About the gun

Ok, I'm finally home and have some time to actually do some blogging. I was having a hell of a time getting the pictures up, and honestly this trip was worthless without pictures (click on 'em to embigginate)

First off, I'd like to talk about the Para USA pistol we got to use. The one I chose was the single stack, .45 ACP with the LDA - Light Double Action trigger. The LDA is about a 3.5 pound trigger that operates almost like my Glock 29's trigger. While the operation was similar, that's about it. The LDA was a bajillion times more smooth than my Glock. It took me a little bit to get used to it, but once I did (thanks to Todd Jarrett's help), I managed to shoot quite well.

The gun is well balanced and felt quite good in my hand. It had Crimson Trace grips, checkering on the rear, but none on the front, which I found to be quite comfortable. I've handled some pistols with aggressive checkering on the front and felt they'd chew into my hands too much when shooting, but this model seemed just right.

The rear sights were adjustable and the front sight was fiber optic, which was amazing outside at the range. The rear sight managed to slice up my arm quite a bit as the edges were fairly sharp and my forearm kept rubbing against it. Several comments were made about that since every here and there someone would whack the back of the pistol to get it shut and would slice themselves. I might have to have the outer edges beveled a bit to prevent that. The sights worked fine (it was me that needed the work!).

I only had a few malfunctions with the pistol. There's was what I called The Huffman Malfunction, something Joe Huffman ran into quite a bit. I can't explain it as well as he can, but there's an issue with the trigger and the safety that can cause the gun to fail to fire and require you to rack the slide again even though the firearm is ready to go. That's kind of a ding against it as Para was aware of it, and since it happened quite a few times would appear to be a design flaw. In fact, the safety isn't necessary at all with an LDA and really only gets in the way. It is nice to rest your thumb on while shooting, however not being used to the safety there were times I'd put my thumb under it and, during the course of fire would inevitably flip it back up

I didn't have any failure to feeds and really only had the slide fail to lock open after the magazine was empty a few time. That turned out to be simply the slide rails being completely dry and the pistol being quite filthy. It needed to stay somewhat clean in order to work flawlessly, but from what I hear that's common with all 1911's.

The pistol was definitely more accurate than I was. By far. I watched Jarrett put the bullet in the same hole over and over. The wide groupings I made were my fault and my fault alone.

I don't know how I'm going to swing it, but I'm buying the pistol. I was comfortable with it, it shot well, and I feel I could use it nicely in IDPA. Now, I know a lot of people had commented that we were going to be shills for Para, but that's simply not the case. This was a decent pistol and one that I'm willing to purchase because of it. While I'm very, very, very gracious of Para for putting this on, I must remain honest about my experience and the pistol simply was a joy to shoot for me.