Duane Thomas
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Posts posted by Duane Thomas
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Hey, Dat, got your email directing me to this thread.
Let me begin by saying that I am not the world’s biggest Smith & Wesson M&P fan. I place a lot of weight, relative to how much regard I have for a particular gun design, on how I’ve seen it perform at matches, and also the feedback from police departments that issue it. I have rarely if ever seen an M&P complete a match without some sort of functional problem, and feedback from police departments has not been great. So to start with, you’re running a gun that doesn’t have a great reputation/track record for reliability, even in totally stock form.
Other than that, let’s take your issues in some sort of order. One thing I had a good pistolsmith tell me years ago, that has always stuck with me, was, “Whenever a gun malfunctions, people always blame the gun, they never blame the ammunition. But the fact is, the vast majority of gun malfunctions are caused by the ammo.” All of the ammo types you listed have notably hard primers. The S&B, Blazer (i.e. CCI) and Mag-Tech all feature notoriously hard primers. The Rems are the best of the lot, but still not what I’d choose to run in a striker fired gun with a tuned action. Failures to fire with all the ammo you’ve mentioned, in a gun with a tuned action (i.e. lighter than normal firing pin strikes) are not just predictable but unavoidable.
If you’re going to be running a match gun with a tuned trigger/firing pin system, you need to be running Federal primers. Period.
As to your failures to go into battery/failures to extract, my immediate reaction is that you have just way too many things going on at once to be able to isolate your problem.
I have not, personally, been pleased with the performance of aftermarket match barrels in my striker fired autos (granted the autos in which I’ve tested the concept have been Glocks, not M&Ps). The smoothness with which the guns cycle, and feed, the consistency and repeatability with which they go into battery, simply can’t compare to the factory unit.
Factory recoil spring weight on a full-sized M&P is 16 pounds. If everything inside the gun is as it should be, I see no reason you shouldn’t be able to run a 13 pound spring. I have had slides IonBonded in the past myself, and it’s never had a negative effect (granted my IonBonded guns have all been 1911s). IonBond is actually a very thin surface treatment and shouldn’t cause any tolerance issues. Yes, you have had your slide lightened, but once you add on the red dot, the overall weight of the slide is probably pretty darn close to factory standard.
My advice is:
(1) Switch to Federal primers.
(2) Install, as much as possible, all factory parts. Install a factory barrel. Switch out the aftermarket recoil spring assembly for a factory guide rod/spring. Install a factory extractor spring. Install a factory fire control/firing pin/firing pin spring system.
If you’re going to continue running the factory fire control/firing pin/firing pin spring system, technically you probably don’t need to be running Federal primers, but I proceed on the assumption you will not be able to contain yourself from eventually playing around with your light trigger system, so you might as well remove the ammunition as a potential cause of ignition failures right off the bat.
Once you have switched to ammo that will predictably work in a gun with a tuned action, and have, as much as possible, set up the gun as a factory piece, fire the gun. How does it work? Probably much better. Then, if you really, really, want to be running a gun with an extra-long match barrel, an aftermarket light trigger, etc., you can try adding that stuff one thing at a time, testing to see if it causes problems. The first thing I would experiment with, myself, would be the 13-pound recoil spring, since that actually does make a difference in how the gun acts in recoil, and can make it easier to shoot fast and well. Honestly, I would stay away from the aftermarket match barrel and the aftermarket light trigger kit.
So, in (as close to possible) factory stock form, the gun works acceptably well. Switch to the 13-pound recoil spring. Does the gun continue to work well? Yes? Leave it in. No? Put the gun back the way it was when it worked, i.e. reinstall the factory recoil spring. Lo and behold, the gun starts working again. Stick in the aftermarket barrel. (I wouldn’t, but it’s your gun, not mine.) Does the gun continue working well? No? Reinstall the factory barrel. And so forth.
Personally, regarding aftermarket light trigger systems, I have to say I have gotten away from wanting really light trigger pulls in my match guns. Now, that has a lot to do with the fact that I have always been very serious about competing with my carry gun. Currently my Glock 17 is running a factory stock “minus” connector, factory firing pin, factory firing pin spring, and Glockmeister 349 trigger return spring, with all the relevant contact surfaces hand polished. Trigger pulls run 4-1/4 pounds. By competition shooter standards those are heavy trigger pulls, but y’know, they don’t really seem to be holding me back. And the gun predictably goes bang every time I pull the trigger.
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I added it to the poll, so now you can vote for it.
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On my website I have a thread where folks can vote on what should be the title of my next book. With Brian's permission, here's a link:
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I do recognize that with the types of pistols that most people compete with, dropping the slide with the slide lock is a simple gross motion of the thumb. However, with the types of compact and subcompact pistols that are typically carried for self defense, deactivation of the slide lock can often require much greater dexterity.
A good craftsman doesn't blame his tools. And the slide stop on any Glock, whether it's a semi-longslide, full-sized police duty gun, compact or sub-compact, is the exact same slide stop. "The types of pistols that most people compete with" are, if you're talking IDPA, or USPSA Production or Single Stack, the exact same types of pistols we carry every day. My match gun is my everyday carry Glock 17.
I will admit that I recently, after years of running the stock Glock slide stop on my carry guns, went over to the slightly reshaped Vickers Tango Down part. It's not that I couldn't make the stock slide stop work - I did it for years - it's that the Vickers Tango Down part works just a tiny bit better. And that's a good thing.
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Okay, you say you need more than anecdotal evidence. But where do you think Grossman got the info on which to base statements like, “The debilitating effects of combat stress have been recognized for centuries”? Anecdotal stories. This is all we have, the statements of people who’ve been out there on the sharp end of the stick. And if you ever got your study of what happens when highly skilled and trained shooters get in gunfights, all you’d really have would be a whole bunch of anecdotal stories.
Did you read the part in Grossman’s work where he’s quoting Ron Avery, who is both a black belt martial artist, a veteran street cop, and a USPSA Grand Master, when Ron is talking about Condition Black and he says that, for him, the adrenaline dump of a real fight gives him an extra surge of energy and speed that makes him perform better under stress? One-size-fits-all statements like, “Under stress you will yank the gun out and point it in the general direction of the target, and start convulsively mashing the trigger, and you’ll stab at slide stops and magazine release buttons and never use the sights” just don’t cut it because highly trained competitors don’t react under stress like people at the lower skill levels.
Vietnam-era Special Forces veteran, street cop, firearms instructor and legendary SWAT trainer Ken Hackathorn has commented that – and he has seen this again and again in the people he’s talked to who have actually been in gunfights – one of the predictable responses of those involved in violent encounters is that they will almost never attempt to do anything they don’t already know they can do WELL.
Don’t overlook the importance of this portion of the Marine Combat Marksmanship Coaches’ Course doctrine:
“a. Physical aspects. In a high stress situation (fire fight) a Marine will encounter many physical changes. Awareness of these physical changes will enable the Marine to compensate for them in actual combat." (Emphasis added.)
Massad Ayoob states that, at the Bianchi Cup, one of the competitors, a gunfight winner himself, told him that shooting the Bianchi Cup was more stressful than his gunfight. Severe stress is something that you are, to a certain extent, proofed against once you understand what’s happening, once you know you can handle it and still perform. Serious competition shooters know that when the chips are down, the match win hangs in the balance, the chance to be a hero or a zero looms, your heart is pounding so hard you can hear it in your head, you’re sweating, your breath is coming short, and your hands are visibly shaking, we can still deliver the goods, shooting skills-wise. Those who’ve never tested themselves in competition don’t.
Eventually you get to the point where you’re so good at dealing with stress that those symptoms lessen or even stop entirely. But that’s not because competitors don’t have to deal with real stress. It’s because we’re so good at dealing with stress it simply doesn’t hit us like it does other people.
For all the dire aspersions that those who’ve never done either like to warn people about the idea of being a competition shooter who gets in a gunfight, the truth is that, in the real world, serious competition shooters who get in gunfights excel. Jim Cirillo was involved in 17 gunfights and other armed encounters during his years with the New York City Police Stakeout Unit, and not only did he survive, not only did he win, he never missed a single shot. Why? Well, in addition to impressive fortitude and strength of character, he also had the skill at arms, and self-confidence in his own shooting ability, that came from being a state champion PPC shooter. Jim wasn’t afraid to take what most people would consider “hard shots” in a real gunfight because he already knew, from his competitive experience, that he could make them.
Closer to home (for me, home being Washington state) we had an incident where a certified psychopath walked into a gun store and tried to kill a cop standing inside it. When the cop’s gun choked at the moment of truth, one of the gun shop employees, Danny Morris, an avid IPSC shooter, drew his concealed carry gun, a stainless steel Colt Delta Elite Gold Cup 10mm loaded with full-power, big bore Magnum-level ammunition, and swiftly shot the bad guy three times in the center of the chest and solved the problem. I have interviewed Danny Morris. I have copies of the police reports. I have copies of the autopsy photos. Beautiful group. Looked like a little triangle.
C-class IPSC shooter.
By competition shooter standards, that not very impressive. Actually it’s about average. But by the standards of the typical “guy with a gun,” a C-class IPSC shooter is a pretty awesome pistolero. When I asked Danny Morris if he thought his IPSC match experience helped him in this gunfight, his reply was, “Compared to what I do every weekend, this was actually a very simple shooting problem.”
Yes, there are basic differences in the way competitors approach their training compared to those whose only emphasis is on self-defense. The greatest difference, I think, is that we work at it just a whole lot harder. Therefore, on average, we have a much higher skill level. We’ve all heard the Jeff Cooper quote that a competition shooter will work harder to win a trophy than most people will work to save their own lives. That’s really, literally true.
You say that it requires an immense amount of work to train-in skills that will survive severe stress. And that’s true. What you don’t seem to understand is that you’re talking to people who have put in that level of work. We have put in the thousands of hours of training necessary to have a skill level that survives stress much better than the typical un-or-semi-trained individual.
Put it this way. If a serious, highly skilled USPSA or IDPA shooter is 100 times better with a gun in their hands than the typical “guy with a gun,” even if, under stress, our skill level drops to one-tenth of what it is normally (not saying that’s necessarily going to happen, I’m just throwing that out there for the purposes of discussion)….we’re still going to be ten times better than anyone else out there.
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I knew what you were referring to re technique, and the technique you demonstrate is indeed that to which I was referring.
I wouldn't say my mind is "made up" in the sense that I'm totally resistant to new ideas. I treasure new ideas. You're just not giving me any new ideas, nothing I haven't already considered.
Anyone who doesn't know where the slide release is on their gun needs to learn their weapon. Anyone who uses multiple weapons needs to learn where all the controls are located, and how they work, on every weapon they use.
Why do you think that the hit rate for law enforcement officers at typical pistol distances (<10 yards) is less than 20%?
I think the hit rate for law enforcement officers at typical pistol distances is abysmally low because the average cop, when he reports for training, has never fired any gun before. Then they get a brief amount of trainig that, depending on the agency or department, can range from excellent to horrible. Then they qualify on an extremely simple, easy test. Then the typical police officer never fires their gun again unless you absolutely force them to, which for most departments translates into a once-a-year requalification. Most police officers have never fired any gun other than their service sidearm and maybe a few rounds out of a pump shotgun.
According to John Farnam, of the police officers who are shot in America every year, 50 percent shoot themselves. I'm not talking suicides here, I'm talking about accidentally putting a bullet into their own bodies. Thankfully these events are rarely life threatening as they consist mostly of bullets to the off hand while drawing, and the master side leg while reholstering. 30 percent of officers shot are accidentally shot by other cops. 10 percent are shot with their own guns after being disarmed. Obviously this is not expert level performance.
There are some few police officers who are very skillled and experienced shooters. Names like Darrion Holiwwell, Ron Avery, Phil Strader, Tom Ketells occur to me. I know these people. I also know they are greatly in the minority.
You need to understand, when you're posting on this site, you are talking to people with an extremely high skill level. The average skill level on this site is probably A-class USPSA or Expert-class IDPA. So when you start lecturing on how the average person, or the average cop, reacts in a gunfight it's not really relevant to the audience you're addressing because we're not average people. We have put in the thousands of hours - in some cases tens of thousands of hours - necessary to master our skills. And it never ends, working on our skill level with a gun in our hands is a lifelong passion for us. Telling a serious competition shooter that, in a shooting emergency, they're going to react like the typical cop is like telling an Indy driver they're going to react, in a driving emergency, like someone who only has a learner's permit.
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This is a nice theory. The problem I have with it is that puting my thumb on the slide stop and moving it downward to manipulate the slide release as part of reacquiring my grip during a slidelock reload is not a complex, fine motor skill. Having to come up over the top of the gun, grab the slide, pull to the rear, let go at exactly the right moment, then come back down along the side of the gun and reacquire my grip is.
I find that those people who actually believe this whole "racking the slide is more stress resistant and works better than thumbing the slide release" stuff have an amazing ability to ignore input that doesn't fit what they want to believe. For instance I regularly shoot a league match put on by a school, at which I have trained in the past, that teaches racking the slide during a slidelock reload. The shooters at this match are all their students, who have a MUCH higher level of skill and training than the typical person. We frequently do drills that require shooting the gun to slidelock and then reloading. At any match you'll see a blend of people on the line using slide racking and thumbing the slide release during slidelock reloads. And you'll also notice something else, if your mind is open to it.
The people racking the slide frequently screw up.
They ride the slide forward and cause a failure to feed. They rack the slide several times and spit live ammo out onto the ground. They rack the slide before inserting a magazine and don't afterward. You will see these things happen over and over again thoughout the course of a match. They get CONFUSED, because this is a complex, multiple-step sequence of movements that must be executed perfectly or it won't work. It's especially important to get your hand off the slide at exactly the right moment after you've pulled it to the rear, and not ride it forward into a failure to feed. Essentially, your technique must be perfect or it doesn't work. In fact, this technique has a high disaster factor. It's easy to screw up. And when it does screw up, it tends to cause real problems. Soime people might say, "Well, if they executed the technique correclty it would work." Frankly, in my opinion, complex, multi-step techniques that must be executed perfectly to work set themsevles up to fail when real people have to execute them under stress. If this is how that technique works for people who are only operating under match pressure, is it supposed to somehow magically get BETTER in a real fight?
You know how many errors in execution, and gun malfs you see among those shooters thumbing the slide stop? Zero. It never happens. Because thumbing the slide stop is a far simpler, one-step, gross motor skill, with far fewer movements, and less potential for error. We don't have to turn in perfect timing on a slide pull and release because that's not part of our technique, we simply press down on the slide stop and then let the gun do the work for us. I'd think that people who pride themselvs on understanding kinesiology would be all over this. And still the primary instructor at those matches, who has stood on the same range I did, who has seen the same things I have, who has seen repeated, blatant examples that racking the slide as part of a reload simply doesn't work, and that a different technique works much better, comments on the people using "that competition technique" when we get the job done faster and more reliably than anyone else on the range.
Hi-ho, as Kurt Vonnegut would say.
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Does anyone remember a video that was posted on this site awhile back where someone went out to the range and timed the difference in slidelock reload speed between thumbing the slide stop versus racking the slide? I would have sworn it was G-ManBart doing it, but I could be wrong on that one.
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I have bunch of DNG files, currently saved into MS Photo Manager which doesn't seem able to open them. What is the best software out there to export them out of MSPM, convert them to JPGs, then re-import them back?
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For my next book I am going to need to transfer a lot of old slides over into being digital imagery. Does anyones here have any experience in doing that? I have, myself, in the past dealt with the computer hardware/software necessary to do this.
OTOH one of my editors tells me there's the option of a slide copier that consists of, basically, a frame that fits onto the front of the camera instead of a lens, you insert a slide into the frame, point it toward a light source, and basically take a photo of the slide. He says that works great, and certainly it sounds easier, and less expensive, than the computer hardware/software option. Anyone have experience with the low-tech slide copier option? Which might be my best bet?
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Recommendation made. Thanks for the pointer.
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Just started my own website a few days ago, and wouldn't you know it, the very first training question I got asked HAD to be something on which I know very little, if anything. Can anyone give some better advice? Here's a link:
http://self-defense-handguns.com/forum/index.php?topic=4.msg21#new
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I don't take it as an insult at all. Sounds to me like I need to take my laptop to a professional to get this sorted out.
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I've been on that page before. I'm good right up until I get to these steps:
- From the File menu, click Export.
- In the dialog box that appears, make sure the "Selected branch" radio button is enabled, then save the file somewhere that you can find it later. This is a backup of this registry key. You should hang on to this in case you need to reimport your original settings later.
- On the right side of the Registry Editor window, right-click the UpperFilters entry and choose Modify from the shortcut menu.
I click on Export. Okay, fine. I see the Selected Branch button. But how do I "save the file somewhere I can find it later"?
I don't know what "right side of the Registry Editor window" means. That kind of rules out everything after that.
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Deleted anything that looked like it could be other CD burning software, then reinstalled iTunes. Same problem still there.
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I wouldn't know it even if I saw it. Hold on...maybe Adobe Flash Player?
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I recently downloaded the latest version of iTunes. Now whenever I start iTunes I get the following message: "The registry settings used by the iTunes drivers for importing and burning CDs are missing. This can happen as a result of installing other CD burning software. Please reinstall iTunes."
However, even after completely uninstalling and reinstalling iTunes I still get the same message, and iTunes will, in fact, no longer burn CDs for me. Suggestions on how to fix the problem?
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Well, if you find October 1999, I know where it could get a good home.
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As the author, I'm really surprised that you cannot call the magazine and ask for an article reprint or a back issue.
The editor had copies of all back issues until his house burned down in 2005. He's been buying back issues ever since but October 1999 has not been one of them.
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Thank you, Joseph. I appreciate that.
M&P 9 fullsize getting light strikes 80% no joke
in S&W (M&P, etc)
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As has already been said, Federal. For less expensive factory ammo, there is the Federal generic brand, American Eagle.