Archive for the 'Firearms' Category

Via Kenny, question asked and answered.

Another misgiven “fact” I see running rampant is associated with comparing stainless steel to chromemoly steel barrels for longevity. Stainless steel barrels will, yes, shoot their best for more rounds, but, chromemoly will shoot better for an overall longer time. Lemmeesplain: the difference is in the nature of the flame cutting effect on these two steels. Stainless tends to form cracks, looking like a dried up lakebed, while chromemoly tends to just get rough, like sandpaper. The cracks provide a little smoother surface for the bullet to run on (until they turn into something tantamount to a cheese grater). The thing is that when stainless stops shooting well it stops just like that. So, stainless will go another 10 to 15 percent more x-ring rounds, but chromemoly is liable to stay in the 10-ring at least that much longer than stainless steel.

Good information to know.

Readers, weigh in for a friend please.

I was asked a question about red dot sights for MSRs, and I really don’t know that much about them.  I have an EOTech for an AR pistol, but as best as I’m aware, EOTech pretty much has a lock on the holographic side of things.  I don’t think anyone else makes a holographic sight.  I could be wrong.

As for standard red dots, there’s Trijicon, Burris, Holosun, and a whole host of others.

Which red dot sights do readers like, and why?  List them by price point if you can.

Field & Stream.

It’s called hunting, and it’s fun. Of course, you ultimately need to put a bullet through a squirrel’s quarter-size brain, and your gun is the tool for tying the process together. But if you’re going squirrel hunting mainly to show off your custom rimfire, the redneck who’s using iron sights and knows how to identify and creep up on the sound of pignut husks peppering the ground can probably teach you a thing or two.

That squirrel hunting has become overlooked is a hell of a statement about modern hunting culture. “You hunt squirrels?” people say to me. “That’s cool. My grandpa used to hunt those.” Instead of woodsmanship, today’s hunters seem to value and obsess over gear, especially guns and cartridges and optics. We pore over information about bullets and twist rates and custom turrets so that we’re ready for that 400-plus-yard shot we’re sure we’re going to get—but we forget to pick our feet up and whisper on the way there. We buy choke tubes and reflex sights and pattern shotguns with $10 shells so we can kill a turkey from 70 yards—but in the process, we fail to learn what a drumming turkey sounds like because we have never listened to one that’s been completely fooled at 15 steps.

When you see a bunch of outdoorsmen gathered around a phone these days to look at pictures of a buck or bull, the question you’re almost bound to hear is: How far was the shot? If it was a close shot, the ­hunter’s reply is usually sheepish: “Oh, he walked by at 40 steps. Kind of hard to miss that.”

Funny.  My youngest son was saying that same thing to me just this morning.  Oh, he knows a thing or two about long range precision shooting.  He was a DM and he went through Scout Sniper training.

But he would still rather shoot at 20-40 yards than 250 or further.  Because that’s hunting.

Of the things that turn gun owners against gun manufacturers, these three things are highest on the list.

1. Aligning with gun control
2. Exclusive focus on military contracts
3. Reliance on name branding in lieu of true appreciation for the customer (e.g., H&K).  Look up the H&K memes like “Hi, we’re H&K and we hate you.”

It’s difficult to understand what’s so hard about this.

David Hunt on the Trench Gun.

The enemy didn’t like the trench broom one bit. In September 1918, the German government issued a diplomatic protest, complaining that the Model 97 Trench Gun was illegal because “it is especially forbidden to employ arms, projections, or materials calculated to cause unnecessary suffering” as defined in the 1907 Hague Convention respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land. When the Americans rejected this, the German high command then threatened to execute any soldier caught with a Trench Gun or even just Trench Gun shells. General Pershing replied that, henceforth, any Germans caught with flamethrowers or saw-bladed bayonets would be lined up and shot. As far as is known, no American or German POWs were executed under such circumstances.

For a lesson in history, visit his article.

But not so fast.  The shotgun is still a weapon of war.  As I’ve pointed out before, the U.S. Marine Corps used shotguns for close quarters battle in Now Zad, Afghanistan.  I snagged this shot of a YouTube video of fighting there when I was covering Marine Corps work in that theater.

So the next time some loud mouth tells you that “civilians” should not have “weapons of war designed only to kill others,” inform them that every soldier or Marine is first and foremost a civilian (in that he came from our ranks and will return to our ranks), and that every weapon that has ever been designed, or improvised, by an insurgency or uniformed army, is a weapon of war.  There are no exceptions, from sticks to rocks, from shotguns to rifles, from revolvers to pistols, from bolt action long guns to machine guns.

That’s a Red Herring anyway.  They don’t care about the details.  They just want you disarmed of all weaponry.  You’re easier to control that way.

Field & Stream.  I will note for the record that the average price is high because this is a left-skewed distribution.  There are some reasonably priced rifles (like the Browning X-Bolt, Mauser M18, Savage M10 Stealth, and Bergara B-14), with the highest price being $3,999 (for the Proof Switch).

So maybe the mean should have been a geometric mean rather than arithmetic mean.  In any case, you get the point.  Accuracy doesn’t necessarily have to come with a big price tag these days.

Shooting Illustrated.

By any reasonable standard, the .44 Magnum cartridge is a milestone in handgun history. The big round came along in the mid-1950s, when America was on top of the world and American industry could make anything a sportin’ handgunner might want. By consensus, the guru of handgunning in those times was a little Idaho rancher with a big hat and gun savvy for the ages—Elmer Keith. He had been around for many years, shooting, hunting, handloading, experimenting and writing for the major outdoor magazines. Keith was widely read in the mid-1930s when Smith & Wesson took the bold step of stretching the .38 Spl., loading it hot and creating the first magnum revolver—the .357 Mag. One of the first to write a review of this new concept, Keith was still hard at it when World War II ended and sport shooting was popular once again.

For many years, Keith had hot-loaded .44 Spls. with bullets of his own design and sold them via the U.S. Mail. He developed a great deal of information about the feasibility of such a gun on a commercial basis. Smith & Wesson was exceptionally open-minded in the early ’50s and cooperated with him on a .44-caliber cartridge, which paralleled the concept used in the .357 program. It stretched the .44 Spl. case enough to increase its capacity and came up with an ultra-strong N-Frame revolver to fire the new round. The resulting gun and ammo opened to roaring acclaim and brisk sales. The now-famous Model 29 .44 Magnum was a spectacular success as a product.

[ … ]

There is another event that had at least significant effect on .44 popularity and it just might be one of the most important. Elmer Keith had a wonderful outdoor life, but one of the things that actually helped him make a living was working as a hunting guide. Keith put many hunters onto game—deer and elk mainly—over a wide span of time. On one of these trips, he encountered a situation that people still argue over. Keith was guiding a hunter on a mule deer hunt, when they turned up a really choice buck.

The animal was about 200 yards off along a ridgeline. Keith’s client hit the deer with an early shot, but the hit was in the jaw and it was obvious the shooter wasn’t quite up to the marksmanship challenge. In the next few minutes, the animal first disappeared, then came out of the timber even farther away. With no other arm available, Keith drew his brand-new .44 Magnum and began working his shots into range. After several ranging shots he got a hit and then another. The buck was down for the count, an animal that would have been subject to a lingering death had it not been for Keith’s skill. He was too much a man of the outdoors to let something like that happen. The shot was debated for years to follow—it was 600 yards. It was among the first (if not the first) game animal taken with a .44 Magnum.

That’s quite a shot!  Jerry Miculek can do that too, at least with 10mm rounds.

But then again, 10mm isn’t .44 magnum.  Jerry needs to get a better game!  I want to see Jerry do this with .44 magnum.

It would have been an honor to have met Mr. Keith.  They made them stout back then.

We covered this before, but there was some question as to the authenticity of the statement by Colt.  Listen to them in their own words.

Colt moving away from selling ARs to civilians isn’t a sign that the company wants to stop selling guns to civilians altogether, however. Instead, the company will ramp up sales of pistols and revolvers, including its 1911 models, Cobra, King Cobra, and Single Action Army collectible series.

Which, of course, is an absurd declaration, i.e., that “rifles aren’t heavily favored by the civilian market.”  It’s just that the civilian market doesn’t apparently favor Colt rifles.  Ruger, Smith & Wesson, Daniel Defense, BCM, FN, and a whole host of other companies are doing well enough.

So they intend to focus on … wait for it … producing rifles to fulfill outstanding military and law enforcement contracts.  I take this to mean replacement rifles and more particularly, replacement parts.

The revolver market was abdicated to  Smith & Wesson and Ruger, and I doubt that Colt will regain support in this sector.  This portends bad things for Colt’s future, in my estimation.

Via WiscoDave, TTAG.

“We have just been notified by Colt Firearms that they will be discontinuing production of all Colt long guns to focus on regaining military contracts.

This isn’t surprising.  After my son returned from Iraq and had a chance to work with the RRA rifle I had, he told me that the Colts they were issued were vastly inferior to my own rifle.

Colt has long ago jettisoned QA in favor of bulk government contracts.  That isn’t the first mistake they’ve made, viz. the withdrawal from the revolver market to leave S&W the only manufacturer involved in revolvers, only then to see Ruger enter the market in a big way and then a resurgence of interest in wheel guns.  Too bad they’ve lost all of their revolver mechanics and no longer make the Python (which still sells for $2500 – $5000 if you can find one).

Another aspect of their demise surely involves their commitment to Connecticut where the state hates them, their workers are union shop, and their senior management inept.

News from Houston, Texas.

A Houston, Texas, woman used her firearm to defend herself from five male suspects when they attempted to rob her early Tuesday. Now, she says she is in disbelief that she was able to walk away from the incident unharmed, telling a local news station, “I saved my life.”

Lachelle Hudgins arrived home around 2:30 a.m. on Tuesday, and as she pulled into her apartment complex, she noticed a group of men lingering together roughly 20 yards away. According to Hudgins, the suspects approached her vehicle,and two of them reached inside her open passenger window — grasping for her purse — as she tried to roll it up.

“I couldn’t do anything except scream,” Hudgins told KTRK-TV. “At one point, they told me to stop screaming.”

But she was, actually, able to do more than just scream. Hudgins reached inside her purse and grabbed her handgun before the suspects could. She fired off the only two rounds in the firearm, striking one of the perpetrators. “It was all I had in the gun,” she explained to KTRK. “I shot until I couldn’t shoot anymore.”

Hey, wait a minute!  This doesn’t fit the narrative of defenseless people who are too terrified to use firearms and when they do they shoot other, innocent, people rather than their assailant and firearms are more of a danger to the owner than anyone else and we must wait for the cops and you have to be a juiced up tactical super-Ninja to be able to fight like cops and none of us are like cops because of cop-land tactical training and … and .. breathless … hand wringing …

Because.  Collectivists.  Dumbasses.

Good for this woman.