Archive for the 'Firearms' Category

From American Rifleman:

Ruger has announced the new AR-556 Multi-Purpose Rifle (MPR) chambered in .450 Bushmaster, offering an ideal hunting platform for midwestern whitetail deer, sizeable pigs, and target shooting at heavy steel

It has an 18″ barrel.  I like the price point of approximately $1000.  I think that’s the sweet spot for these kinds of rifles, and both Ruger and Savage are doing a nice job of new chamberings for that price range.

Nasdaq:

Proxy service firms Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) and Glass Lewis are calling for American Outdoor Brands (NASDAQ: AOBC) investors to follow the lead of those at Sturm, Ruger (NYSE: RGR) and force management to draft a report stating that management is monitoring acts of gun violence in the country and the risks they represent to the company.

American Outdoor Brands — the former Smith & Wesson — is hosting its annual meeting on Sept. 25, and a number of activist healthcare and religious groups have jointly submitted a shareholder question for approval. Earlier this year, a similar effort succeeded at Ruger.

The ballot question asks the company to do three things:

• Monitor violent events in which Smith & Wesson products are used.
• Prove the gunmaker is working to produce safer firearms and related products.
• Assess the risks to the gunmaker’s reputation and financial well-being from gun violence in the U.S.

In a report issued by ISS, the corporate governance outfit endorsed the proposal as a way to prove American Outdoor Brands’ board of directors is keeping the long-term risks of gun violence in mind.

Reuters reported that ISS concluded, “There is reason to believe that smart gun technology could be employed to make guns safer in the U.S. and that any engineering problems could be overcome if there was a market for the product.” So-called smart guns use technology to make sure the weapon is in the hands of its owner before it fires.

[ … ]

Sturm, Ruger CEO Chris Killoy accepted the vote by investors, saying, “shareholders have spoken,” but he also went on to point out, “What the proposal does not and cannot do is to force us to change our business, which is lawful and constitutionally protected.”

While American Outdoor Brands undoubtedly feels the same way, it’s possible it will have a very different result than Sturm, Ruger did.

First, Ruger’s meeting was held at a hotel and an activist representative appeared and made an appeal to shareholders; American Outdoor’s meeting is an online-only event. (It’s the second year the gunmaker has conducted the annual meeting this way.) And as noted above, institutional investors own a smaller proportion of American Outdoor stock, making it a little more difficult to compile enough votes in favor. The meeting is also further removed from the Parkland school shooting, while Ruger’s event was more contemporaneous with it and emotions were more raw.

As I’ve said before, if you open your stock to investors (go public) and you’re subject to the political whims of money-people, you’d better make sure your employees own a majority of the stock and can reject things like this.

I see both Ruger and Smith & Wesson as vulnerable.

CBS19:

SMITH COUNTY — The East Texas State Fair will not allow open carry guns this year, according to fair president John Sykes.

“We really want everyone to understand that safety and security at this event is for most on our mind and has been for many many years,” Sykes said. “We as an entity do have the right to prevent open carry.”

While Sykes says they do reserve the right to prevent concealed carry, fairgoers may carry guns concealed as long as they have a CCW.

“I’ve learned that maybe we are violating the rights of others too much when you already have a license to carry concealed,” Sykes said. “So we have decided to go ahead and allow that to happen.”

Sykes says security will be checking licenses and will also be looking to see if a weapon becomes exposed. If someone violates the open carry policy, they will be escorted from the property.

Sykes says security and police are expected to be the first line of defense if an incident should happen. However, the fair ‘trusts’ those with concealed carry licenses should anything happen.

Those concealed carriers are so much more trustworthy than the open carriers.  Hey, it’s too bad for the criminals that they won’t be able to open carry now as they plan their mass shooting.  I guess they’ll just leave their guns at home or not go.  Surely they won’t violate regulations and conceal their firearms.

Via Knuckledraggin’, this news:

Sturm, Ruger & Co., Inc. (NYSE: RGR) mourns the loss of William B. Ruger, Jr., former Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of Ruger. Mr. Ruger, who was the second CEO of the Company and the son of the Company’s founder, passed away this past weekend.

“We are deeply saddened by the passing of Bill, who was integral to the foundation and early success of this company,” said Chris Killoy, President and CEO of Ruger. “Bill’s 42 years of loyal service to the Company has had a lasting impact that is still felt today. We will sincerely miss him and our thoughts and prayers are with his family.”

I have no idea what that means for the company.  Probably not much if he wasn’t at the helm of the ship.

From American Rifleman.

They were using a 16.125″ barrel.  Isn’t it interesting that slowing the round down just a bit and making it a wee bit heavier reduced the spread by more than one inch?  Also, remember that published 5.56mm muzzle velocities in the range of 3100+ FPS are for a 22″ barrel, not a 14.5″, 16″, 18″ or even 20″ barrel.

I expect advocates of heavier 5.56mm rounds to make hay over this.

The barrel had a 1:8 twist (which is about optimum for a wide range of weights).  I would have expected a little better accuracy with the lighter rounds than 2.3″.  And yet, this is still good.  I’m also willing to bet that if they had used a better ammunition (like Hornady) for the lighter rounds, they would have gotten better accuracy.

Funny.  I’d never even considered adjusting my point of aim for flinching.

Shooting Illustrated:

Lubricating is where many shooters make mistakes. The old adage, “more is better,” does not apply. Yep, Grandpa used a half-can of 3-in-1 Oil on his rusted fence pliers or his shotgun, and your father probably believed in the liberal application of WD-40 on any moving metal part. With firearms, however, too much is not good. In fact, according to Moore, you should “lightly lubricate.” The technical terminology he frequently uses is, “one drop.” He also warns to not lubricate the firing-pin channel, chamber, bore or magazines, because lubricants often allow debris to stick, and you don’t want stuck debris in these areas.

Some of his advice on cleaning frequency disagrees with what we studied earlier from Shooting Illustrated.

I’m neither concurring nor disagreeing with the bulk of the article – just sharing.  I did find it interesting that this bears on a comment thread we recently had here on whether it’s possible to over-lube a gun.

I have to disagree with one aspect of this advice.  I always oil my chambers, and always will.  If it gets dirty because of that, I’ll clean it again.

In a filthy firearm.

As a young Marine captain, I was the new officer on a rifle team and remember asking the grizzled old salts who had shot in many an inter-service championship or Camp Perry what the proper cleaning interval was for those incredible Quantico-built National Match M16s. The answers varied from daily on one end to at the end of the season on the other. There didn’t seem to be any real testing to support any given answer, and I accepted that you punched the bore whenever it seemed right.

I recently thought back on that experience as I finished up an endurance test on a Bravo Company Manufacturing (BCM) upper receiver. Over the course of a little more than three years, I had logged the lubrication intervals using FireClean to see how far the AR would run as it got dirtier and dirtier. At the end of the test, I was in possession of a barrel through which I had logged 10,000 rounds and had never cleaned in any manner. In shooting the last thousand rounds or so, I had noticed that the rifle seemed to be still shooting quite well and thought it would be interesting to do a formal accuracy workup. I borrowed a Bushnell Elite 4.5-18×44 LRTS riflescope to give the barrel every chance to succeed, and grabbed some quality ammo.

All firing was done from the prone position with the rifle supported by a Harris bipod in the front and some bags under the toe of the stock. The rifle had a Geissele Super V trigger, which is an excellent duty and snap-shooting unit, but not normally associated with group shooting. The BCM wore a free-floated KeyMod aluminum KMR-A rail and the barrel was a basic government profile 16” with a mid-length gas system and a 1:7” twist.

I fired a couple of sighters to get the LRTS on paper and then the very first five-round group of Hornady Steel Match clustered five .224-cal. holes into a tight .84” group that could be covered by a nickel. That was pretty close to prophetic, as the average of all five groups with the Steel Match ran .89 from the filthy barrel, with the series tallying .84, .85, .86, .72, and one lonely group over one minute of angle at 1.17.

That performance wasn’t an outlier. After 10,000 rounds, the BCM barrel grouped Federal Varmint hollow points into just barely over 3/4 m.o.a. on the low end and averaged just over an inch due to one “large” 1.5” group that pulled the average over one MOA.

Black Hills 69-gr. Sierra Match Kings clustered together consistently, poking holes in a tight knot while maintaining polite separation for each hole at just under a minute on average with .79, .82, .90, .92, and 1.25” groups.

[ … ]

I was somewhere between pleasantly surprised and mildly shocked for the barrel to do this after 10,000 rounds and never had as much as a boresnake, brush, or patch run through it.

I’m not surprised.  Eugene Stoner engineered a fine system.  Of course, I wouldn’t recommend doing that – this was a stress test of sorts.  Increased fouling and friction will only increase wear and metal fatigue.  But it’s nice to know that the delivered wisdom may not be so wise after all.

It’s funny how old myths die hard.  My son never had any complaints with the weapon system so I never came into it with predisposed prejudice.

HuffPo:

This sort of technology hasn’t caught on in the U.S., so it’s something of a gamble for LodeStar, which is raising $3 million in seed funding to finalize a prototype. The company is banking on being able to disrupt the firearms industry by capitalizing on an uncertain demand for gun safety features. If such advances prove popular, LodeStar says, it could lead to an industrywide evolution that would ultimately save thousands of lives each year.

LodeStar is still ironing out the specifications of its pistol; regardless of how it turns out, it won’t be the first or only smart gun on the U.S. market. Firearms manufacturers have been tinkering with personalized locking technology for decades, hoping to sell consumers on handguns that are resistant to misuse by children, thieves or assailants.

Oh please, please, please, please let it be.  Please Lord let a company invest huge sums of money into a gun that costs too much, is too complicated, has too many failure modes, and [oh please Lord let it be] requires surgery to operate.

And remember what I said about hard hats and ketchup.

From Shooting Illustrated.

So if, like me, you believe in Genesis Chapter 2, you believe in the second law of thermodynamics.  If you don’t but still believe in the second law of thermodynamics, your belief if spurious and baseless but still useful.

Either way, entropy increases.  That means parts rust, corrode, fatigue, wear, fracture and fail.  Always inspect your guns.