Archive for the 'Firearms' Category

I want to cover this ground one more time for good measure.  The lawmakers in South Carolina are toying with constitutional carry, and this is a small step forward for liberty, but the largest step has yet to be taken and is still opposed by the power brokers in South Carolina.  Open carry.

Please realize that as gun owners, you’ve been conditioned to be embarrassed and ashamed of the fact that you own and carry weapons.  What was once considered poor taste, ill-bred and even criminal, hiding your weapons, is now required of you in order to keep them out of sight of all of the offended parties.

You’ve been taught that all of your gun owning life.  You have holsters for concealed carry.  Instructors and trainers are there to teach you to draw and present from concealment.  You know all of the applicable laws on concealed carry for your state.  There are entire posts and videos on carrying in non-permissive environments.  It’s even in vogue for the gun community to criticize open carry and viciously attack open carriers, with largely irrelevant and ridiculous notions of tactical advantages on concealment.  Those advantages, as you know, cannot be demonstrated to be advantages with any statistical significance that meets the Central Limit Theorem.  Finally, the tactical advantages of open carry, which is quicker draw and presentation, is largely ignored in these conversations.

Comfort is largely irrelevant to the conversation, as is the fact that you’re sweating and dirtying your weapon with IWB carry.  All of these things are signs and symptoms of the fact that gun owners have been taught by society to respond like dogs or other pets by “operant conditioning.”  The first time you ever openly carried caused you some degree of self consciousness, didn’t it?  Just go ahead and admit it.  It’s useful to demonstrate my point.

Gun owners, and in particular open carriers, are treated like second class citizens, inferior men, uncouth savages, like those who have no etiquette, when exactly the opposite would have been true two hundred years ago.  That’s one reason I openly carry when I can.  In some small way I want to change all of this.  I open carry “For the peace, good and dignity of the country and the welfare of its people.”  So should you.

Army Times:

Early evaluations of the Army’s new handgun, the M17, last year showed test failures when the pistol was fired with the standard ball ammunition, stoppages, and double ejections.

Ridiculous.  Everyone should have a “high pistol grip.”  They are also having to do this because of the tall slide and high bore axis, and thus the muzzle flip this firearm produces because of the couple, something I pointed out when the Army selected this pistol.

As for not being able to shoot FMJ lead ball, that seems like a real problem.  Double ejections are also a big problem, and firing when dropped makes this firearm completely unacceptable.  Funny, this.  I never have any problems with any of these things or any other failures with my 1911s, or with my new CMMG .45 ACP AR pistol.  I just won’t accept failures.  It’s a machine, and it can be designed and fabricated properly (although I’ll have to say that it’s hard to beat what John Moses Browning did and I don’t think anybody has even come close yet).

Here is the right way to roll out new software.[1] Set functional requirements, [2] programmers go to work, [3] put high end users in a room with it and tell them to break it, [4] repeat parts [2] and [3] until no more breakages.  Only after this do you roll it out to the user community.

The Army should have taken this approach prior to selecting a new pistol.  This must be embarrassing for them.  It should be.

I sort of want one, but not enough to pony up the $$$.

Fox News:

The biennial report of the U.N. Secretary General on Small Arms and Light Weapons, issued in December, leaves little doubt about activists’ priority for 2018: to have ammunition included in the PoA, even though ammunition already has its own instrument, the harmless International Ammunition Technical Guidelines.

The impracticality of focusing on a consumable commodity like ammunition, of which tens of billions of rounds are produced annually, will not deter the activists.

The PoA is also likely to return to an obsession with marking and tracing modular firearms — such as the AR type of firearm popular in the U.S. — and with polymer (i.e. plastic) and 3-D printed firearms. These are, at best, niche issues, if they are issues at all.

What the PoA is guaranteed not to do is to eliminate the exemption that allows China to leave its firearms unmarked in any meaningful way, thereby making them nearly impossible to trace.

Getting rid of the Chinese exemption would be a genuinely useful step, but the PoA is not about doing useful things. The best the U.S. can do, therefore, is to try and ensure that the PoA does nothing at all. The U.S. certainly cannot agree to any obligation to do the impossible by tracing every bullet it produces.

The ATT conference in August, fortunately, should be less fraught. The treaty is now, on its own terms, an obvious failure — nations are not paying their dues or filing required reports. The only thing left for the U.S. to do is for President Trump to ‘unsign’ it, and leave those nations that wish to keep on pretending to take it seriously to pay for their meetings on their own.

But just because the ATT is accomplishing nothing useful doesn’t mean the U.N.’s efforts are having no impact on the U.S. The most disturbing thing I learned at the SHOT Show was that U.S. importers were having increasing difficulties — which they linked directly to the United Nations.

One firm which relies on imports of parts from India found that New Delhi — acting under the guidance of the International Small Arms Control Standards, yet another mischievous U.N. initiative — had impounded an entire shipment worth millions of dollars, on the grounds that these parts had to be controlled under a technical definition that India did not understand and which those who did found close to meaningless.

Other nations will no longer ship arms to the U.S. — even to the U.S. government.

Another firm that imports firearms from southeastern Europe now has only one reliable route off the continent — from Slovenia to Austria to the German port of Hamburg. Many shipping firms departing from European ports will no longer take cargoes of arms — even when all export and transit licenses are in order — and even proper licenses do not always prevent cargoes from being seized en route. These problems began to appear after the ATT, which requires controls on the transit of arms, entered into force.

Activists will no doubt celebrate these developments as victories. They should think again. As shipping by sea becomes harder, legitimate firms will be forced to turn to air freight — which offers an easier route for the unscrupulous.

If southeastern Europe does not sell its firearms to the U.S., those arms will find their way to conflicts in Africa or the Middle East.

And as it becomes harder to import parts and components, U.S. manufacturers will source domestically — as, indeed, they are already starting to do.

I’m not entirely sure I understand this commentary by Ted, whom I’ve found to be a good researcher.  If I’m not mistaken he is suggesting that the UN agreement, which apparently we’ve signed, is making it hard to import parts into America for the building of firearms.  If this happens to ammunition too, it will throttle the flow to users.

Okay, if this is the point, I’ve got it, and competition is always a good thing.  But I’ve got to believe that in the total absence of imports for parts – whether guns or ammunition – American manufacturers would step up their game.  That might in fact lead to an increase in prices too.

Bottom line: you don’t have enough ammunition, right now or in the future.  Neither do I.

Sarah Bregel:

My 3-year-son Tener is sitting at the dining room table, coloring next to his big sister. “What are you drawing, Ten?” I ask, while staring into my screen. “A gun,” he replies, not looking up. “Oh, that’s nice,” I say, relatively unfazed by his creative choice.

His sister smirks at me. She remembers how not long ago, I would’ve maybe tried to redirect either one of them if they’d been talking, playing, or even drawing guns.

But in truth, the question of whether or not to allow my kids to play “guns” is not something I had to think much about until the past couple of years. When kids on the playground would play guns, my daughter would find something else to do. It just wasn’t of interest. But almost as soon as my son could speak, “gun” was on the tip of his tongue. He wanted to play with the other kids who were playing guns. He’d lose his mind if someone had a toy gun to play with because he wanted it for himself.

He has a few weapons at home — a wooden sword from the Renaissance Festival, a lightsaber he got for Christmas, and tons of superhero costumes — the same as his big sister. But intentionally, I had never bought any toy guns or allowed them in our home when he asked. To me, it felt wrong and dangerous to turn gun violence — a very real and serious issue, especially in America — into a game. I fiercely believe that we need common-sense gun control laws in our country. Nearly every time we flip on the news, there’s another mass shooting. How could I, in good conscience, allow that kind of play?

Regardless of the fact that we kept guns out of our home, and my son didn’t play violent video games or watch frightening stuff on TV, his interest still budded on its own. If he went to a friend’s house, he’d go straight for their Nerf guns and hold on tight until I picked him up. He’d shoot me dead with his pointer finger while I sat on the couch and then laugh at a job well done. For the record, he’d also shoot “fire” at me, burning me to the ground, or defeat me in just about any way he enjoyed. But shooting remained of high interest, too.

started to look into the issue with a more open mind. I picked up Gerard Jones’s book, Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence. In it, he talks specifically about this kind of play and even suggests that it actually benefits kids.

According to the book, studies showed that in British preschools when kids were allowed to play with toy guns, their games became more aggressive in the short-term, but that they were actually more relaxed later in the day. So playing fantastical games didn’t impact kids negatively or make them more aggressive. You could even say that they got their aggression out by having the freedom to play how they chose.

Some studies have suggested that watching violent shows or playing violent video games encourages violent behavior (not just play), but high amounts of screen time no matter the content, has been shown to have the same result. And it’s no surprise that context matters, too. If kids have a violent home life, their violent tendencies go up. But if they have safe surroundings and are simply playing these kinds of games, they remain just that — games.

Sarah is a feminist and that probably has a lot to do with how she’s interpreting the response of her son and what she chooses to do about it.  Her world and life view affects her actions and perspectives, as it does with us all.

But try as she might, she cannot construct a value system that can make any sense of this.  The term aggression is there, but what causes it remains unexplained.  Why poor parenting can have a negative effect on children is just taken as an axiom.  She just decides to let it happen, and it appears to me that she has found justification for all of this as opposed to being unable to stop it and also unable to find justification.  If it’s going to happen regardless of what I do, then I may as well justify it, she apparently thinks.

So let me help a little, Sarah.  Getting aggression “out of his system” isn’t why he needs to behave like a boy instead of a girl.  Evil exists in the world.  We aren’t a tabula rasa, or a blank tablet, and we do have predilections and propensities, regardless of what the nineteenth and twentieth century idiot philosophers told you.

You want to teach your children well.  We don’t learn to drive in driver’s education.  Boys learn to drive by watching their fathers, and girls by watching their mothers.  Our children generally take on our own value system, at least initially, but there are still God-given tendencies in boys and girls that will always be different.

You will want to turn your boy’s predilections towards good.  He wants to learn to protect and provide because that’s the way he is wired, no matter what your feminist friends and professors have taught you.  He can use his predilections for evil, but you want him to learn the good.

Protecting his family is good.  Defending his community is good.  Opposing tyranny is good.  All of these things are necessary by someone, because many people will not turn their children to the good, and regardless, some children will not accept their teaching because we all have volition.

You don’t want your little boy to grow up to be a man who cowers in a corner when hard times hit and a loved one or neighbor is under threat.  If he does this, he will hate himself later in life and feel worthless, and even worse, an impediment to the good.  You don’t want your little boy to grow up to hate himself, do you?

You want better than that for your little boy.  You want him to grow up to be a man, not a unisex, genderless robot.  A man is what God designed him to be, and it’s your job to assist in that calling.  So your husband, if you have one, has a job to do with him.  Tell your husband to get busy hunting, fishing, shooting, camping, hiking, biking, and doing all of the things a man should do with his boy.  It’s what God wants.

If you have no husband, then you’re going to have to pull double-duty.  But your son is worth it, yes?

Fox News:

Authorities plan an investigation after a video posted on Facebook on Thursday showed a Kentucky police officer’s rifle leaning up against a car unattended as a student walks past.

“It is unfortunate that this accident happened, but we as police officers are human and do make mistakes,” Dayton, Ky., police Chief David Halfhill said in a statement Thursday, Cincinnati.com reported. “We hold our police officers to a higher standard and be assured that this mistake will be fully investigated.”

Multiple officers can be seen in the video engaging with a suspect on the opposite side of the street, while what appears to be a rifle rests against a parked car. At one point, a student walks by the weapon but doesn’t seem to notice.

One police officer then walks a person down the street, while two other officers walk the opposite way with a person of their own – the weapon still left alone.

It’s not until a voice can be heard in the video yelling, “there’s an assault rifle left unattended,” that an officer saunters over to reclaim the gun and take it back to his patrol car.

Ha.  I hate it when that happens to me.  I remember the last time I laid one of my guns out on the sidewalk in my little town, and later when I went to pick it up the cops talked to me about the Youth Handgun Safety Act.  We all laughed and laughed and laughed.

I told them I just did it for fun and they understood, but said they expect better of me and will “fully investigate” if it ever happens again.

Army Times:

As Army leaders look to the service’s next standard issue rifle or carbine, a lot of options are on the table.

One such option has been around awhile but still strikes many U.S. troops as a futuristic form of the rifle they think they know.

This past fall, officials with the Army Maneuver Center of Excellence’s lethality branch laid out several concepts being considered for the Army’s Next Generation Squad weapon and likely new designs for the ultimate replacement for the M4.

Some of those include major advancements to the fire controls and a likely change in caliber. But one was a possible bullpup design.

Hey, that’s a swell idea.  Take the location where the explosion occurs, and the place where the initial sound wave goes greater than Mach 1 (not inside the barrel), and put it closer to the shooter’s ears.

Or otherwise, make wearing hearing protection with electronic communication with all of your teammates mandatory for all engagements, even unplanned ones.  Don’t patrol listening to the people or the crunch of the sticks in the bush, or even enemy fighters.

I read some forums today on noise from shooting, and the term “perceived noise” came up by some contributors.  There is no such thing as “perceived noise.”  That’s a myth.  Noise functions as dictated by Gauss’s law, where it increases or decreases as a function of the square of the distance.

I predict that use of the bullpup design will also make the shooters less accurate at distance than with any other design.

Via TFB, FN has come out with a new pistol chambered in 5.56mm (or 300 BO).

Hey, great idea.  That’s really innovative.  No one else has thought of an AR pistol in 5.56mm before.

Now.  Go back, re-engineer it for the 5.7X28, knock $400 off the price, and you may have something there.

So says John Farnam:

The 5.56×45 cartridge (“militarized” version of the 223 Rem) lacks adequate range and penetration for military applications. This range/penetration problem is not soluble within that caliber, and never will be!

For domestic law enforcement and personal defense, the 5.56×45 is acceptable.

But, in a battle rifle, the 5.56 comes up short. I’ve lived through a least half-dozen attempts to “improve” the cartridge, and provide it with satisfactory range and penetration. Each succeeding “wonder bullet,” despite all the promotion, has failed to live up to the hype!

The Pentagon needs to worry less about a new rifle, and more about a new caliber!

We need, once more, a 500m rifle that shoots bullets that actually go THROUGH things! We don’t have anything close to that now!

This is ridiculous.  The Army doesn’t even teach their soldiers to shoot 500 yards, much less can they afford the weight of carrying around heavier ammunition.

The Marine Corps doesn’t need it because they teach their Marines to shoot 500 yards and the 5.56m does fine.  Furthermore, they rely on designated marksmen for longer range shooting anyway, and some of the time they use .308 but some of the time they use 5.56mm.  For the really long range applications, they shoot a .50 Sasser.

This is a tired argument.  Before anyone makes this claim again, they need to teach soldiers to shoot and see how it goes.  If you want something heavier, switch to the 77 gr. Sierra Match King.  Much of the enemy shoots 7.62X39, and Russia shoots 5.45mm.  You don’t hear them complaining.

This will be the first of several reviews of the CMMG PSB .45 ACP.  My intention for this first one wasn’t to test accuracy at distance, as I will get to that later.

My intention was (1) to put a lot of rounds through the gun with different manufacturers, (2) to test it in rapid fire, and (3) to sight in my EOTech with the gun.

I headed out to the range with the Glock .45 ACP magazine that came with the gun, plus another (26 round mag) from the Gun Mag Warehouse (this one was SGM Tactical).  Both magazines worked fine, but the Glock magazine loaded easier and the spring on the SGM Tactical was very stiff.  I spent most of my time with the Glock magazine.

It took a long time and a lot of rounds to get the EOTech centered, more turns of the screws than I had anticipated.  I finally got it shooting at about one inch low at 7 yards, or a little higher than height-over-bore.

I put close to 300 rounds through the gun.  I was also shooting a Dan Wesson 1911, but only two magazines worth of rounds.  The CMMG performed flawlessly.  It ate everything I put in it.

Remington, Federal, Magtech, American Eagle and Winchester.  The Remington was hollow point.  The Winchester seemed dirtier than the others, and the Magtech and Federal seemed to perform the best.

But every round hit where I aimed when I finally got the red dot centered where I wanted it (I had to move it to the right and up).  It works very nicely in rapid fire, and it’s easy to recover sight picture.

The things I like about this gun are as follows.

(1) It worked flawlessly over nearly 300 rounds, many of which were discharged virtually as soon as I could grab a sight picture (less than a second).

(2) It has AR style operation, with which I’m intimately familiar.

(3) I find that I really like the thumb-over-bore (or C-clamp) grip.  It helps to stabilize any AR style weapon.  I had worried that this barrel was so short that the muzzle brake would cause concussive stress to my left hand upon discharge.  No worries after the first shot.  The barrel was cool, the hand guard was cool, and I didn’t feel a thing even without gloves.  My left hand was near the end of the hand guard.

(4) This gun and its caliber were very controllable.  I’ve shot AR pistols before in 5.56mm that I considered to be out of control (or better said, very difficult to control).  This one is not.

(5) It has a flared mag-well where the magazine is easy to insert, but not the AR-15 size magwell.  It is one suited for the Glock magazine for which it is designed.

The things I don’t like about this gun are as follows.

(1) Nothing …

I consider this gun to be a very good weapon to fill the gap between pistols and rifles, as I don’t really relish the idea of shooting a rifle inside the home for self defense.  I really, really like this gun.

Now, if I could just remember to put my tools in the range bag before I go so I don’t have to borrow tools from other guys.  It’s embarrassing.  Or I could just get some tools and leave them in the range bag.

I’ll do other reviews on this gun as time permits.