IALEFI 2008

06 May 08

2008 IALEFI Conference in Reno, NV:

I arrived on Range in Reno, NV yesterday afternoon, eager to shoot several new guns I've only handled up until now. Classes continue on the Range all week with lecture Classes going on simultaneously at the local Silver Legacy Hotel.

Ruger's diminutive LCP is very functional and digests 380 ammunition with great enthusiasm. Smooth, flat, small, an slick, I like it! It's a single-column, self-decocking seven-shooter. It makes a wonderful hide-out/back-up pistol. Comments were generally positive.

Sights are rudimentary and hard to see. Officers who have to qualify with back-up pistols may find sufficient accuracy difficult to attain. Gunsmithswill thus stay busy retrofitting the LCP with after-market sights!

The LCP has an external slide-lock lever, but the slide does not lock to the rear when the last round is fired. Magazine-release button is in the customary place on the left side of the frame.

Priced at under $400.00, Ruger will have difficulty making LCPs fast enough!

SIG's P250, currently available only in 9mm with the "medium" frame, is a compact seventeen-shooter that runs well and is makes a wonderful concealed-carry pistol. My friends from SIG are already complaining that they can't get enough copies to run an Armorer's Class, so it will be a while before SIG is able to fill the pipeline!

The P250 is a DAO service pistol, designed to compete, price-wise, directly with Glock.

Action Target has produced yet another ingenious innovation: the "Dropper." With this compact, collapsible system, The shooter shoots through a cardboard target in an effort to hit a steel plate positioned on the body mid-line, eight inches behind it. The shooter cannot actually see the steel plate, as it is concealed behind the cardboard target. When the plate is struck, the cardboard target falls forward, and the plate falls backward! This inexpensive, manual system does two important things: (1) It trains the shooter to keep after the target until he gets results, and (2) it trains the shooter to see the target with "X-ray vision." That is, the shooter can't perceive his ultimate target directly. He must estimate where it is, beneath the skin ofthe torso.

Seeing one's target with X-ray vision is a discipline to which Dr Jim Williams introduced us all, and the "Dropper" enables one to actually exercise this critical skill.

More later!

/John