Like many of you, I've been relying on the 9mm for a long time now. It's cheap practice, easy to control, accurate, and does a fair amount of damage. There are a lot of good guns chambered for it as well, allowing the consumer to have pretty much any flavor of pistol they want. Currently, I'm finding the Beretta PX4CC, brain child of Earnest Langdon, retired USMC and world champion shooter, to fit the bill quite nicely (mostly because I just cannot warm up to Glocks, no matter how many decades I'm given): But, the 9mm is still no .45 despite it's popularity. Tossing 230grn chunks of lead around at 850fps is, quite frankly, one of the most American things a person can do. Sure, a 115grn 9mm at 1300fps (Federal 9BPLE) is nothing to sneeze at, especially when you can have upwards of fifteen to twenty of them on board, but it's just not quite the same. For the time being, I'll continue to rely on my Beretta, but a man can dream. And, what do I dream...
The hardest times are ahead of us - health, political, social, and for some mental. Calls to suicide hotlines have grown exponentially by all accounts. Our years of handing out participation trophies has gained us hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of citizens who cannot handle negative news or hard times. I recently listened to a podcast where an expert talked about how difficult times literally build mental strength. Each time we go through difficult or stressful events, chemicals are released in our brain to deal with it; the more incidents, the more our brain becomes hardwired to deal with difficulty. It goes a long way towards explaining why people from poor, agrarian backgrounds so often become some of our best soldiers, sailors, and Marines. The horror of war is something easier for them to roll with, giving them vital mental and emotional resources to deal with the issues at hand instead of spending them on accepting the difficult environment they fi...
China, amidst strong world condemnation for falsifying the number of deaths in Wuhan, recently released new numbers. The amount dead almost doubled, but considering this is the epicenter of the pandemic, less than 4,000 deaths in a city of 11,000,000, it’s still hardly credible. Either they are still lying (very possible), or its just more evidence of extreme over reaction on everyone’s (ok, not Sweden’s) part. Let's pretend for the moment the numbers a real, in Wuhan, 4.6% of the population caught the virus. Of those. 7.7% died. But that means the death rate to the overall population is currently .035%. Meanwhile, South Korea reports that about 2% of those who had COVID-19 test positive a second time within a month of initial recovery. They say these people are not nearly as contagious as an initial case and the only some show even mild symptoms. While doctors are choking teenagers for not properly social distancing, the world actually seems to be handling this pretty wel...