i received my uplula magazine loader from midway on wednesday, along with 3 magazines for my s&w m&p9c, 2 days ahead of schedule. ya gotta love midway. in any event, i loaded up my now 5 magazines using the uplula, and i am very pleased. although the instructions are poorly written and difficult to understand, once i figured out how it works, i can now load mags about twice as fast, and with much less wear and tear on my fingers. i highly recommend it.

 

 

i have a reservation at the range for 2:00 PM today. unlike the last few times i went, i made a reservation to avoid having to wait. this way, i can wait here and blog, instead of walking around the store looking at everything i can’t afford to buy…

why i still love my s&w 2206 .22 cal pistol:

 

 

best group at 5 yards, but the rest of them looked as good, with maybe a flyer or two. i’m not quite as good with the new 9mm yet, but getting there:

 

 

i did get one failure to extract, which was somewhat concerning. it might have something to do with the ammo i was using – winchester white box, which is the cheapest ammo one can get, or the fact that the uplula seems to slightly score the casing of each round. for self defense use, i’d hand load each mag, and of course use higher grade jacketed hollow point ammo. other than that, all went well.

i even had the opportunity to shoot an fn five-seven, as the gentleman shooting next to me asked me if i wanted to try it. i jumped at the chance. this is the pistol that was used in the fort hood shooting in november of 2009, and was also claimed by the brady campaign to be armor piercing, so called “cop killer”. of course, the actual ammo that has that capability is not commercially available, so only law enforcement and military can legally obtain it. i suppose that’s one of the advantages of being female at the shooting range, some men will strike up conversations with you, and let you try their guns. i think he may have had ulterior motives – he reloads, and asked if he could have my brass, which of course, i agreed since i would have just thrown it away into the brass buckets.

as far as the fn five-seven goes, i found it to be pretty accurate, featuring very controllable recoil, and quite comfortable to shoot. though the bullet is only slightly larger in diameter than a .22 caliber, the casing is a bit larger in diameter and “necked down” to fit the smaller diameter bullet, so there’s quite a bit more powder for higher velocities. there are pictures of both the ammo and the weapon on that wikipedia page i linked to.