19Aug05

From one of our instructors in CA:

"Monday, I sent my ageing G19 (serial number is only three digits) b ack to Glock for a minor problem. Rear sight was loose. The pistol was returned t o me the following Friday, fixed, cleaned, lubricated, and adjusted. No questions; no charge; no quibbling. Glock also updated my pistol with a nu mber of new parts that had nothing to do with the sight problem. The pistol came b ack in a new shipping container, with a new bore brush, and a new trigger lock (which I promptly placed with the others).

My G19 looks and feels new, better than new! Can't say enough about Glock' s customer service. I bought the gun retail over twenty-five years ago. This is the first service, other than cleaning, it has ever received. It h as functioned perfectly all those years, including at your courses here in CA. Looking forward to the next twenty-five!"

Comment: Who has the best customer service has the market!

/John

19Aug05

A note on pistol reloads, from a friend and instructor:

"At our last program in CO, I shot my G19. I had a thousand reloads that I wanted to use up. When I reloaded these ten years ago, I used only once-fir ed (by me) brass, Remington bullets, CCI primers, and a quality, commercial powder. The load was worked up and examined for signs of excessive pressure . Each reloaded round was checked in a chamber gauge, and any of questionable

dimensions were discarded. I was about as careful as one can be.

During the Program, functioning of the reloads was fine. However, when I got home and cleaned the pistol, I noticed a circular pattern of metal cutt ing on the bolt face, the same diameter as the primer. This indicates that the

fit of the primer in the primer pocket was not tight enough to prevent gas from escaping around the edges of the primer and eating into the bolt face.

Conclusion: No reload can ever be as good as new, factory ammunition. In serious guns that we use and shoot a lot, I am now thoroughly convinced that we should only shoot quality, factory ammunition. You have been saying this for years, and I now see that you are right."

Comment: Reloading, as an industry and a hobby/pastime is firmly entrenched

in America, but risks attach to shooting a lot of reloaded ammunition, as we

see from the foregoing. In serious guns, factory ammunition is always bes t.

/John

19Aug05

One of our instructors, a lawyer, brought this to my attention:

"It seems the growth of MRI scanners in hospitals and medical office s has been substantial over the past decade. Doctors find information gleaned fr om MRIs to be extremely useful. The downside is that MRIs all have powerful magnets, magnets that can violently suck in anything metallic, eg: wheelcha irs, floor polishers, et al. Even guns have been snatched from the holsters of police officers who got too close. There have been serious injuries as a result, several deaths.

There are regulations, of course, but most accidents are the result of simple oversight and carelessness. Rarely does anything go wrong with the machine itself. Some clinics use metal detectors to address the problem, but they slow down operations to the point where little gets done. New technologica l improvements may cut down on accidents, but probably not substantially, at least in the short term. The inescapable conclusion: MRIs are indispensabl e to modern medical practice, but, like so many other things in our civilization , they are inherently dangerous and cannot be made less dangerous without fatally compromising their usefulness. Guns fall into the same category!

In a regulation-happy society like ours, the only 'solution=80 anyone ever suggests is, of course, MORE REGULATION. Grasseaters all think we need the

federal government to point out to us all, even more loudly than they alread y do, that messing around with these things is dangerous.

Unfortunately, not only is the federal government unable to 'fix =99 many things, they would not be called upon to do so if people used a bit of (unc ommon) common sense. 'Don't throw metal into a big magnet,' is abo ut the same as saying, 'Don't drive your car into a brick wall,' or =80 Don't point guns at your head and pull the trigger at the same time.' We don=80=99t need the federal government to tell us that!

I'll bet that there are signs all around these machines saying 'Keep metal away! Strong magnet.' They're probably in Spanish also. They =99re surely in French!"

Comment: The world is full of dangerous things! People get hurt. Sometimes,

it no one's fault. With excessive, heavy-handed regulation, we discover that

the "cure" is worse than the "disease!" Badly needed technological advance s are thus retarded, because careless people keep finding ingenious, new ways of hurting themselves. Our anal civilization is going to have to confront the fact that not every personal injury, not every example of personal unhappiness, is the direct result of someone's else's negligence.

/John