Welcome!

As noted there to the right, this blog is intended to be a discussion forum primarily concerned with the ‘nuts & bolts’ of how we did our testing and the results we obtained, not a general gun discussion forum.  As such, you’ll find a number of posts already created pertaining to each of the different calibers, as well as some general topics – just go to the appropriate entry and pose a question or comment, then you can follow the discussion either by visiting the blog or subscribing to the RSS feed.  If a discussion thread gets too long, or takes a turn which warrants further attention on its own, we’ll create a new post and shift things over to it.

We reserve the right to moderate comments – to keep them on-topic, and to keep things ‘family friendly’ – but will take a fairly light hand insofar as possible.  Your cooperation on this is appreciated.

If you need to contact any of us directly, you can do so via these email addresses:

Jim Downey: jimd@ballisticsbytheinch.com

Jim Kasper: jimk@ballisticsbytheinch.com

Steve Meyer: Steve@ballisticsbytheinch.com

So, welcome – and jump in!

Coming up on 1.5 million.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here – there really isn’t much to say, day to day. But checking the numbers, I thought I would post a brief update which may be of interest.

October had over 140,000 hits to the BBTI site, which puts our total to date to 1,477,315. At present trends (we get between 4 and 5 thousand hits a day), we should cross 1.5 million sometime in the next week – less than one year since our initial launch! That’s pretty cool.

One of the more recent referrers that I found to be amusing was this one: http://feulibre.forumactif.com/ But we have had links from sites in Russian, Korean, German, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, Swedish, Italian, Portugese, Chinese, . . . you get the idea. Ballistics By The Inch is a decidedly global resource. Which I also think is pretty cool.

I’ll post a note when we ‘officially’ cross 1.5 million.

PS, 9 November: Well, we officially crossed 1.5 million hits to the site sometime early yesterday morning. Pretty cool.

Jim Downey

Limits of the project.

Got a note from “Neal” this morning:

I’m questioning the information on the website for the two Cimarron Colt clones in the two barrel lengths in the Corbon 200 gr. JHP +P column. It looks to me that you have two of the entries swapped. The 1094 and the 1227.

And here’s what I told him:

Well, I checked the data sheets, and it shows very clearly that the data points are for the correct guns. Those tests were conducted early in the day (10:30 in the morning), so I can’t imagine that we were tired or messed up getting things written down correctly, and the info is consistent with regards to the other ammos (or, rather, I should say the other ammos are consistent with one another).

So, it’s hard to say. It could have just been a fluke with those three rounds. This is the downside of only shooting three rounds – ideally, you’d do ten or more, to make sure you got enough data points to cover any glitches, but our funding and time wouldn’t allow doing that for all the ammo tested.

We will be doing some other testing in the future, and one of our guys owns that Peacemaker, so we should be able to run some 200gr. Corbon through it to see if we come up with some other data.

But thanks again for bringing it to my attention – it makes for an instructive point for our blog, as well.

It is a good point – there are real limits in what our data shows. Overall, I think you can get a pretty good sense of what is happening, but for any given data point there is some statistical doubt. More testing would give a greater level of confidence, but requires a greater level of effort and expenditure.

Jim Downey

17k

This post was originally posted to my personal blog, but I thought it might also be of interest here. – JD

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Feeling better, though still not entirely over the gut-bug. But I thought I would share some numbers with you.

In the six or so weeks since the last update, another 1,500 people have downloaded Communion of Dreams, which puts the total number of downloads at 17,000. This makes me happy. And we have a small publisher who is interested in the book. Maybe.

In other number news, BBTI continues to get a lot of hits. July had over 100,000, and that puts the total so far at 1,126,943. This also makes me happy. Feedback generally on the whole project continues to be positive, though we’re always getting comments like this:

ANALYZING UR STATS for 9mm, KEL-TEC (which I own). Dont know when this study was done. looks like maybe mid ‘2008??? which is current enough to be relevant. However…

> WRONG AMMO for analysis w/KEL-TEC. ANYTHING with a long barrel should ALWAYS use +P or +P+ to take advantage of – via specific brands at that. FEDERAL & SPEER ARENT right choice because they’re specifically designed for short-barrel. “Fps gain” would expectantly be marginal over short barrel. CORBON might be close to reality – but this is only marginal. Would LOVE to see something like BUFFALO BORE or DOUBLE TAP +P/+P+ 124gr & 147gr put thru these. This is what I shoot all the time with it, and can only base “visual” on what I think… would bet its substantial “fps gains” over pistol barrel, then.

Any chance of u updating ur chart to include some +P super-stuff specifically? Would even volunteer to send u a box or 2 of the BUffalo Bore if I could get a “yes” commitment from u!!

*sigh* Proof that, no matter what you do, somebody, somewhere, will bitch about it. It’s just the way people are.

But you can’t let that drive you nuts.

Too much.

Jim Downey

There’s more there than meets the eye.

One of the things which I have found to be very rewarding concerning our BBTI project has been the way some people have done more than just look at our data. Yeah, just checking our charts and graphs is informative, but for those who take the time to get into the actual data, there’s more there than meets the eye.

Here’s a good example, taken from a nice blog post at the Handgun Club of America:

Think your .40 S&W round is plenty no matter what barrel length you’re using? If you’re using Cor-Bon’s 135 grain JHP, you’re losing a whopping 100 fps per inch (103 to 138 fps) between a 5-inch barrel and a 3-inch tube.
This type of data is there, but you still have to work it out on your own. The good news is that you can directly cut and paste their data tables into a spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel. That allows you to crunch your own numbers if you’re familiar with spreadsheets.

In preparing this article, I used Excel to help analyze some of the data. Since we’re handgun oriented, I focused on the two to six-inch barrel figures. When I looked at .38 Special data, some intriguing things stood out. Something unexpected.

It seems that the losses when dropping from a 4-inch gun to a snubby 3-inch or 2-inch are much higher than losing an inch between four and five inches. In fact, for the ammo listed, the drop from a 4-inch barrel to the shorter barrels was the highest loss of velocity. This indicates that revolver cartridges are optimized for 4-inch and longer barrels.

As I told the author of that post in an email, this is *exactly* the reason why we made all the data available. Call it a crowd-sourcing strategy if you will. And while I think it is great that we’ve had over a million hits, it is probably more important for the long term that we’ve had some four thousand downloads of the data files.

Cheers!

Jim D.

Closing in on a million.

Just under a month ago I wrote about launching the major upgrade to BBTI. Since then, we’ve had 217,390 hits to the site, bringing us to just shy of one million hits (986,999) as of midnight. Given how things have been going the last couple of days, I expect we’ll break a million today or tomorrow. [edited to add: we had over 21 thousand hits on 6/27, thereby crossing a million.]

And that’s kinda cool.

So, thanks to all who passed along word of our project. In particularly, our top ten referrers have been:

1. www.darkroastedblend.com
2. www.google.com
3. www.defensivecarry.com
4. www.thefirearmblog.com
5. www.ar15.com
6. www.thehighroad.org
7. www.thefiringline.com
8. ballisticsbytheinch.wordpress.com
9. forums.somethingawful.com
10. www.saysuncle.com

I find it interesting that the top referrer (by a long shot) isn’t even a firearms-related site. That we’ve risen high in Google searches comes as very little surprise, and I’m pleased that the BBTI blog itself has such a prominent spot, just after five of the best known gun forums/blogs. That’s kinda cool, too.

Anyway, thought I would pass this bit of good news along.

Jim Downey

(Cross posted to my personal blog.)

One week later.

Just a quick update – one week ago I wrote about launching version 2.0 of Ballistics By The Inch, considerably expanded with a lot of data and graphs. Well, since then we’ve had over 100,000 hits and our total hits for the site is now at 875,000. I am still waiting for DRB to post their new set of links (which is supposed to include us) and they were our top referrer for the first launch back in November. This time around all I have seen are good reviews on referring sites, without any of the negative or dismissive comments we got with the initial launch. I think more people “get it” now, and it doesn’t hurt at all that we added in a whole bunch of additional real world guns.

It’s very rewarding to see the news and use of the site spread.

Jim Downey

(Cross posted to the my blog.)

And this is why we did it.

This past weekend, after we had ‘launched’ version 2.0 of BBTI, I sent out a few emails to places where I thought they might be interested in mentioning the new and expanded site, in addition to announcements on the four gun forums where I post. The Firearm Blog. Dark Roasted Blend (pending). Ammoland . And to several gun organizations and firearms-related magazines. I know that there’s a high level of interest in our work (we’ve had over 800,000 hits since the initial launch last Thanksgiving), and the word would get out, but it doesn’t hurt to do a little promotion.

Anyway, I got back a brief email from the editor of one leading publication. Let’s just call them “Firearms & Ammunition Review”. Here’s the response:

Sorry, but because we discuss ballistics on the “F&AR” web-site, we’re considered competitors.

It sounds like you guys are having a lot of fun, though, and I wish you the best of luck.

And that, right there, is why we did this whole project.

Because far too often the data which has been generated has been considered “proprietary.” Secret. Not to be trusted to the average guy who just wants to make an intelligent decision about what caliber and barrel length will suit his purpose.

Now, I understand capitalism. I’ve been a small business owner for almost 20 years. Magazines are under a lot of pressure to try and generate revenue one way or another. But the mindset of “no, we can’t discuss *that* – people might stop paying for access to our data” escapes my understanding. What, they think that people aren’t going to find out about BBTI? That if they just ignore us, the “threat” we pose will go away?

Wouldn’t it make more sense to do an article on our project, to help push their publication/website as having a solid handle on all that is going on in the world of ballistics research? They can still do their other articles. Still have real experts on ballistics comment on our project (none of us involved in BBTI has any illusions about being an expert in this field). Still cover reviews of this or that firearm, discuss how this or that new ammunition performs.

So, this is why we did it. Because the data generated by ammunition manufacturers and firearms makers was locked away in corporate databases somewhere, inaccessible. Because we wanted to know. And because once we knew, we thought that others might like to know, too. And that maybe, just maybe, having an “open source” resource like this would benefit everyone, us included.

Jim Downey

(Cross posted to my personal blog.)

Six months ago.

Six months ago we launched Ballistics By The Inch. And since then we’ve had over 770,000 hits, one major magazine article, and coverage & discussion of the site in countless gun forums & blogs around the globe. When I have checked the stats for the site, I have never failed to be impressed with just how widely it has become known.

Well, tonight we posted a major upgrade to the whole site. This includes three additional caliber ‘chop tests’, but it also includes data collected from testing over 40 additional “real world” guns – including a baker’s dozen carbine-length guns. This data has been separated out into a new series of graphs for easy comparison. All together, there are now over 150 graphs showing ballistic performance – along with all the charts giving numerical averages for each 1″ increment in barrel length for 16 different calibers. And for the true data junkies, there are downloadable files (in two formats) for the entire sequence of initial tests, and another set for the second round of testing done in April 2009.

Like the initial project, this major upgrade and revision has been a huge job – and one only made possible by a lot of work from several individuals. Yes, there were the three of us testers from the original project. But there was also the addition of a fourth tester this time around who helped us gather & operate all those ‘real world’ guns, and I would like to welcome Keith to our team. But I would especially like to thank my good lady wife for all the html coding & design for our website – both the last time and with this major revision. Quite literally, none of this would have been available without her hard work.

There will probably be minor tweaks and additions to the site in the coming months and years. We still have some ideas of data which might be of interest to the gun community. But for now we hope that you will enjoy and make use of the data provided, and help to spread the word to others who may be interested.

Cheers!

Jim Downey

(Cross posted to my personal blog.)

Concealed-carry.

For reasons I’ll discuss sometime later, I was digging around in some of my old archive writings this afternoon. And I came across an essay which was intended to be a companion piece to an op-ed I had written for the St. Louis Post Dispatch about 16 years ago (they declined to run it). It’s curious to see how little my opinions have changed in the interim, but also how what I had to say then was somewhat predictive to how things have actually played out, here and elsewhere around the nation. For this reason, I thought I would share it here.

Jim Downey

Cross posted to my personal blog.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Concealed-Carry

Recently, I had a column here concerning the radical NRA leadership, and the danger that their attitude of ‘anything goes’ with weapons and ammunition poses to police, federal agents, and the average American. So it may come as a bit of a surprise that I favor legislative efforts to allow most people to carry a concealed firearm.

I do not see a contradiction here. What the NRA leadership is doing to demonize and discredit law enforcement makes us all less safe. Having more law-abiding citizens trained in the safe handling of firearms, and duly licensed to carry those firearm for self defense, would make us more safe. Sure, the ideal solution would be to rid society of all firearms, or at least all handguns. But that isn’t likely to happen anytime soon, with a huge number of firearms already in private hands. Certainly, the criminals aren’t going to give up their weapons. And a crime-fearing public doesn’t want to relinquish their guns, though they rarely carry them in violation of current law.

A concealed-carry law would change the calculus of crime in a very fundamental way.

The calculus of crime is pretty straight-forward: people will turn to crime when they feel that the chances of reward are greater than the risks. Of course, how risk is estimated depends on what one has to lose. If a person has few options other than crime (either in reality or in perception), the threshold of acceptable risk is lower, and the incentive to turn to crime is greater.

There are a number of ways of affecting this equation. A strong moral incentive to not commit crime raises the level of risk. If you believe that you face a final judgement before an omniscient deity, you know that you cannot escape the consequences of committing a crime. Or if violating what you believe to be ‘right’ makes you uncomfortable, the rewards are diminished, and you are less inclined to resort to crime.

A greater probability of being caught and convicted by the criminal justice system likewise raises the threshold of risk. More police, wider law enforcement powers, and mandatory sentences are all efforts in this direction.

A high standard of living raises the threshold of risk (since the potential criminal has more to lose). Attempts to reduce poverty, provide job training, and give people opportunity and hope are based on this part of the equation.

Reducing the incentive also makes sense. This is one of the major premises behind arguments to legalize (and control and tax) some drugs. Legalization would greatly reduce the profit potential for dealers, and keep prices down for addicts, so that they wouldn’t have to turn to crime to support their habit.

These are all general, society-wide efforts. Businesses also tend to employ the same principles. Tighter inventory and accounting control reduce the threat of loss through employee theft and embezzelment, alarms and similar security systems are aimed at stopping burglary, and keeping a limited amount of cash on premises reduces the potential reward to a criminal.

Likewise, individuals apply the same understanding, whether we do so consciously or not. We are more nervous when we are carrying a large sum of cash, because we know that this increases the potential reward to a robber. We avoid dark alleys because this lowers the threshold of risk for the criminal, since there is less chance of that criminal being caught and convicted by the criminal justice system.

If concealed-carry laws were in effect, and a significant number of people availed themselves of such permits, this would also change the equation at both the individual and societal level. The threshold of risk to the criminal would rise. Instead of being relatively assured that a law-abiding (and hence unarmed) victim would be unable to respond to a threat of violence, the criminal would have to consider what the chances were that a likely victim would not only be armed, but trained in the proper use of a firearm.

Training would be the key. The military (and a number of states which already allow citizens to carry concealed firearms) have training regimens designed to teach people how to safely use and care for their weapons, when it is appropriate to use them, and what the ramifications of use are. Completing and passing such a training regimen, including periodic qualification on a shooting range, would be necessary to obtain a permit to carry.

And the weapon to be used would need to be licensed. A sample of that weapon’s unique ballistic profile could be put on file for future reference. Carrying a weapon not so licensed should be grounds for immediate revocation of the permit to carry. And there should be draconian punishments for carrying a weapon without the proper permit and training. Police should have broadened rights to search for a concealed weapon using hand-held metal detectors or other new scanning equipment.

What about crimes of passion? Wouldn’t adding more firearms, having them even more handy, increase the number of this variety of murders?

I don’t think so. There are already more than 100 million firearms in this country. Allowing people to carry a small fraction of that number would not increase the risk much. In fact, because of the requirement of training in the safe handling and proper use of concealed weapons, this risk might very well drop.

The experience in those states which have had concealed-carry laws on the books for a few years indicates that there are very few instances of improper use by citizens who hold such permits. And while it is difficult to establish the causal connection directly, the data also suggests that those states have experienced a drop in crime rates greater than the drop in the national average.

Lastly, allowing citizens who have a background clean of criminal activity and mental health problems to obtain a permit to carry a concealed weapon would do more than just change the calculus of crime. It would shift responsibility. The police really cannot protect us from predators. Often, the most they can do is be there after the fact, to help pick up the pieces of a shattered society, and to try and locate the perpetrators of a crime. A citizen who has a permit to carry a concealed weapon is empowered, with at least some greater control over his or her own fate in the face of crime. This is why many women have sought and obtained permits to carry in those states where such permits are legal.

A concealed-carry law would not be a panacea, any more than any of the other efforts to affect the calculus of crime have been a panacea. But a concealed-carry law could make a significant difference, and it is high time that we give our citizens the tools and training to protect themselves.

Video preview.

Work continues on the preparation for the new data and major site upgrade – all coming soon. No, really. Here’s a preview:

That’s the clip I’ve come up with from the second sequence of tests. Since very little new can be seen from the routine chop tests, they make up a small part of this clip. Rather, what’s there is testing a bunch of “real world” guns (including a nice sequence where Keith – our new team member – is working to get a Korth 9mm working properly) as well as a bit of relaxed shooting of some of Steve’s black-powder rifles. All fun stuff – hope you enjoy!

Jim Downey

That interesting .32/.327 caliber…

I came across an interesting discussion of the .32 H&R over on TFL, and added these comments:

I’m intrigued by the caliber, as well. We’d tested the H&R Mag in our first series of tests, and just recently completed doing the .327 Mag tests (data should be available on our site in 10 days – 2 weeks). I had been very skeptical about the .327 but the tests were impressive.

and

Hammer It, I’m not at all surprised by those numbers. I just pulled the data sheets from our chop tests for the .327 Mag and they are all in excess of what you got. We tested the following ammo: Federal Hydra-Shok 85 gr, American Eagle 100 gr JSP, and Speer GDHP 115 gr. At the full 18″ barrel the velocities we got were all in excess of 1900 fps (with the AE almost 2200 fps). At 6″ all were in the 1700 fps range, at 4″ they were 1450 – 1600 fps. And, as noted on our site:

One note: in every case with the T/C Encore the length of the barrel was measured from the end of the barrel back to the breech face. This is how semi-auto pistols are measured, but revolvers are measured as the length of the barrel in front of the cylinder gap. Take this into consideration when comparing calibers using our numbers.

So the numbers for a revolver with a 2″ barrel would fall approximately in that 4″ chop test range.

Yeah, I am very intrigued by the .327 magnum. Certainly, you’re not going to get the same kind of performance as you would with a .357 magnum throwing a heavier bullet at similar velocities, but the 115 gr slug is considered a good 9mm round – and those velocities for the .327 are significantly higher.

Impressive.

Jim Downey

The definite article.

Good news! After checking with the editor of Concealed Carry Magazine, we were able to add the following blurb to the BBTI homepage:

Magazine Coverage

The April 2009 edition of Concealed Carry Magazine (the member’s publication of the US Concealed Carry Association) contained a great article on the BBTI project.  With the permission of the editor, the entire article is available here in pdf format.

If you’re not a member of the USCCA, here’s a chance to check out the full article, complete with images.

Jim Downey

700,000

Well, April is already as good as March was, and sometime in about three or four days we’ll break 700,000 hits to the site. The Concealed Carry Magazine article clearly has had an impact, and has boosted overall daily hits by about 50%. Unfortunately, the article isn’t available online, so I am going to see whether arrangements can be made for us to repost it on Bbti.

I had promised to start giving some preliminary data from our latest sequence of tests, thinking that it would likely be several months before we had all the data crunched and be ready to make a major upgrade to the Bbti site. But Steve is working hard on getting the data compiled, and thinks that it may only be another week or so before he is done with that. With luck, we’ll be able to do the upgrade *much* sooner than I thought! So I’m going to hold off a bit – there’s no reason for me to muck around with the data (not my forte) and risk getting some bad information posted. Just be a bit more patient, and soon we’ll have it all available: .327 Magnum, .41 Magnum, 10mm and a huge addition to the “real world” data points for all the calibers.

And bets on how long it takes to break a million hits, once we do the upgrade? I bet it’ll happen within a month!

Cheers!

Jim Downey

The big list.

When we did the original round of tests, we used one or two ‘real world’ pistols for each caliber as a reference point for people to compare to the ideal platform of the T/C Encore. We thought that this would be adequate. But it quickly became evident that a lot of people wanted more data points of how ‘real world’ guns would compare at different barrel lengths.

So one of the major goals of this most recent round of testing was to revisit those calibers we had tested last year using a lot more ‘real world’ guns. In preparation for the testing, we started asking around from friends and family, until we had over 40 additional guns to test, in different lengths and quality. Here is that list:

Para LDA Carry 9 – 9mm, 3” barrel
Korth semi-auto – 9mm, 5″ barrel
Beretta 92 FS – 9mm, 4.875” barrel
Kimber Target ll 1911 – 9mm, 5” barrel
Sig P210 Target Heavy Frame – 9mm, 6” barrel
DSA TP-9 – 9mm, 6″ barrel
Beretta Cx4 Storm – 9mm, 16″ barrel
Kel Tec Sub-2000 – 9mm, 16″ barrel
Special Weapons MP5 Clone – 9mm, 16″ barrel

Infinity – .357 Sig, 6″ barrel

Bond Texas Defender – .357 Mag, 3” barrel
Colt Detective Special – .38 Special, 2.125” barrel
Smith & Wesson 627-3 – .357 Mag, 5” wo brake / 5.625” with brake
Korth revolver – .357 Mag, 5.875” barrel
Winchester Model 94AE – .357 Mag, 16” barrel
Stoeger Buntline – .357 Mag, 18” barrel

Beretta 96 Elite ll Brigadier – .40 S&W, 4 1/2” barrel
Rocky Mountain Armoury Sphinx – .40 S&W, 4 1/2” barrel
Browning Hi-Power – .40 S&W, 4 5/8” barrel
Ruger PC4 Carbine – .40 S&W, 16″ barrel

Bond Arms “Texas Defender” Derringer – .44 Mag, 3″ barrel
Smith & Wesson 629-5 Mountain Packer (ported) – .44Mag, 3” barrel
Smith & Wesson 629-5 Performance Center – .44 Mag, 4 7/8” wo brake 5 5/8” with brake
Smith & Wesson Model 629 Classic – .44 Mag 6 1/2”
Smith & Wesson Model 629 – .44 Mag, 12” barrel
Henry Golden Boy – .44 Mag, 20” barrel

Smith & Wesson Model 325PD (Airlite) – .45 ACP Revolver, 2 1/2″ barrel
Bond Texas Defender – .45 ACP, 3” barrel
Para LDA PDA – .45 ACP, 3” barrel
Beretta Model 8045 Cougar – .45 ACP, 3.625” barrel
Ed Brown 1911 – .45 ACP, 6” barrel
Group IND UZI – .45 ACP, 16″ barrel
Kahr Thompson – .45 ACP, 16″ barrel
Vector Arms Kriss Super V – .45 ACP, 16″ barrel
La France M16 – .45 ACP, 16″ barrel

Bond Derringer – .45 Colt/.410, 3 1/2” barrel
Navy Arms Schofield – .45 Colt, 3 1/2” barrel
Cimarron (Uberti) Colt – .45 Colt, 5 1/2” barrel
Cimarron (Uberti) Colt – .45 Colt, 7 1/2” barrel
Beretta Stampede Buntline Carbine – .45 Colt, 18” barrel
1892 Winchester Lever Action Rifle (reproduction) – .45 Colt, 20″ octagonal barrel

Quite a list, eh?

Jim Downey

New round of testing completed.

As I mentioned the other day, this last weekend was the next round of testing for the Bbti project. We finished up in good form yesterday, after completing the ‘chop tests’ of three new calibers (.327 Magnum, .41 Magnum, and 10mm) as well as revisiting many of the previously tested ammos with a bunch (like over 40) of new ‘real world’ guns. There are some very interesting results already evident in the raw data, some of which I will be discussing informally here in the coming weeks until we get everything crunched and posted formally on the main Bbti website.

But not for a day or two. As I told a friend this morning: “My hands feel like they have been pounded with hammers for the last week.” Just doing this much typing is very painful.

So, until later . . .

Jim Downey

(Cross posted to Communion of Dreams.)

Double February

I just checked the stats for March – we did almost 105,000 hits in just that month alone, which was double what we did in February.  Helped along by this surge, of course, which I found was in large part due to a posting (which I still haven’t found) on the AR-15 forum.  Which brings us to within 15,000 hits of 600,000!  Depending on how the response to the article in Concealed Carry Magazine goes, I won’t be surprised if we break a million hits before this summer.  As Jim K said:

Wow!! I still find it hard to believe just how right you were about the amount of interest in our beer bet

Heh!

So, cheers to all who have helped to spread the word!

Jim Downey

Huh.

Well, I wonder what that is all about?

What?  Well, the site has been plugging along, getting between one and three thousands hits a day.  This has been a slow drop off since the launch, with occasional spikes up to say five thousand hits in response to a post about the project in a forum or something.

But yesterday we had just shy of 24,000 hits.  No idea why, though it does seem to have been picked up in a new forum or two.

Weird.

I’ll have to see if I can track it down, once the Googlebots have had a chance to index the links and whatnot.  In the meantime, if anyone here can point me to this or that specific thread or post, let me know.

Jim Downey

Size DOES matter.

Just thought I would pass this along: the most recent podcast at The Gun Nation got into a discussion of barrel length and ballistic performance.  And naturally, spent a good deal of time discussing Ballistic by the inch with a lot of very favorable comments.  You can download the show as an MP3 here – warning, it is a rather big file, as the show is about 90 minutes long.  And if you just want to skip to the bits about Bbti, that starts at about the 54:30 mark – and the first five minutes are so are an excellent primer on the various factors involved with ballistic performance that I would recommend to anyone; it’s one of the clearest and easiest to understand explanations that I have come across.

So, cheers to The Gun Nation!

Jim Downey

Breaking 500,000

Hey everyone!  It’s been a while since I posted anything – mostly, there wasn’t a lot to say.  Word of the site and our tests continues to spread, we’re in the process of gearing up for testing the next calibers, and life has been busy.  But I thought it appropriate to share some details.

First off, probably this weekend (probably sometime late Sunday) we’ll pass half a million hits to the site.  Yeah, 500,000 hits since we went live just after Thanksgiving.  Very impressive response, and I would like to thank all those who have helped to share our testing results with the rest of the world.

Yes, we are getting ready to do the next round of testing, in about 5 or 6 weeks.  The barrels are being made, ammo gathered, guns borrowed, schedules examined.  We figure that it will probably take a long weekend to do the three calibers (.327 Magnum, .41 Magnum, and 10mm), and perhaps do some carbine testing to supplement some of the “real world” data we have for some of the other calibers we tested earlier.  I hadn’t thought too much about this, but in the last couple of weeks there has been a lot of interest in our data from the lever-gun community, so we might as well go back and provide some of that information for comparison (since we still have the remainders of the original ammo tested).

And here’s something a bit exciting – Concealed Carry Magazine, the publication of the USCCA, will have a feature article on our project in their April issue, due out the beginning of next month!  Pretty cool, and should help to spread the word of our efforts.  Be sure to look for a copy at your local newstand, or go ahead and join the USCCA and get the magazine directly.

Cheers -

Jim D.

Taking a break.

No, not from blogging. And it is only tangentially related to yesterday’s post. Rather, from visiting some of my usual gun forums – the upcoming inauguration has caused a resurgence of hatin’ on “LIEBRALS and DEMONCRATS”, and I just don’t have the stomach for it right now. As I said in a diary I posted on dKos a month ago:

I have given up participation in some gun forums for being told that I cannot be a gun owner and still be a liberal. Seriously, sometimes it is impossible to get other gun owners to understand that this issue does not need to be one which breaks down according to party alignment (and isn’t good for gun rights if it does). Even my family and some of my gun-owning friends have a hard time wrapping their head around it. The most common refrain is that no “true” gun owner can possibly be a liberal, or vote for a Democrat.

It happened again to me last night in one forum I particularly like. But I’ve seen much too much such sentiment the last week or so, on a variety of such discussion forums.

It’s maddening. Maddening because it is so damned short-sighted. A lot of people would rather be “pure” than win – they don’t care if they lose an argument, or their rights, so long as they get to trumpet their moral superiority. And a whole lot of “gun-rights activists”, who have tied their activism to the tail of an elephant, and now are so aligned with that party that they can’t see that there is a better path to preserving their Second Amendment rights. A path where the RKBA, and all the rest of the Bill of Rights, is respected and preserved by *both* major political parties. No, they would much rather pay homage to the GOP, and so alienate most moderate gun owners that they seem to be extremists – and therein delegitimize their cause, perhaps even hastening new pointless gun control legislation.

Gah. Makes me crazy.

So, I’m going to take a break. Being off to the wilds of northern California next week will help. Maybe the worst of this outbreak will pass by the time I get back.

Jim Downey

(Cross posted to Communion of Dreams and UTI.)