Archive for the 'Firearms' Category

We recently discussed the new S&W Performance Center 686.  Jeff Quinn gives his take.

Unless you do this sort of thing every day – and I don’t – it pays to rehearse some of the basics.  These links are worth the study time today.

WRSA: Fighting in the Forrest

WRSA: Practical Marksmanship Lesson

WRSA: Practical Carbine Accuracy

M4Carbine.net: 5.56mm Trajectory

Sniper Central: .223 Remington

Sportsman’s Guide: Ballistics Charts

The Mercury News:

Correction: This commentary has been updated to correct the type of weapon used by the gunman in the Sutherland Springs, Texas, shooting — it was an assault rifle, not an automatic weapon — and by the hero who shot him — who also used an assault rifle, not a “single rifle.”

And that, dear reader, is all you need to know.  You don’t need to know that the formal definition of assault rifle includes selective fire.  Assault rifles aren’t machine guns, or something.

The most important thing you learn from this is that there is such a thing as the “single rifle.”  In the author’s world, anyway.

Perhaps we could get the author to drop by and tell us what that is.  If it’s more powerful in its awesomeness than an assault rifle, by God I must have one.

To the author, I would also like to know, “What color is the sky in your world?”

H/T reddit.

Prior:

• High Magazine Clips And The Shoulder Thing That Goes Up
• The Captain’s Journal » High Ammo Clips
• The Captain’s Journal » Automatic Bullets In Rapid-Fire Magazine Clips
• The Captain’s Journal » Duck Hunting With Bullets
• The Captain’s Journal » Guns, Accoutrements And Idiots
• The Captain’s Journal » The Fully Loaded Ammunition Cartridge
• The Captain’s Journal » The High Magazine Round
• The Captain’s Journal » Mother Jones On “High-Caliber Rifles”
• The Captain’s Journal » The 40-Clip Magazine

News from New Orleans:

An 18-year-old with an AR-15 rifle in his pants was among more than 20 people arrested for illegal gun possession as Thanksgiving and the Bayou Classic football game brought big crowds to the French Quarter over the long holiday weekend, the New Orleans Police Department said Monday.

The NOPD made 19 gun arrests Friday and Saturday, and State Police added six of its own, including the arrest of a Bourbon Street bar security guard and bouncer who shocked another man with a stun gun while pretending to be a law enforcement officer.

[ … ]

A group of undercover officers found the AR-15 on Saturday in the possession of Joseph Graham, of Baton Rouge. The cops stopped Graham after they said they saw him smoking marijuana near Canal and Bourbon streets. During the stop, they found that he somehow had managed to hide the rifle, which is a staple of the U.S. military, in his pants, Gernon said.

Ah, I see that the law against SBRs (long guns with less than a 16″ barrel must be registered as SBRs with a background check, ATF approval and a $200 tax stamp) didn’t stop him from going ahead and concealing a carbine length barrel.  Look at the picture.  That’s not an SBR, it’s got a barrel of 16″ or greater.

So much for the wisdom of Congress and the NFA.  But we peaceable, law abiding gentlemen who want to have SBRs must continue to have the paperwork.  Because 16″.  It’s a magic number.  Even though we could conceal a longer barrel.  They didn’t stop him for a rifle.  They stopped him for pot.

HuffPo:

The interview, which can be read in full here, touches on Gorka’s stint advising Trump on national security (Gorka left in August, following criticism over his anti-Islamist views and reported ties to a far-right Hungarian group), his political stances and his dim view of the media (hi!).

Since Recoil is focused on firearms, the piece included a large segment devoted to Gorka’s zest for guns and shooting. And there was one detail in particular that stood out and captured the interest of many folks on social media.

Well, social media is stupid, so what do you expect?  I routinely carry two guns, depending upon what I’m doing and where I’m going.  At night (walking the dog, travelling, etc.) a good tactical light is a must, and if you ever leave home without a knife, you’re leaving the best tool ever known to mankind.  There isn’t a single day that goes by without me using my tactical knives for something.

The fact that the social media entries think Gorka is excessive is just proof that while they may grow hipster beards and wear flannel, they likely have never done a man’s work a day in their pathetic lives.  What kind of a man doesn’t carry a knife?

PDN:

Here’s why I don’t even like these devices being called “safeties.” I started shooting at a very young age and took my hunter’s safety course when I was eight years old. In that course we were taught that mechanical safeties are by definition “mechanical devices prone to failure.” We went on to learn the basic rules of firearms safety and that you should not rely on a mechanical safety. This has stuck with me throughout my years of shooting and even more so now that I am an instructor.

Many people have the misconception that these mechanical devices automatically make a gun “safe” and therefore you can let your guard down about the firearms safety rules once they are engaged. This leads to complacency and dangerous behavior, and goes even further when people question firearms not having these mechanical devices when children are around. The thought that this mechanical lever or button is going to prevent a child from firing a gun if they gain access to it is far from reality. But due to the name of these devices, uninformed people assume they instantly make a gun “safe.”

Due to these misconceptions, I believe that calling mechanical safeties a “safety” actually leads to firearms being more dangerous – the idea that once you “turn the safety on” you can ignore the standard rules of firearms handling. I have seen people get upset about being reprimanded for pointing a gun at someone, with the reasoning, “Well, the safety was on.” Some people have even been upset that anyone would question them about safety. Following the rules of safe gun handling does not end because you utilize a mechanical safety. Instead, if you choose to own or carry a firearm that requires the use of a mechanical safety, such as a single-action semi-automatic or double/single one in single-action mode, you should make an even greater effort to follow the basic safety rules of gun handling due to these firearms having more likelihood of an accidental discharge if you forget to engage the mechanical safety.

This argument makes no sense to me.  It’s like telling an engineer that he shouldn’t perform his designs with margin, rather, just learn not ever to make any errors or simplifying assumptions or engineering judgments.  I’m with him on ensuring that having a “safety” doesn’t lead you to ignore the rules of gun safety.  But my emphasis would be to follow the rules of gun safety regardless of the various and sundry mechanical features of your firearm, and if you want a mechanical safety, then have one.

I’ll keep my traditional 1911, thank you very much.  To his credit he does address the light trigger when the hammer is cocked on the 1911 and seems, haltingly and begrudgingly, to accept the 1911 safety.  But what about striker fired pistols and their light trigger pull?  The author spends a lot of time on double-action semi-automatics and the heavy trigger pull for the first shot, but when he addresses the obvious question of the light trigger pull for single-action striker fired pistols, unlike with the 1911 (where he accepts the safety) he simply rehearses the rules of gun safety again.

I think he wants his cake and eat it too.  Or not to offend 1911 owners, or something else I don’t understand.  Like I said, I’ll stick with my 1911, or an internal hammer pistol (FN makes models that have internal hammers).  My FN 5.7 has a safety and is an internal hammer pistol.  As for reaching the safeties of either my 1911s or my FN, I don’t see it as a problem since it is right where one of my fingers (or thumb) is.  Sure, it’s something to practice, but I don’t see this as a reason to give up guns with safeties.

Dallas News:

Mike Brewer has tried all kinds of corn bait to lure feral hogs into a $1,000 trap at his Sunnyvale pecan orchard. He even mixed the corn with strawberry gelatin because the pigs love strawberries.

Nothing.

The hogs dig around the trees and trample the earth. They eat his pecan harvest off the ground. It costs Brewer and his wife, Kathy, weeks and weeks of labor to patch up the soil around the trees.

“It’s a constant battle,” Brewer said this month.

So what action has been delayed in the state?

Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller spoke enthusiastically about a “Hog Apocalypse” earlier this year when he approved the use of a controversial poison called Kaput Feral Hog Bait. The poison contains a chemical called warfarin, an anticoagulant that makes pigs bleed internally, ending in slow, painful deaths. Some people voiced concerns about the unknown effect on the food chain, and the manufacturer withdrew its state registration for the poison. Because it was classified as a state limited-use pesticide, Texas can no longer license people to use the bait.

Good Lord.  I cannot imagine a worse idea for hog control than to introduce that into the environment not knowing the effects on the food chain, and besides that, while these are awful and destructive creatures, we should still be concerned about “ethical kills” as good hunters.  This is a profoundly bad idea all around.

Hey, here’s the low-down on that stupid statement in the article about hog removal not being as simple as shooting them.  A kill shot is ethical, and removes the hog from the population.  If lethal removal isn’t enough in America – and so far it hasn’t been and is a long way from being enough – then we aren’t doing enough lethal removal.

Prior:

Save The Planet: Buy An AR-15

Texan Takes 416 Pound Hog With AR-15

Philly.com:

Remington Outdoor, the second-largest U.S. gunmaker has suffered a “rapid” and “sharp” deterioration in sales and a similar drop in profits since January, and faces “continued softness in consumer demand for firearms,” credit analysts at Standard & Poor’s Global Ratings said in a report today.

S&P as a result has cut the company’s corporate credit rating — already at a junk-bond-level CCC+ — two full notches, to CCC-, a move likely to make the company’s high-yield debt less attractive to investors and lenders, and force Remington to pay more in interest. The company could face a change in control, bankruptcy, or default on its debt by next year.

A backlog of unsold, unwanted firearms will force Remington to operate at a loss and “pressure the company’s sales and profitability at least through early 2018, resulting in insufficient cash flow for debt service and fixed charges,” unless Remington gives up cash to pay for ongoing operations, S&P adds.

S&P expects “a heightened risk of a restructuring” of Remington’s $575 million senior secured loan and asset-based lending facility, which it is supposed to pay back in 2019.

If Remington defaults on its payments, based on the company’s current value, S&P expects first-lien creditors may receive around 35 cents back from every dollar they have lent or invested. Lower-rated creditors would get back less, or nothing.

Default is not yet “a virtual certainty,” the report added.

And yet I know firearms manufacturers who can’t keep up with the demand.  I currently have one on backorder that no one is able to find, anywhere.  As they say, if you make things that people want, at a high quality, for a good price, the people will come.  If not, they won’t.

Shooting Illustrated:

In general, you want to start off with the largest diameter suppressor you think you’ll need. You can shoot 9 mm through a .45 ACP can, albeit with a slight increase in noise due to the larger opening, but you cannot shoot .45 ACP through a 9 mm can. Also, in general, shorter and smaller suppressors are going to be louder, because they have less volume to soak up the expanding gasses escaping from the muzzle.

When it comes to mounting your suppressor on the barrel of your gun, Knox says that direct-thread suppressors will have more versatility because they will fit on any barrel threaded to the same pitch. However, you will occasionally need to tighten the fit, as it can work loose as you shoot. A quick-detach (QD) mount, allows for faster attaching and detaching from one gun to another, but it pretty much locks you into using one manufacturer’s quick-detach mount on all your guns.

When it comes to specific types of suppressors, there are essentially three different types: Rimfire, centerfire pistol, and centerfire rifle. Rimfire suppressors are less expensive and weigh less because the pressure buildup inside the can is much less than with a centerfire round. However, rimfire rounds, especially .22 LR, tend to shoot a lot dirtier than their centerfire cousins, which means that easy disassembly for a cleaning is vital in a rimfire can.

Centerfire-pistol suppressors have unique features as well. Most service pistols today use some variation of a tilting-barrel delayed blowback action, and hanging a suppressor off the barrel of such guns can make it significantly less reliable due to the extra weight on the barrel. A muzzle booster or Nielsen device inside the can momentarily relieves that weight, much like jumping up inside an elevator going down can give you a brief feeling of weightlessness and lets the pistol function normally. Also, because most suppressors block the sight picture from normal-height pistol sights, suppressor-height sights are almost a must for a pistol that has a can.

When it comes to rifles, the weight of your suppressor matters less than it does with a pistol. A rifle already weighs at least several pounds, so the few ounces of a suppressor added onto it are less noticeable compared to pistol cans, and because of the power of rounds they shoot, centerfire rifle cans are much more robust than either pistol or rimfire suppressors.

Because rifles don’t use a tilting-block action, there is little need for a Nielsen Device or other muzzle booster. But because of increased distance they can shoot, a consistent point of impact with or without a suppressor on the gun is of vital importance to the accuracy of the rifle. Hanging a weight off the muzzle end of a rifle and messing with how the propellant gases exit the barrel is going to affect how the bullet leaves your gun. There will probably be a point of impact (POI) shift when you attach a suppressor to your rifle, but better-engineered cans will affect your POI less than others. In general, as long as the POI shift you get when you attach a suppressor to your rifle is consistent and repeatable, you can adjust for it and keep on shooting your gun.

Time will tell if suppressors become more available to armed citizens, but in the meantime, take your time and do your research before you choose a can that’s right for you. The legal complexities of owning a suppressor (not to mention the extra $200 you need to pay the government to own one) means that buying the right suppressor for you is even more important than buying a gun that’s right for you.

I’ve lately been discussing suppressors with a neighbor since I don’t believe anyone in Washington has the guts necessary to press the SHARE act, at least not without also giving something away so that the state may further infringe upon our rights (the example, by the way, being set by the NRA).  Moreover, they may give something away without ever getting a thing.  Most “men” in Washington aren’t fit to clean dog shit off the floor.

What I’ve found is that it’s difficult to get good advice on suppressors, there are almost no really good reviews, and the discussion forums are mostly void of buyer and user remarks and experience.  This is a shame with something that ends up being as expensive as it is.

Any experience with suppressors by readers is welcome in the comments or by EMail.  Preferably use comments so that we can all learn.

Dave Kopel:

The global history of mass shootings demonstrates that the vast majority of these crimes are perpetrated in places where citizen firearms ownership is close to nil. While people can argue about cause and effect, the facts are indisputable.

This might seem surprising to people who read a recent article in the New York Times claiming that the mass shootings in the United States are a direct consequence of the high density of gun ownership in the country. But the article is analytically flawed, as Robert VerBruggen detailed for National Review Online. For example, the Times article is based on a study by a professor who refuses to allow skeptics to see his data or his methodology. But let’s hypothesize that the assertions by the professor are correct. It is still true that mass shooting fatalities are heavily concentrated in areas where citizen firearms possession is prohibited.

Consider, for example, some of the deadliest mass shootings of the 20th century. As soon as the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union began on June 22, 1941, special SS units called Einsatzgruppen were deployed for mass killings. All the Jews or Gypsies (also known as Roma) in a village would be assembled and marched out of town. Then they would all be shot at once. (Yehuda Bauer, “Jewish Resistance in the Ukraine and Belarus during the Holocaust,” in Jewish Resistance Against the Nazis, Patrick Henry ed. [D. C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2014], pp. 485-93.)

Within a year, the 3,000 Einsatzgruppen, aided by several thousand helpers from the German police and military, had murdered about 1 million people, concentrating on small towns in formerly Soviet territory. (Hillary Earl, The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945–1958 [Cambridge, U. K.: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 2009], pp. 4–8; Reuben Ainsztein, Jewish Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Eastern Europe [London: Elek Books, 1974], pp. 222–25.) Einsatzgruppen mass shootings took place not only in today’s Russia but also in nations that the Soviet Communists had taken over, and which were then over-run by the Nazis: eastern Poland (taken by Stalin pursuant to the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact), Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.

Because of psychological damage to the Einsatzgruppen, the Nazis attempted to replace mass shootings with mobile gas vans. But these did not work out well, partly because herding people into the gas vans required even closer contact with the victims than did mass shooting. (Earl, p. 7). Therefore, the Nazis invented extermination camps with huge gas chambers, which were more efficient at mass killing, and which created a larger physical (and, consequently, psychological) distance between the murderers and their victims.

In pre-WWII Poland and in the Soviet Union, “no firearm, not even a shotgun,” could be lawfully possessed without a government permit. For most people, “such permits were impossible to obtain.” (Ainsztein, p. 304; see also Chaika Grossman, The Underground Army: Fighters of Bialystok Ghetto, trans. Schmuel Beeri [N.Y.: Holocaust Library, 1987; first pub. in Israel 1965], p. 3.) “Not to allow the peasants to have arms” had been the policy “from time immemorial.” (Ainsztein, p. 304.) In this regard, Lenin and Stalin carried on the Russian czarist tradition, as they did in many other ways. (See generally Eugene Lyons, Stalin: Czar of All the Russias [Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1940]; Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar [N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004].)

In Poland, the main way that firearms got into citizens’ hands was peasant scavenging of rifles that had been left behind from the battles of World War I (1914-1918) and the Russo-Polish War (1919-1920). Usually the rifle barrels would be sawed short, for concealment. (Ainsztein, p. 304.) But thanks to the 1939 Hitler-Stalin Pact, the Soviet Union invaded and conquered the eastern third of Poland at the beginning of World War II. The Soviet secret police, the NKVD, “took great care to disarm the local population, and was very successful.” (Ibid.)

The one big chance to acquire arms was in the chaos immediately after June 22, 1941. In those first weeks, the Soviet army reeled in retreat, leaving large quantities of weapons behind. But the abandoned arms tended to be in rural areas (where Polish peasants picked up many), whereas most Jews lived in cities or towns. (Ibid.)

During the chaotic early weeks on the Eastern Front, the Nazis successfully deterred most Jews from attempting to scavenge arms. As in every nation conquered by the Third Reich, being caught with a firearm meant instant death for oneself and one’s family, and perhaps even for others, in reprisal. This was especially so for Jews. Disarmed, the Jews and Roma were soon destroyed.

Victims of a mass shooting perpetrated by organized government are just as dead as victims of a mass shooting perpetrated by a lone nut. Adopt the broadest definition of “mass shooting” that you want (e.g., three victims wounded, one killed). Add up all the mass shooting deaths from lunatics, organized crime, jihadist cells and ordinary criminals. The global, historical total of mass shooting deaths will be gruesome, and it will also be small compared to the total of mass shooting deaths perpetrated by criminal governments — including Fascists, Communists and non-ideological tyrants.

University of Hawaii political science professor R.J. Rummel compiled demographic data regarding genocide. He estimated the total number of victims of mass murders by governments from 1901 to 1990 to be 169,198,000. (Rudolph J. Rummel, Death by Government [Piscataway, N.J.: Transaction Pub., 2d ed. 2000].) This figure does not include deaths from wars; it includes only deliberate mass murder of civilian populations.

Let that number wash over you again, and consider it in the context of Hitler, Pol Pot, the Armenian Christian genocide at the hands of the Turkish Muslims, and the Christians in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Uganda (under Idi Amin), and throughout Africa (the later count of murdered Christians may not even be included in the estimate).

This is why we have a second amendment.  Right there before your eyes.  Look no further.  We have weapons because of the evil perpetrated on men by governments.  If you ever forego having them and training with them, you risk a similar fate.

Ask yourself why these numbers are excluded in the statistics on mass shootings by the controllers?