TGO David

I believe this explains the water plume from the explosion...

This is the most likely explanation for these seeds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brushing_(e-commerce) The alarming parts of the whole thing are that (a.) people will open something like this and then actually use it, and (b.) that people continue to thumb their noses at Ocam's Razor and embrace complex conspiracy theories more readily than they will embrace something more sensical like "This is a brushing scam, not China's bid to take over the US with bio-engineered Communism seeds".

See above. The SRO really isn't duty / carry grade without something like the new BROS adding some protection to it. This video is worth watching. At least watch the first 5 minutes from this timestamp which starts 47 seconds in.

Between those two, Trijicon RMR if it's going to be an EDC. Jagerwerks has a neat new "suit of armor" for the Trijicon SRO that they literally just started promoting in the last few days. It is called the B.R.O.S. (bros) or the Battle Ready Optic Shield. If the larger SRO strikes your fancy, I'd give that a hard look as the SRO simply is not duty grade and won't stand up to a whole lot of abuse. The RMR won't need it, and not all guns' optic cuts are guaranteed to be compatible with it. But it looks like a viable way of making the SRO a lot more durable. http://jagerwerks.com/pre-order-b-r-o-s-4-6-weeks/

Green dots have some distinct advantages. A lot of folks find the green dots / reticles a lot easier to see and faster to recognize. The human eye sees green something like 30% easier than it does red, so as a result a green reticle or dot seems far brighter than a red dot or reticle at the same illumination level. This means you can dial down the illumination on a green dot and get better battery life. The one thing I've heard "against" green dots, and it's a very nit-picky sort of thing, is that they can be harder to see when the field of view has a lot of greens or brightly lit foliage. It seems that just bumping the power up in those situations would be an easy fix. I am also hearing that older eyes pick up the green dots easier too. That's not a slight on you, Hipower. My eyes aren't near as young as they used to be either. The 507C and 508T do both use the same mounting footprint as the Trijicon RMR and SRO. Generally, they will be compatible with any mounting system made for the RMR. The only exception might be a gun that was precision milled for an RMR. My M&P 2.0 Compact is like that. It was milled specifically for an RMR and the Holosun 508T that I have is just different enough around the leading edge radius that it won't fit that gun. Really aggrivating. But mass produced stuff? Should work just fine!

Fundamentally I agree. There are few things that the Holosun 507C an 508T bring to the table that I'd like to see Trijicon do, proving that Holosun really is out there innovating and not just following. 1. The Ring-Dot reticle can be very useful and is a nice option 2. The larger window of the 507 and 508 as compared to the RMR makes for quicker, easier dot acquisition without being as large as, and being more robust than, the Trijicon SRO. 3. The solar panel is a heck of a nice feature. 4. The V2 variants of those two from Holosun have that "FINALLY!!!" side-loading battery door that keep you from having to remove the optic from the gun just to change batteries. I bought another RMR RM07 a few days ago to put a dot back on one of my M&Ps. I wanted to do a Holosun HE508T-V2 but Holosun keeps dragging their butts on releasing it in any sort of quantity that effectively makes it available.

Well, it finally happened and hit somewhat close to home for me. A colleague at work came down with COVID about a week and a half ago and succumbed to it last night via related complications. Their family was having to make the awful decision today to remove them from life support. I sucks that this virus seems so laughable until it strikes someone in the .0001% for which it is fatal. I suppose the exact same thing can be said of the flu, but I can't tell you the last time I heard of a person who was walking around healthy one week and dead the next because of the flu.

Ah, thanks man. I appreciate the kind words. I'm just trying to share what I've learned to make it easier for others. If I were wanting a lighter weight, affordable, hammer fired gun with an RMR these days, I think I'd probably pick up a CZ P-07 and have someone like Cajun Gun Works, JaegerWerks, Primary Machine, etc. mill the slide for me and cook up something like this...

Just be aware that Sig tends to cut their slides for their own optics. The exception is that the more recent P320 RXP X-series guns are cut for their Romeo 1 Pro which shares the same footprint as the Leupold Delta Point Pro. They wouldn't have done this if it weren't for Sig getting the Army's pistol contract and Leupold getting the optic contract. If you want to run an RMR on a Sig, you're better off buying the P320 you want in a non-optics variant and then getting an aftermarket slide for it from someone like Zev Technologies or Norsso. Or having the plain slide milled for an optic.

Get an optic that doesn't eat batteries. The Trijicon RMR is proven and built for battle. I have four of them. I change their batteries on my birthday and Christmas day. I certainly don't need to change them that often but batteries are cheap and this is cheap insurance. My Holosun 508T-v1 has even better battery life but I change it once a year as well. The solar panel on top of it helps keep it running longer than optics with battery only. I haven't had to change the battery in the Sig Romeo-1 Pro yet but I'll do it the same as the RMR. Twice a year, for insurance. Would I really own this many red dots on handguns and have switched to exclusively carrying handguns with red dots if they weren't proven and reliable and offered a significant advantage? Stick to reputable brands with good track records and you will be fine. Trijicon and Holosun, yes. Sig Romeo, only if it's the Pro series. Not a fan of the Leupold Delta Point Pro, Swamp Fox, or Vortex. Go watch any of the Sage Dynamics video reviews of red dot optics on YouTube. Buy the ones that he beats the living hell out of and still work at the end. (Pretty much the list I just posted.) https://www.youtube.com/user/SageDynamics

We are still encountering old automatic renewals that aren't processing properly with PayPal. The bug has been fixed, they say, but the old transactions have to be cancelled when we find them. I've refunded the PayPal transaction to your account and cancelled the automatic renewal. You can buy a Benefactor membership again via the store and it will create a new account for you that hopefully will not be subject to that bug again.

Just get their name right when you speak with them. It's Cloud Defensive ... not Defense. I know this sounds like a small thing but small details set people apart from the crowd for the right and wrong reasons. They're small enough to be able to care about things like that and might give you a (friendly) hard time about it.

They are 100% an American company. I know one of the owners.

It's unfortunate that they weren't receptive to your feedback. Given that they seem to do quite a bit of in-house R&D and aren't 100% ripping off other people's intellectual property, you would think that they would want to know what the consumer thinks of their products and use that feedback to drive improvements. On the other points that you made, I wonder if you were just dealing with a bad sales rep? Again, I suspect that a person can get by just fine with an Olight for casual purposes and especially so if they are sticking with the handheld models. For weapon lights, I'd skip 'em.

OLight makes good consumer-grade stuff but I am going to stick to Surefire, Cloud Defensive, Modlite and Streamlight for things that I might need to count on in a fight. I'm not trying to rain on the sale of these items as I think they are perfectly fine for what most folks are going to use them for, but I really cannot in good conscience recommend them for someone who's life might depend on them. Bear in mind that "reviewers" like S00tch are paid handsomely by vendors to post favorable opinions about their products. That guy hasn't met many products that he didn't fawn over. One problem in particular that both Mark and I have been able to exploit with ease on Shooters Nation is the latch design on the Valkrie. It's easy to snag that thing on the draw and inadvertently rip your light off of the gun. Even if they were to use a toggle design similar to what ADM and Surefire use (see below) with an integral lock button, it would still be prone to snagging on things as you draw. There's a reaosn why no one else uses these types of latches on pistol mounted weapon lights and my guess is that everyone else patended their designs and left OLight with very little option BUT to use them. Again... I am not opposed to OLight for casual purposes. I am opposed to them for serious use. ** Not the OLight lever. OLight's lever doesn't have the integral lock, which would at least be a step in the right direction.

My podcast co-host, Mark, works for a major national distibutor. He said the sales volume in 2020 has far surpassed the numbers from 2012 after the Newton CT school shooting that Obama capitalized on to push more "assault weapon" bans. 2012 and 2013 were absolute boom years for TGO. We saw members buy/sell/trade more in that period of time than likely transacted cumulatively in the following five years. If you weren't in the gun community back then, for Mark to say that 2020 has blown those numbers away is honestly just staggering for me to consider.

Holosun is killing me with the delays on the 508T V2 being available. It played out like this with the first gen 508T also, though. They announced it nearly a year before it actually made it into stores and then it was only available for about 6-7 months before they stopped producing them to ramp up for the V2.

I am very sorry to read the news, Hipower.

Be the gray man. Be the gray man. Be invisible or at the very least not noteworthy or deserving of attention, have an exit strategy, and let the police handle the lunatics until you have no choice to handle them yourself.

I can't even count the number of times we had to ban people from coming here and stirring up drama about people on that site, who weren't even TGO members, because of bad deals. Or the occasions when we would be alerted to the fact that some scammer over there was using photos and descriptions of firearms listed for sale on TGO to post bogus ads on that site. People would Google whatever the key words were and then wind up here looking at the legit ad and raise hell with the legit ad's poster about whatever scam had happened to them on that site. It took us a few times of that happening before we totally figured it out, but after that it was a 100% block for any URLs going there. That place used to be a complete cesspool. I can only assume it still is.

We have seen so many questionable postings and had so many people show up here trying to hunt down people who weren't even TGO members because of bad deals on that site, that we started blocking their URL just to keep people from accidentally hopping over there. I see that I need to tweak the URL filter a bit more now.

I've given up trying to make sure that TGO email can reach all others. I've done everything I can to make sure that we have all of the right DNS records, that our server is secure, and that we are using a reputable mail-sending service (At a cost of nearly $100 per month I might add). All it takes is a group of unhappy dickheads getting banned from TGO to suddenly start reporting the email they signed up for as "Spam" and we get blocked from Comcast, Verizon, etc. I've successfully had us whitelisted with all of these providers in the past, but it's a never-ending cycle.

You can turn the audio recording off on practically every dash cam I've seen or used. I turn mine off just because I want maximum capacity on the storage card for video. If I am bugging out of my vehicle, it takes maybe three extra seconds to grab my dash cam and shove it into my pants pocket. Since that camera is evidence of what occurred, it's a worthwhile three seconds.

I am so glad that someone mentioned dash cams. A recent article I read inspired me to not only put my cam back in my car but to upgrade it to a different model that has a camera for the front window and a separate camera for the back window. The article brought to mind that you want factual evidence to support your account of any altercation rather than it be your word against the accounts of conspirators within the mob.

RFTH Scenario Discussion Series: "In Your Vehicle, Surrounded By An Angry Mob" I am going to start a series of scenario discussions using events ripped from the news headlines. These will come as events warrant and justify, and the purpose of them will be to help us think through situations while we have the luxury of time and without the pressure that comes from being in the moment. The intent is to prepare us for things that might actually happen by evulating real-world occurances, dissecting them, and thinking critically about strategies and tactics. As with any structured conversation, there will be some parameters. Guidelines for Participating Discussing the actual event(s) that inspired the topic are fine so long as the discussion is germane to evaluating what went right, what went wrong, and learning from it. Comments should be meant to ask serious questions or provide serious answers. Humor should be used sparingly and appropriately. Comments should pe productive and not solely meant to entertain. We strongly recommend that you remember that the Internet has a long and very indelible memory. Don't make comments here that you would not want your lawyer to have to defend in court before a jury of people carefully selected by the prosecution to maximize the odds of sending you to prison, or worse. Be open to criticism and be able to support your statements with historical evidence or real data. If you are simply offering an opinion, please state such but, again, be open to criticism. The point of this is to make us all smarter and better prepared. Recognize that profiling is a legitimate tool if used appropriately to compare people, the environment, and activities to a baseline of what is normal or conventional for a given place or time. I would refer you to the concepts of the US Marine Corps Combat Hunter program or to the excellent book Left of Bang for more details on this. Profiling deemed to be driven by racism, bigotry, or ignorance will not be allowed, however. In the case of ignorance we willt try to educate, but racism and bigotry will not be allowed. All other TGO rules apply. The Scenario: Recent civil unrest following the death of George Floyd while in the custody of Minneapolis, MN police and even more recently the death of Rayshard Brooks after being shot by police in Atlanta, GA has proven that mobs of angry people can assemble quickly. These uprisings might catch the unware completely off guard. These uprisings have closed down public roadways and included the destruction of private and public property, as well as assaults on law enforcement officers and the general public. On Saturday, June 13, 2020, rioters said to be protesting the Brooks killing set fire to the Wendy's restaurant that owns the parking lot where Brooks was shot by police. In another part of Atlanta a major interstate highway was shut down when protestors marched onto the roadway. [source: https://www.foxcarolina.com/atlanta-protesters-block-interstate-set-fire-to-cars-at-fast-food-restaurant-where-police-killed/article_e45c6e96-3aef-5cdf-9c8a-f0b2f5fabc51.html] While some reconnaisance ahead of time of an area through which you might be traveling or participating in other activities could spare you from being sucked into some protests, others -- such as these -- can spawn rather unexpectedly and without much forewarning. For this discussion, you are asked to consider that you are driving through an area not necessarily prone to violent demonstrations when suddenly a group of people march into the roadway blocking you, the motorists ahead of you, and the motorists behind you. You are effectively "swarmed" by a mass of very angry individuals who appear to be engaged in a protest of some sort. How would you respond? What would your order of options be and how would you work through them to determine the best option given increasingly escalating hostility around you?