El Chapo

I have a 43 foot tower in my yard with tribander + dipole for the WARC bands and a 43' vertical for 40/80. Let me know if you want to schedule a qso sometime, 40 meters is probably best for us in the evenings and 20m during the day. For a directional antenna, it really depends on what your tower will withstand. Mine won't take a yagi bigger than about the 14' boom or whatever I have now, so I use wires for the WARC bands (which is fine, there's no contesting and not very much bandwidth for phone, and for FT8 you don't need a fancy antenna). While antenna is VERY important, if you can hear them and you can't break the pileup, an amplifier will do more to change that, contrary to popular opinion. Ideally you'd have both, but when I flick my amplifier off of standby, the pileup is over and I'm in, nearly every time.

I disagree with the suggestion of not buying anything until you go to a match, but I agree with the sentiment that you do not need everything to go and experience a match. Cowboys will be happy to loan you equipment if you don't have what you need, or let you shoot without leather from the table or whatever. Read the shooter's handbook carefully, keep an eye on the classifieds, and focus on what category you want to shoot, but certainly, with or without equipment, go to an event as soon as possible.

I'll take it all if you can ship it in flat rate boxes at 70 pounds per box. That's a great price.

Just FYI: I'm shooting the Springfield Prodigy mags in one of my 2011s that has a Gen I STI gripframe on it and they work great. They're $37 each on Palmetto State Armory's website.

I have had an STI for 17 years (it's on indefinite loan right now to another cowboy), but I would not ever buy anything from Stacatto. STI was an employee owned company that supported the shooting sports and was founded by superstar shooters. It employed gunsmiths who really cared and it stood behind its products with a lifetime warranty. Once they rebranded, all of that stopped, and they even quit making 1911s. Stacatto is not a company I'd ever do business with. There are a ton of 2011 type guns out there to choose from. I'd focus on someone else. Where they're priced now, you can get yourself a very nice gun from another company where they actually want the sport shooter market. The 2011 is a wonderful platform. I have tried every handgun there is (including the CZ pictured above, I still have one) and nothing is as good for me. Many are close and all are compared to 1911 type ergonomics, but none work as well for me. I tried to like a lot of other things but I've always come back to the 19/2011. That said, they're not for everyone. The quirks of a 125 year old design are still there. I just have no reservations about saying that my preference and what works for me is a 19/2011, better for me than anything else.

The Supreme Court has already opined on the issue and is it unconstitutional to use the death penalty for anything the government has tried to use it for other than murder (outside of military tribunals and law). It is also not lawful for the death penalty to be mandatory, the process is far more complicated than that, and those things have been the law for so long that there is no going back on that. The procedure for obtaining a death sentence is complex and extremely expensive. As much as I like John Lott, this post is very sloppy. Empirical research has shown for generations that the death penalty has zero general deterrent effect. It costs millions of dollars to obtain a death sentence, even against the most worthy of candidate, yet the effect it has on the general crime rate is zero. It's hard to think of any other political issue where people advocate spending millions of tax dollars for literally zero benefit. This one is just emotional for people, and I get that, but it is not a responsible use of public resources to spend millions of dollars for no benefit. All he really establishes by his words is that if the death penalty is threatened, people are willing to plead to life imprisonment. What he ignores is that happens anyway. I have personally seen and been present in the courtroom when a person pleded guilty to life imprisonment. The best part is that there are no appeals, and that man will almost certain as the sun comes up tomorrow, die in prison. His hope of ever seeing life outside of custody again is basically zero. I am not opposed to the death penalty in principle, but I am opposed to using resources that could be used to actually improve public safety to for the political benefit of a few. Even if the death penalty was available, I wouldn't want it sought even if my own family member was the victim, because even if the public did spend the millions to obtain a death sentence, the appeals process is so extensive that not only would it never be carried out, the chance that some attorney would find a reversible error decades from now is much higher; in death penalty cases there is no finality until the punishment is carried out, which in many cases, is never. Imagine your family member is murdered, the defendant is convicted, sentenced to die, and 30 years from now, some judge orders a new trial of 30 year old facts. The witnesses are dead, or can't be found, or forgot everything, and the state would be lucky to get any conviction in that circumstance. And something like that happening is way more likely, maybe hundreds or even thousands of times of times more likely, if the defendant gets a death sentence instead of life imprisonment. In my state, if a person gets a life sentence, he gets one appeal, to the Supreme Court, which affirms the overwhelming majority of those cases, and that person rots in a cage until he dies. Absent something extraordinary happening, the case is over and the person is realistically never getting out of prison. There are virtually no death cases (at least not in America, maybe in Iran or North Korea) that work out like that. I wish more people knew this. There is an entire apparatus of people out there who do nothing but attack old death sentences and courts buy it. It isn't like TV. Don't take my word for it--there are volumes full of books, documentaries, and podcasts on the subject.

There's no such thing. I had to get a motorized pepper grinder just to make white gravy. It should be so peppery that only a little bit of salt and spice from the sausage can shine through!

How common were auto pistols before the 1980s among non-military shooters? If cops weren't likely to face people armed with autos on the streets, they probably were just carrying what virtually everyone else was carrying.

It's hard to say without knowing what military he's supposed to be in, but if it's ours, there is nothing correct about that. If he is supposed to be wearing a Class B uniform, he would be wearing ribbons on his left chest and there are none. Those shoulder boards are not correct at any rank. It goes on and on from there. When I was in the Army, we didn't wear a Class B version of our dress blues, although that changed later so there has been a white shirt uniform in my lifetime but not when I served. The Class B shirt would be have been green in my day. AF would wear a blue shirt (and blue tie) and the Marines' greens are a different color green. I suppose the Navy's officer service whites would have a white shirt, but their aviator wings are gold and look nothing like that shape, and their shoulder boards for a Rear Admiral look nothing like that.

Probably more a function of personality than degree. My wife is a Nurse Practitioner/Hospitalist. If you ask for "the doctor" (aka, a physician) she will be happy to tell you that the residents will be with you when they are free.

I have heard of this and even using a roll cage as an air tank. I'm not sure they have enough volume for it to matter, but it's better than nothing, I suppose. My K5 Blazer has electric onboard air setup and a 5 gallon tank. It takes about 2 minutes per tire to go from 10 PSI to street pressure.

That seems like a good start. Once to get to 2-3000 presentations I bet it'll get a lot easier. Also practice your draws in front of a mirror and practice picking up your dot before your arms extend.

I have very weak eye dominance and I a red dot is the first time I was able to shoot with both eyes open. I also just got the most incredible training tool I have ever seen, a Meta Quest 3 and the Ace shooting game. It is so real I walked into the wall. Hopefully that will help me find the dot.

I never liked green fiber optic tubes in my sights although I did try them and one of my guns even came with it. I replaced it with red a long time ago. The red dot is a lot more natural for me because that's what I'm used to looking at on my front sight. I do agree with the big dot; mine is 6 MOA. I'm shooting a 2011, so it has a narrower slide and the RMSc cut. The Vortex Defender CCW is one of the larger windows available for this bolt pattern so that's what I'm running. Like I said, this is my first dot pistol so I'm not that familiar with all of what might be out there but it's doing the job for now. A few of my cowboy friends and I will be going to the state level USPSA match in September so this is the division I'm picking for that.

A conclusion can follow from a single observation. Is there a magic number where "conclusions" are acceptable? 35 incidents is a pretty big sample. The 63% hit probability is a big deal. The national average is in the neighborhood of 20% the last time I looked at the data. During the 8 years where I would have been involved in investigating OIS incidents, I don't recall any where multiple shots were fired and the hit probability was anywhere close to 63%. The aggregate was, as would be expected, close to the national average. I think what I would take away from this is that people who don't shoot very often or very much do better with a dot than with sights because the dot is hard to ignore. I recently got my first pistol with a dot and it remains to be seen if I can shoot it faster. By the winter I will have an idea by looking at my scores, but right now the jury's still out.

If I was dead, I wouldn't care what my guns sold for. I got my money's worth out of every single one of them. I wouldn't spend one minute of my time left on this earth focused on that.

It's sad how far they fell. I remember them winning the longest world series game ever and sweeping the series.

That is wonderful! That's what I love about SASS so much, the culture of people. I hope that never changes.

I think Christmas songs or Yankee Doodle probably fit into that category. I'm not sure I know a single word to "Dixie."

I hope we never get to a point where gun giveaways become the norm. Big prize tables ruined PRS and probably many other shooting sports. SASS has the best people because there is no million dollar prize table for winning. I'd rather see vintage guns raffled off or given away randomly to match participants than winners, if we must.

The last time I watched it, the cars held 40 gallons of fuel and still had turbochargers. What year was that?

That's a shame. But that's also why I left my home state in 2010 and won't return.

Friend of mine accidentally answered a question incorrectly on a tablet like that and was banned from buying firearms from Sportsman's for 30 days. Still to this day he has no idea what he answered wrong. And he's an IT guy by trade who does cybersecurity for the DoD and has a TS/SCI clearance.