I try like heck not to make mistakes, but every now and then I suffer a brain fart. This month, I\u2019ve felt like the Cerebral Flatulence Poster Child.<\/p>\n
For one thing, I learned I had made an error in my article on pistol-caliber carbines in the current print edition of Backwoods Home. I had described the neat little Tresna 9mm carbine, which runs on Gen4 Glock 9mm magazines in an AR15 format, as having a polymer lower. It does not: the lower is 7075 aluminum, thank you very much. The gun was not in front of me when I wrote the article, and I suspect what happened is that since I was impressed with its light weight, it looked polymer-ish to me in the photos I was working with that we\u2019d taken while shooting it, and I also had an assignment at the time to write up the polymer-lower PolymAR from ROBAR, some conflation occurred.<\/p>\n
All I can say is mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.<\/em><\/p>\n Within the same week, I found myself shooting a United States Practical Shooting Association match. Hadn\u2019t shot one in a while, but remembered that while the International Defensive Pistol Association game I shoot more of has very tight rules about shooting sequence, shooting from behind cover, etc., USPSA is more free form. Basically, solve the shooting problem however you like so long as you\u2019re safe, and whoever gets the best finish (time divided into target hit score) wins.<\/p>\n Not as free form as I remembered, though. On my first stage, the range officer told me I had four penalties because I wasn\u2019t standing where I should have been when I shot a series of targets. Happened again on the second stage. And again on the third: acute and chronic brain farts! By then I had accumulated about 140 penalty points and was totally in the tank. Finally got focused and managed the next three stages with no penalties and won one of them in my division (I was shooting Limited Minor with a 9mm Springfield XDM 5.25 out of a Comp-Tac holster). The one I won was a classification stage that had no running and was therefore geezer-friendly.<\/p>\n I was reminded of a time a while back when I forgot something and asked my significant other, \u201cGail, could it be early Alzheimer\u2019s?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNo,\u201d she replied sweetly, \u201cat your age, it wouldn\u2019t be early.\u201d<\/p>\n Sigh\u2026<\/p>\n