Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #265...

A handy little Sig Sauer P320 X Compact in tactical dirt color with a Sig Romeo-X Compact red dot optic makes for a tidy totin' package.

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Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #263...

It appears I may be spending some time getting good with a DA trigger again, as the tactical dirt colored SIG Sauer SP2022 in the horsehide Milt Sparks Summer Special 2 will attest. The SIG is likely just going to be a waypoint for three or four months as I work back up to spending six months or a year carrying the Langdon Beretta, which is the pistol with which I've had most of my moments of glory in gun school.

The rest of the pocket detritus is the same as usual: Surefire EDCL1-T, Spyderco Dragonfly, and POM spray.

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Now it can be told...

The reason I was in Nebraska last month was for a product launch event for a new Leupold optic, the LCO Pro F2. The format of the event was a 1½ day class, followed a mini carbine match, during which I had the opportunity to put several hundred rounds downrange using the new dot.

Hornady hosted the event at the excellent Heartland Public Shooting Park just outside Grand Island.

Kyle Lamb instructed us media types in the use of the carbine...

...aided by Doug Koenig.

I'll expand further in print elsewhere, but in short, Leupold is gearing up to go hard into the high-end duty grade electro optics biz again, since they're one of a small handful of companies who can credibly play in that end of the pool.

Chris Cerino lighting up a target.

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Tuxedos and Origin Stories

Gorillafritz has an interesting tale on professional attire for firearms instructors and the origins of the "tactical tuxedo".

"I was there, Gandalf..." (photo by Oleg Volk)

The shoot-me-first vest in that photo is an O.G. one from Royal Robbins. I bought it in late '01 or very early '02, before there was a company called "5.11 Tactical"*. The buttons still have the little hiking dude from the famously granola-y outdoor apparel company.

To this day I prefer Royal Robbins for my gun burkhas.

*The Wikipedia article has a good history of how 5.11 Tactical came to be.

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Tab Clearing...

• I did not know that: Indiana has a statutory 12,000 mile limit on the total amount of highway INDOT is allowed to maintain. This has odd side effects.


• Deepfakes are doing serious epistemic damage. What do? (Related.)


• No, the green smoke you see the feds using in Minneapolis is not a chemical agent. It's not even from the older HC style smoke grenades that give off hexachloroethane as a byproduct (those are white smoke grenades and HC ones aren't used as much anymore.) They're just plain old green smoke grenades from DefTec. But people have been conditioned by comic books, TV, Hollywood, and video games to associate green clouds with poison, so...

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Last Minute

With two-day shipping (free with Prime) there's still time for stocking stuffers.

• There's a cool multitool with a 1911 bushing wrench and other gun-specific tools.


• Or just a classic Victorinox SAK.


• And then there's this little manual Out-the-Front Kershaw.


• The Wedge XT from Streamlight is a popular little 500 lumen rechargeable light and it's on sale! 


• If someone wants to get into a fun kind of photography, the Instax Mini from Fujifilm is a lot of fun.

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Hey, Look!

• The Mod Squad


• 1979 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am


• Handguns: Packing For Success

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Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #255...

Coming soon to the pages of Shooting Illustrated, a full review of the Ruger RXM, seen here sporting a Trijicon SRO with the 2.5 MOA dot.

Between the true swappable chassis system, the shape and texture of the gripframe, and the optic mounting system, this thing's a legitimately Product Improved Gen3 Glock 19.

I don't want to spoiler it here, but... well, I'm probably buying the test gun and may tote it for six months to a year and run it in classes and some matches.

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Safe Use of a Weapon-Mounted Light

One advantage of newer, more powerful WMLs is that there's enough bounce and spill to make them useful for searching via reflected illumination. The linked article does a good job of explaining this.

A WML is an integral part of the weapon system, providing light in critical low-light situations without hindering the ability to shoot. It frees up a hand for other tasks and ensures the light is always aligned with the weapon. While it complements a flashlight, it doesn’t replace it – your handheld light is your primary illumination tool. If you’re not justified in drawing your gun, you’re not justified in pointing a WML.

When searching with a WML is warranted, baseboard and umbrella lighting techniques can help avoid muzzling non-threats by illuminating an area without aiming the gun directly at it. These techniques also offer additional advantages.

Go and RTWT. It's worthwhile.

We've come a long way since this old 300 lumen TLR-1s, but even it can be used on baseboards and ceilings.

Opposites...

Someone commented that the Staccato C and the Ruger RXM from Wednesday's range trip were on opposite ends of the spectrum, but I think the actual opposite end of the spectrum from the Stack-a-Toe would be this high-cap Makarov with a bargain basement CTC optic.

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Sig Electro-Optics Recall...

There's a product recall for the SIG SAUER ROMEO5 electro-optical red dot sight. Apparently the button cell battery compartment is not secured in a fashion that is considered child-safe and therefore the button cells pose an ingestion hazard for small children.

Of course, if your carbine with a red dot sight is stored in a fashion where your kids can get at it and eat the batteries, you have a lot bigger problems going on in your life, my friend.

(I will point out that any battery cap that can be unscrewed by a toddler has other problems.)

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Lever-age

At the range last week I helped Michael Grasso dial in his .44 levergun with some .44 Special loads, just because having a gun in the house with an unsighted optic is anathema to all right-thinking people.

That mount for the Aimpoint Acro was pretty groovy. I hadn't gotten a good look at one before. I also dug the Magpul ELG furniture, although I'd expected to. I remember being skeptical of their shotgun stock before it came out and winding up having to eat crow, so...

Some people are skeptical, but I think a levergun has its uses, although it's possible to get carried away with one. 

I remember back at TacCon '19, Lee Weems made a pretty good case for why he used a .30-30 as a patrol rifle...

Reliability Check...

My friend Michael Grasso was able to obtain a loaner RMR HD from Trijicon to use on the Staccato C test pistol. There's some question as to whether the fact that the element slightly overhanging the rear edge of the ejection port would affect the reliable ejection of spent cases or not.

I was optimistic, since I've put thousands of rounds through several FN509's wearing a Trijicon SRO, which similarly overhangs the rear of the ejection port, without any problems.

We mounted the optic, got it dialed in, and proceeded to crank out two hundred rounds at a pace that left the slide hot enough to be painful to the touch. Not only were there no malfunctions of any type, the brass does not seem to contact the sight housing at all.

This morning I'll get back to the range and we'll try some different brands of ammunition with varying power factors.

Executive Poker

I've written about "gent's folders" before; smaller pocket knives that aren't all aggro and tacticool-looking.

Most of the ones I've played with so far were the short-bladed kind, which are not only non-threatening looking but also legal in the widest variety of places.

If you're not constrained by regulations regarding blade length or a locking blade on your folder, there's also the "stylus" type of gents folder, which I hadn't really played with before, so I decided to give the CEO model from Columbia Knife & Tool a whirl. (I sold some old ammo at this weekend's otherwise dismal Indy 1500 gun show and decided to share some of my small windfall with Brad, the knife guy.)

As the name would suggest, this style of knife is very slender, and will generally slip into any pen pocket large enough to accommodate a fine writing instrument, like that Monteverde Regatta.

You could carry it in your pants pocket, I guess, but I think its natural home would be a shirt or jacket pocket where pens are normally carried.

The blade is a bit over 3" long (3.11", to be technical) which can run afoul of local regs in places like Boston or Chicago. It's made of 8Cr13MoV steel, which is a lower-tier Chinese stainless that's roughly similar in properties to Japanese AUS-8... you're not getting exotic alloys at this price point. It's less rust resistant than good ol' 440C but easier to sharpen and less likely to chip in my experience.

There are complaints from reviewers at Amazon about the lack of a flipper on this variation (they make one with a flipper for a couple bucks more) but I prefer the slimmer profile of the flipperless one. This isn't a tactical knife.

The pivot is smooth and fitted with a ball bearing; a good shove on the thumb stud will often pivot it right into the locked position, although this is not an assisted opener. The pocket clip makes it sit nice and low and only someone who's paying a great deal of attention to your chestal region will notice it's not a pen. The lock is positive and the blade on my example was nice and sharp right out of the box. It's well up to normal everyday knifely chores.

Given its intended use, I give it a solid B grade. It's nothing exotic, but it's good-looking in a very clean and simple way, and the price is right.

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Dots Don't Go Everywhere...Yet

I'm on record as mentioning I'm not a huge fan of the 3" J-frame, and that steel J-frames in general don't have a ton of applicability in my world.

Small revolvers fall into one of two categories in my world. Either they're a pocket/ankle gun, or they're a belt gun. For me, a 3" J-frame is too long for a pocket, and a steel-framed one is too heavy for a pocket. I've pocket-carried a S&W 432 (and a 442 before it) for almost 25 years now, but a steel gun would make my winter coat hang funny.

"But you could carry a 3" J-frame in a belt holster!" you say. Well, sure. But I could also carry a Detective Special, a Taurus 856/327, or a 3" Smith & Wesson K-frame in a belt holster with no more real difficulty and get a 20% ammunition capacity boost. In fact I have been carrying an 856 TORO for a year now.

This is what makes the new R.O.C. J-frame red dot mount from Shield Arms a real head-scratcher for me. It mounts to a Smith J-frame using the sideplate screws, but all the photos show it on a Model 442. That effectively makes the gun too big for a pocket and anyone who's actually carried an ankle gun should get a good belly laugh out of the idea of sticking an MRDS in the most dirt-and-lint collecting spot where it's possible to tote a blaster. (Even IWB, the 507k on my TORO needs blowing clean every few days.)

I guess you could use it to mount a dot on a belt-carried 3" 640 or something, but all the J-frame revolvers in Smith & Wesson's current catalog lineup that could really benefit from a small red dot... think the 3" Model 60, Model 63, or Model 317 ...all have adjustable rear sights, which means that they're already compatible with an Allchin-type scope mount.

I mean, I get that red dots are awesome, but we're a ways off from a functional MRDS solution for pocket guns.

(H/T to Gorillafritz.)

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Tab Clearing...

• The easiest way to be a rich and famous author is to be a rich and famous person who gets offered a book deal.


• "Fully Self Driving" has been a scam. Perhaps in the legal sense, even.


• Stop pointing guns at people you shouldn't be pointing guns at.

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Negligent Discharge

So one of the NYPD cops, an ESU* officer at that, cranked off a round in the Columbia building that was temporarily occupied by student protestors. He was using the weapon-mounted light to find a way to navigate barriers in the dark. Fortunately the bullet didn't hit anyone.

There was absolutely no reason to have an unholstered firearm in the middle of that Punch & Judy Show. That was a job for a handheld light, not the SureFire U-Boat screwed to your Glock. 

People act like just having a light on a pistol turns it into some sort of dual-purpose tool and next thing you know they're using it to direct traffic or look for stuff they dropped under their squad car in the dark. I swear to gawd, it's only a matter of time before we hear about some Officer Fife using it to check for horizontal gaze nystagmus.

*NYPD Emergency Services Unit contains their equivalent of SWAT, but not all ESU officers are SWAT dudes.

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My mind has been changed... mostly.

At the TacCon presenter's dinner this year, Andy Stanford passed out SureFire Stilettos to attendees as door prizes.

When the Stiletto was introduced, it was very much the flavor of the month and all the cool kids used them for a bit before moving on to whatever the next awesome light was. I am very much an uncool kid and I stuck with my trusty EDCL2-T, which I'd been using since they were introduced back in '17.

I stuck with that 2-cell light until a few months back when I downsized to its single-cell EDCL1-T cousin as part of a general pocket clutter shrinkage project: Sabre Red Mk.6 to a POM dispenser, Spyderco Delica to a Spyderco Dragonfly, et cetera. Since doing so, I haven't found myself feeling limited by the single cell light's 500-lumen output. It's still plenty if your job doesn't include nighttime traffic stops and clearing structures.

The Stiletto is roughly the same size as the single-cell EDCL, but nice and flat and more comfortable in the pocket.

When I popped the packaging open I immediately felt stupid. See, the reason I didn't jump on it like everyone else back then is... um... I didn't realize it had a "tail cap" button that served as a momentary switch for the full 650 lumens.

For some reason I had thought the only buttons were the ones on the side (one a light control and the other used for programming the sequence of toggling between 650, 250, and 5 lumen settings) like the setup on the Guardian or Sidekick. 

That side button is fine for normie flashlight use but sucks for "tactical" applications. Further, you don't want to have to toggle through brightness settings to get to the full output in a "tactical" light, but having it immediately pop on with 650 lumens and then toggle down to 5 reduces its utility as a normal task light. That was the genius of the EDCL series, where a light press of the tailcap got you a task light, but a full press summoned up the face-melting output.

So I've been carrying and using the Stiletto for something over a week at this point and here's my rundown:

PROS:

• It really is comfortable in a pocket. It's slim and light and my fears of it turning on in a pocket seem to have been overblown.
• The dual button configuration makes it handy for both normal and "tactical" use. You can program the side button so the bright light comes on first, but why would you? Use the tailcap button for that.
• It doesn't look "tactical". Some security people have started getting squirrely about knurled metal "tactical" flashlights, even ones without scary fanged bezels. You're less likely to be told you need to leave it in the car than the EDCL1-T.
• You don't generate a steady stream of dead CR123 lithium batteries that need to be disposed of.

CONS:

• Supposedly it's plenty tough and rugged and waterproof, but I just don't get the same reassuring vibe from plastic, no matter how "high-impact" it is, that I do from knurled metal.
• When the internal batteries go flat, you have to plug it in to recharge it and that takes time. You can't just toss a fresh cell in there and be up and running immediately. Also, SureFire... Micro-USB? Really? The rest of the world is basically standardizing on USB-C. Why not step boldly into The Current Year?

On balance, though, the Stiletto is an improvement over the EDCL1-T, I think, so I reckon I'll stick with it for a while, unless some flaw I haven't noticed pops up.

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Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #253...

Hotel room nightstand shot from TacCon: Taurus 856 T.O.R.O. with a Holosun 507k in a PHLster City Special, six rounds of Hornady Critical Defense 110gr +P in an eight round Tuff Strip, my trusty POM spicy treats dispenser, 500 lumen Surefire EDCL1-T, and a waved Spyderco Dragonfly.

Click the links to steal this look!

(Do I think the Hornady 110gr +P Critical Defense is the bestest load for the .38? Probably not, but it's easy to get the dot sighted in with, and reloads are speedy with those pointy bullets. Its performance is certainly adequate, especially if you're not particularly worried about needing to defeat vehicular barriers.)

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Incremental Improvements

I'm currently working with a Rost Martin RM1C for an upcoming review in Shooting Illustrated.

It arrived with an RMR-compatible optics plate, and the Swampfox Justice I had on hand bolted right up.

I like the fact that all RM1C's are optics-ready, rather than the annoying tendency, all too common among manufacturers, of releasing a non-optics model first and then...one or two SHOT Shows later...releasing an optics cut model like it's some big event.

Normally, here in 2024 I'd gripe about the fact that the optics cut wasn't deep enough to allow the normal height irons to co-witness, and the fact that the slide required adaptor plates rather than being cut to allow direct mounting using the RMSC or 507k footprint. Rost Martin gets a bye from me on this one, however, because it's not an entirely new design, but rather an Americanized version of the AREX Delta Gen.2 from Slovenia.

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