The Truth About Guns

A Shiloh Sharps has been on my wish list for quite a few years, so I definitely was looking forward to seeing their booth at SHOT Show.  Not having much, er, any experience with these types of rifles, I was impressed with their weight.  Barrel length and diameter is also impressive, as was the many options for front pinhead sights and rear tang sights with Hadley eyedisks.  More Pics after the jump:

The hand engraving was truly a work of art:

Today I got to wrap my hands around the new Taurus View on the SHOT Shot floor. Actually, I only got to wrap my thumb and middle finger around it because this is absolutely the smallest 5-shot .38 revolver I have ever handled.

The visible internals are pretty cool, kind of like that ‘Visible V8′ car engine model I built in fourth grade when cars still had V8 engines.

The View is blessed with one of the smoothest double-action revolver triggers I’ve ever fondled, but the almost nanoscopic grip may prove to be something of a problem for some shooters.

Dan’s smallish hands were a decent fit on the View, but my average mitts just smothered the poor thing. I h

I was really psyched to have an opportunity to get my mitts on the new Model 101 by J.P. Sauer & Sohn GmbH. The Model 101 comes with a match grade 22 inch barrel and weighs in at a svelte 6.7 Ibs. . . .

It features a silky smooth bolt that ejects the round 90° from the vertical, so that the ejected round doesn’t come in contact with the scope. The 6 lug bolt locks directly into the barrel.

It looks cool as hell, and if Larry Vickers knows anything about guns (and the former Delta Force legend certainly does) it shoots like hell too. Ultra-low bore height? Check. Negligible recoil and muzzle rise? Check. Fixed-barrel accuracy? Check. Ready to call your FFL and order one? Belay that order, sailor . . .

We still don’t really know anything concrete about the Arsenal ‘First Strike’ pistol, because Arsenal still hasn’t started importing them for retail sale. The gun might very well be awesome, but this waiting game is just tiresome.

While Arsenal claims that the design has been approved for importation (which they said last year, too) they still have no importers or distributors actually signed up to bring the thing Stateside and into our warm and waiting gun safes. This means we’re probably looking at another year of Strike One vaporware.

Despite my opinions about the MVP in .223 Remington, I think the folks over at Mossberg might have a winner on their hands with the new .308 version. There’s a market for a ready-to-go magazine fed .308 Win rifle, and the MVP fills that niche quite nicely. The gun ships with a 10 round Mossberg magazine, but can also accept DPMS magazines and Magpul PMAGs.

There are three versions of the gun shipping: the varmint, the patrol, and the FLEX. The varmint is the standard version, the patrol is a shorter black version and the FLEX uses the FLEX accessory system to

Kel Tec continues to introduce more and more new SKUs to its catalog without ever seeming to devote any resources to actually manufacturing the boatload of products they already claim to supply. The newest unicorn in their lineup is the RDB bullpup rifle, shown here in its steel-and-wood M43 variant. Feast your eyes on it here (if you need to) because odds are you’ll never see one on the shelf of your LGS . . .

In addition to sporting the ugliest spot welds I’ve seen since my own 8th grade Metal Shop class, the M43 also ‘features’ an AK muzzle device and bayonet, along with a flimsy sheet-metal front sight post that probably can’t survive contact with the inside of a gun safe, much less contact with the enemy.

Crimson Trace is the top of the mark when it comes to firearm mounted laser systems. They make a set of lasergrips for damn near every handgun out there, but if that doesn’t work for your special snowflake then there’s always the Rail Master line of rail mounted devices. They released the red laser version a while back, but now there’s a combination green laser and white light box that straps to your gun’s accessory rail. MSRP is about $379, and for a nightstand gun it seems like a perfect solution.

Knight’s Armament Co. is announcing the release of the SR-15E3 Carbine MOD 2.  It features a chrome lined, 16-inch hammer-forged barrel (1 in 7 twist), improved three-prong flash eliminator, the 14.5 inch URX 4 handguard, the new MOD 2 gas system, as well as extras such as the ambi QD swing swivel sockets, the 6 Position SOPMOD stock, fully ambi lower receiver controls, extended charging handle, and folding front and rear 200-600 Meter Rear Micro iron sights . . .

Best of all, the entire package rockets in at a surprisingly low 6.6 lbs. Students of the gun will recall that the original M16 A1 was also 6.6

ALG Defense is the slightly downmarket brand of Geissele gear, designed by the same guys and manufactured the same way, but with a slightly lower level of polish. This year they’re adding two new products to their line. First up is this extremely lightweight handguard that has detachable rail sections and comes with the proprietary barrel nut and mounting spanners. The handguard runs $135 for the 10-incher, $140 for 12″ and $145 for the 14″ . . .

Press release [via AmmoLand.com]:

This past Saturday over 50 Second Amendment supporters from the group Twin Cities Gun Owners & Carry Forum met for lunch at an independent and locally owned Plymouth eatery to show support and appreciation for Twin Cities area businesses that recognize the state’s right-to-carry law and allow “lawful carry” at their establishments. The group called ahead and scheduled their lunch meet up during off-peak hours at the eatery, and it’s estimated that the group spent at least $700 or more during their visit . . .

The group meets monthly and purpos

Kel-Tec extensively used 3D printing to prototype their new RMR-30 carbine, a .22 Magnum that uses the same magazines as the PMR-30 pistol. The carbine has a retractable stock, a 16-inch barrel, and uses a straight blowback action, instead of the delayed blowback of the PMR-30 pistol. The RMR30 required a redesign of almost the entire firearm, even though the magazines are interchangeable . . .

Here is a view of the RMR-30 lower receiver alongside a PMR-30 pistol.

We have one source for this story: calgunlaws.com. “In perhaps one of the more shocking discoveries at the 2014 SHOT Show, Ruger spokesperson Kevin Reid revealed that Ruger was going to let it’s entire California Semiautomatic pistol roster ‘…drop off…’ the CA Department of Justice Approved Handgun List . . . Ruger has already let some 60+ semiautomatic pistols drop off the approved handgun roster with the rest shortly to follow.” TTAG main man Dan’s on the case. We’ll post a statement here in a few hours.

The SIG/Sauer catalog continues to expand, now with this new carbon fiber-enhanced M400 and its piston-driven 516 counterpart (not shown.) The free-floating handguard and A2-length fixed buttstock are both fashioned from the cool shiny black stuff . . .

Yes, $2100 is real money, but street pricing should bring this down to the ‘maybe someday’ price category. Which isn’t bad for a SIG, after all.

You can instantly tell that the carbon fiber M400 is lighter than a standard AR, but exactly how much lightness does that carbon fiber (and your extra dollars) buy you?

Good question: the product tag doesn’t say. The SIG rep didn&#8217

Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America (a wholly owned subsidiary of Mayors Against Illegal Guns) has published an open letter to the Presidents of ABC, CBS, CNN and Fox News. The missive (after the jump) calls on Manhattan’s media mavens to refer to “mass shooters” as “the killer who shall not be named” or some such thing. It also demands that they refrain from publishing photos that “glamorize” or “aggrandize the shooter.” Oh, that’s what they want to call killers like Adam Lanza, James Holmes and Seung-Hui Cho. But what if the mass ki

According to timeanddate.com, it was -7 degrees Fahrenheit on January 6 in Columbus, Ohio. Add in the wind chill factor and you might even say it was colder than a witch’s mammary. Luckily, that didn’t daunt muzzle loading Buckeye Staters dead set on reducing Ohio’s deer population by sixteen thousand-plus animals (one at a time). For those who believe in the PETA principle, ohioinsurance.org reports “20,683 deer-vehicle crashes reported in Ohio during 2012, down from the 2011 figure

It’s been more than three years since I first reviewed Kel Tec’s diminutive and now somewhat infamous PF-9. My review from November of 2010 was quite favorable, and the PF-9 was my carry gun for the next year. It was a promising little gun once it got broken in, but things started to go wrong after less than six months. I don’t know if my experience is typical, but this gun has completely lost my trust.

As you’ll recall, the PF-9 functioned great with factory ammo but had problems digesting my standard-pressure handloads. There was evidence of light primer strikes, and it took a new firing pin and a lot of elbow grease to solve this problem. I honed the firing pin channel with fine-grit emery cloth wrapped around a cotton swab, and this eventually solved the problem. Mostly.

But his particular malfunction proba

I’d first like to welcome Colt Competition to the Republic of Texas. They made the move just after all of the anti-gun legislation started flying, and it looks like they’re settling in well. The company is producing a new rifle called the CRP20SS, which is designed for the law enforcement market rather than the competition market — a first step for an otherwise single-minded competition based company — yet still available to the public. The gun features a 20 inch barrel, tuneable gas system, and modular rail sections to give you rails when you need them and flat tube when you don’t. They said something about pricing but I just plumb forgot — the older similar model is $1,899.

“It’s unfortunate that hundreds of guns purchased in the weeks before Maryland’s stricter firearms regulations went into effect last year ended up in the hands of people who should never have been allowed to own them,” baltimoresun.com opines. Wait. What? Is the Sun saying that the Free State’s statists should have prevented a significant percentage of Marylanders from exercising their natural, civil and Constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms in the run-up to Maryland’s post-Newtown civilian disarmament regulations? Yup. Whyzzat? Start with this . . .

“The hijacking of our movement by these radical extremists causes me to fear for the future of the right I have spent my adult life fighting to defend . . . When we engage in noisy, extremist rhetoric rejecting all firearms regulation whatsoever, or refuse to acknowledge the plain fact that constitutionally validated regulations and statutes already exist, we risk alienating the American mainstream. And if we lose that mainstream, we will lose this war.” Dick Metcalf, Target: Me [via

Nick and I spotted this rare beast in the wild today at Media Day At The Range, but the headline says it all. We came, we saw, we walked away empty-handed . . .

We were definitely up to the challenge, however. Nick and I both took shots with an absolutely gorgeous (and brutal) Sako .416 Rigby, and a few rounds through a bipod-mounted, gas-operated .50 BMG with a recoil-reducing QDL suppressor would have been a quiet walk in the park by comparison.

But alas, Barrett wasn’t offering any free shots when we were there, and we had places to go and guns to shoot.

Maybe next year.