Articles by Herschel Smith

Now this looks like it would be fun. And who else would teach it except Chris Costa.

I’ve followed the infantry weapons in use, from the bullpup IPI Malyk to AR-15s and AKs.  Of course, some idiot always drops by to respond that it’s all propaganda rather than really add to the conversation about weaponry.

This article outlines some really nice rifles recently given to their fighters.

Ukrainian National Guard special forces have started to receive their first 5.56x45mm AR-15-patterned rifles. This comes as some Ukrainian National Guard units have begun to rearm in line with NATO standards as part of closer alignment with the western alliance.

The official press announcement of the Ukrainian National Guard does not name the unit, only saying that a separate special unit of the Eastern Territorial Administration has received new UAR-15 assault rifles. The Firearm Blog website mentions that in recent months Ukraine also received a shipment of US military aid worth $60 million. Since the outbreak of the conflict in Donbass and the annexation of Crimea, Ukraine has undergone a massive rearmament program and kick-started its defense industry with a number of attempts at developing a small arms manufacturing capability which has seen the development of the FORT-250 rifle and the M4-WAC-47.

The rifles in the photos released by the National Guard are clearly marked “UKROP”, a branch of Ukraine’s state-run “Ukroboronprom” concern. The UKROP UAR-15 has been exhibited at a number of defense trade shows since 2018, and it seems that production of the rifle is now underway. The rifle appears to be patterned after the AR-15/M4, with a KeyMod forend, an enlarged T-charging handle, an adjustable stock and a full-length top rail. The rifles also appear to be select fire. They are also shown with Lancer translucent polymer magazines and a suppressor with flash hider, which is reportedly rated for up to 10,000 rounds.

I see the flash hider, I don’t see the suppressor.  Maybe the author is wrong about that.  But they are using translucent mags, a light KeyMod forend, a nice charging handle, and MLOK attachment rails along with a full 1913 rail on top.  The rifles appear to be Cerakoted charcoal gray.

Outdoor Life.

It’s a common sight to see someone pull the trigger on the rifle, shotgun, or pistol they just emptied, whether they are finishing up at the gun range or jumping in the truck after the evening deer hunt. The intent is to confirm that the gun is clear. But is that safe gun handling? Or is it a pointless risk?

I think the answer depends on what you’re doing. But I do know some hunters and shooters click their trigger every single time—and that’s not the right approach.

Before getting into those less-than-safe scenarios, let’s talk about when it makes sense. At every 3-gun, multi-gun, or handgun competition I’ve attended, the standard procedure after finishing a stage is to unload the pistol by pulling the magazine, racking the slide, and pointing downrange and dropping the hammer. The Range Officer managing the stage watches this process to verify that the blaster is clear to his or her satisfaction. The same procedure holds true for showing that a long gun is clear.

At a gun range, you can point the muzzle at a solid backstop. If you do produce a negligent discharge when attempting to show clear, it isn’t going to cause any problems other than a potential stage or match DQ. I’ve witnessed this myself and recently saw a video of shooter at a match crank off a round in front of the range officers after pulling the magazine and racking the slide repeatedly. Obviously, he had a round in the chamber that the extractor didn’t engage (perhaps the extractor had broken) and when he dropped the hammer the pistol went off. The fact that he had an utterly safe backstop to shoot into is what prevented it from being a dangerous situation.

Now out in the wild, the safety of the backstop becomes relative. When you’re exiting your deer stand or hopping into your truck, is it possible to have a backstop as certain as the berm at a rifle range? Sure, in theory. In practice, you won’t have that every single time.

With that in mind, dropping the hammer becomes a risk-reward scenario where it’s often better to not pull the trigger.

Years ago, I discussed this issue with Jim Carmichel, my predecessor as Outdoor Life’s shooting editor. He was firmly in the “don’t dry fire to show safe” camp. “What is it you’re trying to prove?” he said. Good point. You’re trying to demonstrate that the gun is empty—but if it isn’t you just opened a whole can of worms for you and everyone who might be around you.

Some shooters have argued with me that they’d rather have the negligent discharge happen then, rather than risk carrying or transporting a gun they thought had a clear chamber but didn’t.

My problem with this logic is that it ignores the first rule of gun safety: Every gun is always loaded. If someone hands me a firearm I don’t care if they just field stripped the thing and put it back together to show it is empty—I’m still going to check it myself. We shouldn’t consider any firearm, even the deer rifle that just went “click” in your buddy’s hands, any safer than one we just found on the side of the road. To ignore this is to become complacent, and when handling firearms, complacency kills. (It also ignores the second rule, which is to keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to shoot.)

The article goes on and you can read the rest at Outdoor Life.

Here’s what I do, and readers can weigh in as well.  This is an interesting subject and one that I’ve thought about before.

I’ll normally empty the chamber of any gun (rifle, pistol or shotgun) by removing the magazine and cycling the slide (or action) several times.  But here’s the next step.  I visually examine the chamber to ensure that it’s empty.  This is an absolutely essential step for me.  And then I do a self-check of my judgment.

I normally carry the firearm home with the action open and the spring tensioned.  I don’t see a problem with that.  It also lets me self-check my visual inspection as many times as I want.

But I don’t store the firearm with the action open and springs tensioned.  We’ve had this conversation before, but springs undergo creep.

Do not make the claim that stainless steel (like SS304) doesn’t suffer creep below the yield limit and at low temperatures.  Yes … it … does  (“In all tests at applied stress/yield strength ratios above 0.73 some plastic deformation was recorded”).

No offense, but don’t try to be an engineer if you’re not one. If you make the claim that SS304 (I presume the material of most magazine springs) doesn’t suffer from metal creep, you’d be wrong, and then you’d also be answering the question the wrong way.

The right way to look at the question is one of whether the creep is significant.  It usually isn’t, and it is less significant than for carbon steel.  It’s also not significant for applied stress/yield strength ratios lower than what the authors tested.  Where your specific magazine spring falls in this data set is best determined by the designer, not me (I don’t have drawings or any other design information).

Gun springs are an essential part of the gun, and the gun needs to function every time I pull the trigger.  On the other hand, magazines can be replaced.  I don’t leave gun springs tensioned.  I de-tension the spring before storing the weapon.  That requires that I pull the trigger while having the gun pointed in a safe direction and after visually verifying again that the chamber is empty (since I only shoot hammer fired pistols, that’s an easy fix – I let the hammer slide down smoothly, and this is also an easy fix with bolt actions).  I don’t care so much about magazine springs.  And I don’t shoot striker fired pistols.

I know that this is done different ways for different people and that multiple strategies are advocated by shooters everywhere.  If there was one answer, there wouldn’t have been an article to begin with and no conversation necessary.

By way of brief followup to my post entitled Things Learned About Modern Warfare From The Ukrainian War, I thought I would roll in the experience of my former Marine son.

It was long held that the USMC is special operations, so they don’t need one.  I have a whole host of thoughts on this claim that would take us very far afield and ruin the main point I want to make.  Besides, readers would get bored and skip out on it.

But sooner or later the MC would capitulate, and Marine Raiders were folded into SOCOM.  When that happened, money flooded in.  They had all sorts of perks that other Marines didn’t have, for example, when my son learned to perform CQB and room clearing, he went to hot shoot houses, all over the country, before his deployment to Iraq.

The SOCOM Marines do too, but before that, they have (onsite at Camp Lejeune) better-than-video-game quality simulations of shoot houses (with physical movement) that could be programmed for whatever situation they wanted to test, and it could be run at any time, night or day, but only for the SOCOM Marines.

Each SOCOM Marine, even when my son was in the Corps, which ended in 2008, had his own cage with equipment.  Literally anything he wanted was in this cage.

When my son visited these cages with a buddy on Camp Lejeune, you know what was found in many of the cages?  Drones, along with controls for them.  They could pick them up at will and carry them on whatever deployment was next.

Drones.  Modern warfare requires them for intel and surveillance.  The losers will not have drones.  The winners will.

Ammoland.

While the world’s attention is focused on the horrific events unfolding in Eastern Europe, the Biden-Harris administration quietly unleashed hell on American gun dealers.

As the NRA first noted, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has started revoking licenses of gun dealers for the most minor of paperwork errors – errors that never led to license revocations until Biden took office.

The move was intended to bolster Biden’s politically motivated strategem, which he first announced June 23, 2021, that “rogue” gun dealers are responsible for skyrocketing crime rates in large cities that historically have been controlled by Democrats. The “epidemic of gun violence” wasn’t caused by weak prosecutors who refuse to hold criminals accountable, or gangs or underfunded police departments or by any combination thereof, Biden claimed. It was all the fault of “rogue gun dealers.”

Inner city crime has nothing to do with so-called “rogue” gun dealers.  It has to do with the destruction of the nuclear family and rejection of God’s laws.  We all know that.  This is just another ploy to make it as difficult as they can on firearms manufacturers, dealers and owners.

Having said all of that, I observed some number of months ago that if FFLs want to stay in business in the future, they’re going to have to implement human performance and error reduction tools, to include: (1) routine training and retraining, (2) qualification measures, (3) self check and STAR (stop, think, act and review), (4) independent verification, and so on.

Staying in business will require error-free performance of employees.  In the future, I see no other way.

By the way, as best as I can cipher the statistics, the lowest error rates by industry in the country are nuclear (coming in at the lowest), airlines, and pharmaceutical manufacturers and distributors.  The medical profession comes in at one of the highest human error prone professions.  I’m not criticizing – I’m just reporting.

I wouldn’t embed this video except that I have actually talked to people like this.  Yes, to someone who told me he was arming himself (and even minimizing ammunition purchases) but planned to take what ammunition he had and steal ammo and food from other people.

I’m not kidding.

I did this on Saturday.  I shot at clays with a Beretta 1301, Langdon Tactical.  And yes, I was able to connect, but it’s more challenging with a 18.5″ barrel.

Did you make it to the range over the weekend, and what did you shoot?

This is meant to be a tactical analysis, and also to admit I was wrong about certain things a number of months (or years) ago when I discussed 5GW.

The notion behind the F-35 was communications, control of the sky, ability to leverage connection with MilStar Uplink with other air assets, command, and so forth.  That’s a simplification, and for the rest of the story you can find better explanations of it online.

True enough, the F-35 program has been disastrous and it would have been better in retrospect to have reengineered and retrofitted the F-22 which was a proven platform.  I also won’t hear of any talk of replacement of the A-10, which only an idiot would advocate.

However, it seems to me that the Russians are approaching the battle space as if they are fighting WWII.  Ukraine, on the other hand, is using modern anti-tank rocket designs to their advantage, as well as leveraging drones to kill tanks, refueling trucks and APCs.  Two things happen when the armor is found and Ukraine has the assets to attack.  First, the armor gets killed.  Second, the soldiers in the armor either die or quickly abandon the armor and scatter.

Russia is driving tanks and other armor in large, slow moving, laborious, lumbering columns, all of them susceptible to stand off weapons.  This makes them susceptible to enfilade fires.  If they break out of the lumbering columns, they splinter to the point that they are susceptible to defilade fires.  Some of the targeting is being done during the daylight hours, but a lot of it is being done at night, because as I read in one account, “They can’t see us at night.”  That report was specifically pertaining to civilian drones, as small as a couple of square feet, being operated by civilians, those same civilians working in military complexes and alongside military observers and tacticians.  Once again for emphasis, these are civilians, using small civilian-owned drones.  Frankly, I don’t think it would matter if they could see them in the daylight either.  They would be looking up in the sky all the time for something that looked like smaller than a bird.

The drone usage is for surveillance and intelligence gathering.  From their vantage, they can send ground pounders to use stand off anti-tank weapons or send weapons-carrying drones to perform armor killing functions.  Radar cannot see these small drones.

To be sure, Russia can still use large artillery and fighter jet strikes to damage infrastructure, and they are doing just that.  Also, when the battle is between ground pounders, it’s brutal, just as it always has been throughout history.

But a tank must be able to function within parameters: weight, ability keep from sinking into the ground, fuel consumption, and armor protection.  The turrets and rear ends of tanks are usually much less armored than the front.  It’s impossible to design a tank that has thick armor on all sides and the top.  It would be logistically unsustainable and wouldn’t move.  Engines would tear up, and mechanics would get shot while trying to make them work again.

It would be interesting to see how the M1A1 variants hold up under these circumstances.  They might do better than the older Russian designs because they move faster, have explosive reactive armor, and are more off-road capable than the Russian tanks.  But who knows?

But you can bet that tacticians in the Pentagon and at Leavenworth are today watching video very closely and asking some hard questions about heavy, lumbering warfare in light of the concepts of 5GW.

At the beginning of the discussions about 5GW, you could have colored me very skeptical.  Today I’m convinced.  With miniature drones the real-time intelligence and surveillance capabilities are endless.  The next barrier for these drones is the use of AI to let them all talk to each other and learn from their losses and successes, operating more autonomously when they perform proper enemy ID and surveil the area for unacceptable collateral damage potential.

Another thing this shows (and I was right about this prediction) is that the Marine Corps was stupid to have ever pushed the ridiculous EFV (Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle) to the point that the Senate had to kill it for them.  And they were smart to let it go when they were told no.  With drones and modern rocket designs, no EFV would have ever landed on any beach, anywhere.

One thing is certain.  The days of lumbering columns of tanks conducting near peer warfare on the field of battle is over forever.  No one will try it again, and if they do, they’re fools.

The two things most important in this war are ground pounders and control of the skies (and not necessarily control of the skies at tens of thousands of feet).

Andy at Practical Accuracy sends this video of shooting his RRA rifle at 1000 yards with iron sights.

Andy is a good shooter.  I can’t see a quarter that far without magnification though.  I’ll say again, Rock River Arms rifles are shooters.  We’ve discussed it many times before, but the 1:7 twist which is MilSpec was never put in place because of accuracy requirements.  Steve at RRA and I have discussed this before too, and they make their rifles 1:8 (some of them 1:9).