But, it shouldn’t have been. As we all know, “the past is prologue.”

This time, it was Sergeants Mark Todd and Kimberly Munley who “rode to the sound of the guns.” Fifteen years ago at the air base, it was USAF Security Police Officer Andy Brown.  Both times, the Good faced the Evil in horrific situations. Both times, it was the Good people – armed with simple Beretta 9mm pistols – who faced direct gunfire, outshot the Evil people, and put them on the ground…and decisively stopped the carnage.

Andy Brown is a helluva man. I had known his story since shortly after it happened, and got to meet him earlier this year when he attended one of my classes. He was kind enough to share his experience with the class, which unanimously found it both moving and inspirational. He allowed us to record his account of the incident at Fairchild AFB for the Pro-Arms Podcast. You can download it and listen to it at no charge through iTunes or Zune, or at http://proarms.podbean.com.  You’ll be looking for podcast number 033. Or, you can read it in the current issue of American Handgunner magazine, in the continuing feature Ayoob Files, available now on the newsstands or readable at no cost at www.americanhandgunner.com.

There is much to learn from it. Just today, we authorized a trainer in South Africa, where the ordinary citizens are presently embattled in a level of violent crime and terrorism alike that goes far beyond anything seen in this country, to use Andy’s podcast in training there.  Yes, it’s that important.

Sergeants Munley and Todd have already spoken to the press about their experiences. I hope that they can both do what Andy did, and share the specifics of what they went through with their peers, some of whom will inevitably have to do in the future what they did a week ago. And I salute Andy Brown for having had the courage to do that already.  The knowledge born in their hard-won experience will certainly save lives in the future.

For Andy, the most painful part of the experience was arriving too late to save those who had already been shot. The military fifteen years ago did not handle that sort of thing well, and Brown suffered in the aftermath. I sincerely hope THAT past does not become prologue for our two current heroes.

When it came out that he had used a 5.7X28mm pistol, to wit the FN Five-SeveN, some in the media and among the brie-and-chablis crowd seemed almost to wet themselves. This gun had already become a focus of the anti-gunners, who call it a “cop-killer.”
Now, I’m a little more on top of murders of police, and officer survival issues, than the average bear, and I’ve not yet found a case of a police officer being murdered with this particular handgun. But, I’m an old guy and probably getting forgetful. Can anyone ELSE document such a case? If so, post it here, please. Forgive me if I don’t hold my breath too hard…

The mainstream media is, in large part, overlooking the fact that the accused mass-murderer had studied under a radical Islamist who had also taught some of the 9/11 terrorists (LINK HERE). And that the accused killer had allegedly posted on the Internet, comparing suicide bombers with soldiers who throw themselves on grenades to save their comrades in battle (LINK HERE).  AND that he was a totally hypocritical FALSE Muslim. Out of one side of his mouth, he sought a traditional Muslim bride who would wear the hajib and pray five times a day. Out of the other side of his, uh, mouth, he apparently sipped light beer and bought lap dances for $50 a time from American blondes at strip joints. (LINK HERE)

My heart goes out to the victims and their families. I have family at Fort Hood myself. And I feel for the estimated 3500 followers of the Islamic faith who honorably serve at this writing in our nation’s armed services. I hope these loyalists won’t be tarred by the same brush as Hassan.

And I am saddened to see clueless journalists instead blame and demonize the gun, which has roughly the on-paper ballistics of a .22 Magnum rifle that you or I might use to shoot woodchucks on the farm to keep them out of the lettuce patch.

The 5.7 in its original SS190 military load was indeed designed to pierce armor, and still tumble through flesh, creating substantial wound potential. From its inception a score of years ago to now, there has been much controversy over whether it’s a magic man-stopper or an impotent mouse-gun. Morbid as it sounds to say it, a LONG time from now, once the medical reports and autopsy results have been tallied and declassified, this terrible incident will give researchers information that may answer that question.

For now, it suffices for logical people to recognize that the pistol was not the demon.

In this terrible incident, the demon was the one holding the pistol.

The FN Five-SeveN with its 5.7X28mm cartridge.

Note that at the moment of discharge, mild recoil of the 5.7mm leaves muzzle on target, ready for next shot.

Fred Zera sends along THIS LINK to remind us that the Fort Hood massacre is not the first time GI blood has been fatally shed stateside by a cowardly assassin acting in the name of radical Islamic beliefs. Major Hassan apparently showed his hostility and even his murderous inclination well in advance. Someone should have reported it, and someone it was reported to should have acted upon it. I don’t intend for this blog space to become a host for anti-religion sentiments of any kind, but the fact is, our nation is in global conflict with people who commit mass murder for the sake of their belief system, and it cannot be ignored in the interest of either religious freedom or political correctness.

I’m still wondering why, for all those hours, the authorities told us the killer was dead, and only later revealed that he was alive and on a ventilator? Was someone perhaps pumping the SOB with sodium pentathol “truth serum” to find out whether his actions constituted a conspiracy or not? If so, the ACLU will have a problem with it, but the pragmatists among us will not.

When someone asked a Fort Hood spokesman why there was no soldier with a gun among the crowd to stop the religious fanatic, the spokesman almost indignantly replied that they didn’t need to be armed, because at the base they were “at home.” Someone might have told him that so many of us “backwoods home” folks DO keep guns at home for protection, because self-protection is already there and “official protection” takes time to arrive. At Ft. Hood it took some three minutes. A long-declared jihad has made American soldiers stalking victims. They have a right to be able to protect themselves any time, anywhere, just like the unarmed citizens they serve to protect.

Finally, kudos to Sgt Mark Todd and the wounded Sgt. Kimberly Munley, who courageously “rode to the sound of the guns,” shot down the mass-murderer, and ended the carnage.

Actually, taking it apart is the easy part.  As so many of our experienced readers know, the challenge comes when you try to put the damn things back together.

Hint…leftover parts are NOT a good sign, and were NOT usually extraneous to the design…

As a kid, I was proud of my ability to disassemble, clean, and most importantly, reassemble the family firearms.  And I remember my frustration at age twelve when I ran into the first gun I couldn’t properly do that with, the Ruger .22 caliber semiautomatic pistol.  (I was later relieved to learn that grownups went nuts getting it apart and back together, too. There are actually tools to help you do this. Google “Brownell’s.”)

Today I am old and lazy, and probably go too far between cleaning guns – well, at least the play guns as opposed to the work guns. Some of my match guns don’t get cleaned until I realize that lower life forms are beginning to evolve in the mechanisms. I knew I was getting sloppy when a friend asked me, “Mas, what do you use to clean guns?”  I heard myself answer, “Armorers.”

In rural America, where guns are handed down through the generations and bought or swapped between friends, owners’ manuals tend not to last as long as the hardware. Today, most gun manufacturers will happily furnish you with the manuals. Trouble is, in “backwoods homes,” there dwell lots of guns whose manufacturers are no longer in existence..

Two good friends in law enforcement recently passed on a tremendously useful website for this stuff. It’s called “Steve’s Pages” and you can find it HERE.

It’s an absolute treasure trove of info for maintaining firearms, including the ones that are rare, and exotic, and obsolete.

Many thanks to the cops who turned me on to this – I’ve thanked them already, and they know who they are – and particular thanks to Stephen Ricciardelli who makes “Steve’s Pages” available as a resource to the rest of us.

The daylight savings time thing got a smart enhancement this year when they postponed the turning back of the clocks to today. It allowed the trick-or-treaters another hour of daylight last night, and made things safer for all those excited little pedestrians running around the streets in the evening hours. (I noticed last night that ninjas seem to be “in” for Halloween this year. Black clad in the dark, scampering across streets…sigh. And I didn’t see a one of the little ninjas wearing the usual light-stick around their neck. Doesn’t go with the ninja costume, I guess.)

I dunno who came up with the idea of changing flashlight batteries and especially smoke alarm batteries at time change, but it made excellent sense and has probably saved lives. I’ll be doing that today. (As noted in an earlier blog entry, flashlight batteries can be expensive, especially the modern lithium type, but not being good-to-go in fast breaking emergencies is MORE expensive.)

As a gun person, I extend the concept a little and on “spring forward, fall back” days also change out the magazines in my autoloading firearms. For instance, the standard “load-out” for a duty pistol is three magazines, one in the gun and two on the uniform belt, so I try to keep at least six mags on hand for any auto pistol I use regularly. When I change the clocks and the batteries, I’ll also unload the carry mags that have been full up, and “let ‘em rest” until the next time change. The ones that have had their springs at rest will be filled up and put into the “carry rotation.” A good way to keep track of them is with a tiny spot of white or yellow paint on the floorplates, yellow for summer and white denoting winter.

I’ve heard many engineers say that this isn’t necessary, and that they learned in metallurgy class that it’s flexion of the springs caused by action and use that wears them out, and they’re not under stress when compressed. Well, I ain’t never been to metallurgy class, and can’t speak to that. However, there are other studies that say otherwise, and tell us that being constantly under maximum pressure can cause magazine springs to “take a set,” resulting in them being too weak to keep doing their job when the cartridge reservoir in the magazine has been reduced by firing, and the tired spring has to keep pushing them up. Mike Izumi is one who has studied this, and he holds several aerospace patents. When guys who are literally rocket scientists talk about this, I tend to listen. In his avocation as a part-time cop and firearms instructor, Mike determined that it was a good idea not only to rotate full and empty magazines, but to store the full ones a cartridge or two down from full capacity to lighten their load, and top them off only when he was “taking them to work.”

Maybe it’s a belt-and-suspenders approach, but that kind of caution is what firearms are all about.

I had the impression of an honest man giving honest answers to honest questions.

I knew and admired the late Bill Ruger, Sr., the company founder. He was always proud that his corporation had no debt. That’s still true today.  Too bad we never elected a man like that to run the whole damn country. Congrats to Fifer and his crew for keeping that paradigm intact.

Item: there are some 300 different SKUs (Stock-Keeping Units, or specifically different products) now being shipped out of the Ruger plants in Newport, NH and Prescott, AZ.

Item: the newly introduced products are the ones that are selling best. Welcome to typical American consumer values. “We want new! We want it now!” (That’s me talking, folks, not Fifer…but apparently Fifer is seeing the same thing.)  The small frame LCR revolver introduced last January, and the LCP .380 pistol introduced the year before, figure hugely in those massive sales, which seem to be up somewhere around two-thirds higher than the previous year.

Item: innovation is alive and well in American gunmaking. Said Fifer, “We took orders for three times what we thought the best case scenario would be, during the first 48 hours of the (2008) SHOT Show. (Shooting, Hunting, and Outdoor Trade, the primary industry show in the firearms world). We’ve been adding engineers left and right, made offers to two this week, and are still looking for more.” Concluded Fifer, “I don’t think we have enough new products.”  Fifer later added that while there are teams working on new platform products, established products are still getting “line extension” – modifications that better suit them for specific purposes for which a market has been identified. The bottom line is that new projects are getting the most attention.

This blogger’s take…

Fifer has done his homework.  He has under his command some of the most brilliant engineers currently working in the firearms industry, and some of the most savvy marketing folks who best understand the real motivations of the people who buy guns.

Personally, I was impressed as hell with their SR556 interpretation of the AR15 rifle. Fifer was candid enough to say in his talk to the stockholders, “There were some cost overruns on the SR556, but it will be a good long term product for us.” (Damn, in this blog several months ago, I TOLD ya the SR556 would be a good buy for the consumer. When the manufacturer admits it costs too much for him to make, that’s nature’s way of telling the consumer he just got a helluva deal.)

Fifer and his people get out and go into gun shops. They talk to consumers. (Interact with those who buy and sell what you make? THERE’S an idea whose time has come!)  They’ve noted that empty shelves are filling back up again, more with guns than with ammunition.

Bottom line? Ruger is a profitable company to invest in because it listens to its end-user marketplace.  That’s what makes companies successful in this country.  That’s what Bill Ruger, Sr. did to make his company successful.

I still remember standing beside Bill Senior’s grave on the day of his funeral…but right now, I have to think he would be proud of where his company has gone since he left us.

Ruger’s LCR, introduced this year, is selling extremely well.

The two events that kill more cops than anything else are shootouts and car crashes.  There was heavy emphasis on preparing for both.  When your vehicle is slewing out of control is a lousy time to START getting experience in steering out of a skid.  That’s why the $45,000 Skid Car device we mentioned in the last post is absolutely worth its price for training purposes.  Training costs are cheaper than death benefits and lifelong Workman’s Comp, and those two things are exactly the stakes on the table.  As cops have long said, it’s better to sweat in the training environment than to bleed in the street.

The pistol match kinda brought that home for me, and for the significant other. She’s the current state and regional women’s champion in International Defensive Pistol Association shooting, and being five feet tall, was chosen to teach the bloc for instructors on how to adapt small-handed female officers to full-size issue service pistols.  Primarily an auto pistol shooter, she grudgingly practiced with her “old fashioned” Smith & Wesson Model 67 revolver. The practice paid off at the match: she won High Woman in the service revolver category.

I had practiced with her, something I don’t usually have time to do before a match anymore. The practice paid off for me, too.  Another truism in law enforcement is that “in a fight, you won’t rise to your greatest possible ability, but will probably default to your training.”  This course involved the police B27 silhouette target fired in competition mode, which means that the target is a 2” X 3” oval tie-breaker X-ring, fired at under time constraints from as far as 25 yards.  The practice scores were consistently 100% in “qualification mode,” but in the much tougher “competition mode” scoring they ranged from 97.5% to 99.2%.  Did I skyrocket with a flash of brilliance and shoot 100% on match day? Hell, no…but I did default to the 97.5% bottom line of performance “on demand,” and that was enough to win the revolver match (S&W Model 64 .38 Special, 4” barrel) and the pistol match (Beretta Model 92 9mm), and take the overall win.  For me, practice beforehand hadn’t delivered stellar performance, but it HAD helped to guarantee a safety net where “fallback” wouldn’t fall TOO low.

The lesson is, I guess, that the more you drill with the relevant skill, the more you retain that skill for “on demand” performance. The deposits practice makes in your bank account of what some call “long term muscle memory” give you a balance against which to draw a check when you need to pay out some skill for something important.  That’s a check you can’t afford to bounce.

There’s a reason cops practice. It’s the same reason we all should.

Practice target: Gun is S&W Model 64 .38 Special with Craig Spegel “Boot Grips” designed for concealment.

Match day. With Stage 2 of revolver event complete, score is 180-16X out of 180-18X possible, so far. Model 64 is in Ayoob Rear Guard holster by Mitch Rosen, on right hip.

Gail is happy that she has practiced with that old “20th Century gun,” S&W Model 67 tuned by Bill Pfeil with Hogue grips and riding in Milt Sparks #1AT holster.

Practice pays off. Match director Mark Rominger, left, hands Mas a gift certificate for a new S&W pistol, prize for top overall shooter. Score was delivered with Beretta 92 9mm pistol that’s concealed under Mas’ EOTAC lightweight vest.

Throughout the massive, beautiful campus of FPSI, you can hear the screech of tires and the crash of gunfire. It sounds as if an action movie is being filmed.  And, truth to tell, some of this is fun.  Chasing “bad guys” and ramming them off the training track with a PIT maneuver in a patrol car especially reinforced to take the repeated impacts, or going through a curve in the Skid Car – a vehicle fitted with a $45,000 apparatus that allows the instructor to cause it to lose traction and skid, and see if the driver can bring it back under control – is fun.  Disney World could sell this experience for a hundred times the price of an E-ticket ride. But these instructors are here on business, all 265 or so of them, and the Institute is charging them only a hundred bucks apiece for 40 hours. But the knowledge they’ll bring back to their emergency service agencies is priceless. It will save untold lives in the future.

We are surrounded by reminders of the danger these people and their in-service students face every day at work. The wreath solemnly laid in the opening ceremony, to commemorate those who died in the line of duty. The Troopers’ Memorial which we pass each day on the way to classes.

We’re getting state of the art material from top instructors from around the country. But it’s also a recharging of the batteries, a renewed commitment to the jobs we all do. And it’s always a joy to be surrounded by people who accept high risk and high liability alike, in return for the high satisfaction of saving human lives and providing a sense of safety and peace of mind to others.

Florida Highway Patrol cars set up for the repeated collisions of PIT Maneuver training.

The Troopers’ Memorial reflects the many generations and both genders of FHP who have sacrificed their lives in the name of public safety. Note the older style uniform on right, with service revolver in crossdraw holster.

The helicopter on the tower, located on a live-fire range, allows rappelling and assorted other SWAT rescue maneuvers.

The Draconian ammunition law in California which we discussed here a few weeks back has, despite a blizzard of mail from honest people all over the country to the Governor’s Office in Sacramento, has been signed into law. Read The Governator’s justification for it HERE.

Elsewhere in the nation, a little six-year-old boy took a camping tool to school with him to eat his lunch. The innocuous device included a fork, a spoon, and – gasp! – a tiny knife blade. Deemed to have violated the Zero Tolerance policy of no “weapons” on school grounds, the tyke was banished to some sort of local “reform school,” though common sense may finally be prevailing. Read about it HERE.

And, finally, a seventeen-year-old Eagle Scout with dreams of West Point was practical enough to have some emergency gear in his car including water, an MRE, blankets, and a two-inch blade folding pocketknife given him by his grandfather, a police chief. All were locked in the vehicle and inaccessible to him while he was in school. He has been suspended for a record period of time over this, with a blot on his record that may profoundly impact his hopes for West Point. Details are HERE.

For God’s sake…

Back in the blissful 1950s, I and most other elementary school boys I knew carried scout knives or pen-knives to school in our pockets daily. I don’t recall any knife fights by the swings or the sandboxes at recess. I remember bringing an unloaded Smith & Wesson K-22 revolver to junior high school as a science class “show and tell” thing, with both the teacher’s and the principle’s permission, in the early 1960s. In high school, many of us boys had rifles and shotguns locked in our cars during hunting season, with ammunition of course, so we could get in a couple of hours of hunting after school. There were no shootings in the parking lots. And that wasn’t in Mayberry, RFD; it was in the state’s capitol city.

Things are going in sad directions…

Even if you choose not to own firearms, you can’t live away from the city streetlights without artificial illumination at your disposal. The more you need that artificial illumination, the better you need it to be.

What we used to call flashlights and battery lanterns are now, in the crossover languages of modernspeak and tacticalspeak, “illumination tools.” We have the finest of their kind that have ever existed, branded with names like SureFire and InSight and Streamlight. Truth to tell, these devices have rapidly outpaced firearms in their rate of development in the last couple of decades. We now have lights more powerful than our grandparents could have gotten from the garage with advance warning of emergency, which are small enough for us to have in our pockets 24/7. Personally, I have similar technology on detachable white light and sometimes white light plus laser sight units that lock onto my guns.

They generally work on Size 123 batteries.

There are batteries, and there are batteries. And with this sort of hardware, you want the best. The photo below shows you what can happen when you “buy cheap” with this sort of stuff. It is said by reliable sources to have happened to a police officer in Texas who, like many cops today, had the light unit attached to his service pistol in a holster designed to accommodate same. The officer sustained burn injuries, and the famously rugged Glock pistol he was carrying was seriously damaged. His holster and patrol jacket were ruined, as well. The light unit in question is a heavy duty InSight M6X, one that I have a lot of personal experience with, and trust and recommend.

The problem has been, apparently, traced to cheap, substandard batteries. In addition it is not recommended that you mix different brands of batteries or mix batteries that have different charges, for example putting a new battery in with an old one.

The photo of the damaged gun and illumination unit come from an old friend who is a heavy hitter in the law enforcement tactical equipment world, and a watch commander on a good-sized Midwestern municipal police department. He strongly recommends using only the Size 123 batteries designed especially for tactical flashlights and tactical light units. I totally concur. My colleague states that he trusts only SureFire, Streamlight, Duracell, Eveready, and Sanyo brand batteries, and notes that SureFire and Streamlight are the only two brands of 123 batteries that he has determined to be optimized for performance in heavy duty tactical lighting units.

Whether for the SureFire, InSight, and Streamlight tactical lights I keep on some of my guns and available to quickly attach to some of the others, or for the SureFire A2 LED Aviator light that I carry virtually every day from when I put my pants on in the morning to when I take them off at night, I use SureFire Size 123 batteries. I order them in quantity and keep them well-stocked at home, and take a few on the road on extended trips. The rare times I’m caught without my own spares, I make a point of buying the available-everywhere Duracell brand for replacements. A call to InSight elicited the information that they currently ship their products with Duracells.

It ain’t just a performance thing. It’s obviously a safety thing, as well. Be warned. In the photo below, the substandard batteries didn’t just burn, they EXPLODED.

HPD officer injured by exploding flashlight

Exploding Lithium Flashlight Batteries?

Info from the CDC.

More info and Links to other instances.