TGO David

I present, my new hotness... I've been flirting with this model for about two years now. Ever since it came out, I've been trying to get myself to just do it... but for some stupid reason I kept gravitating towards other plastic 45's. I bought, and sold, a Glock 21SF because I figured I liked my G19 so much I had to love the 21. Wrong. I bought, and sold, an HK45 because I figured I liked my P2000 so much that I had to love the 45. Wrong. I bought and kept another 1911 because I figured I liked the 1911 platform so much that I could be plenty happy carrying one all the time while my beloved Wilson Combat pulled safe-queen duty. I wasn't wrong, but I still didn't like it as much as I liked carrying the Wilson. And I really didn't want to go back to carrying the Wilson all the time. *sigh* So I finally gathered my wits and did what I'd been subconsciously wanting to do all along. I added yet another M&P to the collection. I ordered this M&P 45 4-inch (mid-size) version and had the guys at D&T do the transfer for me. The moment plastic met hand, I was in love. M&P OH YEAH! Knowing that it was on the way, I ordered another set of Warren Tactical night sights for it since all of my M&Ps wear them. Easily my favorite sight design, period. I also decided to order the Apex Tactical DCAEK drop-in sear and trigger kit. All of this was waiting for the M&P as soon as it arrived. Since installing the sights and the DCAEK, I have to say that this is now very rapidly becoming my new favorite. If it's as reliable as my M&P40 has been, it will overtake both it and my Glock 19 in preference for carry. I'm not a caliber weiner and don't buy into the idea of handgun stopping power, but I do wax nostalgic for the .45ACP and find that I shoot this cartridge very, very well. I also reload for it, which means I can practice all I want. Win-win. Being able to carry 10+1 in the firearm itself and another 10 on my hip in a spare mag carrier provides me with a solid number of almost 1/2" diameter projectiles that have been stopping various bad guys for 100 years now. In fact, this handgun has earned serious accolades from acknowledged 1911 experts like Hilton Yam at 10-8 Performance, who picked it over the aforementioned Glock 21 and HK45 as his preference for a plastic fighting 45. I'm pretty stoked about this and feel that me and my M&P will be spending quite a lot of quality time together, both at the range and for social carry.

Meh. I know some schools... local ones... teach this mentality, and there's anecdotal evidence supporting all sorts of weird crap out there on the Internets, but I'm still not convinced that this is the one-size fits all tactic that every civilian should resort to. I'm going to let the cops dictate my response. If they demand that I DROP the firearm, I'll comply. If they tell me to put it down, slowly, I'll comply. If they tell me to shove it up my ass and dance the Macarena, I'll unwillingly comply. Yes, I realize that a gun is a tool and you shouldn't be worried about getting your tool bent up a little by tossing it to the ground, etc. blah blah blah but I'm going to use a little common sense and discretion too. You and I are usually on the same page but I'm not sure the Camden Drop* is always going to be necessary.

Mike, I'm really not buying in to the whole "throw the gun to the ground" or "drop the gun" nonsense that I see so urgently expressed on other forums. The only conceivable reason that I can see that I'd be standing in my driveway holding a gun in the first place is if I just shot someone for a legally justifiable reason and was in fear for my life from his accomplices, friends or family. In which case I'm retaining my weapon until the police are on the scene and then I'm obeying their commands. I'll place the gun on the ground with great haste but I'm not tossing it, dropping it or kicking it into the pavement where maybe... just MAYBE... the planets might all suddenly align and all of the bad karma in the world come crashing down on me at once and the damn thing would discharge upon violently striking the pavement, resulting in some hair-triggered constable letting loose on his own accord. I've seen the whole "THROW IT DOWN" nonsense spread elsewhere and believe that this is sadly one of those cases where Internet mythology has taken root but to the opposite extreme. If a police officer arrives, sees me complying with his command to put the weapon down and then shoots me because I wasn't fast enough yet the firearm was never pointed in his direction, that ill-trained trigger happy son of a bitch, his department and the city/town he works for is going to end up making me or my survivors very wealthy. Besides, if this crap was real... Voldemort would be dead by now.

Kittah is not amused!

ROFL... Dude... I have so many pictures of our male Doberman wearing hats, antlers, shirts, ties ... occasionally a clean sock stretched over the end of his snout, a la elephant trunk. He's an endless source of amusement for my kids.

This is good stuff. Folks, Chad provides Gunsmithing services for D&T Arms, one of our vendors. Be sure to stop by their shop and see his 1911's in their selection of firearms for sale.

Same here.

I posted a thread offering them for sale via pre-order a few weeks ago.

Cool... glad they are starting to arrive!

My co-workers all thought I was crazy for paying for a personal cell phone since the company happily issues us all smartphones as part of the job. They changed their opinions when someone recently had their call records pulled and evaluated by HR as part of a witch hunt. They were perfectly in the right to do so because it's company property and you understand that you have no expectations of privacy when using company resources. If I'm not on the clock or on call, my company phone stays on the charger turned off. They know how to reach me on my personal phone if it's an emergency. Otherwise I keep my work and my personal lives completely separate from one another... phones included.

Nicely done!

I miss my past life where I was able to carry into work and just lock it up in the desk.

Meh. If it's a Blackberry and he has it managed by a BES server at his company in order to receive email and such, they can load apps on it all day long and prevent him from making changes. It's all done via BES policies. We do this with our Blackberries at work, although we don't go installing GPS nanny apps on them either. A factory reset to the phone will fix the issue, but it will also break his feed of corporate email. Once he reconnects it to their BES server, they can go right back to dropping whatever apps they want onto the phone. So really, it's a legal privacy issue since your son bought and pays for the device. If I were him, I'd demand a new company-provided Blackberry that he can leave at the office or at home (etc) and only carry when he doesn't care about being "tracked".

Just a very quick update. I have mailed all of the existing orders out and folks should start receiving them in the next few days. Keep in mind that the USPS is slow right now due to the holiday rush. Once everyone has received their stickers we'll look at how many extras we truly have left. Of course, everyone had a chance to pre-order so if you missed out this time maybe you'll act faster next time. Sent from my DROIDX using Tapatalk

Closing thread for the interim.

In the interest of full disclosure since the OP has been secretive about this, the store in question appears to be Coal Creek Armory based on the fact that the IP address of the OP matches that used before by JWP. I'm closing the thread and banning the OP since he is clearly aware of our policy concerning establishing alter egos.

I'm kind of tempted to do this, actually. Yes, but I've also seen it implemented properly where the SME's had a ton of humility about them as well. If we couldn't pull that off here, I'd kill the idea in a hurry. No fear of that. I wanted honest feedback and I'm getting some really good contributions here. Again, if we implement it properly there's not much danger of it becoming a popularity contest. Still, I've got a lot of thinking to do still. I'm seeing some flaws in my plan that need to be addressed ... and even then I'm not sure any of these changes will translate into great improvements. I didn't mean to imply that but I can see how it may have been read that way. However there are undoubtedly clear cases in point where someone has asked a fairly serious question only to receive good advice that was lost in the noise of a lot of really bad advise. I've tried implementing iTrader here again as recently as two weeks ago. It's still very, very buggy on vBulletin 4.x and I don't have much hope of it improving. ... At any rate, I'm not going to do anything just yet. As I said I've got a lot more thinking to do.

I'm almost done stuffing envelopes and hope to be mailing them out tomorrow. It looks like I may have between 30-50 left over but I need to double check and make sure that everyone who pre-paid receives theirs before I sell any more. Thanks for being patient.

I've been toying with some ideas lately that I think could improve the quality of information provided on TGO and further elevate this community above the status of just being a cool place to hang out and talk about firearms, to a community where you can hang out and talk about firearms and get good, solid, no BS information. Frankly, as we continue to grow in size I am becoming increasingly concerned about us going the way of Arfcom or Glocktalk in terms of signal to noise ratio. If you've spent much time on those sites, you know that they started out as brilliant sources of solid information and then became so popular that the pool of knowledge became diluted. There is so much random nonsense and utter farcical bull-feces on those forums now, that a person who is new to the community has precious little chance of identifying the true experts from the "mall ninjas" who have zero practical experience and just parrot what they read last month on some other forum. Sadly I've seen an increased instance of this happening on TGO where patently bad information was given out or someone regurgitated what they read somewhere else as an answer to a question, and further contributed to the propagation of yet another gun myth. Things like "stopping power" in a handgun, or why a Glock is better than an M&P or why you should trade in your gas impingement driven AR's immediately because they are doomed to fail. So here's what I am thinking about doing. Tell me what you think. It doesn't mean I'm going to base my ultimate decision on popular vote, but I promise I'll take the constructive comments under advisement. My Brilliant Plan: First, I am thinking about doing away with post counts entirely -- or at least as far as the regular members will ever see. Post counts for some reason equate to experience in the eyes of some folks, and they are an absurd matter of pride to others. I really hate post counts because they mean nothing more than the fact that a person has spent a lot of time on a forum. I've spent a lot of time working on crap in my garage at home, but that doesn't make me a car. The same holds true for post counts being an indicator of someone's knowledge or expertise. I'd like to get rid of post counts so that people don't weigh the value of a person's comments based on how many other comments they've made. Second, I am thinking about setting up a designation for members who have demonstrated themselves to be Subject Matter Experts in certain disciplines. This isn't a popularity contest where the cool kids are nominated by me or the staff, it's just a simple fact of the matter that when certain folks speak about certain subjects, the rest of us would be wise to shut up and listen. For example, if Tony at Secret City Weaponeers has a whopping 200 posts to his name and takes it upon himself to tell us how to make our own Kydex belt loops for his holsters, we should probably freaking listen to him as opposed to some random guy who has 20,000 posts to his name but his only credentials are he stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night. Right? Wouldn't it be nice to have folks on TGO who are recognized as experts in certain things? SURPRISE! We already do! The problem is they either tend to be quiet about it or their posts are lost in a sea of noise from people who haven't really got any practical experience backing up their often-incorrect opinions. It's my hope that by designating folks as SME's (based on real world resumes) we will help identify the people who really ought to be listened to when they talk about certain things. Just a thought. I'm also thinking about using a feature of the vBulletin forum software that I have resisted the urge to implement here thus far. Namely, Reputation Points. I haven't quite figured out the procedures for this, but I would implement it in such a way that it wouldn't be possible (or at least not easy) to abuse it for the sake of stupid popularity contests among cliques. I would want it set up so that maybe the Staff and the Subject Matter Experts could add positive reputation to members who contribute valuable posts. Everyone would be able to see each other's reputation points also. That way we all kind of know what a person's career here at TGO has been and whether they are a good apple... or not. Perhaps as members gain positive reputation, that advances them towards becoming Subject Matter Experts themselves. It seems like a good way to keep track of the folk who constantly contribute solid information to the community. Another angle of Reputation Points is that they can swing negatively as well. So if a person comes onto TGO and starts posting all sorts of completely inaccurate information, tarnishes the reputation of firearms owners everywhere, makes a complete ass of themselves, etc. that person could be awarded negative reputation all the way up the point of the forum automatically banning them for being worthless drains on society. Anyway... just some thoughts I've been having lately and surprisingly enough they are similar to what some other folks that I've talked to recently have been thinking as well. And again, none of this is to create popularity contests on TGO... it's all about providing the best information we can to our members and ensuring that we don't become yet another useless waste of your time on the Internet. Thoughts?

Finished and did Christmas with my family this past weekend. Christmas Day my wife and I will have her family over and just relax and enjoy each others company.

Schweeeet.

Ok, that makes a little more sense. Still seems really unwieldy. Is it light enough that it makes more sense to go this route than to just put taller sights on your gun and run a smaller, fatter can?

It's no small coincidence that the parallel between the two was drawn though, do you think? At some point it becomes obvious that while the two individuals may indeed be two individuals that we're just deciding upon degrees of extremes.

I'm going to assume that nothing bad was meant by this, nor did they mean to intrude. It's not as though they are trying to advertise their shop and frankly we've probably got some unemployed folks on TGO who could really use a job. Let's just run with things as they are.

I don't see the irony. I also don't see Voldemort as a law abiding citizen who has been repeatedly maligned by the police. What I see when I look at his case is someone who is using their firearm and carry permit as a prop in his quest to get rich quick. Carrying a firearm for your self defense is serious business. It's a responsibility that is not to be taken lightly. Voldemort doesn't exhibit the normal traits of a person exercising his rights in a responsible fashion. My opinion of him is that he's a narcissistic opportunist looking for the fast track to easy cash at the government's expense, holding out hope that a judge and jury will find him innocent and award him lots and lots of taxpayer money to soothe his poor little injured soul. If he was the patron saint of responsible handgun carry being wronged by the government, don't you think that the NRA or some other champion of the Second Amendment would have rushed to his aid by now? Frankly I'm sick and tired of people mistaking what is happening to him as somehow indicative of how The Man wants to treat the rest of us. It's not. He got the confrontation he was looking for and is now just waiting for the payout.