The Wandering Minstrel

I took the Glock 33 round magazine to the range today. Before leaving home, I loaded it up with 33 rounds of 9mm ammo.

When we got everything set up at the range, I snapped the magazine into “Little Boy,” my Glock 26 subcompact pistol and started firing at the target. All was well until about the twenty-second round when i encountered a misfeed. I visually inspected the gun and saw a round partially fed in the chamber and it was stuck there. I racked the slide a couple of times to clear the jam and two unspent cartridges were ejected. The rest of the rounds in the magazine fed and fired normally.

The Better Half loaded 22 rounds into the magazine and tested it - all 22 fed and fired normally. In the video above, yours truly loaded the last seventeen rounds in the box and all fed and fired properly.

I don’t know if it was a fluke that the round jammed (jams are very rare for this gun), but we did fire about 68 rounds downrange today using the big Glock magazine with “Little Boy.”

We also brought another 9mm pistol, the S&W 908 and fired 32 rounds with that gun. We fired 50 rounds of .38 special using The Better Half’s S&W 686 revolver.

In spite of the unusual jam, we enjoyed today’s target practice on a beautiful 65° February day in Wickenburg.

The Better Half and I went to the range today for our weekly target practice session.

The firearms shown in the (clickable) image at the right are the ones we practiced with today. Top to bottom, The Better Half’s unnamed S&W 908S 9mm pistol, “Fat Man,” my Glock 30 .45ACP pistol and “Jerry Lee,” my S&W 686 .357 magnum revolver. The guns are shown on the cleaning station that we break out after each practice session.

We shot a total of 50 rounds of 9mm, 50 rounds of .45 ACP and 50 rounds of .357 magnum. All shots stayed on target (as far as we could tell) with many of them close to or on the bullseye. We don’t keep score, so both of us generally use just one target per session.

We missed our trip to the range last week. We both just decided not to go - maybe it had something to do with it being Friday the 13th? Naaaah.

Anyhow, we made it out there today and fired The Better Half’s S&W 686 .357 revolver, my S&W 908 9mm pistol and my Glock 26 9mm sub-compact pistol. We fired 100 rounds of 9mm and 50 rounds of .38 special.

We set up a single silhouette target and paced off 7 yards to establish our firing line. By the time all rounds had been fired, most were within the center 30 percent of the target with a few outliers around the edges. I’m pretty sure all rounds actually hit the target somewhere. Keep in mind that we let ourselves get rusty while we were building and furnishing our new home. We’ll get better, I’m sure.

In the (clickable) image above, The Better Half is practicing shooting from her weak side. She likes the little S&W pistols just because they don’t kick a lot and she can practice single-handed shooting with them.

We went to the range today for our weekly target practice. We took three handguns with us: “Jerry Lee,” my .357 magnum revolver, “Little Boy,” my Glock 26 9mm pistol and The Better Half’s unnamed S&W 908S 9mm pistol. We shot 50 rounds of .38 special and 100 rounds of Luger 9mm parabellum ammo.

Video - The Better Half shooting “Jerry Lee.”

Now that we’re getting back to shooting on a regular basis, we can see ourselves improving after the long period of not shooting while we were building and getting moved in to our new house. The Better Half put a nice group of rounds on the small target at the top of the stand and I got three or four rounds out of 10 within two inches of the center of the big target. The other rounds were all in the black. We were shooting at a distance of about seven yards.

We went to the range yesterday and afterwards cleaned our guns, as usual. Before we started, I posed “Rosie,” my Smith & Wesson .38 special 442 J-frame revolver on the felt workbench cloth and snapped this nice photo (if I do say so myself). Clickable image.

These signs are posted at the WSC shooting range. “PLEASE HELP KEEP OUR RANGE SAFE AND CLEAN” and “BEND AT THE ASS PICK UP YOUR BRASS - OK.” When we watched the action pistol shoot the other day, folks were indeed bending to get the brass. There is a repository for spent brass at the rear of each range station. We have seen a range or two where brass literally is the ground cover. We’ll do our part to keep this place safe and clean. Clickable image courtesy TBH.

While we were waiting for our decadent meal at Screamer’s yesterday, we saw some flyers on the counter. One was for the CCW class we took last month and another advertized upcoming gun shows. I was going to write the information down, but taking a picture was so much easier. Clickable image.

Genitron.com has an interesting feature on their site. It is a utility to access their database which allows you to search the database for the top 100 guns ranked by the following criteria:

• Power Factor
• Recoil Factor
• Total Capacity
• Concealability
• Defense Factor

When the results show up, there is a “pop up” button next to each gun. When you click on it, a window pops up with details about that weapon.

I created the (clickable) image above using a screen capture for each of our carry guns and a utility to merge the four into one. The five criteria are ranked in the bar graphs at the bottom of each panel.

The guns from left to right are Fat Man, Little Boy, Miss Piggy and Rosie the Riveter. Click the image to read the fine print.