TGO David

Maybe Joe will chime in here, but I believe there are places locally that can engrave the necessary information for you. Any lower must be engraved once it is registered as an SBR. Owner information is included in the indicia.

You guys are giving me hope that S&W has worked the bugs out with the M&P automatics over the past year. Keep the good range reports coming in.

What... that we don't want him either?

It's not just here. It's on a lot of forums. But like one cop told me a while back... if he had wanted to be popular and have everyone love him, he would have become a fireman. It's probably also why a lot of officers don't feel very welcome on civilian oriented forums. Which is a real shame if you think about the mutual advantages that exist when civilians and police officers have a common understanding of things. My goal for TGO is for it to be a place that you can come and discuss firearms ownership issues regardless of which side of the badge you are on. That's why this latest rash of "cop bashing" really has me concerned.

I agree and would like to emphasize that this sentiment is exactly why we insist that members of TGO debate issues rather than attack individuals (or professions). A lot of "cop bashing" would be averted if people would just state facts, leave out emotion and avoid brash generalizations. It's one thing to say that a particular police officer was a complete dick when he pulled you over for a burned out headlight, beat you with his Maglite, kicked your dog and insulted your preference in whiskeys. It's another to say that all cops are dicks because of what that one guy did. And how DARE he insult your preference in whiskeys. How DARE he.

It ran fine. However the lack of a ambidextrous mag release is one of the Glock's flaws. We did several one-handed (injury simulation) drills in class and it was made very obvious that the Springfield XD and the Glock 21SF both have the advantage for weak-hand shooting because of their ambi design. The extended release can be manipulated with your one weak hand even if you have to physically lay the weapon down, mag release downward, and push it against a hard surface to eject the mag. YES, that is an extreme situation. But **** happens and usually at the worst possible moment. I already had difficulty manipulating the mag release with my strong hand because of a real bitch of a case of tennis elbow (tendonitis). I'm going to stack the deck in my favor any way I can. The recoil spring and guide rod are just improvements to help cut down my split times (faster follow up shots while retaining accuracy) and avert a known problem with the plastic Glock guiderods splitting and failing over time. BTW: I agree with your NRA instructor but there are cases where minor improvements make sense. These are two such cases.

Thanks. It's already a great gun. It just needs a great shooter behind it and that's the part I need to improve the most.

I know what you're saying. "Whoa there, buddy! That's crazy talk!" But I am going for it. I'm improving on perfection and have ordered a few new tweaks for my Glock 19 based on some things that I experienced and learned this past weekend in the defensive handgun class. First up, a Vicker's Extended Glock Mag Release. Not as short and stubby as what it was born with (aww... wookit at how cute it is) but not as long and cumbersome as the ninja commando mall warrior Glock Extended Mag Release that the Tactical & Practical models come with. No sir, just right. Big enough to get the job done, small enough you can still tuck it away without a ... um ... premature ... discharge? Next up, a reduced weight (15lb) recoil spring and steel guiderod. I got to shoot Todd@CIS's Glock 19 with this setup and the difference in splits between followup shots was surprising. Apparently Glock saves a little cash by using the same heavy recoil spring on the .40SW Glock 23 as they do on the 9mm Glock 19. You tell me... do you use the same shock absorbers on a Kenworth as you do on a Toyota Tundra? I. Don't. Think. So. After I do all of this, the only logical thing left to do is glue on some velcro so that it can be uber tactical. Thanks for the advice, Todd! Oh, and I was just kidding about the Velcro. Or was I?

Yes, it is the truth and you're not the only one to notice it. I've been noticing this disturbing trend more and more lately but haven't really been able to put together a coherent thought about it that wouldn't come across as a disciplinary rant. For some reason it seems to me that there is an unusually large percentage of RTKBA folks who really have a chip on their shoulder about the police. I think it has to do with the fact that a lot of RTKBA people are Libertarian to some degree and that they see cops as being "The Man" or at least henchmen of "The Man". Reference Waco, Ruby Ridge, etc. for the fuel to their fire. The problem is, most cops aren't that way at all. I had the extreme pleasure of getting to shoot with and cut up with a few of them this weekend. GREAT guys, each of them. None of them wore jackboots and none of them wiped their muddy shoes off with my Constitutional rights. Unfortunately many citizens only get to interact with the police on the occasion that someone did something wrong and the cop had to do something about it in his or her professional capacity. Like getting pulled over for speeding. Sure there are some bad cops out there, but there are some bad doctors, bad dentists, bad school teachers, bad construction workers, bad priests, bad preachers, etc. We typically don't vilify those professions just because somewhere someone decided to be a jackass on the job. Walk a mile in a man's shoes and your opinion of that man might change. Some of our members would probably do well to remember that when they start in on the cop bashing.

Blah blah blah... I hear he also breathes air. I'm not going to give that up just because of association.

Perfection is evolutionary and St. Gaston is slow as hell to acknowledge that his babies need anything new. Sometimes the Kool Aid tastes a little bitter. If Glock would do away with the absurd hump on the backstrap and make it a modular design like the M&P or the HK P2000 / P30 / P2000 and others, they would really have something spectacular going on.

Now... start importing them to the USA so that we colonials can own them, Glock!

Thoughts on this now that I've had some time to step back and think about it a little more... #1. Some people are inherently evil and need to die. The adult male attacker deserved to die. Unfortunately was able to murder the child before meeting his own fate. That's the true shame of the situation. #2. The bystanders have to live with the result of their inaction for the rest of their lives. I'm sure it will be pure torture to some. To others it will perhaps embolden them to ACT the next time they see a child being victimized now that they've seen what happens when they don't. #3. This reinforces something we were told in the defensive pistol class I took this past weekend. In moments of crisis, people will have one of three reactions: They will fight, they will flee or they will freeze. These people apparently froze, despite what sounds like feeble attempts to reason with someone who only spoke and understood violence. There's a whole lot to be disgusted with in this situation.

The guy tried to run a roadblock. That same roadblock was put in place to also keep out the looters and opportunistic thieves. If you let one person in, you have to let them all in. The roadblock was put in place to keep people out of dangerous territory. Swift currents, underwater debris, unstable bridges, roadways and utilities are all tremendously hazardous to anyone who tries to navigate flooded areas. They cordon off areas hit by tornadoes also! If this guy had gone back into the restricted area and gotten into a bind, that puts emergency personnel at risk because they then have to go in and save his ass. But no, let's not use reason and common sense. Let's run around like this and scream "Police state! Police state!" and use it as a reason to further hate and distrust the people who usually end up standing in harms way for you.

She tried to get good photos of you, but some cop-looking guy in a Gulf Shores shirt kept stepping into the shots.

The combat reload is one of those things that makes you go "hmmmm". And it made absolute sense as soon as I saw it. It just goes against everything we've ever done in competition, but that's why they call IDPA/USPSA "gaming" and not training.

Sounds good on the charcoal. Thanks!

10 year plan from what I hear. But it's also about 30 miles away from the airport in most places.

Yes, I've got about 220 that were worth keeping from the 400 or so shot. Once Todd or Dustin approve them (operational security for Dustin) then I'll post a link to them.

I would avoid 440. At certain times of the day it is a complete parking lot. I-40 flows much smoother regardless of time of day.

Oh well, that's OK then.

That sounds perfect. Let's just count on that and consider you as being the grill meister for the day. Do we need to bring charcoal or is it gas?

By the way... If you were in the class this weekend with me, drop me a private message later if you don't mind. I am still trying to put screen names with faces. I think I know who a few of you were but apparently there were more of us TGO people there than I realized at the start of things on Sunday.

What: Defensive Pistol Class Who: Critical Incident Strategies Defensive Pistol This 2 day course starts with a lecture on firearm safety, legalities of deadly force, proper mindset, shooting fundamentals, loading / unloading / reloading, malfunction clearance, shooting while moving, shooting from unusual positions, use of cover, and dealing with multiple threats. Defensive Pistol continues with live-fire range drills that reinforce the topics covered in the classroom. Prerequisites: Handgun carry permit class, NRA "First Steps," police / military training, or equivalent. Overview: I took the Defensive Pistol class with CIS this past weekend. We started at 7:30am on Saturday with an approximate 3hr lecture in classroom setting, broke for 1hr to eat an early lunch and then followed it with 4hrs on the range working on fundamental defensive handgun concepts. Sunday we started again at 7:30am but worked the firing range for the entire 8hr day. Total round count for me this weekend was a hair under 900 rounds of the 1,000 rounds that I brought. In retrospect I firmly believe that you do not want to shoot a 2-day defensive skills class that expend less than 900-1000 rounds. Anything less and you're doing too much talking and not enough shooting. The cost of ammunition cannot be compared to the value of trigger time. Lots of trigger time. Thoughts: The preliminary lecture was necessary and informative. I like to think that I am fairly well informed on the basics of carrying a handgun for self defense, yet I still left the lecture with quite a bit of new information filed away between my ears. The lecture and multimedia presentation was eye opening to say the least. It was designed to wake you up and make you see that there are evil people in this world who do really evil sh*t to people every day, randomly and with extreme prejudice. This is why we choose to go armed rather than fade quietly into the night. DAY ONE Day one on the firing range introduced us to necessary skills like combat reloading, dealing with weapons malfunctions and forcing ourselves to do several things at once automatically and reflexively. Round count for this day was only about 200 rds for me. Some may have shot more, some may have shot less. I found myself making silly mistakes on Day One and letting the stress get to me. The biggest challenge for me on Day One was winning the mental fight against myself when crap went wrong. Overall I don't think I did poorly on Day One but it definitely made me retreat to a firing range later that night to flush the bugs out of my process. I also learned a lot about my gear on Day One. We started out in the rain and mud but ended up in hot, muggy, humid, nastiness. My Glock 19 ate everything I fed it, including mud caked magazines that had been dropped top-first into the muck. It never failed. Not once. What did fail me was the Ameriglo "Operator" rear sight. I need a rear sight that has white dots. Blank rear sights may be good for some people but not for me when the precision of a hard sight picture was required. As long as I was shooting with a soft sight picture, they rocked. When I had to really focus, they became a hinderance. I'll be swapping them out soon. DAY TWO Day two was much more shooting intensive. If you weren't shooting, you were reloading. The only times we weren't doing one of those was when we were taking a break to fill magazines, seek shade and suck down water. Lots of sun, lots of heat and lots of dirt in dropped magazines. I changed out for my Springfield XD Tactical 9mm for Day Two because of some problems I was having with my magazine carrier and Glock mags. I debated this long and hard the night before but I finally concluded that trying to use ill-matched equipment on Day Two would have been more detrimental to my training than using a gun that I won't necessarily carry very often. The XD didn't fail but the magazines did a few times after ingesting a lot less dirt than the Glock mags did. Rinsing them out with water from a spigot was all that I needed to put it back into action. The Glock clearly wins out in that area. But the XD itself ran fine and I ran it hard all day long. From an educational perspective, Day Two built heavily on the basics that we learned on Day One. The instructors introduced more complexities into the scenarios as we moved through the day. There was plenty of no-BS assessment of our progress from the instructors but it lacked the sort of silly yelling and screaming that I've seen depicted in videos and photos of other schools. They didn't go easy on us. You knew when you screwed up. But they didn't get in your face and destroy your self confidence either. You were constantly admonished to "stay in the fight" and not give up. It wasn't common to be told that you're not dead until you decide that you're dead, so keep fighting... fix your equipment, deal with the problems and keep fighting! By the end of Day Two we were working drills that most civilians who have never taken a defensive handgun class have never been exposed to. Barring military or police experience, many of us -- even those of us who have shot competitively in USPSA or IDPA events -- have ever shot the sort of moving drills that we shot this weekend. We shot individually, we shot in two man teams, we shot head-to-head to bring the stress level up, we shot on command, we shot on surprise. We shot, we shot and we shot. And we reloaded. A lot. All the time. God bless whomever invented magazine loaders like the UPLULA. FINAL THOUGHTS? I hesitate to call these my final thoughts. There was so much information packed into these two days that I am still digesting and processing it all. These thoughts surely won't be my final ones. The class was WELL worth the time and expense. Anyone who carries a handgun for self defense needs to take a class like this from SOMEONE. Yes, 1000 rounds of ammo is expensive but you really can't and shouldn't put a price tag on the sort of knowledge that you will take away from a good defensive skills class. Equipment isn't everything but it can make or break you in some areas. I'm really glad that I opted for the Glock 19 as my every day carry but would be equally comfortable with an XD. I wouldn't want less than 15 rds per magazine in my primary weapon, however. I don't see myself carrying my 1911 anymore for that reason alone. My Glock will be getting a better rear sight and a slightly extended magazine release subsequent to things I learned. A slightly reduced recoil spring is also very likely. There is strong evidence to support that Glock will be producing a new model 19 with ambidextrious magazine release. When that happens, I will probably upgrade. Todd and Dustin at CIS know their stuff. Their teaching style fit me perfectly. They talk frankly and candidly but there isn't a lot of trash talking like some instructors feel is necessary to make them more "tactical" or battle hard. I'd let my wife, teenage daughter or mom take a class from these guys and not feel like they were going to be cussed into embarassment. I thought I was prepared to fight before I took this class. Eh... I give my self circa Saturday 6:00am a C+ in hindsight. Today I'd give myself a solid B. I'm better prepared now and know where some of my weaknesses are, both physically and mentally. There is a lot of room to improve so I'm going to invest time into working on those areas, fixing them and forcing myself to be better. I thoroughly enjoyed the class and look forward to taking more training as I am able to invest into it. Both from CIS and, as they recommend, from other quality, professional training organizations. If you can at all afford to, you should definitely do it as well. You owe it to yourself and to anyone that you ever intend to protect should you be called upon to do so. PHOTOS Select photos have been posted in this thread here, here and here.