Year: 2009

Subcaliber Training

Michael Bane has an article on training with smallbore and “even airsoft guns.” I can tell you from personal experience that shooting air guns will make you a better all around shooter, and these days there’s a lot of air gun sports.   You have Action Airgun which use airsoft guns, and is a good substitute for IPSC/IDPA.  You can even compete online with this.   You also have 10 meter competition.   Then you have what I do, which is air gun silhouette.  All of them are worthwhile, and will translate to other types of shooting. Back to Michael:

The fundamentals teach us to how to control a firearm…as we add more recoil, nothing should change. In a personal defense situation, or even when the buzzer goes off in a match, you will likely not notice the recoil, the noise or the blast, and if your fundamentals are sound the bullet will go where you intended it to go.

My experience has been that a shooter who goes back to his/her duty or competition gun after a session training with .22s discovers the more powerful gun has less recoil than before (especially if that shooter has practiced extensively with full power ammo in the primary gun). Of course, the recoil didn’t miraculously go away…rather, subcaliber practice (after appropriate visualization and dry-fire) has allowed the shooter’s attention to be focused on controlling the gun through the application of the fundamentals rather than becoming fixated on the recoil, noise and flash.

Yep.  Due to the ammo shortage, and sky high prices, I am shooting larger caliber pistols hardly at all, and am shooting almost entirely smallbore and air pistols.  When, on that rare occasion, I do go to the range to shoot the Glock, my groups are tighter than they’ve ever been.  You also can’t beat range availability for air guns.  If you have a basement, you have a range.  You can shoot every day, and it costs pennies.

Related posts (automatically generated):

  1. New Shooter
  2. More on Laser Training
  3. Competitive Shooting as Police Training

Mr. C Selling a New Sight Mount

Mr. Completely is fabricating a sight mount and selling them.  They get the sight lower on the gun for less parallax.  In silhouette, competitors tend to want higher sights, since you have to lob chunks of lead farther downrange, requiring a higher arc.  But for steel shooting, like Mr. C does, it looks like it would be a pretty good sight mount!

Related posts (automatically generated):

  1. California Hunters Coping With Lead Ban
  2. Front Sight Copyright Violations?
  3. DRTV Interview on McDonald Coverage

Spitzer’s Gun Control

Michael Bane warns us of an idea by Eliot Spitzer, to regulate the firearms industry by using the government’s buying power.  The reason it won’t work is that civilians buy more guns than the government does, so the industry would be unlikely to accept regulation in exchange for government contracts.

Sure, some of the big government contractors, like Colt, might cave.  But it’s basic economics, so let me put this in terms I think the Governor could easily understand.  If all the governors and former governors got together, and decided they would only accept services from the most classy and beautiful high priced hookers, you wouldn’t expect that to eliminate the market for more lowly street walkers. The demand is there.  Someone will meet it.

Related posts (automatically generated):

  1. Waaah! Waaah!
  2. The FDA is Getting too Cautious
  3. Understanding the Shooting Industry

Florida’s Deadly Force Law

Florida is one of those states that still allows for use of deadly force in order to stop the commission of a felony, which played out in this story out of Florida:

Authorities do not plan to file charges against a Florida orange grove owner who fatally shot a 21-year-old woman, saying he is protected under the state’s controversial “no retreat” law.

But the woman’s boyfriend faces second-degree murder charges in her death, because the woman was shot to death during an alleged felony — the theft of an SUV.

This has nothing to do with the “no retreat law”.  Florida law allows for, and has always allowed for, the use of deadly force to stop a felony in progress.  In fact, this was common law, as I understand it, even going back to English common law.

At common law, the duty to retreat did not apply to someone stopping a felony (then felonies actually were serious crimes, unlike today when it’s anything politicians disapprove of strongly).  Duty to retreat generally only applied to individuals who were brawlers, or engaged in some other kind of non-felonious dispute.  Those individuals were expected to retreat before resorting to deadly force.  But if someone pulled a deadly weapon to rob you, you were justified in shooting him dead on the spot, as you were stopping a felony.

Fast forward a bit, and states started to take the common law justification of self-defense and put it into statutory law.  A lot of states, when they did this, took out the common law justification for felony, since these were done at a time when professional police forces were becoming common, and it was felt that apprehending and stopping felonies was a more a job for the police than private citizen.  The effect this created was that one had a duty to retreat in all circumstances.  Under American law, retreat is only necessary when the actor could have obtained complete safety by doing so, but it is still an element of the law, even if someone pulls a knife on you and demands your belongings, or even in a carjacking situation.  A prosecutor could, in theory, argue that you didn’t need to shoot the carjacker when you could have just driven off.

Some states, however, did create statutory justifications for stopping commission of a felony, and Florida is one of them.  This doesn’t have anything to do with castle doctrine.  Castle doctrine laws are meant to address the carjacking situation I spoke of above.  They eliminate the duty to retreat from a place you have a legal right to be, and establishes that deadly force may be used on a home invader, without having to first ascertain whether he presents a deadly threat.  This is not a new idea.  It used to be, many years ago, common law.

But don’t expect the media to do their research for you.

Related posts (automatically generated):

  1. “Is Rendell French?”
  2. What Was Common Law Self-Defense?
  3. Bloomberg Going After Stand Your Ground

No Wonder Sugarmann’s a Sad Clown

Bitter did an analysis of VPC’s finances a few years ago.  Now Howard Nemerov has updated us on the current state of VPC’s finances:

In 2007, VPC saw a small improvement, mostly by cutting functional expenses by 48.7% since 2003, plus the fact that salaried employees received no raises since 2005, along with  $144,227 increase in “direct public support.” (Where this “public support” comes from will be examined in Part 2, because this tells the story of who VPC really represents.)

This ought to be good.

Related posts (automatically generated):

  1. How Deep Does the Rot Run?
  2. Mayor Bozo
  3. Surprisingly Steady

Harrisburg City Council Votes to Waste Money in a Legal Fight

Taxpayers in Harrisburg will be happy to hear that their City Council voted unanimously to waste money by passing an illegal gun control law. They passed the same kind of law that has prompted a lawsuit from NRA in Pittsburgh. I wonder how the residents feel about a gun law that won’t make a lick of difference, but will cost the city tens of thousands of dollars to defend – tens of thousands of dollars that could be going to schools or other local program.

Related posts (automatically generated):

  1. Hatboro Votes to Look Into Ballot Measure
  2. City Council Ousts Boy Scouts
  3. Pittsburgh City Council Vote Tomorrow