{"id":2774,"date":"2014-06-22T20:17:00","date_gmt":"2014-06-23T00:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/?p=2774"},"modified":"2014-06-22T20:17:00","modified_gmt":"2014-06-23T00:17:00","slug":"changing-hats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/changing-hats\/","title":{"rendered":"CHANGING HATS"},"content":{"rendered":"

After three weeks on the road, about 36,000 shots fired by 90 or so students. I have some time at home, which will be devoted to writing. \u201cInstructor\u201d cap comes off, \u201cgun writer\u201d hat goes on. Ten or so guns will be tested in the coming days.<\/p>\n

\"Massad<\/a>A couple of \u2018em, I\u2019ve already been running while \u201con the road\u201d teaching. One was a P320, SIG\u2019s new striker-fired pistol. It gave me a 300 out of 300 when I shot a pace-setter qualification with it for our Illinois class. If you\u2019re testing a deer rifle for an outdoor sports magazine, you\u2019ll want to go deer hunting with it; if you\u2019re testing a combat pistol, well, you\u2019ll want to shoot a \u201ccombat pistol course\u201d with it to see how it performs. I spent a day carrying it; it rode perfectly in a Leather Arsenal<\/a> inside the waistband holster made for a P250 the same length; no surprise, since the brilliant SIG engineer Ethan Lessard developed the P320 from the SIG P250 platform. The P320 in the full size configuration is not a small pistol, but it\u2019s no trick to conceal a fairly large handgun if you know how.<\/p>\n

\"Gun<\/a>If you\u2019ve read many of my articles in the gun magazines, you\u2019ve seen me refer to the \u201ctest team,\u201d a group which varies depending on where I am when the gun is being tested. If you read my latest book, \u201cGun Digest Book of the SIG-Sauer, Second Edition<\/a>\u201d you saw the picture of me with designer Ethan Lessard, and the prototype P320 whose frame was marked \u201cP250\u201d because it was an early version photographed at the SIG factory in Exeter, NH before the final gun actually came out. Researching who developed the gun, and why, and how is part of the story, too. When I write a gun up for a magazine, it ain\u2019t just me pullin\u2019 the trigger and puttin\u2019 holes in targets: there are small people and big people, lefties and righties, men and women, to see how the gun works for different potential users.<\/p>\n

\"Tam<\/a>Sometimes I feel like Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence: my friends do the work, and I get the credit, and my friends like being \u201cthe first on their block\u201d to test a new gun most others have only \u201cheard announced on the Internet\u201d but haven\u2019t actually seen or touched. But, the fact is, it gives me a helluva lot more useful feedback to pass on to readers about how the given gun is gonna work for a wide variety of users.<\/p>\n

\"Massad<\/a>Confession: teaching may be the most satisfying part of my job description, but testing is sometimes the most fun part.<\/p>\n

Spoiler alert: No, the slightly higher bore axis of the SIG P320 doesn\u2019t make it kick noticeably more than any similar 9mm pistol, and yes, you can shoot a perfect score with it out-of-the-box with 40-some people looking over your shoulder.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After three weeks on the road, about 36,000 shots fired by 90 or so students. I have some time at home, which will be devoted to writing. \u201cInstructor\u201d cap comes off, \u201cgun writer\u201d hat goes on. Ten or so guns will be tested in the coming days. A couple of \u2018em, I\u2019ve already been running […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":6428,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2774","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2774"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2774\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}