Cousin Wallace Trains them up.

All this week I've been @ APD Firing Range assisting/instructing our current class of Cadets in firearms.

We've cussed and discussed just about every conceivable aspect of shooting and launched a lot of lead at paper, falling plates, reactive paper targets and steel silhoettes (sp).

 

Shooting stance. Orientation of body armor to threat. Proper grip. Proper sight alignment. Proper trigger control.  Drawing from level three security holsters. Focusing on front sight. Weak hand/strong hand drills. Transition from handgun to carbine drills. Immediate action drills. Remedial action drills. One-handed malfunction clearing drills of handguns (Not once in thousands of rounds have I seen an actual malfunction of their Glocks in both 9x19mm or .40 S&W...we purposefully load 2 or 3 dummy rounds in their mags so they never know when their weapon will FTF). Tactical reloads. Slide lock reloads. Turn left/right/180 degrees toward threat & shoot drills. Shooting from sitting. Shooting supine. Shooting from side laying on non-weapon side/weapon side. Shooting prone flat/left side/right side. Shooting moving forward/laterally/backing up. Shooting w/weapon mounted lights. One-hand hand-held flashlight techniques. Two-handed flashlight techniques. Shooting with backlight. Shooting with no light. shooting with take-down/overhead flashing and/or strobe lights. Shooting with ambient light. Shooting after being blinded by light. Shooting with and without night sights. Being aware of muzzle flash. Getting off the "X" after delivering fire or during reloads.  Shooting drills with shotgun/birdshot. Shooting and what to expect from different types of buckshot (regular 00 Buck vrs Federal Tactical 00 Buck). Shooting shotgun slugs. Shooting practicals with less lethal (bean bag rounds). Shooting from cover vrs concealment. Shooting from under vehicles. Bounding overwatch drills. Providing cover fire. Communication during critical incidents. Shooting targets and being aware of the 3-D aspect. The 21 foot edged weapon rule, demonstrated. Timed hit from holster drills. Timed hit from sewell drills. .... I'm sure I've forgotten some of the other stuff we've done all week.

 

Training has come a long way in the last few years. I'm proud I'm able to help teach these new troops some of this. Also glad we have top-notch instructors! We really put these guys through the ringer! Our ultimate goal is to teach them enough to survive if they are unfortunate enough to get into more & more frequent deadly encounters. Our officer involved shootings have really been on the increase over the last few years...not good.

 

I'm also glad/fortunate to see what really works & don't work with different types of weapons. Like em or not, the Glock is one heck of a tool for law enforcement work. When you are charged w/training these FNG's, some of which have never fired a handgun, this is an important consideration. We have the data and experience to show the modern striker-fired sidearms have many advantages over DA/SA or SA autos....not trying to ruffle feathers as I like a lot of those types too....but have to admit SA XD's, Glocks & other striker-fired pistols are just superior in many categories.

Also got to admit I'm not as hard-headed on caliber choice as I used to be. With our wonderful Winchester "Talon" bullets, even the 9x19mm is a damned fine performer! Never been a big proponent of the .40 S&W but got to admit it's really performed nicely in actual shootings we've had. The .357 SIG and .45ACP ought to be icing on the cake! With that being said, some of these guys have no bizzness trying to shoot anything bigger than a 9x19....some were not performing up to par with the .40S&W were switched to a 9x19 and they are doing very well....guess that's what Tx DPS was thinking when they were going to switch from .357 SIG since it's quite a bit more frisky to shoot. I'm sticking to my .357 SIG as long as they allow it but, if forced to switch, as long as I could shoot +P+ Win Talons in a 9x19, I wouldn't feel nearly as bad as I would have 20 years ago without Talons. ( Can you tell I'm a fan of W-W Talons???? hahaha! ).

 

Anyhow, we've had some very practical/valuable training this week....probably would have cost a person $3K @ places like Thunder Ranch!  Good stuff!  

Daily Deercam, Oct 28, 2014.

Just a few day to deer season.

Little buck.  Not the same as the little buck below.

Doe and two fawns on the scrape and having a little corn.

Suspiscious doe.  

She's seen that cam somewhere before.....

The flash goes off.

Both little bucks were on cam for the first shot, then two blank shots.  The flash scared them off.  Usually not the case.

Daily Deercam, Oct 24, 2014

Moved a cam.  My house cam isn't giving me any files on the cards.  Typical cam-death.

New cam placement on the 24th.  She's in a little scrape.

Unknown.

Looks like buck passing.

One of the little ones.

Passing the buck.

You never hear this story these days...

IRISH: THE FORGOTTEN WHITE SLAVES

They came as slaves: human cargo transported on British ships bound for the Americas. They were shipped by the hundreds of thousands and included men, women, and even the youngest of children.

Whenever they rebelled or even disobeyed an order, they were punished in the harshest ways. Slave owners would hang their human property by their hands and set their hands or feet on fire as one form of punishment. Some were burned alive and had their heads placed on pikes in the marketplace as a warning to other captives.

We don’t really need to go through all of the gory details, do we? We know all too well the atrocities of the African slave trade.

But are we talking about African slavery? King James VI and Charles I also led a continued effort to enslave the Irish. Britain’s Oliver Cromwell furthered this practice of dehumanizing one’s next door neighbour.

The Irish slave trade began when James VI sold 30,000 Irish prisoners as slaves to the New World. His Proclamation of 1625 required Irish political prisoners be sent overseas and sold to English settlers in the West Indies.

By the mid 1600s, the Irish were the main slaves sold to Antigua and Montserrat. At that time, 70% of the total population of Montserrat were Irish slaves.

Ireland quickly became the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants. The majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white.

From 1641 to 1652, over 500,000 Irish were killed by the English and another 300,000 were sold as slaves. Ireland’s population fell from about 1,500,000 to 600,000 in one single decade.

Families were ripped apart as the British did not allow Irish dads to take their wives and children with them across the Atlantic. This led to a helpless population of homeless women and children. Britain’s solution was to auction them off as well.

During the 1650s, over 100,000 Irish children between the ages of 10 and 14 were taken from their parents and sold as slaves in the West Indies, Virginia and New England. In this decade, 52,000 Irish (mostly women and children) were sold to Barbados and Virginia.

Another 30,000 Irish men and women were also transported and sold to the highest bidder. In 1656, Cromwell ordered that 2000 Irish children be taken to Jamaica and sold as slaves to English settlers.

Many people today will avoid calling the Irish slaves what they truly were: Slaves. They’ll come up with terms like “Indentured Servants” to describe what occurred to the Irish. However, in most cases from the 17th and 18th centuries, Irish slaves were nothing more than human cattle.

As an example, the African slave trade was just beginning during this same period. It is well recorded that African slaves, not tainted with the stain of the hated Catholic theology and more expensive to purchase, were often treated far better than their Irish counterparts.

African slaves were very expensive during the late 1600s (£50 Sterling). Irish slaves came cheap (no more than £5 Sterling). If a planter whipped, branded or beat an Irish slave to death, it was never a crime. A death was a monetary setback, but far cheaper than killing a more expensive African.

The English masters quickly began breeding the Irish women for both their own personal pleasure and for greater profit. Children of slaves were themselves slaves, which increased the size of the master’s free workforce.

Even if an Irish woman somehow obtained her freedom, her kids would remain slaves of her master. Thus, Irish mothers, even with this new found emancipation, would seldom abandon their children and would remain in servitude.

In time, the English thought of a better way to use these women to increase their market share: The settlers began to breed Irish women and girls (many as young as 12) with African men to produce slaves with a distinct complexion. These new “mulatto” slaves brought a higher price than Irish livestock and, likewise, enabled the settlers to save money rather than purchase new African slaves.

This practice of interbreeding Irish females with African men went on for several decades and was so widespread that, in 1681, legislation was passed “forbidding the practice of mating Irish slave women to African slave men for the purpose of producing slaves for sale.” In short, it was stopped only because it interfered with the profits of a large slave transport company.

England continued to ship tens of thousands of Irish slaves for more than a century. Records state that, after the 1798 Irish Rebellion, thousands of Irish slaves were sold to both America and Australia. There were horrible abuses of both African and Irish captives. One British ship even dumped 1,302 slaves into the Atlantic Ocean so that the crew would have plenty of food to eat.

There is little question the Irish experienced the horrors of slavery as much (if not more, in the 17th Century) as the Africans did. There is also little question that those brown, tanned faces you witness in your travels to the West Indies are very likely a combination of African and Irish ancestry.

In 1839, Britain finally decided on it’s own to end its participation in Satan’s highway to hell and stopped transporting slaves. While their decision did not stop pirates from doing what they desired, the new law slowly concluded this chapter of Irish misery.

But, if anyone, black or white, believes that slavery was only an African experience, then they’ve got it completely wrong. Irish slavery is a subject worth remembering, not erasing from our memories.

But, why is it so seldom discussed? Do the memories of hundreds of thousands of Irish victims not merit more than a mention from an unknown writer?

Or is their story to be the one that their English masters intended: To completely disappear as if it never happened.

None of the Irish victims ever made it back to their homeland to describe their ordeal. These are the lost slaves; the ones that time and biased history books conveniently forgot.