I would also like you to read yet another blog post from yet another friend of mine, Caleb Giddings. This one postulates that “Winning is the Only Thing:”
I don’t enjoy competition shooting that much these days. Sure, I still like to shoot matches, but for me the juice isn’t really worth the squeeze. See, the problem is that I like winning more than I like getting better. You’d think those two things would go hand in hand, but they really don’t. Sadly, it’s an easy trap to fall into.
Sadly, true…a trap I’ve fallen into once or twice myself. Still, it is a trap, and traps are to be avoided. If we’re going to be the shooters we want to be, we have to learn to love the process. I refer you to Mastery by the great George Leonard. My few conversations with George were wonderful, like having a few friendly conversations with Yoda. Once a year I tread Mastery, and I learn something new each time.

via The Michael Bane Blog: John Farnam: “Little Mistakes”.

Maybe I approached IDPA the wrong way and luckily turned out for the best but I got cured of the competition bug early enough.  I did not have the money for a custom-tuned 1911 or tricked out G34 on a slick kydex holster and all the “legal” bells and whistles. When I got to reloading, I actually did it to save money and not find a  bullet & powder combo with enough recoil to operate a slide and make a hole in paper but as close as I could to my everyday carry +P ammo. In fact, my competition gear was my everyday gear. I was one of those freaks that could actually arrive at the range and start shooting without having to go to the tactical dress room and change into the performance stuff.

So who I competed against? Myself and the cardboard targets that came to life after the beep. Weird? why yes! In my mind they were bad guys doing bad things that required my intervention. . If you are practicing for life, those brown suckers  do have guns and they probably shoot better than you so.. take frigging cover and as much as you can!  Transitioning from Point A to Point B? The course of fire tells you there is nobody so you can run, but are you willing to take the chance in real life of going blind? screw that…go slow & scan.

And then put enough BBs where it hurts. Ammo is cheap, a coffin is expensive. My goal was zero points down for accuracy (never achieved) so if it took three shots instead  of the two required by the CoF, who am I to argue?  Shoot till you figure he is down, that is all.

Does that mean you cannot learn anything from those who do it for competition alone? Quite the contrary but be smart. A pound and a half trigger not the smart thing to do but gun manipulations & reloads? You may wanna bet they have it down with an economy of movement that is amazing and you should duplicate.

In the end, it goes back to mindset which is probably the most important part of shooting. Training begins in the mind, not with the finger.

Last week, people had fun in Twitter with the  #ImBlockedByShannonWatts . Some, smartly enough, showed  their own  blocks by Shannon so I went ahead and pulled mine and two more for purely giggle reasons.

I was amazed to see that I was not blocked by the Bradys, but I remembered that I never posted a thing in their Twitter account. Also, and as Linoge put it, we need to thanks Shannon for introducing us to thousands of gun people that we were not following and came to be known thanks to her silliness and the hashtag.

I swear I can’t take a couple of days off without people going full retard.

Despite the relentless attacks, those who share Sincic’s perspective haven’t exactly rushed to her defense. In fact, one of the country’s leading gun control advocacy groups on Tuesday all-but threw her under the bus, suggesting that she may have been hired by right wing activists to stir controversy and anger.

“I smell a rat here,” Ladd Everitt, a spokesman for the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, told Vocativ on Tuesday. “To me, this reeks of something that’s been planted.”

“It’s shocking how this suddenly went viral on right wing media when no one in our movement is promoting this video,” Everitt continued. “I’m actively questioning who this woman is. And I’d like to know who paid for this and why.”

via Creator of Controversial Gun Violence PSA Defends Herself.

Are we going to have a plane spray Thorazine over the Cult Coalition to Stop Gun Rights Violence HQ? Yes Ladd, your side is that stupid. Hell, haven’t you been checking your Facebook Page lately? Or was it because maybe in your legal department called and told you “Hey, this video is totally screwy and anybody following it will end up wearing orange rompers and having a fierce introduction to alternative sexual modes of intercourse” that you decided to change your original support for Ms. Sincic’s Public Service Ad ?

That’s it…see you guys Monday. I need a break from the Year’s End insanity.

The upshot, Diaz writes, is that in today’s USA, “guns are most likely to be owned by white men who live in a rural area, those who are middle aged or older, with middle to higher income, who grew up with guns in the home and who live in the southern or Midwestern regions of the country.

via Increasingly Dangerous Guns Endanger US Communities.

Apparently the memo about Gun Culture 2.0 being urban, multi-ethnic never got to the author.  That or Florida with more than one million concealed weapons permit suddenly moved somewhere near Nebraska.

From a group that has not yet allowed one pro-gun commentator in their Facebook page or Twitter follow pages without immediate ban and a leader that will not accept any invitation to a debate and run away protected by armed bodyguards when she is challenged, we have to call this supreme irony.

Hat tip to Gun Rights America.

This jewel is from a CSGV post about the new place in Orlando dedicated only to the rental and shooting of fully auto weapons. I had this since December 19, but it was just now that I got around to share it.

The usual suspects in the media tried to make Mt. Everest out of this Machine Gun America place, but they not the only place in the nation and certainly not even the first location in the Orlando area that does that and its only difference is that they are not your traditional gun store / gun range but just dedicated to their own weapons.

Here is the screen cap, but I pasted the full text under for easier reading…trust me, you will need it.

• Anna Rosa Because we saw what happened with that 10 year old girl. This is tooooooootally safe. So I’d love to know how this place can call themselves an amusement part and have guns. To me this would be called a Shooting Range. With that said, I’ve been to Disney world 15 times for the past 13 years or so. Magic kingdom, frontier land. They have a mock western shooting range with fake guns and lasers/rfid chips. They have the fake guns for a reason, because by law they are not allowed to have a real loaded weapon to use this attraction. So why in hell is this place even allowed to do this? If I was the police force in the area I would immediately contact village hall and file a complaint or go over there and say hey you can’t do this without a permit or just not at all, this absolutely cannot be right. My mind is exploding just trying to think of the legality of this. It just can’t be possibly legal at all, like at all.

  1 · 7 hours ago · Edited
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    Anna Rosa call it what it is! A shooting range, a death panel, a murder cage, Execution Station!

    2 · 7 hours ago
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    Nora Hild The difference is that one amusement park is in California and the other is in Florida.

    7 hours ago
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    Anna Rosa No; Disney world in Florida and this “amusement park” in Florida should be expected to go by the same laws that Disney world in Florida must obey and abide by, that’s my point. In other words this is fallacy and total fraud what this organization is doing, and I’ll call it exactly that. Terrorist organization. Like a cult they’ll get the kids in there and make it look like all fun and games until one day the same thing happens like that 9 year old and we still won’t ban them, I f’ing gaurentee it. The NRA will then come into towns and tell people oooooh don’t worry guns are safe guns are okay! And guess what? MORE generations die, MORE generations think guns are cool and safe and keep them safe. I want to see some future where the word GUN is taken out of the dictionary and history books. I want no idea in the futures mind of what such a primitive piece of 1800th technology from China it is. Cheap man killing GARBAGE. That needs to be broken in half thrown in the fire; just like 451 and books, except guns. Something for crying out loud. It would be more normal just to have the fed go by the gun registry and take them but we all know how this will end up and most likely will, a civil war. So if it’s a war these gun nuts want then let’s give them federal and police HELL. Police brutality? Not until justice is served cold and hard. Then I want to hear about “police brutality”. What’s brutal is a race f*cking killing themselves! Barbarism, we are no better than the so called terrorist!!

    5 hours ago

Where to even begin?  Making up laws in Florida because she doesn’t like a place of business (or as we know it, loophole), name calling, re-writing history, book burning, wishing for violence …. damn, I have to say she covers pretty much the whole spectrum.

She might be hired in a full-time basis as media director for CSGV.