and inconsistency and finished 5-11.” Really? The Seahawks lost one out of every ten players?
