Jonnin

We have a full sized wittness, and it is officially my wife's favorite gun atm. She can put do a 2-3 inch group at 25 yards or so on a good day with it. It had a somewhat lengthy break in period where it jammed left and right for a while, mostly that was the magazine springs / break in. It has been flawless on factory ammo for a while now and is easily one of the best value guns we have bought, at a little over $400 for a well made, reliable tack driver. Couldnt say about the smaller model of course, but if its up to the same standards, it would serve you well. *** the compact, unless I missed it in the list of their stuff, is not really all that small. They are sort of based off cz designes, and CZ's idea of a compact is 7 inches long.

Well the bersa's have a pretty good rep and meet your requirements. I would say maybe the beretta px4 subcompact. It seems to be a metal frame but plastic grip, has a rail, pretty darn small but fat and sort of heavy. I carry this in .40 cal in my pocket (barely). I can think of a dozen guns that dont have a rail --- but I suspect any gunsmith worth anything can put a rail onto almost any gun, maybe not the very smallest ones, but most. It may be slightly wider than the frame, but they can get it on there. If you decide to install a rail, that opens up things like the cz rami, mil surplus like makarov, colt new agent/defender, sig 238, and many more. But the small, single stack carry guns by and large dont have that rail, the plastic's usually do, and thats just how it is unfortunately. A lot of the metal guns are older designs, if not older guns they came from designs that pre date the rail craze.

Welcome! Bersa makes a great 380 and 9mm in a medium/small frame, metal and with a rail. These are DA guns, not DAO. Is this at all the size or shape or stlye you might like?

haha I was going to suggest 5 min for the answer, about how long I would get tired of beating the gun (unloaded and pointed in a safe direction) on a mattress or something to see if it fired. I see thats been covered enough already. Seriously, do it. I did the mattress test with my 238, my first cocked & locked carry gun. Determined that it does not go off until trigger is pressed. Modern guns are safe until you pull the trigger, if they are not defective. If you combine the rules of safe gun handling with the knowledge that a defective gun is extremely unlikely and even if you have one it won't be a problem because its being handled safely, then you can overcome the mindset, safe in your knowledge that the only thing left to happen would be a very freak accident or carelessness. Don't fear your gun, but always, always respect it.

Glad to be helpful. I did a google image search 3 or 4 different ways until I found a close image, which got me the navaja keyword, once I searched that + knife, I got some good images and picked the one with a decent paragraph on the topic to link at you. Sheer dumb luck though, I was about to surrender when I found the first image and navaja name associated with it. Armed with that you can research it to your heart's content, once you know the style and proper name of it you can really dig.

Its very skewed in many ways, much of it simply the lack of complete data for the author to use. I drew 2 conflicting conclusions from this thing: 1) small calibers worked very, very well; the 380 and 22 family made many major calibers look poor. I can conclude that a mousegun is enough to do quite well in a situation and that "physics"** do not improve effectiveness. 2) rifles and shotguns, which have a LOT more physics than handguns, show that "physics" actually do improve effectiveness. From here, I cannot really proceed to make any use of the paper. ***physics is the science of physics from which the poorly defined terms that are used, such as stopping power, are created. "More physics" then just means a larger momentum, energy, or other measurable value of the round in question.

just looked out of curiosity... you can get a new les baer for 1600 at one place I found online, though 99% of them were right at 2k. Surely you can find a gently used one for 1500 or less. Basically, with that budget, you can skip over the middle grade, overpirced & mostly cosmetic guns and go directly to a fine gun. For that price, you can see what Kandros Custom Gunworks - Nashville's Premiere Custom Colt 1911 gunsmith can do for you as well -- your budget is borderline but high enough to get a custom build, I think. Can't hurt to talk about it -- soon as I get some spending money I plan to pay him a visit.

very nice! I love the finger grips on it, one thing I wish I had on my 1911.

By and large. Some of the colts have lightweight frames, which may or may not appeal to you, my wife's is one of those and the thing has more recoil for sure (still not bad, just more). As a carry gun that may appeal to you. S&W is not known for its 1911s --- they have good reviews, but are sort of the new kid compared to SA and colt.

My thought is to dump money in about 8-9 of 2012 if it looks like O is going to lose the election. I think a change of administration will lead to, if nothing else, a brief recovery period where some $$ can be made, then pull back out or not as things take shape...

That looks a lot like this: ANTIQUE 19th C. SPANISH NAVAJA NAVAHA CLASP KNIFE *VGC* do you agree?

I like the kimber out of the box, they look nice, have good accuracy and trigger, and are a nice plinker. I am not sure I would get one for carry, as I have heard (but not experienced) of some reliability issues, this is something you should research carefully if you plan to carry it. About all I will say here is to beware of the cosmetic appeal. In between the bargain stuff (which, by and large, are great range guns and most are fine for carry as well) and the top dollar custom stuff, there are a lot of brands that have little more than the cheap ones apart from very nice looking exteriors. Its very, very easy to spend $500 + on nothing more than a brand name and fancy grips.

what markings, if any (even a single letter or symbol) are on the blade, up near the hinge? Usually a trademark or something there.

I have not, I will go see what I can see on that model. Thanks for mention of it.--------edit That didnt take long. Its bigger than the colt, not by much but by enough that I would pick the colt if I had them side by side, since the price is about the same (colt is actually cheaper for once). But they are very similar!

custom, to me, means one of a couple of things.... the buyer called up the maker, and had it built to specifications, or the builder is a pro who made one from hand picked parts with the intent to sell it, or the buyer modified a stock gun over time then sold it. If some company makes 10000 identical guns, they are not custom...

Same one, didnt know you came down here. I also like the nearby sportsman's warehouse, which has reloading supplies and all kinds of good stuff. If you come down again, check them out as well... just not for mak ammo, its there sometimes but academy is more likely to have that. No mak slugs either, if you reload it. Its not russian friendly!

I think it varies some by location. Ours has hunting, fishing, guns, camping, and outdoor stuff in almost equal amounts to the sports gear.

Dunno how big a gun you accept for a pocket pistol but there are a lot of really small guns in bigger calibers now (380+). If you like that DAO stuff, you should be able to find one you like. If you dislike DAO, let me know, thats where I have focused my carry guns, I can tell you what I have tried. I am headed toward a colt new agent 9mm next, as an example of what I prefer, but its more funds than I have at this time.

If you need a reason, the true maks are amazing, accurate, reliable, rugged, low recoil. About the worst thing you can say about them is they arent the best carry gun (IMHO), low capacity & weakish caliber -- you can get the same in a much smaller gun (pocket 380s, for example). But for the range, its inexpensive to shoot (no worse than 9mm), the gun itself is also cheap (under $300 for anything short of a collector piece) so its a great way to enjoy something bigger than a 22 in a great platform for not a lot of $$. I have many thousands of rounds thru mine and last time I shot it (less than a month back) I made a 1.5 inch hole @ 15 yards or so, and I have kept it in the black of a 25 yard NRA target(at 25 yards, roughly a 3 inch diameter circle?), for a short/small gun with fixed sights thats hard to beat. On the range, this one is probably my favorite gun, and that is saying a lot as I really like my other stuff too.

The last PC we bought (from best buy) had an actual virus (trojan) installed on it in the preloaded junkware. It was there the first time I booted, and I had not yet plugged it into the internet nor put in any disks or anything. Amusing, but annoying too. Getting that stuff out is a black art. I boot it in safe mode, then delete everything I can find that is known junkware and run a couple of registry cleaners to repair the damage. The uninstallers do not work on half of this junk and they are slow when they do work, a del/s *.* is pretty darn quick. Running ccleaner and msconfig will find most of the auto-start bloat so you can get rid of those entries and locate what is on the computer. Its usually an iterative process because even doing this you will miss some of the junk and when it starts running you determine what it is and where, then go kill it. On the darn near impossible side is recovering the hidden partitions they stuck on your hard drive, without reloading that is quite tricky and sometimes just not possible. All in all its probably best to just wipe the drive and start from scratch, but loot the trashed install for drivers BEFORE you do that to save a lot of time and hassle. I can usually kill the junkware faster than a reload, in under 1/2 an hour. But I almost always have some wasted disk space for dlls and other pieces that were missed in the cleanup, minor enough but it can be a few meg of wasted space.

academy has relabeled russian (steel cased and probably bimetal jacket) if you have one nearby.

How times have changed, haha, my first desktop had a 13 inch screen I think.

That would cost the great state of TN $10 in tax money for every gun sold. No can do!

Its crude but I was hoping that blown up diagram of each individual part (towards the end of the booklet) would be of some use, beyond the field stripping section. Sounds like you are on the right track now though, but that diagram may help you put it back together if you can see enough detail in it.

Not only this but my dad used to shoot them off by hitting them on the side to unscrew them. They would jump straight up in the air (stabalized from the spinning from being unscrewed, I guess) when he did it right and was pretty cool to watch. That was bench rested with a 22 rifle. I am pretty boring, I suppose, and am happy to just shoot at whatever small sized target. I often just shoot at the repair stickers that come with targets (1/2 inch to 1 inch circles). Most of the places I shoot are paper only.