TGO David

Thanks for hanging in there and trying again!

You've got four old renewal invoices in your account. I'll cancel all of them and you can just buy a new one, but this may happen to you again whenever it expires. At least it'll be less confusing when that time comes as there will only be one of them.

Merely trying to understand the intended use. I tried to stop associating with people who think like that a long time ago.

What's your intended application for the gun? Competition?

It sounds like most of your gripes are centered on the original 509 or maybe 509T and are things that FN addressed the with 509M and the MRD. It doesn't sound like you have any experience yet with the M or MRD? I've got two 509's obviously (509M and this MRD) and can't say I have experienced any of the "squeaky, gritty, jerky pull with plenty of hitches in the creep" that you described. At all. I did put an Apex flat trigger and sear in the 509M to get a lighter pull weight, shorter pre-travel and reset, but it wasn't to clean up the action any because none of that was needed. I've had the sear apart in mine several times as I've had the Apex trigger and sear in and out several times for photography, measurement, etc. The OEM sear doesn't strike me as being flimsy enough to bend easily and the Apex part definitely isn't. Maybe FN revised the part on the M and MRD and made it thicker. I'm not willing to go try to bend either of them "for science" so I'll just have to keep my eye on it and see how it plays out. TBD on that one. Your complaint about the fence around the mag release has been addressed by FN with the M and MRD. The black frame gun in this pic is an M. The tan frame gun is an older 509. You can see that they relieved the fence around the release to make it easier to access. I don't really have anything to say about the chamber throat and reloads. I'm sure FN really didn't have reloads in mind as most manufacturers don't. That's probably more of an issue for competitive shooting / gaming / casual plinking and out of the immediate realm of what FN designed the gun for, if I was going to guess. The good news is that Apex has a barrel forthcoming for the 509 series that might resolve that issue? Not sure since reloading 9mm isn't something that ever made financial sense to me.

It's interesting how different tastes affect a person's impression of a handgun. I had a P10C and think the 509M and MRD are vastly more refined than my P10C was.

Whenever I am dialing in a dot optic on a handgun I print out a stack of Lucky Gunner's 5x5 drill targets and take them with me to the range. They are pretty much perfect for getting a gun's POI and optic's POA printing together without much hassle. This is the first serious 15-rounds from the 509 MRD after getting it dialed-in, grouped around the 1-inch aiming point of a 5-inch target, slowly and deliberately at 7 yards.

The front strap texture can be brutal on the dominant hand if you grip it as firmly as you should. My fingers hurt like hell yesterday after a few hours at the range and several hours of dry-fire at home. I already have callouses on my hands from daily use of a rowing machine and lifting weights, but this thing tenderized them and is going to put callouses on top of callouses. I figure I will either toughen up, or lightly knock off some of the edges of the front strap's knurls with some very fine grip sand paper, or just send the frame out to someone and let them do a full make-over on it. Yet to be determined. Right now I'm sucking it up. For a fighting pistol, you want a grippy texture. Blood, water, sweat, slime, goo of questionable nature... all of those things make it hard to hold on to your blaster. So, the 509 is perfect for the job under dire circumstances and that is why part of me says I should just leave it alone. At extended sessions at the range or an all-day, all-weekend class... you're going to feel it.

My FN 509 MRD arrived this past week and I wasted no time popping a spare Trijicon RM07 red dot optic on it and taking it to the range. This is my second 509, having purchased the non optic-ready midsize 509M earlier this year and being very pleased with it as well. As I have commented elsewhere on TGO lately, I am quickly coming to the point where I am not interested in a handgun for daily carry if isn't set up for use with an optic. I began the red dot journey a year ago and am fully converted to the religion now. If you had asked me about it two years ago, I would have told you I was greatly skeptical. This one of those things where personal exposure and experience are the greatest persuaders. As for the 509 MRD, there is is only one reason that this gun could could fail to put a hurt on the sale of more well known 9mm handguns for duty or serious concealed carry: lack of marketing exposure. FN doesn't have the marketing budget of Glock or Smith & Wesson, I'm sure. But they have a superior firearm in the 509. There. I said it. Buy one before the rest of the world figures it out and you have to wait to find one.

Exactly right. And as he said, thanks for supporting the community.

Good stuff here.

Double yep.

Yep.

Shooters Nation has given me a rare opportunity that I frankly don't deserve to sit among people inside the industry and listen to what they're saying. I've heard and seen things that have later come to pass, and likewise things that fizzled and never manifested. That's the way "insider" information works. In the last 72 hours, some of what I've been privy to has been leaked elsewhere on social media by other people eager to outdo each other. I guess to prove that they know cool people who know cool things, or whatever. I'm not keen on betraying the confidence that some of these folks have shown in me, so I'll continue to keep my mouth shut. I will say this... we've got some smart folks on TGO and a lot of common sense present here. Naturally we come to some pretty accurate conclusions all on our own. But we've also got some loud voices on TGO that people are listening to at their own peril just because they're loud on TGO. Like I said, some of what I've seen and heard in advance has fizzled out or changed. What I've heard in the last 48 hours from people in the industry who generally know things in advance has changed directions twice and two people that I've come to trust are now diametrically opposing each other's statements about what the government might be ramping up to do in response to the recent spree killings. I'd just buy whatever you want to buy with the thought in mind that nothing is guaranteed tomorrow. AR pistols and pistol braces have been a finger in the ATF's eye for a while and it's only logical to assume that they might be low-hanging fruit for a President that wants to be perceived as having "Done something". Don't assume there are too many of them to do anything about. Some things can be made legal to own but illegal to transfer, effectively halting the propagation of them beyond the current generation of owners. And that's not insider info... that's just me thinking out loud.

I haven't held one yet but nothing I've read says the grip angle is different than the Glock. The circumference of the grip is smaller and re-contoured, but no angle changes from what I can tell. Which is good for me because that's what screws me when I move between platforms.

SB Tactical is one. There may be others? I only know of them. Everything I have with a brace is SB Tactical. They went through the effort to get an ATF determination letter a while back. Several other manufacturers copied their letter under the assumption that the ATF's opinion applied to them too. In principle, it may have - for a time, but if times change those manufacturers might find themselves on the wrong side of a new policy shift.

If I were going to buy things right now it would be pistol braces from manufacturers with determination letters issued specifically to them by the BATFE and steering away from others. Call it an educated hunch.

My co-host on Shooters Nation, Mark, really liked it when he got his hands on one at Triggrcon in Washington state last month. The thing that I noticed on a video review that I watched was that the optics mounting plates are polymer. The reviewer said this surprised him, which it does me as well, but he then added "Well so are the frames of practically every gun made in recent history so I guess this really shouldn't bother me" and I had to concede that he had a valid point. Really what I think the Masada signals to me, along with the arrival of the FN 509 MRD and the Sig P365 XL and a slew of other optics-ready guns from SHOT and NRAAM this year, is that the gun industry is finally making this mainstream. The Masada, though, is making it affordable... and that's awesome!

Oh, well let me point you another direction then... https://www.rainierarms.com/nomad-9-frame-glock-19-b/ Serialized, uses Glock parts, but the feel of it is somewhere in between a Glock and M&P. I've been teetering on the edge of doing one of these for a while now and may finally just get off my butt and do it soon. I'm thinking: Nomad frame, maybe a Brownell's slide, an Agency drop-in barrel, Glock frame and slide parts kits...

IMO, it beats having someone work-over a Glock frame for you since the P80 frames already have almost all of the things people commonly have a "plastic surgeon" do to their Glocks. If you want a more aggressive texture, but one of the special models that P80 makes for Brownell's from Brownell's marketed as their "Aggressive Texture" series. Catchy name, right?

Fantastic! I loved my P80 enough that I bought a serialized version so that I wouldn't have to worry about explaining the law concerning 80% lowers to a cop if I were ever to be detained. Now I've got a range toy and a "Not a Glock" that is fantastic for carry when I feel like carrying something that isn't a Glock 19 but almost is.

It looks like a Squared Away Customs "Kilo" but there may be quite a few that use this design. https://www.squaredawaycustoms.com/kilo/

The only outdoor range in middle Tennessee, that I know of, that hosts some training option from time to time is Strategic Edge in Chapel Hill. There is a new training group called Treadproof Academy with what looks to be a superb facility off of I-840 near Fairview. They have already pulled in some good nationally known instructors such as Kris "Tanto" Paranto. Their range facilities aren't open to the public as far as I know but are limited to use for their courses. The club that @BCR#1 mentioned isn't relevant to this conversation at all. That is a very exclusive, high-end hunting club catering to social elites who want a highly curated hunting experience and a few pistol pits and carbine lanes. It's not a bad operation at all and it's nice to see something like that happening locally, but the buy-in for it is on par with a very exclusive country club. If that's your style, I can connect you with the owner. He's a great guy and I'm overdue chatting with him again.

Correct on all points. It's not ready yet and I'm not sure when or if it will be. I am not impressed with the way the software works.

Tony Cowden [click for bio] recently and rather unintentionally kicked-off a small storm of "discussion" on his Instagram account with the following post about using a target-focused sight picture with iron sights: In my own constantly evolving experience at the range, which pales immensely against Tony's 22 years of service in Special Forces, I have observed the same thing. A year ago I made the transition to running a Trijicon RMR red dot sight on two of my handguns, either of which you will find me carrying 99.999% of the time. In order to become proficient with the use of a red dot sight on a handgun, I have fired a few thousand rounds at the range and invested what I would guess is at least 200 hours of dry-fire practice into it over the course of those twelve months. Running a dot sight really only works if you quit looking at the dot and adopt the practice of looking at the target instead. Once you force yourself to figure that out and make it the default way your eyes and brain work together, your speed and accuracy increase with a dot fairly quickly - if not exponentially. At least it worked that way for me. What I have found since then is that I am instinctively running iron sights the same way, because I've reprogrammed myself to stop putting the sight into crisp focus and instead "average" the sights and the target together on the same plane, or bias my focus toward the target. This works exceptionally well for distances under 20 yards which, frankly, is where handgun work for civilians statistically occurs in the first place. It was no surprise to me then to find that high-ranking competitive shooters have been doing this for years and really just don't talk about it much. Or at least not much outside their circle. Perhaps it's part of the secret sauce (said halfway jokingly) because I know more than a few competitors who have attested to successfully running matches and scoring very well without sights of any sort on their firearm. Granted, familiarity with the gun and muscle memory play a role there... but so does the adoption of target-focused sighting. Anyway... I'm curious how many of you find yourselves doing this intentionally or otherwise, and how it's working for you. If you've never tried it, maybe give it a whirl at the range and begin working it into your sessions over time to see if you find that it accelerates your ability to put hits on target with "combat accuracy".