Allow me to quote myself from the previous entry:

She goes on to quote Mayor Manny Diaz and Police Chief John “I drive a free SUV” Timoney crying about the increase of murders and how easy is now for the gangs to obtain the Evil Black Rifles. However crime numbers from the FDLE website reveal that after Chief John Timoney took office in January of 2003, crime shot up in Miami Dade and the Assault Weapons Ban did not expire until September of 2004. So it seems more a question of ineffective Police leadership that guns after all. Maybe the true mass murderers are not those of us with Evil Black Rifles but the Major and the Police Chief with the tactical support of Journalistic Whores.

So what really do we have here? Is it really that assault weapons are widespread and mowing down innocent people or something else entirely? The sad truth is that Chief Timoney has been a failure curbing crime in the county and more specifically in Liberty City and Brownsville where these attacks happened. These are black impoverished areas under the control of local drug gangs that pretty much do whatever they want to do with little opposition from the Police. The rank and file cops, who want nothing more than to take on the criminals on the street are ticked out of their minds (a study done in 2007 shows that almost 70% of the officers under Timoney have serious complaints about his tenure), but the powers that be have not done enough to bring confidence the community and this has created a huge vacuum between the community and Law Enforcement where criminals thrive. Maybe it is too hard to commit resources to what them might consider a lost zone or lost group of people. Maybe Chief Timoney is too busy traveling abroad in conferences and junkets to be paying attention to dopers shooting each other and their communities or just plain racism.

People in these communities are double hostages: First of the criminal element doing plying its deadly trade and also hostages of a Mayorship and a Police Chief caught in their own web of political correctness but incapable of doing the right thing for fear of catching hell… or maybe afraid to break a sweat. It is much easier to blame inanimate objects that face the reality of their failures so the Evil Black Rifles get blamed for the tribulations of the poor Black Neighborhoods. Not the useless Mayor, not the corrupt Chief of Police, not even the Black Leaders that place the race card but do not have the testicles to tell the community the hard truth of being responsible for their lives and doing the right thing. It is my AK the one at fault for the collapse of cheap Social Engineering.

Rubbish!

For the last couple, three years and thanks to the impositions at work, I had my shooting skills lapse somewhat. Not that I was any good from the beginning (far from it) but they were at such a low that I was actually embarrassed to shoot at my local IDPA matches. I am back to standard in my mediocre pistol skills but I had not shot rifle in a long long time till last Tuesday when I had the chance to attend a South Florida Defensive Carbine Club match. SFDCC is the bastard child of Rob Sloyer of TacticalYellowVisor, curmudgeon extraordinaire and a new writer for SWAT Magazine.  SFDCC is basically a group of South Floridians gathering to practice and run matches with Evil Black Rifles. The gamut of participants run from the very lousy (yours truly) to some very gifted and trained individuals shooting from AK Klones to tactically pimped ARs .

During the SFDCC match, I was an absolute mess. I forgot about holdover costing me two failure to neutralize targets on just one simple vanilla stage. The fact that I wanted to be fast and slick also added to the clusterfuck and eventually general piss poor attitude when I reached the next stage.  This stage (a handgun to rifle transition)  was shot better and slower although one of the steels was set to be knocked down by a S&W 500 only so my 9mm couldn’t knock it down and I gathered another Failure To Neutralize. The last stage was a rifle to pistol transition which again I took slowly and managed to shoot clean although you could have timed me with an hourglass.

What were the lessons learned? Lack of practice will screw you up. Shooting is a perishable skill that requires practice and more practice to keep fresh. In a situation, you do not have time to stop and think what you are doing wrong and carefully deduct what you must correct. You either do it right from the start or you will end up with assorted new holes that were not there the day you came into this world. So lots of dry fire are in my future. Also I will need to get some sort of reliable mag pouches but the pickings for AK mags are slim still. I was using a modified soviet block 2 magazine belt pouch, but the crappy canvas material gives too easy and made for a lousy reload. The craze nowadays is chest rigs but I am not very fond of them. I see them as clumsy unless you have a flat stomach or are slim which I am neither. I must also look for a new sling or figure out a better way to use the Specter Gear AK CQB sling since it gets in the way of my reloads.