ShadowCatcher

I don't know about you folks, but when I was a kid I had no trouble finding all the places my parents would hide gifts, especially Christmas gifts. The last thing I ever want to do is come home from the market, and walk into a group of teens or older who not only snuck into my house, but also found one or more of my guns. Nor a whole lot better is to find out they took them and ran away - now my guns are on the street being sold to other bad guys. Worst of all is when a neighbor comes to visit my beautiful bride and brings along a child old enough to be unattended for a bit, then having them discover one can potentially be so heart breaking. I carry my pistol and at least one reload, two if a single stack. I keep it with me until bed time, then it's out of sight but within grasp range. My theory about gun control is I want to be in control of every gun in my house at all times. Just my $0.02 worth. SC

For the game going too short in the barrels won't make an improvement in handling or knock down. The only place I've seen short barrels was with full size butt stocks for prison guards and other close quarters uses. The short barrels gave assailants and prisoners less to grab onto, made the gun more maneuverable in tight quarters, and with the full length butt you had better leverage on the gun while being able to butt stroke more effectively. If I was part of a team clearing an urban building I could see the use for a 14" bbl. SC

I owned a Colt Detective Special with the 3" bbl and shrouded ejector for a few years and adored it. I gave it to my son as he liked it a lot and I was shooting more semi-autos by then. He left his safe unlocked one day while at work, and it and several other guns grew feet that day. The one time I found a duplicate of it was on a Gun auction site - it was $2500. Maybe I'll find another someday.

Ken Null makes a vertical muzzle up rig for some revolvers and semi-auto's. I find the plastic strapping a bit of a bother at times, but i might work for you. https://klnullholsters.com/holsters/shoulder-holsters/ SC

It's also important to drive it a while (at any speed) to heat the oil up enough to cook out all the water build up from combustion. I've seen more than one car that sat for long times and only driven to market and back ending up forming rust in the most unexpected internal places. SC

I understand that - that was my initial issue, and why it took almost 2 years before I felt ready to adopt a RDS on a carry gun. I had 50 years of muscle memory to overcome and that didn't happen in a year, it took 1 1/2 for me before I was within fractions of a second of my earlier times, but I have to acknowledge that being 70 YO my presentation times are slower than when I was 30, with any gun. It was vision issues (focus at close range) that drove me to learn it. Of course switching from SA to DA/SA also came into the mix! SC

Rifles are easier as they typically have four points of contact and almost always present aligned. A hand gun can have lateral or up/down tilt much easier and make it harder, until you retrain your presentation to be flat. Frankly I struggled for a year and gave up, until I had a coach spend a weekend helping me adjust grip and presentation. I'm going for my second gun with a red dot now, but would never put one on my full size Colt 1911's, they need to stay pure!

Typically the sight height affects parallax, so POA isn't POI at different ranges from zero. One way to fix that is extend the distance for zero, maybe out to 25yds. Hunting for it is a presentation issue, not dot height. Most of us learned on irons, so we can present the gun front sight proud and level the gun as we finish the presentation, using peripheral vision to adjust. With a red dot you have to have the gun level as it comes up to eye level. So far for me the easiest way to sort that has been to present the gun from draw to a high position in front of my face, level, an then fine tune dot position as I extend to shoot. More of an exaggerated L shape, gun level and brought to eye level, then pushed out. After a while the hand learns to keep the gun level. If I had to fire sooner than I planned it's level, it will hit, perhaps not a precisely as I would like - but it will hit. Others will co-witness the dot over the front sight, and just look for the sight in the window. It works but I'm not a fan as the two sighting systems have different parallax issues and can cause errors at distance. I've had slides milled and not liked the result, many of them have a cover plate that screws onto the slide to make it seem like it came from the factory red dot ready. My Glock 43 ended up that way, and a friend who wanted to try a red dot finally bought it from me, so it worked out in the long run. Brownell's sells many aftermarket slides machined to take a red dot, and there are a number of gun hot-rod companies doing that as well. You can experiment without altering your original gun that way.

I've found that for my cross dominate shooter friends that if they keep both eyes open (like they should with a any sights but especially with a red dot) and just float the dot to the target, they get hits. Don't know if you've tried that or not. SC

Big topic! Red dot sights are the hot thing these days, especially on competition guns, but making headway in Law Enforcement and civilian carry as well. A few things to understand: 1. Red dot sights have footprints, or mounting patterns involving screw hole placement, size and shape, mounting bosses and therefore many require you committing to a design and only using dots in that mount. There are roughly 6 major patterns and many companies use one of them. 2. Dot size and window size make a difference - a wide window, say 24mm to 30mm is easier to find your target in, and a bigger dot, say 5 MOA is faster to find. A 5 MOA dot at 100 yds covers .5" at 10 yds. 3. Green dots are more visible in day light than a red dot, and sharper if you have any astigmatism. They eat battery's quicker, but were talking 1-2 years vice 2-3. 4. The lower the red dot the less parallax. I zero mine at 25yds and have only an inch rise/ 2" fall from zero to 50yds using 147 gr 9mm. 5. If the gun isn't red dot ready (pre-machined at the factory) you'll have to get a rear sight replacement mounting plate and then put the sight on top of it. More Parallax as a result. A Beretta is limited on how low you can go with a machining job due to the parts that rise up from the slide. Ernest Langdon does an amazing job machining the slide and replacing the parts with patented parts getting the dot to about .85" above bore center, it's just amazing. At the trigger job in a bag and you're really running hot! 6. Trijicon, Holosun, Shield are just a few of the top end contenders, but how much money you want to spend can influence your choice a lot. 7. To get it machined by Langdon you might want to reach out and see - since they ony need the slide there may not be any shipping issues. I run a Beretta 92x vertec compact with trigger and slide (plus ported barrel) by Langdon, as both my carry gun and my training/competition gun. I do still shoot my 1911's a lot but the Beretta has convinced me (unlike when I shot the earlier one's in the '80's). I use the Trijicon SRO with a 2.5 MOA dot, wish I'd gotten the 5 MOA dot - live and learn. Some reference data: https://langdontactical.com https://www.optics-trade.eu/blog/footprints-on-red-dot-sights https://military-spot.com/category/red-dot/red-dot-footprints

Sending my EMP 9mm slide in for machining to mount a red dot as we type! I'm mounting a Swampfox green 3 MOA dot on it, it uses a RMSc mount, and I am having it direct mount for low dot height relative to bore axis. I'm not planning to Cerakote it yet, so it will be in stock colors (black slide over stainless colored receiver). I could be tempted to go with the Imperial Storm Troopers motif, but maybe not!

I've shot iron sights for some 50 years now, and made the transition to a "Red" dot about 2 years ago. I found that the hardest part was the presentation, getting the gun up flat and not front sight proud, like I do with irons. The green dots serve me better during day tie outside, they're brighter and faster to acquire. Yes the batteries go faster, but if I only get three years instead of 5 I can adjust. I replace all my batteries (lasers, dot sights, smoke alarms, etc) every Christmas anyway. I'm finding that my 'students' at the range who are newbies pick up and learn to get hits much quicker than learning irons, and while that's good, we also have to go back and work irons later, because stuff happens. I'm finding out that as my 70 year old eyes do their natural aging thing the Dot sights get me back to 20+ yard hits (free style) and with a good support (table top, wall edge, etc.) I can get meat out to past 50 yds. My words of advice for someone just starting is to get the largest window they can (my SRO is 26 mm) and the larger dots sizes (5-8 moa) and green if they plan to use it outside in the day light or if they have any astigmatism. Once you get your presentation and follow up shots dialed in, then a small dot on a smaller pistol might make good sense. Regarding dot sizes: a a 5 moa dot is 5" at 100 yds, or .5 inches at 10 yds. I zero at 25 yds, and at 1 yd my shots hit about 1" low, pretty flat for my intents. My Beretta compact with SRO. SC

Can't help but agree - I have several shooting companions who choose that gun, albeit in .380. I prefer the Walther PPk in .32 for high summer shorts and tee shirt weather, and my 9mm EMP otherwise. In mid winter I go back to my Colt 1911 in .45 or my Beretta 92 for city travels. I'm 6'2" and 260, so hiding and using a big gun is easy, not so much some of my lady friends though.

I've seen many an older student who cannot afford or cannot operate a center fire handgun due to strength or arthritis, or other issues. Operating a .22 semiautomatic seems to work, and struggling to rapidly clear failure-to-fire or eject issues is useful side result of using cheaper ammo. They then switch to ammunition like CCI mini-mags for reliability. They learn to shoot multiple times to more rapidly de-pressurize an opponent and end the fight, not so much to try for kill shots. It's not optimal, but no handgun really is, you just have to train within the limits of what you can do and what equipment you have. In their case having a few well placed holes beats a dirty word and a scowl. We train them with clothes over the targets so they learn that the hits are not going to be visible, they will need to really know how to focus and hit high center, they're not going to get Hollywood blood geysers. If their budget was not a constraint I'd have them buy a center fire handgun such as a Beretta Tomcat or other tip up barrel pistol, as center fire primers are much more reliable than a rim fire, but for some it's not really an option. When we started our rim fire league shots a great many highly proficient shooters were humbled by how many failures they encountered, and the two common denominators were crap ammo and failure to keep the guns clean. Old beat up magazines were a close third. I've had times where my economic condition constrained me to own only one gun, and I chose .22 because I could afford to practice a lot, shoot some competitions, and trusted my ability to hit fast and often. Money came later, and so did many more guns! Shadow Catcher

Found a way around getting stuck in a habit - our club shoots a rim fire NRA bullseye pistol match (50') for ten weeks starting in Jan. Then after that we shoot an NRA Bullseye center-fire segment every first Monday of the month. On Thursday we do a skills building night where we limit it to rim fire the first Thursday of the month, and any caliber the rest of the time (some times we limit it to guns under 3.5" barrels, other times run what ya brung). Our local outdoor range runs a speed steel every fourth Saturday, so I run an AR in .22 and a .22 revolver. Occasionally I take my Rossi 92 and run it as a pistol caliber carbine! I've used my SAA's at skills night, when we make it 5 shot revolver neutral. Every gun I have except a hunting rifle and shotgun gets cycled through. Having said that I still want to go back and get another D frame sized .38, a wonderful walk in the woods gun. SC