Weekend Reading #79

Some longer or more involved reading:

• First up this week is the most recent newsletter from Jon Low's Defensive Pistolcraft. The first thing I will bring up are comments regarding the videos on cut shotgun shells I had posted recently. You might remember that in one of the videos, the host quickly mentioned that using a cut shell was for emergency exigencies or something like that. Jon reached out to Greg Ellifritz about his thoughts about cut shells, and Greg responded:

     Thanks for thinking of me, but those things are worse than useless.  I got introduced to them almost 30 years ago.  Local ATF agents were encountering them during warrant service attempts and they wanted to see how well they worked.  

     The local ATF firearms instructor used my range to test them.  I was there when he did it.  Results:  
- Didn't reliably feed in pump or semi autos
- Horrible accuracy beyond about 10 yards
- Only penetrated about 6" in gelatin

     After shooting a couple dozen of them with the ATF agents, I came to the conclusion that I would rather shoot someone with birdshot, even at longer ranges where it is ineffective.  The cut shells are nowhere close to the ballistic capability of slugs or buckshot.   

So there you go, in case you were thinking of experimenting with them.

Some other items to look for:

• Jon has collected quite a few comments, links to articles, and offers some of his own comments regarding the recent Silver Rail Elementary School shooting in Oregon. Check it out.
• You've probably all heard some formulation of the observation that you will react under stress the way you have trained. Thus, Jon warns against training to automatically aim and fire your weapon upon drawing it:

     No, you don't need to aim at the target.  No, you don't need to take the slack out of the trigger.  No, you don't need to fire.  Those are all actions based on decisions, that you make, based on what you see.  To automatically shoot as part of your presentation from the holster to the target is WRONG!  If you practice shooting on every presentation, engraining that behavior, striving to achieve a sub-second to first shot, you will be shooting faster than you can think.  You need time to abort the shot when you recognize the silhouette is your teenager sneaking back into your house in the middle of the night.  Oh yes, lots of documented cases.  Tragic. Due to incorrect training.   

In a similar vein, he includes the following quote from Tim Larkin:

     "When you're training to protect yourself and others, speed always comes last. In the more than twenty-five years I've been training people in self-protection, I've never heard from someone who used self-protection tools in the field and felt like they suffered from a lack of speed at the moment of truth.  In fact, I usually hear the opposite:  it's much more common to suffer from a lack of accuracy or force." 

• Jon provides a link to a series of videos under the general heading "Jeff Gonzales Concealed Carry Manual" with each video covering a different topic knowledge, training, holsters, marksmanship, etc.
• Another video he links to is "How to Grip a Pistol So You Stop Re-Aiming Every Shot" with Jon adding:

     The low-left scattering for right-handers, and low-right scattering for left-handers is caused by anticipating the recoil and pushing against the anticipated recoil.  Calling it a flinch is not technically correct.  The solution is the surprise trigger break, as taught by Jeff Cooper and his disciples.  

     When using iron sights, the left-right scattering can also be caused by the rear sight notch being too narrow, making it difficult to center the front sight in the rear sight notch.  The solution is to widen the rear sight notch by about 2 hundredths of an inch (machine out 1 hundredth on each side).  

• Jon has some advice as to a defensive pistol, including that your pistol:

   Must NOT have a compensator, ported barrel, muzzle break, or anything that directs the hot gasses and burning powder in any direction other than straight head.  

You will be firing from a close contact position, because combat is usually close contact.  If your pistol blows hot gas and burning power into your eyes, or if the 
concussion causes you traumatic shock or breaks your ear drums, you will disable yourself.  

     If you think you will be shooting from your isosceles position at full extension, you're delusional.  Ask Jared Reston.  Ask George Zimmerman.  Just because you have a warped perception of reality doesn't mean reality is going to accommodate you.  Instructors who advise you to use a compensator are doing you a grave disservice.   

Lots more, so be sure to read the whole thing. 

• Greg Ellifritz has his latest Weekend Knowledge Dump at Active Response Training. Some links that stood out in particular to me:
• An article by Massad Ayoob on drawing with the weak hand from a holster set up for your dominant hand.
• Links to a couple articles on ambushes. The articles are intended for a law enforcement audience, but have obvious application to armored car drivers as well. But I think there are lessons here for the average citizen, particularly as to car jackings or civil unrest.
• The article "Recognizing and Controlling Courtroom Tricks" was written to help police officers giving testimony in court avoid tricks that a criminal defense attorney might try, but these also have application to things a prosecutor or plaintiff's attorney might also use.
• A good prepping article with the strange title, "Dragging The Futon Mattress Into The Closet." He links to other resources, so pay attention to the links. 
• A fairly detailed article on "How To Track A Human". Greg points out that it has good tips on searching and observation, which it does, including some tips for looking for stuff when it is dark.
• An American Partisan article on the bullet resistance of the average American home, which is pretty much none you can depend upon. There are also plenty of videos on YouTube testing the bullet resistance of different types of walls and appliances. Strangely, though, tightly packed books in a bookcase works pretty well for most small arms (assuming the bullets strikes the books rather than passing through a gap). 
• An article on the differing bullet nomenclature for various handgun rounds, with a particular emphasis on the various .38 handgun rounds used in the latter part of the 19th Century and early 20th Century. Someone once showed me a Colt revolver they had inherited from their grandfather that was simply marked ".38" so it behooves you to know that there are other .38s out there other than .38 Special. 
• And on that same note, Greg linked to a piece discussing the various .32 handgun calibers.
• And, finally, I found the article on why cartridges "nose-dive" in single stack magazines to be interesting. 
• John Wilder's latest, "What Is Your Profession?," looking at where we are, politically, in this country and where we are headed. An excerpt:

    Remember Leonidas in the movie 300, when he asked the Athenians what their profession was, and he got back an accountant and a project manager (or whatever it was)?  What was the profession of the Spartans?

    War.

    That’s where we are today.  The TradRight has to create value in the world to make money, and hires based on merit.  The GloboLeft hires GloboLeftists so that its ideological army is funded.  The politicians go along with this, and if D.O.G.E. tries to shut it down?

    Some GloboLeftElite federal judge will keep the money flowing, while they rule that TradRight words are violence, and GloboLeft violence isn’t punishable.

    The money must flow. 

•  This was interesting: "Male students show more tolerance for political enemies than females show for their own allies"--Expression. The article explains:

    The data, taken from FIRE’s annual College Free Speech Rankings, reveals that overall tolerance for opposing views is low among both male and female students — but the males consistently display far more tolerance than females, regardless of their politics. In fact, with the exception of male libertarians, who are slightly more tolerant, men of all political ideologies have roughly the same level of tolerance as each other. The same is true of women.

    In other words, it’s not that liberals are more tolerant than conservatives, or vice versa. Liberal and conservative men are more or less equally tolerant, as are liberal and conservative women. It’s being a man, liberal or conservative, that makes the difference. 

It brings to mind that famous quote from George Orwell in his novel, 1984:

“It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.” 

Orwell knew. 

•  "The self-making world"--Aeon. A look at the ideas of French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who hypothesized that "all living beings are constantly transforming themselves, from the tiniest microbes to the most complex mammals, gaining new forms and new abilities." 

It wasn’t the bodily structures of organisms that determined their ways of life, Lamarck said, but just the opposite: their ways of life in response to their circumstances gave rise to their changing bodily forms. ‘Can there be any consideration in natural history more important,’ he demanded, ‘or deserving of greater attention, than the one I have just set forth?’ (My translation.) 

Although Lamarck influenced Darwin, his ideas were later ridiculed and dismissed. But, as the article continues, Lamarck's ideas are making a comeback. 

    Lamarck’s ideas have been making a comeback in several areas of biology. For instance, the study of epigenetic inheritance – involving structures outside the DNA that influence gene expression – has demonstrated, throughout every kind of organism, that characteristics acquired in an individual lifetime can indeed be inherited. Many of the examples that scientists have been finding involve the responses of various kinds of animals to climate change. An example is the spiny chromis, a slender damselfish inhabiting the coral reefs of the Pacific. In 2015, marine biologists showed that its metabolism responds to the higher water temperatures brought on by climate change by transforming in myriad ways, and that these changes are inherited from generation to generation. The spiny chromis isn’t alone. In 2020, scientists found that the reef-building coral that provides the damselfish’s home also responds to changing ocean temperatures and salinity with epigenetic changes that it passes on to its offspring.

    German evolutionary geneticists have found that wild guinea pigs subjected to heat-stress show heritable alterations in their livers, which play a crucial role in metabolic regulation; and biologists in the United States and Kenya have shown that the metabolisms of baboons also heritably change in response to differences in their food supply. In fact, it seems increasingly apparent that all kinds of living beings respond to their changing environments with heritable epigenetic transformations. These might provide means of rapid adaptation that precedes, and perhaps shapes, slower genetic changes. 

There's more, so read the whole thing.