Ruger clones the Glock 19

The big announcement rolling out today is that Ruger is making a Glock clone. There’s nothing outstanding about the features, so the real news is that it’s based on a self-contained fire-control group that can be mounted in a variety of frames, similar to the Sig P-320 and P-365, with the initial frame coming from a partnership with Magpul. (and the first replacement frame listed is $40 with mag release and springs pre-installed)

The pitch here seems to be that you can get a Ruger-made Gen3 G19 for around $200 less than a new one from Glock, and it’s optics-ready with co-witnessing night sights, and people will quickly get the specs up for 3D-printing your own. Not for me, thanks. I’d rather see an update to the fully-ambidextrous American Duty pistol.

(I really wish Ruger’s design teams would share some ergonomic concepts and/or parts; it often feels like they don’t even talk to each other)

Unrelated Escape Key

Amazon keeps recommending this to me, despite the lack of a catgirl on the cover:

Shangri-La Frontier 2, episode 9

Back in the saddle again, as Our Half-Clad Hero picks Our Lonely White Rabbit’s tiny little brain about the competition, before setting out to meet up with last week’s $OPPONENTS who have a line on a new boss quest. Fortunately Our Awesome Chocolate Bunny catches him in time to deliver her masterpiece.

The meetup’s halfway across the continent, so he needs an experienced partner to help him get to the church on time and calls on Our Giant Armored Lovestruck Maiden, who is so thrilled at the chance for a virtual play-date that she dissolves into a puddle of hormones. Y’know, if he ever figures out that “Psyger-0” (who will soon ask him to pronounce the “0” as “rei”) is the pretty classmate “Saiga Rei” that he briefly met in the first season, they could actually… (this has not happened as of manga volume 18) never mind.

Verdict: the next boss is underwater, so they’d better get kraken!

(Our Briefly-Excited White Rabbit will not be joining him for this cross-country race)

Bluray, Molested

Apparently the official release date for the Ultra-Gushing Bluray was the 3rd. Amazon listed it as the 13th, but delivered my pre-order today. No complaints; I’ll be “reviewing” it soon.

Byrna LE “less-lethal” .68 caliber pistol

A while back, people realized that A) paintball gaming had produced a wide variety of reliable CO2-powered projectile launchers, and B) you could fill the balls with the active ingredient of pepper spray, producing C) self-defense products that are less restricted than firearms. Byrna is one of the companies working in this space, and just finished a highly-successful Black Friday sale, selling in the neighborhood of 70,000 launchers pistols over the weekend.

The two models they currently sell are actually the same frame, with the larger, more powerful LE being the SD plus the optional 12-gram CO2 adapter. This means that they have exactly the same trigger, sights, and ambi safety, and the only difference is velocity and barrel length. They can be considered DA/SA pistols, since the first shot punctures the CO2 cartridge when you pull the trigger, which they say is patented but at least one other company does it, too.

For “reasons”, I picked up the LE in the sale and set up a backstop in the basement consisting of a cheap moving blanket taped to a stack of moving boxes stuffed with bubble wrap and packing paper (why, yes, I do have a lot of stuff left over from the cross-country move!). I do not have any of the OC pepper balls (not that I’d shoot them in the basement…), just the supplied hard plastic “kinetic” balls from the kit, and the first shot at 20 feet buried the ball in the cardboard, leaving just a bit of color showing through the puckered blanket.

The second shot bounced off the first one and rolled past me. The rest of the 5-shot magazine was just as accurate. Cheaper third-party .68-cal balls worked fine as well, and being bright yellow were easier to find as they rolled away. I got ~32 shots out of a single 12-gram CO2 cartridge; the last 10 or so were obviously less powerful, but at that range they were still pretty close to the others.

File under complete bullshit the claim that “The Byrna is roughly the size of a compact 9mm handgun.” Nope, this sucker is as big as a full-sized duty pistol and significantly thicker, including the blocky grip. Here it is side-by-side with a Smith&Wesson M&P 2.0 in .45 ACP (yes, they’re even wearing the same cheap laser sight, which was another Amazon Black Friday deal):

gun-pr0n

(Byrna on the left in the last pic, obviously)

(classical reference)

On-call alerts interfered with my plans to make it to the range on Sunday or Monday, but I snuck out of the house on Tuesday with four pistols and 317 rounds of ammo, and gave my new split-prescription safety glasses a quick test.

That is:

Bifocals (1):
    OD SPH -100 CYL -050 AXIS 90
    OS SPH -125 CYL -075 AXIS 60
    NV-ADD +225

Computer (2):
    OD SPH +025 CYL -050 AXIS 90
    OS SPH  000 CYL -075 AXIS 60

Shooting (left eye dominant):
    OD SPH -100 CYL -050 AXIS 90 (1)
    OS SPH  000 CYL -075 AXIS 60 (2)

I picked a variety of sights, including basic black, and all of them were in crisp focus against the fuzzy black target 20 yards away. I hardly noticed the switch between eyes when focusing at different distances, and my grouping was much better than last trip.

Next trip, I’ll take the ones where I’ve barely been able to locate the front sights for years; it sucks getting older.

(317 rounds may sound oddly precise, but I’d pre-loaded a bunch of magazines at home: 5x 10-round .22LR, 4x 17-round 9mm, 2x 11-round 9mm, 5x 15-round 9mm, 2x 15-round .45ACP, 4x 18-round .45ACP)

JMB/GG meetup

Gaston Glock has died, after a very full and successful life. I picture him meeting up with John Moses Browning in the afterlife and getting along just fine. Unlike many of their fans in this life. 😁

Purah Explains It All

Maplestar has promised a sequel to that Purah video by the end of the year. Clock’s ticking… [Update: January 4th!]

McPharmacist & Waifu & Sister, Too

The new trailer for season two makes it clear that Ruti loves Red in a completely inappropriate way. So whatever happens with the new hero-dick, they’ve got that going for them.

(wrong waifu, but I doubt I’ll get complaints…)

Dungeon Drops, episode 3

In which Our Hero’s Reward arrives with a bang, Our Perfect Wife has a dark side, Our Service Bunny comes to the rescue, Our Busty Receptionist gets stood up receptionist-zoned again, and again, and Our Heroes save the day with the power of power-leveling. The days are just packed.

Verdict: Emily is not only the perfect wife, she’s also Hoihoi-san.

(service-with-a-smile bunnies are unrelated)

Reminder: Sunday is NieR day!

The final four episodes are being released all at once. Fingers crossed for 2B-service.

ST:SNW, season 2 episodes 5-6

So, the reason that Captain Pike is frequently absent this season turns out to be Anson Mount’s paternity leave.

Anyway, I couldn’t make it through episode 5; they just kept piling on the cringe. Remember how in the original Star Trek, T’pring was a stone-cold bitch, while so far in this show she’s been an awesome sexy Vulcan fiancée? Yeah, apparently even alien girls turn into their mothers, and T’pring’s mom put the final nail in the coffin for me. Yes, she’s supposed to be like that; no, I don’t want to watch her humiliate every man within reach.

As for episode 6, while it picks up a few threads in the ongoing romances and feuds, the main focus is on introducing Uhura to Kirk and starting to build friendship and trust that would come in handy if they were ever to, y’know, serve together on the Enterprise. Ending the episode by introducing Kirk to Spock for the first time was icing on the cake.

Verdict: a decent recovery from episode 5, with Pike really demonstrating his faith in Uhura’s judgment.

(unrelated, but how often does Sukabu post new stuff these days?)

Work In Progress

One of the annoying little flaws with the S&W CSX as a carry gun is that the 12-round extended magazine is A) still too short to get my pinky on and B) comes with a loose-fitting spacer that simply does not stay put that also C) has no texturing on the front or sides to improve your grip. My short-term fix was gaffer tape, which neatly solved B and C, but still left my pinky unable to really contribute to my grip.

So I decided to 3D-print a replacement. Making a tighter spacer is easy, and with some cleverness to handle the unsupported overhangs, could even be done in TPU. But as I got into it, including checking out this pinky extension baseplate, I decided to just make my own baseplate from scratch. Among other things, the linked design only fits correctly on the original 10-round magazine.

After making working models for both, I decided to strip it down to the bare minimum, so I could freely shape the exterior to match the frame and build back up in multiple variations. In OpenSCAD, of course, although now that my sister’s in charge of global events for Autodesk…

Fun fact: one of my 12-round mags loads the last round really tightly; naturally, it’s the one I chose to do my early testing with, and that’s an hour of my life I want back.

Next up, adding the pinky extension and the tail (as seen in the factory spacer).

(this is my first time trying out fuzzy skin in Bambu Studio (forked from PrusaSlicer); I like it for this application, although I really wish you could choose the surface to apply it to rather than having to generate modifier objects to toggle it on and off)

Sigh, public shooting ranges…

I was at the local indoor range, and the first thing that annoyed me was that they put me next to a guy who was shooting a .308 rifle with a compensator. Fortunately he left just as I finished setting up, because the pressure wave was rather intense. (his shots were decently grouped, but given that he was shooting at only 25 yards, from the bench, they ought to be!)

The second was more sad than annoying. Young guy in the next lane with a spiffy gun-case backback that held five semi-automatic pistols. None of which he could shoot a recognizable group with at 7 yards. By comparison, I was embarrassed to have a target with some holes outside the 4-inch Shoot-N-C paster at that distance. (my excuse is that I hadn’t shot my Walther PPK/S in about ten years, and I can no longer see its front sight at all; also, it really hates flat-nosed bullets)

The real annoyance, though, was just how poorly S&B .22 LR works in my Sig P322. I knew it was crap ammo when I bought it back during Obama’s first term, but this was the first time I’d seen the stuff not only fail to feed, but bend the bullet nearly 45 degrees. It must be pure lead.

Speaking of annoyances,

I finally broke down and called the 800 number for “Cold War Patriots” and asked them to stop spamming my (physical) mailbox with solicitations for benefits that I am not eligible for, given that I’ve never worked in any relevant industry. They must have bought the cheapest mailing list in the business.

(mind you, I’m not convinced that they’re actually in the health-care business rather than the insurance-fraud business, but in either case they’re sending their solicitations to the wrong guy; it’s like when AARP started trying to get me to join their Democrat PAC senior citizen org when I turned 30)

Not the recommended shot placement, but…

Police in Centerville, Ohio were recently called to an apparent break-in in progress. Before they arrived, the 911 call recorded a single gunshot. They found the intruder face-down on the carpet, dead from a single shot to the head.

They also found an unconscious woman in the front yard, and recently confirmed that she arrived in the same suspicious vehicle that was parked on the street for over an hour before the incident.

No photos of either person have been released after several days. Could it be… aliens?

(pretty sure this airsoft revolver can’t use those magazines…)

On that note,

I’ve never owned a SIG pistol, because for a long time they were all built with right-hand-only thumb safeties, and they were a touch pricey. Now their prices are quite competitive, and if they have manual safeties at all they’re ambi, and I can get 25% off on pretty much their entire line, but I… don’t really have any openings they might fit.

(the P322 has some potential, with its 20 and 25-round magazines, but I like the longer barrel and target trigger on my Browning Buckmark; and I’d only buy an MPX if I had local far-left friends I needed to piss off, and I could do that with just a picture of this thing)

…as opposed to the more common not safe from Alec Baldwin.

Bond has announced a .45-70 derringer, with the “bonus” of being able to swap barrels and shoot .44 Magnum, .454 Casull, or .50 AE. I have no desire to shoot any of these calibers from a large heavy revolver, much less a pocket-rocket derringer. Years ago I shot a derringer in .45 ACP, and I remember three things from the experience:

1. the recoil twisted the tiny little grip in my hand so that it was pointing about 45° to the side after the first shot.

2. the recoil also undid the latch so that the second shot would have wrecked my hand if I hadn’t checked it.

3. the fireball of still-burning powder was more dangerous than the bullet out to at least six feet.

(the owner insisted it was nearly impossible to hit the paper at 21 feet, and got quiet when I managed to put both shots into the black about four inches apart; you run into a lot of people at public ranges who blame the gun for their poor shooting)

Amusing gun review

I was idly browsing through guns.com and ended up looking at the Taurus 9mm 1911 (one of the few that has an ambi safety), and the first review reads, in its entirety:

The pistol was much larger than expected. I need to return it.

This is a full-sized steel 1911-pattern pistol with a five-inch barrel. What did this person think they were buying?

Twitterific!

Old Twitter: reverts to non-chronological order on every new browser session.

New Twitter: reverts to non-chronological order on every page refresh, which it does whenever it decides you’ve been away for a while.

Unrelated,

I have no idea how an update to the Mac version of Microsoft Edge force-enabled the execrable “dark mode”, something that can only be disabled by toggling a button through a magic URL: edge://flags/#enable-force-dark

He went back inside and got his other gun out of the hallway closet. It was a forty-four with grips and safety configured for a right-handed shooter. The cylinder also opened on the left side. Bosch couldn’t use it because he was left-handed.

I realize I’m 25 years late on this small but entertaining sample of “mystery-writer gun-writing”, but when my sister was out here for the holiday weekend, she mentioned that she really liked the series of novels she’d been reading recently on her constant international flights, about an LA detective named Bosch.

“Oh”, I said, “like in the series on Amazon Prime?”

“There’s a series?!”

We ended up bingeing the first two seasons. She downloaded the other two to her iPad before heading out of the country again.

Having noticed my interest, a few days ago Amazon flagged a low price on the Kindle edition of 5 of the early novels, plus the first in a related series. Annoyingly, the discount was on books 1, 5, 6, 7, and 8, but at least books 2-4 were under my $10 cutoff, and the average price came to $5.75 for all eight.

Skipping down the page a bit, we get to:

And he could have taken it to a gunsmith and had it reconfigured for left-handed use, …

When applied to a double-action revolver, this statement is roughly equivalent to “jack up the license plates and change the car”. Harry Bosch would need more than a homicide detective’s salary to find a pistolsmith who could transpaw a .44 revolver.

Left-handed revolvers do exist, today, but any left-handed cop back in the days before semi-autos took over the market got the standard model, and built up muscle memory on how to reload it quickly.

(and, no, this is not like the very-right-handed target grips you sometimes see; Harry got it from someone who hoped he’d use it to kill bad guys, and he puts it into his standard carry holster specifically so he has something to hand over before crossing the border into Mexico)

(update: …and the cop at the border smirks at him when he sees Bosch sign the form with his left hand after turning in a right-handed gun, sigh. Fortunately, none of these details are actually important to the story; it’s just a bit of flavor text to establish that a cop can easily work the system and manage to be armed in Mexico)