What's New?

Just added an article titled Concealed Carry for the Fashionable Woman. Hope you enjoy it!

Just added an awesome article about how to choose shooting glasses, titled Can You See Clearly Now? The article was written by Brigid, a woman who lives in the midwest and writes the Mausers and Muffins blog. Brigid writes a delicious blog full of wonderful recipes and beautiful prose describing the world around her. Oh, and she also blogs about guns -- and she knows what she's talking about when she does! After you read the article here, surf past her blog and enjoy more of her writing. You'll be glad you did!

Over in the "Miscellany" chapter, I just added some musings about firearms, femininity, and web design. The article is titled, Why Pink? If you've ever wondered why in the world I chose such an aggressively feminine design for this website, this article is for you.

Shot Show review! Walk along with me as I roam the aisles at the 2009 SHOT Show in Orlando, Florida.

Not reported: don't tell anyone, but we played hooky Saturday night and went to see the Delta IV heavy rocket lift off from Kennedy Space Center. Truly an awesome sight. I'm absolutely heartbroken that I won't get to see the last planned flight of the space shuttle. The end of an era ...

Also not reported: I saw an alligator in the drainage ditch at the KSC. Then I saw a bunch of 'em. Then I glimpsed a giant pill-bug that natives assure me is actually some kinda mammal. And we had fried alligator strips for dinner. And yes: it tasted like chicken.

Life's been pretty darn busy. That is all. ;)

This update is for a friend of mine (hi Mike!) who I bumped into during a recent LFI-1 class. He asked, "When are you going to update Cornered Cat again?" Good question! Things around here have been unbelievably busy, but I haven't meant to neglect the site.

New this month are three photo essays about holster safety. They discuss belt holsters, shoulder holsters, and waist pack holsters. The waist pack essay also discusses how to safely place your firearm into a purse or other carrying bag. If you have ever wondered how to use your holster safely (and especially if you haven't!), I urge you to check these pages out.

I owe a special thanks to my husband, Bob Jackson, for taking the photos on these pages. He did a great job!

As I note at the bottom of each page, no photographers or writers were endangered by taking these photos. The bright yellow plastic training barrel you can see in the photos rendered the firearm inert and unable to fire. We purchased it for around $15 from Blade Tech Industries, and it was the best $15 I've spent this year. Highly recommended!

July addenda

I've just revamped the Sight Alignment article and added a ton of illustrations. I hope it will be easier to use and understand!

Our friend LawDog is at it again, with an awesome article titled Meditations on Paper Armour. The article was originally published on LawDog's blog (as always, it's worth following that link to read other folks' comments about the article), and I liked it so much that I asked his permission to mirror it here. Many thanks to LawDog for letting me use it.

LawDog's article is illustrated by talented photographer Oleg Volk, who also runs A Human Right, a persuasive firearms and self-defense website. His own homepage, www.olegvolk.net, contains literally thousands of fascinating and beautiful images. Worth spending an afternoon browsing through. Oleg has a blog where he publishes some of his newest work and discusses the issues of the day. You can find it at www.olegvolk.livejournal.com. Thanks, Oleg.

Just added a new article titled, Why a Gun? The article takes a stab at answering a perennial question: Why would any moral and civilized person choose to carry a firearm instead of something less lethal? For example, you might choose to learn a martial art, or to carry pepper spray, a stun gun, or some other non-firearm defensive device. Why carry a handgun when these less lethal methods of defense are available? Go, read.

The first, from the pages of The Breda Fallacy, is titled, Of Mice and Men. It might just as easily be titled, "The Mouse that Roared" (but that would be giving away the plot!).

The other new article came from Xavier Thoughts, a well-written, well-illustrated gunblog that is worth a look, if you're not already familiar with it. The article tells the story of An Encounter at Wal-Mart.

I am deeply indebted to both these blog authors for allowing me to mirror their work. Please take a moment to stop by their sites and see what else they've written; you won't be disappointed.

Today I added an excellent article lifted from phlegmfate's blog. The title is Leap Day, 1988, and so it was important to get it up today. More updates sometime next week!

Check out the new article about Pepper Spray. It turned out to be a bit longer than I expected, but I hope it's useful to someone anyway.

I've also added several new quotes to the Quotes Page, a page which contains no original material from me but which I'm ridiculously proud of anyway. The quote from Queen Victoria is not new, but it tickles me anew every time I load that page. I guess the reason I like the page so much is more for what it does not contain than what it does. Anywhere you look on the net, you can easily find a gun nut page full of the same time-worn misquotations and spurious attributions about firearms and the right to own them. This quote page is different. Where else could you possibly find Dave Barry and Jeff Cooper sharing shelf space with each other, let alone making room on the same shelf for people like Wendy McElroy, Gila Hayes, Queen Victoria, Peggy Tartaro, and Mary Zeiss Stange?

No big site updates to report, but something cool happened to me this week: Tom Gresham invited me to be a guest on his radio show, GunTalk. He interviewed me during the third hour of the show, and if you're interested you can download the show as a podcast from his archives here.

In other news, I've been working back through The Link Farm, and have added several new ones. Most notable of these is a new website from Tom Gresham and friends: GunTalk TV, which despite the name is not a TV show, but a website filled with excellent video instruction from well-known firearms trainers. It's a worthwhile endeavour, and deserves to succeed. Go take a look! GunTalk TV.

I've added a new chapter, titled Why a Gun? Some of the articles in that chapter will look familiar to long-time readers, but there are a few new ones too. I'm deeply indebted to Oleg Volk for the impetus to write Compensating for Something? ~ an article which includes some very attractive photos of his. Incidentally, if you are a competent writer and have a first-person account of something that happened to you that you are willing to share with the world, I'm looking for a few more voices to flesh out the new chapter. If that interests you, please drop an email to pax AT cornered cat DOT com.

Got Class? addresses the question of how to find firearms training that's right for you. It was previously published earlier this year in Concealed Carry Magazine (CCM).

Turning Fear into Safety was also published in CCM. It talks about a step by step process whereby you can turn your fear into an ally in your quest to remain safe -- without turning into a crotechety, paranoid old person who never has any fun.

Nightmares and Dreams, another CCM refugee, discusses the phenomenon of psycho active sleep which is common to many people who are new to self-defense. I hope that such dreams don't trouble you, but if they do, perhaps the coping strategies discussed in this article may help you get a good night's sleep.

My online buddy Larry Correia and I semi-collaborated on an article idea a few weeks back that I'm only just now getting around to adding to the site. The question we were discussing was whether a long gun or a handgun was better suited for home defense. Larry very graciously agreed to guest-pen an article arguing for using a long gun for home defense, while I wrote a piece explaining the benefits of the handgun. Thanks, Larry!

Speaking of Larry Correia reminds me: he's just published a book, one that I hope is only the first of many to come. The book is pure fantasy fun and just chock-full of all kinds of shooty goodness (I'm not sure if I envy the main character's shotgun or not, but if anyone wants to build one for me, I'm game). You'll probably especially enjoy the book if you dig B-grade horror flicks, intelligently humorous writing, and watching an author totally smear a whole bunch of worn-out stereotypes into slime-splattered oblivion. You can order Monster Hunter International at http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/order-mhi/. Go do it - you won't be disappointed.

Corrected a few minor issues in the Caliber Confusion article. Should I split that article into two separate articles, one discussing handgun calibers and the other shotgun ammunition, or leave it as is? Let me know what you think.

Another "multiple minor upgrades throughout the site" entry. Specifically, you will find a couple of new letters for Gunhilda, a handful of new quotes on the quotes page, and several new links in the Link Farm (including a few which are long overdue).

Be sure to check out the complete rewrite of the long-unfinished article about your child's First Trip to the Range. There's also a page associated with that article which lists Shotguns and Rifles for Children and Petite Adults.

There's a new article comparing Semi-Autos and Revolvers, written by Ryan McAndrews. As with all guest articles on Cornered Cat, I may not personally agree with every opinion the author expresses but the writing is good, the facts are sound, and the viewpoint is solidly worth considering. Ryan, thanks for letting me mirror your work. I appreciate it!

Another new article was written awhile back by a net-friend of mine, Tamara K. It's titled, The Day I Discovered That HCI Wants Me Dead. Tamara's article is a short, hair-raising tale which might help explain why so many of us take political efforts at gun control so ... personally.

Won't even bother telling you about all the half-finished articles lying around behind the scenes, since I do not know when I'll be able to get to those. Suffice it to say that if my Real World life ever calms down a bit, there should be some benefit to that for my friends in the Virtual World. I guess I should upload some articles which were previously published in Concealed Carry Magazine, and I probably will next time around. I'm just always a little reluctant to do it because, you know, first dibs on reading those really should go to the people who subscribe or purchase the magazine. And because there's so much other good material in CCM from other authors, I would really hate it if someone decided not to subscribe to that magazine simply because they could read my articles here instead.

You may notice that Cornered Cat has a new little logo in the bottom right corner of every screen. Thanks are due to several people on The High Road forums who gave me some valuable input while I was figuring out what logo I wanted; to Kaylee, also of THR, who did some of the initial clean-up to make my very rough idea look prettier; and to real-world buddy Don, who did the final clean up and then created it as a vector drawing for maximum flexibility.