Category: Guns

Actual headline: Vermont man surrenders teaching license over assault rifle

Accurate headline: Teacher cashes doubled paychecks for a year, goes crazy when he gets caught

The FoxNews report makes it sound like he lost his job for the completely lawful act of possessing an AR-15 on his own property. If you click through to the original report, you learn that the Bushmaster the guy owned had very little to do with him getting in trouble. The stalking, felony trespass, and restraining order violations had a much bigger impact.

We’re gearing up for selling the house and moving, and my wife found some of her My Little Pony stuff.

Which reminded me of this that odball posted a while back.

So, I present to you: My Little Ponies and a Glock. Because.

By the way, if this wasn’t “a thing” before….I’m making it a thing now 😀

I was at the gun show today, mostly to watch the craziness, and I noticed something odd at the Range training school.  The had the current target used by the state of Tennessee’s CPL classes (which I believe is the standard FBI target), and next to it is what they’re claiming is the new target that will be used as of April 1st.  The new target is roughly half the size of the old target, and the guy at the table informed me that they are to have people shoot at 3 and 6 yards, and that they are going to have to keep the targets on file for 5 years (the length of the permit).

Sadly, I didn’t think to take a picture with my phone (and the show was too crowded, anyways).

I haven’t been able to find anything on the TN Dept. of Safety’s website about it, but I will be contacting them tomorrow to see if I can find more information.

Looks like the state has decided that too many people were getting their carry permits.

*update* Confirmed with another instructor that they are, indeed, making changes and that a new smaller target will be used.  He also confirmed that the new distances are 3, 5, and 7 yards with the removal of the 15 yard requirement.

Looks like a good number of the folks that are rushing out to buy guns are learning how to use them.  I’ve seen a serious up tick in the number of folks at the local ranges (to the point that I haven’t been able to try out a couple of guns I need to write reviews for), and now it comes out that people are applying for their carry licenses in droves.  Or at least according to a store that does the fingerprinting that a local news station interviewed.

For those that don’t know, to get a carry permit in this state, you have to take a class, go down to the DMV, fill out a form and pay your money, then go to a place to have your fingers printed (because apparently that’s too hard for DMV workers), then return to the DMV to turn in some paperwork, and finally wait for them to mail you your permit.  For whatever reason, the oddly named store Goin’ Postal is the only place in Williamson county (which holds a couple upper-class suburbs of Nashville) to get the finger printing done (for a small fee, of course).

According to the story, they normally do 5 or 6 a day this time of year.  Lately they’ve been doing upwards of 50… a *day*.  Interestingly enough, they are seeing a lot of young women (I’m guessing he meant 20-something when he said 20 and 21 year olds since you have to be 21 to get a permit).

This tells me two things:  1. the message that firearms aren’t just for good ol’ boys hunting is definitely alive and well around here.  A lot of women are getting into it, and not because they want to go hunt Bambi.  And 2. the idea that it’s folks that already own guns that are the only ones buying them is a complete lie (of course, we already knew that).

Hopefully our representatives in Washington will get that message as well.

At last month’s IDPA match, I cracked my 4 year old Raven Concealment Systems Phantom Holster. Back then, they were literally the only people making holsters that could handle my Glock 23 with the Insight M6 Tactical Laser on it. I think I paid $85 for it, including shipping, and got it in like 10 days.

Then, that Magpul Handgun DVD set came out with these two guys I’d never heard of both sporting RCS Phantoms. Two week lead times are a thing of the past and have been replaced with sixteen week lead times, even today.

Here is my old, cracked holster:

You can see how it happened. The original holster used the tension lever on the M6 to hold the gun in the holster. Over time, drawing and reholstering weakened the kydex until the day I reholstered into a ~20 degree Fahrenheit piece of plastic.

I hopped on RCS’s site and placed a warranty order. About two weeks later, I got the new one in the mail. I suspect that I’m not the first person to have the holster fail in this specific manner, because they’ve addressed this issue:

Other side, too:

As you can see from that picture, they now index it differently. The light is still what keeps the gun in the holster, but there’s a little “dot” that keeps the light from moving:

It’s a pretty tight mold, too. You can see the outline from the raised lettering on the light in this picture:

That being said, I don’t feel like it’s as tight a hold as the old index point. The old one may have actually been too tight, so this might be like saying “After driving an Excursion, the Suburban fells too small.”

So… after talking about things on #GBC, there’s been a few of us that have decided that there needs to be a blogger shoot in the South East.  My town seems a convenient middle ground for folks, so I’m looking around for venues and such.

One issue is I need to get an idea on how many folks would be interested.  This is still very much in the early development phases, so I don’t have any details yet (including if it’s actually going to happen), but if I’m scheduling it, it will be scheduled around the scifi cons I’m going to.

So… who’d be interested?

The Tennessean has just learned the shocking fact that there is no national gun database.  This news was so shocking to the paper, that it was on the front page of today’s newspaper.  Not the center spread, but above the fold.

Of course, this being the purely non-biased pinnacle of reporting that is the local rag, they talked about how this hampers police departments because they have to ask the ATF to ask the manufacturer where it was initially sold, then follow the trail of bound books, yada yada yada.  Of course, there’s the usual jab to the NRA for helping stop the government from creating a database.  They did throw in a throw away line about how some lawmakers “feel that the act of amassing those records would in essence go a step toward creating an artificial registration system.”  Um… no.  That would essentially be a registry.

By the way, my thoughts that there’s not database? “Good.”

Hmmm… maybe now that the local newspaper has run this story, my mom will stop asking me if it’s expensive to register all my guns… probably not.