28 Oct 03

The Critical Combination:

At a pistol course in Texas last weekend, I had a female shooter with a G19 who was experiencing one stoppage after another. Most involved the slide failing to go completely into battery. Lubrication helped, but the problem returned within an hour.

The woman was small statured, even for a female, and she indicated that her pistol normally works flawlessly and that she could not understand why it was not working well this particular day. When she shot a G32 and a G23, no functional issues manifested themselves. Both worked perfectly in her hands. It was only her G19 that experienced the problem.

I explained to here that she had encountered the "Critical Combination:"

(1) a G19, (2) in the hands of a small-statured person, (3) shooting wimpy ammunition.

The 9mm hardball ammunition she was using at our course was foreign made and wimpy. When she shot high-performance, service ammunition she had, of course, not encountered the problem.

The G19 is a fine carry gun, but it needs to be fed full-power ammunition. It will usually still work, even with wimpy ammunition, in the hands of an average-to-large-sized male. But small-statured shooters will invariably experience problems when they attempt to shoot weak ammunition through it.

/John

28 Oct 03

Local police are not under attack only in Iraq. This is from a friend in SA :

"Last week, Mr Selebe, our Minister of Police, requested the public to come forward to assist investigators with information on criminals who target pol ice officers. We're suffered a rash of attacks lately. Most have been fatal to the targeted police officer(s).

As if to answer his plea, the next day two men walked into a police station here in Capetown asking for directions. Without warning, one pulled a pisto l (type and caliber unknown) and shot the constable who was trying to assist them. He died at the scene. Two other constables in the station at the tim e returned fire, but to no effect. The two suspects fled on foot, apparently uninjured. They are still at large.

I do not wish to run our guys down, but they are inexcusably undertrained an d thus routinely panic and default to 'spray and pray.' The average constable attends a range exercise only once a year and fires fewer than a dozen rounds."

Lesson: Resources expended on intensive and frequent training sessions pay big dividends at those times described above. Isn't it curious how we never seem to be able to find the money to train, but we always seem to be able to find the money for elaborate funerals? My friend and colleague, Tom Givens, recently noted that crime statistics ar e all rubbish. In fact, "security" is merely a word we've invented for the sole purpose of deceiving ourselves. It is used to describe a circumstance that doesn't exist! There is no such thing as "high crime" or "low crime." Thos e terms have meaning only to statisticians. For each of us individually, crim e is either 100% (when we're in the middle of incident such as this one), or i t is zero (for the time being). In the face of daily news, only naive fools remain unprepared and unequipped. Sage officers (and others) will seek out training rather that wait for it to be provided. At the moment of truth, yo u'll be on your own, and there are no "degrees of dead."

/John