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Some of you have noticed I haven't been online much in January or February. It's been busy around the HQ, for sure. First and foremost, on January 31st my wife and I welcomed this little nugget into our lives... Our third child, and second daughter, arrived on the scene on the 31st at 8lbs 8oz and 20-inches long. She and mom have been doing well but the year ahead of us will be challenging. Three days after she was born we discovered that our daughter has a cleft soft pallet which was making it impossible for her to nurse easily either naturally or by bottle. We've been connected with some excellent doctors at VUMC Children's Hospital and they put us onto the trail of some bottles specifically designed for kids with this condition and they've made a tremendous difference. Unfortunately our daughter will need surgery to repair the cleft, but they want her to be at least 10-12 months old before they do it. Our objective in the meantime is to keep her on-target from nutrition and growth perspectives. But we really can't complain about any of this. All it takes is a quick walk through the Children's Hospital lobby to understand how fortunate we are in so many other ways. God's been good to us. As if that weren't enough excitement, last Saturday (08-FEB-2020) I injured myself coming down the stairs in the middle of the night. My eyes an brain got into a disagreement about which step I was on and I over-stepped the last one at the bottom and made contact with the floor about 10-inches later than I anticipated that I would. This was made more troubling by the fact that I was carrying our 2-year old. He's fine and was fine. I took the fall to both knees and plopped him safely onto the hardwood in front of me before I collapsed on my side in agony. I've essentially been living and sleeping in a recliner with my feet up since Saturday, I am able to walk on it just fine and have no pain from supporting or lifting my weight with that leg, but bending it hurts a bit and there's been an occasional mechanical popping sensation in it. Chances are it's a torn meniscus. I'm meeting an orthopedic surgeon tomorrow for an evaluation and consult. I am half expecting arthroscopic surgery to be necessary to trim or stitch the meniscus, but I am praying that it's not that and is just a strain/sprain that needs more time to heal up. Again, though... I'm blessed. My son wasn't hurt at all in that fall and it could have been a LOT worse for the both of us. And seriously, walk though VUMC sometime. It's a perspective changer. Anyway, the next bit will be busy for me and my family. If I am slow to respond to things here, give me a little extra time?

I'd love to see a study that looks at provided valet parking at hospitals mapped against positive patient outcomes. Dollar for dollar, I bet it's some of the best money they spend. If you think about it, if you've been sick enough to have just spent time in the hospital - the last thing they need is you wandering around outside in the cold for 30 minutes with the added stress of not being able to find your car. David, give me a shout if y'all need anything.

Another gun I think I need.

Congrats on your new arrival. If it holds true in your family as it does in so many I'm guessing it will be yet another "daddy's girl" I feel for you on the knee injury. Doesn't take long on TGO to find someone who's dealt with it and I don't think any of them will tell you to avoid dealing with it straight on. At least that would be my advice with all the modern medicine we have. The tough guy approach leads to worse long term damage...ask me how I know lol.

Looks like a Blue Heeler with tags to me. https://www.dropbox.com/s/1tpws8kq2tdxu2g/IMG_2426.PNG?dl=0

Congrats on the new one.

David, Congratulations on your growing Family ! Get well with your injury.

Congratulations !

Congratulations on your bundle of joy, and heal up soon.

Congrats on the new daughter!! Prayers for you & yours.

Thanks, everyone! My visit to the orthopedist today was encouraging, or at least as can be expected. X-Rays looked good, physical exam didn't find anything that seemed particularly alarming to the doctor. MRI is unfortunately not possible because of some metal bullet shrapnel I still have behind my right eye. As much as I'd like to have it removed... that isn't the way I want it to happen. For now the doc thinks I've at the very least strained my MCL and possibly partially torn it. I've also seriously bruised my patellar tendon but he doesn't think it's detached since I sill have the ability to bend my knee. They gave me a nice big shot in the knee with some cortisone, hooked me up with a stabilizing knee brace, and told me to keep it elevated, compressed, and iced for another week and see how it goes.

Congrats on the new member to your family! I will keep all of you in my thoughts and prayers, hoping for the best.

Interesting story.. https://principia-scientific.org/50000-tons-of-useless-wind-turbine-blades-dumped-in-the-landfill/

Here is the latest update on the Glock Store coming to Nashville.

@Capbyrd & @DaveTN my apologies, I took your use of MSR out of context and thought you were referring to Remington’s MSR rifle, which stands for Modular Sniper Rifle. Makes allot more sense now with the proper context, and I agree with you about the other MSR meaning. It is essentially elements of the gun industry trying to take a PC approach to a topic that we don’t need to church up and make it out to be something its not. Again, sorry for my confusion and thank you for your clarification.

Congratulations on your new addition. I hope and pray for a speedy recovery for all.

MSR stands for Modern Sporting Rifle. There is a group of gun owners that think by changing the name of what you call a weapon; you can somehow change the perception of it. Just like those that get their panties in a bunch when they hear the AR called an Assault rifle. Of course an AR is an Assault Rifle. You only need to look at scenes like Sandy Hook, Pulse Night Club, or Vegas to verify that. An AR-15 is not an M-16, and calling it some other name makes it appear as if we have something to hide. It’s not a fully automatic machine gun as the M-16; it’s a semi automatic rifle. Rifles like the M-1 Garand or the Remington 750 Deer Rifle are 30-06 Springfield and have the potential of being far more devastating that an AR-15. The Mini 14 along with a bunch of others have the same potential for use by violence criminals the AR has. If we have to defend every rifle we have based on how criminals have used it, we may well find ourselves defending “Deer Rifles”. A body drops for every round fired at extremely long distances; how scary will that be? I own 3 AR’s. An AR-10, an AR-15 and an AR-22. I call them AR’s; even though none of them are Armalite Rifles. If someone decides to call them “Assault Rifles” or MSR; so be it. But I can still call them whatever I like. It is my Inalienable right to own these weapons for self-protection. It is also a right under the 2nd amendment of the United States Constitution.

MSR means Modern Sporting Rifle. Its an attempt to give ARs and AKs a PC friendly moniker to appease the masses. Its cowering to their fear mongering.

I think of a revolver in 9mm as giving up the potential horsepower of a .357 and giving up the capacity and slim profile of a 9mm pistol. What am I missing?

Congratulations to you and your wife on the new baby! Our thoughts and prayers are with you all for your speedy recovery and for the surgery in the little one’s future.

Congratulations on the beautiful new addition to your family. You are so right about the Vanderbilt Children's Hospital changing one's perspective. They care for children who are truly suffering. All the things you've described are just life. You and the wife will be dead tired for the next several years, but all too soon, you'll be looking back on this time as the best time of your lives.

It’s good to hear that the news is mostly positive. Congrats on the new addition and prayers of fast healing for your knee.

Firsthand experience at VUMC and everyone was fantastic. My daughter that went through a major surgery at 15 months and continued care for a few months afterwards, Your in good hands there for sure. I had the same mishap with my son vs the last step. Ended up hitting the floor on my hip with him still raised in the air after I managed to slide over to my back after all things settled and him over my chest. Use the valet parking. It's free!

Congratulations to you and your family. I'm glad you're able to take your struggles in stride.

Best wishes for you and your family.

Congrats and get well soon.

As above, Congrats on the new daughter, knee fixing has come a long way in the past few years, you will be fine.

Congratulations on the little one and I hope you get that knee fixed soon.

Congrats on the little one. Will keep her in our prayers for the upcoming surgery. I feel your pain David on the fall. Hopefully it is minor.

I have a Ruger LCR 9mm. I like the moon clips, think of them as low profile speed loaders. I did find some soft silicon rubber caps that work well with the loaded moon clips to help keep everything contained. Actually have two different color of caps, one for defensive loads and one for range ammo.

Just a friendly regular reminder that time spent training with people like @Cruel Hand Luke who know what they’re doing is really worth it. Spending a day or two with some good folks, working on *correct* execution of drills you can bring home with you, and getting to put some rounds down range load testing your actual carry setup is so worth it. Really. Seriously. If you’ve never done it, take a defensive pistol course from a knowledgeable instructor. Randy is a great instructor, and we’re so thankful to have him on TGO. But he’s also a professional who has suggested good trainers in other areas to a whole bunch of folks over the years. Get some training. It’s worth it.

I use G96, I like the smell and it does the cleaning and lub. I do have a water based cleaner that is almost odorless and does a great job, even better than G96 on really bad buildup. It is a store branded cleaner and I have know idea what it is. I used it before I moved and I have about half a bottle left so already wondering how I will get more. It has slight green cast.

Missouri Confederates Thomas H. Brown, William A. Brown, and Abe Brown

Fess up who is this Untitled by Johnny Rotten, on Flickr

+1 . I'd argue that fending off a guy who is armed with a knife while you are seated in the passenger seat of a car is pretty stressful yet once I got the gun out and created some space I saw the sights clearly because I LOOKED for the sights. I also took the time (less than a second) to scan the back ground for what was beyond the target in case of a shoot through or a miss. So when people try to tell me it CAN'T be done that just does not match my own experience. Incidentally I had that discussion about the incident and the scanning the background with a student one time. I told him about how fast things can be processed in your mind and it can look like other things and people are in slow motion. I related that I had the time to look at the back ground as I got the gun up and on the sights and that I still had enough dexterity to take up the slack on the trigger AND then let off the trigger without firing the gun once the threat decided that he really didn't want to get shot. I was able to do this without any spastic accidental jerking of the trigger. And that was with a 1911(So much for NEEDING a DA trigger to prevent ADs) And your hands do not ALWAYS turn to flippers during the incident. (Afterward the adrenaline dump did make my hands shake but not until after it was over). So now fast forward about 8 months and that same student who works as a bail bondsman gets into a gunfight while trying to take a bail jumper into custody. He told me that IN THE MOMENT he remembered what I had said and he actually LOOKED at the background (an urban parking lot feeding into a city street) as the gun was coming up out of his holster and BEFORE he pressed off the first shot. He said "It was just like you said" . He shot and hit the guy twice, the bad guy ran off and his lawyer negotiated his surrender to the police a couple of months later. Apparently one round hit the bad guy's gun and one hit him in the leather belt he was wearing and deflected off leaving 2 superficial arm and torso wounds (so much for pistols knocking people down) . Point is that we don't all experience exactly the same phenomena and we don't all react the same to it. You tend to do what you have practiced and planned for...

They aughta sell Hoppe's #9 perfume. Guys would love it!

Fairly certain this was Hoss Cartright when he was a toddler.

The better you can shoot.... the better you can shoot. Period. Even under stress. And it seems that those who start out at a high level seem to do just fine. If you start out at the top of the mountain and tumble down 25% of the way you are still pretty high up that mountain. If you start out only 25% of the way up the mountain and you fall 25% of the way down under stress then you are now in a heap at the bottom. If you can draw and shoot a 3 shot 4" group at 7 yards in 2 seconds and you suffer a 25% reduction in ability due to stress then that is now a 5" group in 2.5 seconds. If you can only do it in 4 seconds that is now a 5" group in 5 seconds. (This is not directed at any individual in this thread) What annoys me is when people who can't shoot well by virtually any metric work in the training industry and take money from people and tell them that as long as they hit the target (generally the size of a king size bed sheet) any where then that is good for you and bad for them. And they use that as a justification for sloppy marksmanship. And they refer to vague "pearls of wisdom" like "you won't be able to see your sights in a gunfight" that was wisdom from a time when sights on "combat pistols" were largely tiny little nubs compared to the sights we have today. Look at the sights on a 1911 built in 1920 or even a 1911A1 made in 1943 vs a modern one made by Springfield or Wilson or virtually any other manufacturer. But the "instructor" is still telling people that you won't be able to see them and therefore they damn the student to not using their sights under stress for lack of even trying to look for them. Self fulfilling prophecy. Garbage in garbage out. Unfortunately there are too many people hanging up a shingle and calling themselves instructors that don't have a good enough contextual and historical body of knowledge to know that what they are saying might not apply today or WHY it might not apply. And frankly too many of them don't shoot at a level to have any idea of what actually is possible and what is not. On the other hand there are plenty of folks (Cirillo and Bill Allard, Charles Askins,Wyatt Earp,John Wesley Hardin etc etc) who saw sights and used them and won a bunch of gunfights. Why? Because they LOOKED for them. The interesting thing is that all those guys could shoot well....hmm...maybe there is a cause and effect relationship ? Now I'm not saying you will ALWAYS have to see sights to hit a human in the upper chest . In fact I am a big proponent building a drawstroke and grip that drives the gun to where it needs to be whether you look at the sights or not and then using just enough visual verification to guarantee the hit and no more . Some shots are so easy that you can make them without focusing hard on the sights. Think about a shot on an aggressor 3 yards away. That is not a technically difficult shot to make and most people can make it from less than full extension. But If you spend all of your time on shooting fast garbage can lid sized groups at 3 yards and you are then confronted with a guy 10 yards away in a parking lot filled with a bunch of "organic backstop " (people) down range then suddenly things just got really dangerous for EVERYONE. AJ mentions the 4" group as fast as you can deliver it. (and the key here is to do it FAST). That is something to strive for in training and we understand that we might still end up with a 6" group at speed under stress. I personally want to keep it all in a 3" circle and work toward that (as fast as I can) so that if it is 4 or 5 under stress that is still adequate to hit them somewhere very close to the spot I was actually trying to hit. And we are trying to hit a SPOT. We are not just trying to hit the guy "somewhere...more times than not....most of the time". If your "acceptable standards" are high in training then your "stress degraded performance" is probably still higher than most people's "best case scenario performance" . (That last comment was an understatement ...there is a reason that the average police hit ratio is 25% and certain specialized units like LAPD SWAT and SIS (Special Investigation Service) is more like 95%. And it does not have anything to do with the gun in their holster. It has to do with their level of training and the standards they accept as "good enough". ) In the end we just do not know what the problem we face will be. It will PROBABLY be 3 or 4 yards but it could be 34 yards. Andy Brown shot Dean Mellberg from 75 yards away with a Beretta 92 to stop the Fairchild Air Force base shooting in 1994. He hit Mellberg in the head and right shoulder. Vic Stacy shot Charles Ronald Conner from 50 yards away with a revolver while Conner was trying to kill officer Steven Means in Early,Texas in 2012. He hit him 4 times. I'm guessing Brown and Stacy probably both saw their sights.......

Come out to the TN/GA/AL Training day on FEB 22 and you will get a full day of it .......

At that distance YOU may not be the immediate object of the attacker's attention. You might be engaging them to save someone else.

That's not what Cirillo himself wrote in his descriptions of the gunfights in which he was involved.

. Irreconcilable differences- grounds for divorce....

I'm old school. I was taught that if you can hit a 9" paper plate out to 25 yards, that was good enough.

You missed my point. My use of the word "correctly" wasn't probably the best choice. I'll try to clarify the point I was trying to make. Yes, Trijicon has a registered trademark for RMR, which stands for Ruggedized Miniature Reflex. Holosun which you referenced, makes similar optics which they are not allowed to call it an RMR due to the trademark, so they call it an Open Reflex Sight which is a generic term. Is the Holosun rugged, yes. Is it a miniature size, yes. Is it a reflex optic, yes. I hear and see others use the term RMR generically to refer to this type of optic. Is it correct, no. But the same thing happens all the time with other products. I used Band-Aid and Kleenex as examples of the most widely used terms for an adhesive bandage and a tissue. Is that correct, no but people use it none the less. Back to RMR, to me that's the quickest way for people to identify what type of "red dot" is being referenced rather than an open reflex optic or a "tubular" type red dot. Just like the OP's title and lead post using the term RMR. It's just convenient. That's all I was trying to say.

Depends on what you reason for wanting a "higher end" gun is, and how good a shooter you are. If you have the time and tools already. Sounds like you already appreciate that the most important thing is the barrel, interface to the upper receiver, BCG. Triggers help, but secondary to those. Greg hit the mark on the economics. Current generics have closed the gap over what was the wild west of parts 6 to 10 years ago. Popular opinion and experience seems to point to there be little difference for a good shooter who knows his build craft and gas system function. The biggest difference seems to be feature sets (ambi this and that) and rail to upper interfaces. There are some that have minor tweaks that are designed to mitigate recoil impulse. If that is worth another 1000 to 1500, is subjective.

“Higher End” means we are not discussing $500; $1000 factory builds. Because those you name are not in that price range. Name recognition (for the higher end Mfg’s) is because they work. Parts are matched, sometimes hand fitted if necessary, and usually tested. If you are building a rifle that you will keep; I would say build your own and go for what you want. Problem is, if you try to sell it. It’s a garage build, and no one is going to want to pay much for it. You will also have to buy gun building tools. In my own opinion based on the many AR’s I have seen and owned; you can buy a factory build that will be just as accurate and reliable as the high dollar designer guns. Guns are like computers. It used to be that you could build your own better, and for less money. Those days are gone. You can build, more specifically to what you want, but you can’t save any money doing it. It’s hard to beat the quality of the big boys in the mid to high end PC’s. That’s just my opinion.

Build=get what you want. Buy=better resale value.

Check the set screw in the trigger first. Loosen it up some (back it out), if the screw is in a touch too far the pistol will do this. If it is okay then go on to check the other items.