Month: February 2015

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The Firearms Policy Coalition Adds Alan Normandy To Its Board

February 10, 2015 by

The Firearms Policy Coalition added Alan Normandy to it Board of Directors yesterday. Mr. Normandy is the CEO of Battle Comp Enterprises and is, in addition, a retired law enforcement officer.

From the release:

Firearms Policy Coalition announced today that E. Alan Normandy has been elected to its board of directors.

In addition to being the founder and CEO of Battle Comp Enterprises, a company that designs and produces firearm components for military, law enforcement, and civilian shooters, Normandy is a retired police lieutenant and 29-year police force veteran. He also serves as a firearms instructor, gunsmith, court-certified firearms expert, and a consultant for firearms industry manufacturers and the entertainment industry.

“As Firearms Policy Coalition sharpens its focus on improving the methods and outcomes of Second Amendment civil rights advocacy, we welcome Alan Normandy and his leadership to our board,” said Brandon Combs, the group’s chairman and CEO.

Combs continued, “Alan’s vision for the future and deeply-held convictions will have an immediate impact on our organization and our fight to advance the fundamental, individual right to keep and bear arms. We are simply delighted that Alan is joining our leadership team.”

“I am humbled and honored to have been elected to serve the members and supporters of Firearms Policy Coalition, the public, and our Constitution,” commented Normandy. “It is exciting to join such a committed group of Second Amendment advocates and I look forward to helping FPC defeat gun control wherever it may surface. I’m ready to get to work.”

Battle Comp makes a full line of muzzle breaks and recoil compensators at their plant in Prescott, Arizona.

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Remington Makes It Official

February 10, 2015 by

Rumors started on Saturday that Remington Outdoor Company was going to fold the Para-USA label into the Remington label.

From the blog of a Raleigh, NC gun store called Carolina Gunrunners which broke the news early:

We have just gotten news that Para will no longer make pistols after the first quarter of 2015. If you currently own a Para 1911 they will continue to honor the warranty. The plan is to focus on one 1911 brand, and that will be the Remington 1911. We will start seeing new Remington 1911’s but they will look more like a Para. The new Remington 1911’s will be available in various sizes from 3 and ½” barreled compacts to full size double stacked frames. The new Remington 1911’s will be announced as they begin to approach manufacturing readiness. Until then, they will not be making any announcements about the change.

Remington had already announced that they were closing the suburban Charlotte facility that housed Para and moving it to their new facility in Huntsville, Alabama.

I think Remington has been telegraphing the end of Para-USA over the last year. You saw a lot of $100 rebates plus amazingly low prices on the Para-USA 1911s. I think this was an effort to clear out inventory before the rebranding. Then at the SHOT Show, I saw Para’s pro-shooter Travis Tomasie wearing Remington colors along with Gabby Franco.

Yesterday, Remington Outdoor Company made it official in an amazingly frank press release. They admitted that they botched the Marlin relocation and the introduction of the Remington R51 pistol. I doubt there is anyone out there that would disagree with them on this. That is why my one and only Marlin lever action was built in 1962 and not 2014.

The press release continued:

In 2012, with a goal of expanding its handgun line, ROC acquired Para USA (“Para”), a company that specialized in the production of competition, high capacity, and double action 1911-style pistols. Following Remington’s acquisition, Para, which had been experiencing quality control issues, saw a steep decline in warranty claims.

In 2014, ROC announced its new, world-class firearms center of excellence in Huntsville, Alabama. Here, Remington is integrating product development, engineering, production, and quality control – a first in Remington’s 200-year history. The integration of modern sporting rifles, suppressors, and Remington pistols commenced immediately, and Para is scheduled to move to Huntsville next month.

I remember speaking with a Para USA engineer at the NRA Annual Meeting in St. Louis in 2012. This was soon after the Freedom Group acquired Para. He made the point that Remington engineers had started working with Para to tighten up quality and tolerances in their products. He told me that before then they just didn’t have access to this level of expertise.

Remington says that they will be keeping their own R1 line of 1911s along with “popular Para products, characteristics, and names such as the ‘Warthog'”. I take this to mean that you will see a rationalization of the two lines with duplicate products dropped and the best selling of the Para products retained. I do wonder if they will continue with the LDA or light double action line of pistols.That is one of the things that made Para-Ordnance and Para USA distinctive.

I do have one Para 1911 in my collection. It is a Officer-sized model called the CCO with a the LDA trigger. It is from the Para-Ordnance days and is roll-marked “Ft. Lauderdale, FL”. It is a fairly accurate pistol but it does have its ammo preferences. I have had no problem feeding it .45 ball but give it any hollow-point ammo and it just stops. I haven’t tried it with stuff like CorBon PowRBall but I really don’t consider it my carry gun so why bother.

Remington says that they will continue to honor Para’s lifetime warranty and continue providing warranty service.

I hope this goes well for both Remington and Para. Remington has a sullied reputation for handguns given the R51 while Para had a reputation for innovation but was plagued by quality issues. Given that the R51 was in actuality made by Para, I guess their quality issues carried forward on that as well. Still, a new plant with new machinery and improved engineering (and proper testing) should put both of these brands back on the road to success. Here’s hoping that “should” becomes “will”.

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There Will Always Be An Exception

February 10, 2015 by 1 Comment

Holders of concealed carry permits have been shown to be more law-abiding than law enforcement officers over the years. That hasn’t stopped groups like the Violence Policy Center from doing everything in their power to portray permit holders as killers and wild cowboys with itchy trigger fingers.

Just as a bad cop is an exception to the norm, so too is a concealed carry holder that commits murder. Unfortunately, we in North Carolina now have one of those exceptions. A 62-year old man who held a NC Concealed Handgun Permit killed one person, wounded another, and killed the wounded woman’s unborn child. He then killed himself. The murder-suicide reportedly stemmed from a business dispute according to local papers.

Sean Sorrentino has much more detail and commentary on the incident. I’d suggest going there to learn more about this story.

All I can say is that it is a sad thing all around but that it is an exceptional one. And being exceptional, it is not reflective on concealed carry holders nor concealed carry in general. Even the Chicago Tribune concedes this point noting that it has been a quiet first year after Illinois finally got shall-issue concealed carry.

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Instagram Picture Of The Day

February 9, 2015 by 5 Comments

I found this on Instagram today. It comes from Freedom Hill Gear.  If you have small kids or have been around them recently, you know that they love the movie Frozen and know all the lyrics to “Let It Go”. It hasn’t reached the level of fingernails on a blackboard for me…yet. But for those it has, this picture is for you.

It also works if you need someone to blame for all the snow you are having to shovel.

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Well, That Didn’t Take Long

February 8, 2015 by 5 Comments

When it comes to dancing in the blood of victims and using their tragedy for her own purpose, Shannon Watts has few equals. Like a vulture attracted to carrion, she is attracted to any shooting that she can twist for her own purposes.

Yesterday, in Douglasville, Georgia, a disturbed man shot his ex-wife and children before killing himself. He reportedly killed five including himself and wounded two others. The earliest reports that I can find of this very sad tragedy was about 4:25pm.

So how long did Shannon wait until racing to Twitter to make light of this tragedy in her efforts to push gun control? How about 329 minutes or just under 5 1/2 hours. Blood takes from one to two hours to dry after being exposed to air. Thus, the blood had barely dried before she took to Twitter.

The mom and children killed are just props for Shannon. That’s sad, it’s pathetic, and it’s repugnant. However, that is just par for the course for Shannon Watts, Mike Bloomberg, and the rest of the gun prohibitionists in Everytown Moms for Illegal Mayors.

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When I Use The Term “Booth Babe”, This Is What I Think Of

February 7, 2015 by 2 Comments

On Monday I did a post about the growing maturity of gun  industry marketers and the absence of booth babes. By the comments, it seems to have been well received by the women of the gun culture.

As I mentioned in the post, the last time I was to the SHOT Show was in 1996 while working for a local knife company. I also mentioned that the company’s booth not only featured our knives but the owner’s girlfriend. She was actually really a nice person and quite smart. I never really got what she saw in my boss who was an incompetent boor who loved to show her off.

It took some searching but I found a CD-ROM with back issues of Blade Magazine.  I was searching for an advertisement from the now defunct Paragon Cutlery that might feature “Miss Paragon”. I was in luck and found the one shown below where they were pushing the X-9 Parabow.

While Kelly didn’t wear the outfit shown below, she did wear a skintight minidress with spike heels. Those body-hugging minidresses were not nearly as common then as they seem to be now.

So now you understand what I feared I would see at the SHOT Show. That I didn’t was a pleasant surprise.

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Do We Really Need A Modern Pepperbox Pistol?

February 5, 2015 by 14 Comments

There is an old saying that goes “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.” That saying should, in my opinion, be applied to The Reliant from Signal 9 Defense.

What is The Reliant? It is a four-barrel pepperbox-style pistol that weighs 16 ounces and has a 2.63″ barrel. The dimension of it are 5.25″ long by .94″ wide by 4.25″ tall. It has a four-shot speedloader that fits into its grip similar to a magazine. It is available in .32 H&R Magnum, .32 ACP, .380, and .38 Special. The trigger pull on The Reliant is 8 lbs. It can come with an integral laser from LaserMax.

Base price on The Reliant is $499 with the red laser being an additional $149. If you want a green laser, that is an additional $299. Extra barrels are available so you can change calibers. These run $175.

If I had to guess, I’d say the designers had the derringer in mind when they developed this. The break-action loading is similar to that of derringers. The change was to add another two barrels.

Signal 9 Defense is positioning The Reliant as a concealed carry gun. They state that it could be used as either a primary or backup weapon by shooters of all experience levels.

Let’s look at some alternatives for a small concealed carry pistol. The Smith & Wesson M&P Shield, the Springfield XDx 9mm, and the Ruger LC9/LC9s are all single stack pistols that are easily concealable and have 7 (or 8) +1 capacity. Sizewise, they are all as thin, approximately the same height, and just marginally longer. In terms of weight, they range from the LC9s at 17.2 ounces to 23 ounces for the XDs-9. They all have a lighter trigger pull.

I checked the prices on all of the above alternatives using Davidson’s Gallery of Guns for my local dealer’s price. The M&P Shield was $354 delivered, the XDs Essential was $407 delivered, and the LC9s Pro (which I just ordered) was $333 delivered. All of these prices include North Carolina sales tax.

I just can’t understand why you’d want to go with a pepperbox (or 4-shot derringer) when you could get a semi-automatic pistol with double the capacity, that is the same approximate size and weight, has a better trigger pull, reloads easier and quicker, has plenty of holster options, and most likely costs less.

It just doesn’t make sense to me nor do I see it’s utility.

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DC Sued Again Over Concealed Carry

February 4, 2015 by 1 Comment

The District of Columbia was sued today by the Second Amendment Foundation on behalf of two DC residents and one Florida resident who resides in Virginia. The suit challenges DC’s “good reason” requirement to be issued a concealed carry permit. Currently, only eight permits have been issued out of 69 applications.

Attorney Alan Gura is representing the plaintiffs in the suit entitled Wrenn et al v. District of Columbia

From SAF’s release:

BELLEVUE, WA – The Second Amendment Foundation today filed a federal lawsuit challenging the District of Columbia’s highly restrictive concealed carry permit requirement that applicants provide a “good reason” before such a permit is issued, which violates the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.

The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. SAF is joined by three private citizens, Brian Wrenn and Joshua Akery, both of Washington, D.C., and Tyler Whidby, a Florida resident who also maintains a residence in Virginia. The city and Police Chief Cathy Lanier are named as defendants.

The lawsuit asserts that “individuals cannot be required to prove a ‘good reason’ or ‘other proper reason’ for the exercise of fundamental constitutional rights, including the right to keep and bear arms.” All three individual plaintiffs in the case have applied for District carry permits and have been turned down by Lanier because they could not “Demonstrate a good reason to fear injury to person or property.”

“The city’s requirements to obtain a carry permit are so restrictive in nature as to be prohibitive to virtually all applicants,” said SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb. “It’s rather like a ‘Catch 22,’ in which you can apply all day long, but no reason is sufficiently good enough for Chief Lanier to issue a permit.

“Because of that,” he added, “the city has set the bar so high that it relegates a fundamental civil right to the status of a heavily-regulated government privilege. That is not only wrong, it also does not live up to previous court rulings. Law-abiding citizens who clear background checks and are allowed to have handguns in their homes are being unnecessarily burdened with the additional requirement of proving some special need.

“The last time we checked,” Gottlieb concluded, “we had a Bill of Rights that applied to the entire nation, including the District. It’s not, and never has been, a ‘Bill of Needs’.”

The city is still appealing its earlier loss in Palmer v. D.C., the SAF-sponsored case that struck down the city’s total ban on carrying handguns. The courts have not yet ruled on SAF’s claim that the city’s “may issue” law violates the Palmer injunction.

“We will give the courts every chance to bring Washington, D.C. into constitutional compliance,” said attorney Alan Gura, who represents SAF and the other plaintiffs in both cases.

The complaint can be found here.