6 years, 6 months ago
To be fair, he does some pistols as well as revolvers. Reader ‘The Alaskan” will like this. BTW, the look of the flames coming out between the cylinder and the forcing cone is cool.
6 years, 6 months ago
Modern Sporting Rifles also have the largest volume of light components suitable for retrofitting existing guns. Most makers of steel barrels and AR bolt carriers offer lightweight options alongside their regular products. Skeletonized, extruded-aluminum or carbon-fiber freefloat fore-ends further drop weight at the front of the rifle, while trimmed-down polymer furniture shaves weight at the tail. DS Arms, V-Seven, 2A Armament and Brownells offer lightweight aluminum and titanium small parts that replace original AR steel. Small pins, grip screws and even muzzle devices can be had in materials that shave a tangible amount of weight after a full retrofit. A small number of titanium parts and accessories specifically designed for SCAR, M1A and FAL rifles are also available in the aftermarket.
While the author didn’t go to the trouble to give you links to actual parts rather than the company URL, I’ve tried to do better. Here they are: 2A-Arms, VSeven, Brownells, and Daniel Defense. Those links will get you to rails/handguards, or thereabouts. Of course, those aren’t the only lightweight AR parts being manufactured.
I’m sure there are many others. I welcome reader feedback in the comments. I’m actually interested in strong, lightweight AR-15 rails and lightweight AR-10 rails (longer, about 17″).
6 years, 6 months ago
I confess I had never thought of something like that. Tim Harmsen of The Military Arms Channel answers the question, as well as one more.
6 years, 7 months ago
Like me, Tim is a champion and fan of the AR-15 design. He begins an interesting test with a BCM rifle.
He shot 1000 rounds in 35 minutes. We’ll see how far this goes before it gives up as he tracks this over time without cleaning or maintenance.
The guys at Wanat claimed that their Colts gave up after shooting 800 rounds in 30 minutes. My bet is that they were firing in 3-round bursts. Although I still can’t see how they managed to put more rounds downrange than Tim.
When Tim posted this a few minutes ago, I heard that Bob Scales puked in his cream of wheat. His contract with H&K stipulates that no one can perform any more run-to-failure tests proving that no one really needs a piston system.
“Rifle is fine.”
6 years, 7 months ago
Via BRVTVS, this is an interesting video.
I have to say that I do have one problem with it. Mr. Johann Boden speaks as if the only important factor in the high velocity from rifle ammunition (and here he’s speaking of the 5.56mm AR, which is an important distinction in the conversation) is the hydrostatic shock from velocities greater than 2200 FPS.
That simply isn’t so. We’ve learned over the years that the tendency to tumble and yaw (even in flight, but especially in tissue) and break apart into multiple pieces is one of the defining characteristics of the lethality of the ammunition, in no small part yielding its massive success on the battlefield.
As we’ve discussed before, see Small Caliber Lethality: 5.56 Performance in Close Quarters Battle.
6 years, 7 months ago
A baggage handler who worked at Portland International Airport admitted Wednesday in federal court to stealing six guns from checked bags over several weeks last year.
Deshawn Antonio Kelly, 27, pleaded guilty to five counts of possession of a stolen gun before U.S. District Judge Michael H. Simon. The fifth count covered taking two guns on one day.
Kelly acknowledged he stole the guns from five people who checked their bags at the Portland airport last August and September. All of them reported their handguns missing after getting their luggage back at their final destinations.
The guns were stolen on Aug. 19, Aug. 29, Sept. 9, Sept. 11 and Sept. 17: three 9mm pistols, two .40-caliber pistols and one .45-caliber pistol, according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Hannah Horsley.
Had the case gone to trial, prosecutors would have presented the court with surveillance tapes and witness statements to support the charges.
Following reports of stolen guns from airport baggage, a Portland police detective placed replica guns in bags twice — on Sept. 11 and six days later — as bait to determine who was swiping them and narrowed it to Kelly, according to a probable cause affidavit initially filed in Multnomah County Circuit Court.
The second time, Kelly was seen taking a bait bag and a passenger’s bag with a gun and later putting them back. The police bag had damaged locks, the affidavit said, and looked as if someone tried to pry the locks off the gun case.
Investigators searched Kelly’s home and found five of the six guns reported missing, and Kelly admitted taking them, the affidavit said.
Kelly previously had been convicted of attempted possession of a rented or leased motor vehicle, a felony that barred him from having or handling guns.
I don’t lie to y’all. It’s like I’ve said before.
“Let’s face it, folks. Since we are dropping off the luggage and we are picking it up, the only necessity for the luggage to be locked up is what happens behind the wall. The only good of locking up the gun is theft by airport employees. We know it, the TSA knows it, and the airlines know it. It’s the truth. None of this has anything to do with security. It’s all about airport theft by airline or airport employees.”
6 years, 7 months ago
The Army has selected the sub compact weapon it will arm its security soldiers with and it wasn’t one of the big companies that have grabbed other recent weapons contracts.
Brugger and Thomet, USA won the competition over Sig Sauer and four other companies that had been vying for the job. Their APC9K was the winner, according to an update on fbo.gov, a government business website.
The small submachine gun is chambered in 9mm and variants of the weapon are in use with police units such as Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT teams.
The gun can fire in both semi- and full-automatic modes, has a collapsible stock and rail system for accessories such as aiming lights and lasers.
I don’t shoot 9mm, I shoot .45ACP. But if I did shoot 9mm it isn’t clear to me why you wouldn’t choose the Sig MPX. I’m sure they had their reasons, but those reasons may not translate to civilian ownership (e.g., cost). Also, for civilian ownership of that weapon above you’d have to drop the forend grip and the stock, or register it as an SBR.
6 years, 7 months ago
David Smith had long been a competitive shooter, and he wasn’t going to allow a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease to end his hobby.
The 46-year-old, now considered by Guns.com a “powerhouse on the competitive circuit,” and who just scored a spot at the 2019 World Rifle Shoot in Sweden, was first diagnosed with the crippling nervous system disorder eight years ago.
But rather than shrinking away, Smith confronted Parkinson’s head-on and developed what he calls “gun therapy” as a means to control the tremors that come with the illness.
And when he lifts his firearm to the ready, those debilitating shakes disperse. In the gun world, he is the “Parkinson’s Shooter.”
“The disease had taken away everything from me in terms of my ability to eat and drink or do anything without help. Shooting was all I had left, it was all I could do,” Smith told Fox News Thursday. “It made me feel normal.”
At the time of the diagnosis, Smith considered himself to have a strong “body-builder type” physique and good health – but that twitch in his finger wasn’t going away. For some time, the feeling of doom was debilitating and he ended up in a wheelchair. Although those around him kept cautioning him to “take it easy” and enjoy not working, Smith wasn’t willing to stop pushing boundaries.
Before Parkinson’s surfaced, Smith – who worked in the scrap metal business – had been going to the range a few times a month for most of his life, but stepping it up changed his life.
“I now shoot 5000 to 6000 rounds a day, treating it as an eight-hour workday,” he explained.
Smith’s “gun therapy” is focused on neuroplasticity, where he can shoot repetitiously using intense focus, hand movement, control, and agility training, which entails running with his firearm and fast firing. His preference is shooting rifles rather than handguns, but he says both come with the benefits of steadying his hand.
According to New York-based psychologist Dr. Norman Fried, while the label “gun therapy” may leave some Americans uncomfortable, a movement called “competitive shooting” may be implicated in healing some side effects for patients with Parkinson’s disease.
“Through extreme dedication and long hours of practice, David Smith may have found a way to help his brain rebuild neural pathways – or reroute cortical connections – that were impacted by his disease. The dopamine rush that comes from this exercise may indeed be at the core of a movement to help some sufferers of brain injury to heal,” he said.
And folks, this man is good. Make sure to watch the video at Guns.com. I’m not embedding the video because it’s a Facebook video. This is a heartwarming story. God bless him, and I hope he keeps it up. He is an inspiration.
6 years, 7 months ago
As a longtime gun owner and supporter of the Second Amendment, I agreed with the Supreme Court’s “Heller” holding that concluded Americans had the right to keep and bear arms. But that constitutional protection did not, and will not, extend to guns designed as weapons of war.
One should expect such things from a mindless dolt like Scarborough, but we should be able to expect better from people who should know better. Apparently, it has become all the rage to throw around a few gun words and argue that the AR-15 isn’t a weapon of war, and thus it is protected under the 2nd amendment.
This means that in both the ammunition it fires and the rate at which it fires, the AR-15 is more akin to the famous Ruger Mini14 ranch rifle than the M4 carbine, which is what’s been putting rounds downrange for the Department of Defense since 1994. No AR-15 marketed for civilian use is an automatic rifle.
If you want to legally purchase an automatic firearm made before 1986, there are a ton of prohibitive bureaucratic hoops you have to jump through (plus, they’re incredibly expensive because of the 1986 ban). If you want to buy one made after 1986, you either need to be a law enforcement officer with a reason to have it or a Federal Firearms Licensee (FFL).
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The fact that so many prominent anti-gun people think that the modern sporting rifle available to civilian purchasers today is a weapon that is used or even proposed for use in combat just shows how little they understand about guns. And if you’re going to try to ban something or criminalize people’s legally purchased property, you’d better at least have your facts straight about it.
Yea, and I believe allegedly pro-gun people should get their facts straight too.
We’ve discussed this before, but it bears repeating. Every weapon is a weapon of war. That is it’s purpose. The U.S. Marines used shotguns to clear rooms in Now Zad, Afghanistan. Carlos Hathcock used a Winchester Model 70 30-06 rifle for his kills in Vietnam, at least most of them. That tradition carried through to the early stages of OIF, where Marines were still using bolt action Winchester Model 70s.
Virtually every sniper rifle today is a bolt action rifle, and even the DM (designated marksman) rifles aren’t fully automatic. That wouldn’t benefit the DM. My own son, while running the SAW in Iraq, conducted room clearing in Fallujah with an M4, and he informed me that they never had their rifles in full-auto mode of fire (3-round burst). Semi-automatic firearms are weapons of war. It’s nonsense to argue that since an AR-15 isn’t fully automatic it isn’t a weapon of war.
Revolvers were used in WWI, WWII, the Korean War, and in fact even in Vietnam (for chasing tunnel rats). The venerable 1911 – which I prefer over any other pistol – doesn’t have a high capacity magazine, and yet it was a weapon of war, and is still on the battlefield today. Knives are weapons of war, and my son carried one with him all the time in Iraq.
Bows and arrows were weapons of war, as were crossbows. Before that, sticks and rocks were weapons of war. In short, every weapon ever invented or used by mankind for any purpose whatsoever has been a weapon of war, and may continue to be so to this very day.
The strategy to frame our right to ownership of weapons in hunting and target shooting is a tip of the hat to the “sporting purposes test,” an acquiescence to the abomination of the Gun Control Act of 1968. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the second amendment, any more than personal self defense has anything to do with what the framers of the constitution wrote or intended.
The second amendment pertains exclusively to the amelioration of tyranny. The second amendment assures weapons of war will be available in order to enable the citizenry to fight warfare. As to the real basis for our right to ownership of weapons, one need only to ponder what God thinks about gun control.
The Bible does contain a few direct references to weapons control. There were many times throughout Israel’s history that it rebelled against God (in fact, it happened all the time). To mock His people back into submission to His Law, the Lord would often use wicked neighbors to punish Israel’s rebellion. Most notable were the Philistines and the Babylonians. 1 Samuel 13:19-22 relates the story: “Not a blacksmith could be found in the whole land of Israel, because the Philistines had said, “Otherwise the Hebrews will make swords or spears!” So all Israel went down to the Philistines to have their plowshares, mattocks, axes, and sickles sharpened…So on the day of battle not a soldier with Saul and Jonathan had a sword or spear in this hand; only Saul and his son Jonathan had them.” Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon also removed all of the craftsmen from Israel during the Babylonian captivity (2 Kings 24:14). Both of these administrations were considered exceedingly wicked including their acts of weapons control.
Stop worrying over whether an AR-15 is a “weapon of war.” Every weapon is a weapon of war, and God says we have a right to them. When you argue in such a way, you cede ground to the enemy because you assume the validity and truthfulness of his value judgments, definitions and categories.
