Gun Nuts

This bad boy was on display at NRAAM in the Benelli/Ethos booth. It was apparently the land record speed holder for some time. It was quite popular with the attendees.

Gun nuts my age and older came of age really before the internet was a driving force in gun culture. I remember sitting around the ready room reading old issues of Guns & Ammo and American Rifleman long before I ever knew what a gun blog or a gun forum was. In fact, I didn’t join my first forum until 2005, back in the heady days before monitization and SEO became the name of the game. What’s great about the internet is that it has managed to kill off a lot of the BS and mythology around firearms ownership, and has been a great tool for spreading news and information about guns and the right to bear arms. However, there are still a lot of myths out there, and sometimes the internet doesn’t kill them, it feeds them. It makes them stronger and gives them life. There plenty of examples, this is just five.

By now everyone has heard of former Mayor Bloomberg’s latest project “Everytown for Gun Safety”. It’s no surprise that Everytown’s launch occurred on the same day as the opening of the 2014 NRA Annual Meetings, if for no other reason than it gave Everytowners a single location and group of people to focus their opening move. It was especially necessary to have something like NRAAM for Everytowners to attack since, from my research, they have very little legitimate arguments to unite them. I was willing to give this new group the benefit of the doubt. I could have overlooked the Bloomberg backing if the group actually did what they said and spread the word about “gun safety”. However, the website behind the name lived up to none of it’s promises. In fact, I found that the website of “Everytown for Gun Safety” offers nothing but scare tactics and empty statements.

Oh yes. We are about to drop something pretty cool in the next few weeks. To get access to the content before anyone else, subscribe to our Youtube Channel.

Uberti has the amazing skill to make revolvers that look so good they make me want to forsake all other guns. Seriously, look at that thing – look at the “worn” finish, like it just spent 10 years of hard life in a cowboy’s holster. You don’t mess with a man that carries a gun like that, because you know he’s left a trail of empty whiskey bottles and bastard children behind him.

I saw a post from Jim Wilson this morning on the Bookface, and I had to slow-clap for the absolute perfection of it:

In many shooting competitions when you see a small shooting box demarkation on the ground you know, this is the spot from which I will shoot. These boxes are usually about two feet by two feet. Shooting from anywhere outside this box is is a really bad idea. But in 3gun this is not exactly the case. Shooting boxes are often huge and they give the shooter a lot of freedom. As I began learning about 3gun and attempting to combine running, shooting and thinking, this freedom began to confuse the heck out of me.

That is just a great looking gun right there.

Andrew Branca, author of The Law of Self Defense and no stranger to these pages, recently participated in a debate on so-called “Stand Your Ground” laws at UC Berkley. His opening statement in the debate is probably the most cogent and succinct summation of what SYG does and doesn’t do that you’re likely to find.

With apologies to our friends at the NSSF, I’ve come to the realization that in the grand scheme of things, NRAAM is more important than SHOT. Bear with me here. Shot Show is an incredibly important event for the industry, no doubt. That’s where most of the year’s business gets done orders are placed, ads are bought, and new products get launched. But because it’s “closed” to consumers, the people who are actually buying the guns don’t really get to see the new toys.

Human critters like predictability. We like to know what something is and to have a good handle on how we should respond to it. I’ve used the example before, but when we go into the store to purchase an item and the cashier asks “How are you today?” we will probably respond with “Just fine, thanks.” The cashier is not really interested in our state of mind anymore than we’re really interested in probing the depths of our psyche with someone making 8 bucks an hour, but it’s social custom and we expect it and have an appropriate response queued up and ready to go. Everybody’s happy. When things don’t go according to that script it can throw us for a loop. A little while back I was having lunch with a friend when he noted a tattoo around the waitresses wrist. “There is no growth without pain.” Combining that tattoo with her physical appearance, posture, and demeanor I gathered that life hadn’t really been kind to this poor girl, and that the tat was a physical manifestation of her attempts to cope with the challenges she was facing. My friend, of course, wasn’t satisfied with my hunch and being the too-curious-for-his-own-good type decided to ask her about it. When she came by to refill our drinks and engaged in normal waitress/customer banter, he...

Last year before SHOT, I wrote a post attacking former SEAL Brandon Webb for his views on the American gun culture, calling him anti-gun. Brandon fired right back on his site, and it looked like we were headed for a full on blog war. Then something strange happened – we had a professional email exchange, and agreed to meet up and do an interview at SHOT SHOW 2014. That interview turned into a pleasant conversation between two dudes whose points of view really aren’t that far apart.

Shelley Rae from GunUp the Magazine sits down with Executive Director of IDPA, Joyce Wilson.

Learn from my mistakes so you don’t make your own.

This is a classic case of outsmarting myself. Here’s how it happened in pretty simple order:

1. The MGW sight pusher is designed to have the back of the sight go through the pushing aperture.
2. The LPA sight is too wide at the rear to fit, but the front fits.
3. Reversing the insert allowed me to get the slide on so the pusher aperture could contact the front of the sight.
4. New sight goes on and everything is fine and dandy.
5. Even with the pusher backed all the way to the left or right, it now doesn’t have enough clearance to get the sight off.
6. In my effort to move the pusher, I stripped the threads, jamming it place.
7. Break out the sawzall.

I thought that “hey, instead of giving my slide to a local gunsmith, I’ll just do it myself.” In the words of Top Gear: “How hard could it be?” Honestly, it wasn’t hard, I just didn’t think it all the way through. Protip: don’t use sight pushers in a way they’re not designed to be used. Next time I’m giving the gun to a grownup.

NRA Annual Meetings are just around the corner! It’s one of the best events of the year, and because it’s open to the general public it always attracts huge crowds. There are also loads of media at the NRA show, from the New York Times all the way down to peasant bloggers. It makes the press room at NRA one of the most amusing places I get to go every year, because you can have writers from Forbes sitting right next to some guy in a Jayne Cobb hat. It’s awesome. Here’s a humorous look at five of the most prominent media types you’ll see.

Later today the Georgia governor will sign bill HB-60. Fox News and others are calling this bill “unprecedented”. Named the “Safe Carry Protection Act” it addresses gun issues like, hunting with a suppressor, the creation of a statewide firearm owner database, and deanying a lease of property to a person lawfully able to carry or posses a firearm. Most noteable though, are the bill’s changes to Georgia’s firearm carry laws in prohibited places.

It’s possible to mess up shooting groups even when you’re shooting off a rest.

I had a good thing going there, and then I thought it would be rad to push the gun harder into the sandbag, which lifted the front sight just enough to open up the group pretty considerably. Considering that the gun and ammo combo is capable of 2 inches easily at 25 yards, this 3 inch 25 yard group isn’t that great.

Competition season is starting to ramp up again, for Gun Nuts that means the World Action Pistol Championship and the Bianchi Cup are right around the corner, for everyone in the shooting sports it means more travel is imminent.

I usually film the Wednesday video on Tuesday afternoon. We have three options for a video tomorrow:

1. A 90 Second Gun Review
2. A training/drill focused video
3. A humorous video about looking cool at matches

Everyone seemed to enjoy the humorous Eject and Catch video, and I really do enjoy making the humor videos. I don’t want to push my luck with them though, so if you’d rather get a serious video one week and a funny video later, I am in this case at the mercy of the readers. Let me know in the comments which you’d prefer, and we’ll film that!