First of all, Jeff’s grip is odd since there is no thumb on the slide for his opposing hand.  I wonder if this “revolver-style” grip is normal for him (it is for some people), or if it is a function of the smallness of the gun frame?  I don’t do nearly as well shooting small frame guns as with large frame guns for this very reason.

Second, for all of my M&P-owning readers, take a simple test.  First of all, unload your M&P.  Do it.  Including the chamber.  Make sure.  Now.  Look at the end of the slide and the gap between the slide and the frame.  Take two fingers and put them on the top of the slide and the bottom of the frame near the end of the barrel.  Press together.  Why does this gap (and play) exist?  What possible engineering justification can there be for that kind of tolerance?  This is true of every M&P I have ever touched.  Every one.  There is rattling at the end of the frame because of the play between the barrel and frame.

Third, in the comments section of  YouTube, Jeff remarks that S&W is made in the USA, while Springfield Armory XD/XDm is not.  Whatever.  If you consider Massachusetts the USA.

Fourth, my son Joseph has an M&P Shield and likes it very much.  Granted I don’t shoot 9mm so I cannot make a good comparison, but Joseph is very discerning and critical.

I still think I’m in the market for another concealed carry gun, a compact 1911, probably a SA Range Officer Compact (RO Compact).  But I don’t have one yet.  So there’s that.

WKBW.com:

BUFFALO, N.Y. (WKBW) – Two separate police raids ended with pit bull dogs shot in their respective homes. Pit bull dogs were shot after police raided houses in the past week.

On the morning of Friday, July 29th, Michael Urban’s house was raided by the Buffalo Police Department, as their Narcotics Department executed 15 search warrants in the Lovejoy-Kaisertown area. Although BPD tells us a search warrant was executed for Urban’s home on Weaver Street, Urban says officers raided the wrong home, and that the description didn’t match him.

“5’11 210 white male and this is a 5’11 170 black male… I don’t look like either of those,” said Urban.

According to Urban, officers came into his home and shot his 18-month-old pit bull, Gotham, twice. A bullet hole on his kitchen floor serves as memory of that morning. The bullet made it through the floor to the home of the downstairs residents.

“What just happened?” Urban recalls what was going through his mind that morning. “As the bullet hole went through the floor through the ceiling, as the dogs blood is dripping through the downstairs apartment… who’s accountable?”

The Internal Affairs Division of the Buffalo Police Department has opened an investigation into the matter.

A similar situation occurred on Esser Street. According to resident of the home on Esser Street, Cindy Meers, her seven-year-old pit bull dog was shot by the Erie County Sheriff’s Office and Buffalo SWAT Thursday afternoon.

I saw you in the video, shit-for-brains.  You looked like this.

What a drag, huh?  Someone had you get all dressed up with no place to go except shoot a dog in the wrong house!  Here’s a hint to help you in the future.  A lot of records that y’all use, such as tax records, are out of date.  They lead to wrong-home raids.  Have a uniformed officer walk up to the front door and knock on it.  He can then ask the resident of the domicile who he is.  That will work better than what you did.

Or if you’re really scared of who might be in there, you can have a plain clothes officer watch the home until the owner comes out for work, groceries, or whatever.  He can’t stay in there forever.  Then he can do this.

Officer 1: Uh … this dude isn’t black, he’s white.  Maybe the wrong place.  How copy?

Officer 2: Uh … okay.  Copy.  Wrong place.

Officer 1: I just called his name, er … the name we think is his.  He looked at me like I was crazy.  I think we need to think about this.  Standing down.  How copy?

Officer 2: Copy that.  Standing down.  Let’s go get a doughnut.

If you are concerned about the high personnel costs of staking out the residence, you can sell off those helmets, AR-15s, EOTechs, Kevlar, Tac-lights, Comms gear and other unnecessary stuff.  We don’t really care about your war on drugs.

You went into the home of someone else, a home that wasn’t yours, onto property that wasn’t yours, and shot his dog.  You committed a home invasion, and it would have been morally justified to shoot every one of you dead.  Most of us aren’t okay with something like that unless it involves the immediate protection of someone’s life, such as in a kidnapping, and even then, I would rather you take a cold shower, find someone with brains and let them deescalate the situation.

But all of this only matters if you have a moral compass.  It doesn’t, and you don’t.  I had thought that I remembered something special about the Buffalo Police Department.  Ohhhh yes.  We have history with you.

According to use of force reports requested by WGRZ-TV under the Freedom of Information Law, Buffalo Police shot 92 dogs from Jan. 1, 2011 through Sept. 2014. Seventy-three of those dogs died. Nineteen survived.

To provide a comparison, Buffalo’s numbers more than triple the amount of dog shooting incidents involving police in Cincinnati, a municipality of similar size.

“The numbers are what the numbers are,” Buffalo Police Chief of Detectives Dennis Richards said in an interview with WGRZ. “Certainly, no officer takes any satisfaction in having to dispatch a dog.”

I don’t believe you.  I don’t believe you because there are other ways to accomplish the same mission.  I believe that you are a bunch of sadists, and I think the people of Buffalo should begin to think of you that way.  You’re a hazard to yourselves and the citizens and animals of the city.  You’re clearly incompetent, and you need to have your entire department cleaned out top to bottom, side to side, front to back, with everyone replaced, entirely new procedures, and a new perspective.

Finally, I was looking for an email address to ensure that someone in the Buffalo Police Department read this article.  I notice that you don’t supply any such contact information for any person in particular, you just give that idiotic form.

I’ve taken to avoiding linking or commenting on articles where the author gives no contact information.  I don’t consider Twitter accounts or Facebook pages contact information.  An author who doesn’t give his email address is a coward.  And a cop who shoots up the city without giving his email contact information is doubly a coward.  I find y’all despicable and loathsome.  I’m glad I don’t know you.  I pity the people of Buffalo who do have to know you.

This is another report of folks who needed to do some work to survive in the wilderness, albeit for a short time.  From this article comes this video.

Don’t listen to her advice.  What is she leaving out?  We cover this frequently here.  Also make sure to take trekking poles, a tarp (or heavy rubberized poncho) and 550 cordage (from which three items you can have virtually instant shelter).  Take a container that can be used to boil water, a knife, a tactical light, and a gun.  Oh, and don’t leave out the fire starter.

Unlike this very unwise man and his son, don’t keep on pushing in the hopes that something good will happen.

We heard waterfalls, one after another, but the mind tends to latch onto something it yearns to believe. A waterfall, Jack and I had been told, marked a faint fisherman’s trail out of the gorge, and we’d been searching for it now for the last few hours. We were no longer thinking of trout; our fly rods were broken down and tucked under our arms. We were trying to get out of the woods before dark, but each waterfall we heard turned out to be the wind coursing through the trees or the creek rushing by boulders. It was one false summit after another. And now worry began to gnaw at my gut, because I’d broken every rule when we left the truck.

We had no map, compass, or flashlight. No shelter, signaling device, or fire starter. No firsthand knowledge of where we were. No clue how to beat the dropping sun back to the trail. I had ignored 40 years of knowing better.

This situation can be dealt with by building a debris hut for protection against the rain and wind, and pine bows or straw to get your bodies off of the ground, along with finding a potable water source.  But in order to pull this off, you have to stop in time and quit hoping that civilization is just around the bend.

Breitbart:

The fifteenth issue of the magazine, titled “Break the Cross,” is dedicated to convincing Christians that Jesus was a prophet of Allah, was never crucified, and that most of the New Testament is a perversion of Jesus’s story orchestrated by St. Paul, a “criminal” “treacherous Jew” who gave up massacring Christians in order to subvert the religion from the inside. Its articles strive to depict Christianity as a pagan religion based on a false Jesus, arguing that the only true Jesus is the prophet of Islam.

The feigned compassion towards Christians in most of the volume stands in stark contrast to the actions of the Islamic State’s terrorists towards Christian communities, which includes rape, torture, crucifixion, and slavery.

In the issue’s Foreward, the editors make clear the intent of the magazine: the issue will help “Crusaders” “read into why Muslims hate and fight them, why pagan Christians should break their crosses, why liberalist secularists should return to the fitrah (natural human disposition), and why skeptical atheists should recognize their Creator and submit to Him.”

“In essence, we explain why they must abandon their infidelity and accept Islam, the religion of sincerity and submission to the Lord of the heavens and the earth,” the editors write.

Among their reasons are that Jesus himself is a “slave of Allah,” according to Ja’far, a cousin of Muhammad. “We say about him like our prophet taught us – that he is the slave of Allah, His messenger, His [chosen] spirit, and His word which He cast into the pure virgin Mary,” Ja’far is quoted as saying.

The cover story, “Break the Cross,” argues that Jesus will do precisely that upon his return: “break the cross, kill the swine, and put aside the jizyah [infidels’ tax, assuming all the infidels will have been killed].”

Here’s a note to the jihadists.  You would do well to remember Philippians 2:10-11.  As for me, you don’t scare me one bit.  You should remember Herschel’s Dictum.  “There aren’t too many human interaction problems that can’t be fixed with a .45 ACP 230-grain fat-boy.”

That is, if I don’t double-tap you with 5.56 first.

This report comes from The Daily Signal.

In early June, after Lichterman fought back and went public with his story—accusing the bank of participating in Operation Choke Point tactics by discriminating against him because he sells guns—HomeTrust Bank reversed its policy and offered Lichterman an account.

But on June 14, two days after an Islamist-inspired terrorist shot and killed 49 people and wounded 53 others in an attack at an Orlando nightclub, the bank again reversed its policy and told Lichterman he couldn’t use their services without completing an “addendum” demanding more information about his business.

The Daily Signal sought comment about this request from HomeTrust Bank via phone and email, but it did not respond.

Among other demands, the addendum, which Lichterman provided to The Daily Signal, asks Lichterman to “submit a complete list of all firearms and ammunitions vendors and customers” that he conducts business with. In part, it reads:

After the first/initial submission subsequent lists are to include all relevant parties since the date of last report. Each list is to specify personal and business names and associated FFL [federal firearms license] numbers and should indicate whether the individual/entity is new or repeat. The list must identify all firearms and ammunitions transaction entities regardless of whether HomeTrust Treasury Management ACH [automated clearinghouse] origination services are used for the transaction.

The list is due no later than the fifth day of the first month in each quarter.

This is a blatant attempt to shut him down, if not at the transactional level, at the legal.  This kind of bullying by the federal executive is still commonplace.  Frank Miniter reports the following.

Many executives at gun manufacturers have told me in off-the-record conversations that their longtime banking relationships have been threatened, even terminated, for political reasons. They say the Obama administration’s “Operation Choke Point” was only a government-led example of a trend. Operation Choke Point is an initiative run by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ); basically, the federal government, in this case via a list sent out by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), threatens to penalize financial institutions that do business with companies or company types the government says might be violating the law—this list previously included gun manufacturers and stores that sell firearms.

Even though they were targeted by the federal government and treated as if they are selling illegal (not just politically incorrect to some) products, most of these firearms-related companies prefer not to go public with their grievances—perhaps because they don’t want to draw the wrath of the federal bureaucracy, but also because most marketing departments and corporate boards naturally prefer to keep clear of controversy.

No one wants to rock the boat, and so the outrage continues.  Now it has been expanded to knife manufacturers.  Concerning Hogue, we have this report.

We were just informed that Wells Fargo Bank would not do business with us, refusing to provide their services based on the fact that we manufacture “weapons” (aka knives). Incredibly, this refusal came after THEY initially pursued us to gain our business. Once we had decided to go with Wells Fargo, they then pulled the plug saying they could not provide their services since we manufacture weapons…Needless to say, we are shocked and confused – considering their logo is a stagecoach and driver with a shotgun too! We felt we needed to inform the firearm and knife community of this discriminatory stance Wells Fargo has taken.

The lawyers who work for the DoJ are sworn officers of the court, and are supposed to live by a very specific oath.  It wouldn’t be too much to demand that when this is all said and done, they all go public – every one of them, from the chief executive down to the lowest entry level lawyer who participated in this moral abomination – to stand in front of the world at a press conference and say, in unison, “I am a toad.  I care nothing about the law or a righteous moral compass.  I am unworthy to govern you, but I owe you my servitude.  Therefore, I will be finding each and every company and person who was affected by this and working as your slave for a decade.  Need your car washed?  I’ll do it.  Need pet-sitting?  I’m there.  Need legal paperwork done?  Well, I’m probably not really qualified, but if you’ll let me earn your trust back I’ll do my best.  Give me a small room and I’ll work for mere scraps of food.  For a decade.  Because I am a toad.”