Continuing with the conversation we were having a few days ago on new cartridges that answer questions nobody has asked, this new cartridge may be the next in line to fail.

Nosler was the first company to launch a new super .22 with the release of the 22 Nosler. It boasted “close to .22-250 velocities” in a short case that could fit into a standard AR magazine. This cartridge was soon followed by Federal’s release of the .224 Valkyrie, which took on a bit of a different appeal. You see, the 22 Nosler was designed as a super-fast varmint caliber with 1-in-8-inch twist or 1-in-10-inch twist barrels offered to stabilize bullets closer to those of the .22-250. This provides a distinct advantage over the 5.56 with similar weight bullets. The Valkyrie addressed more of the long-range interest with its attempt to push 70-90 grain bullets past 2,800 fps.

These velocities are respectable, especially considering that neither has an overall length of more than the standard .223 Remington. There will be many who point out that the .220 Swift was the original king of small-bore magnums, but it really needed a fast twist barrel and long action to make it shine. We have finally seen the shooting sports embrace long, heavy-for-caliber bullets. It has been long awaited, but as I am writing this, Hornady Manufacturing is pushing to get yet another super-cartridge through the Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers’ Institute process, just as the sport has been chasing smaller, lighter calibers to perform further down range.

The 22 Creedmoor is the newest of the overbore magnums to hit the market. With the capacity of the now famous 6.5 Creedmoor, the 22 Creedmoor is just a necked down variation on the same cartridge. So, what can it do that the others can’t? To be honest, it is not that much different than, say, the .22-243 or the .22-250 AI, but what all but a few custom builds have lacked, the 22 Creedmoor has embraced. It was never designed to shoot lightweight bullets at 4,000 fps. Though it will do that easily, the 22 Creedmoor was built with long, heavy .224 bullets in mind. The 22 Creedmoor will come standard with a 1-in-7-inch fast-twist barrel, and combined with the increased volume inside its case, you can push those long pills over at 3,450 feet per second! This is a distinct step up in performance.

Oh, I don’t know.  Maybe it’s just the ticket if you want the rifling blown out of your barrel.  I don’t see this as stiff competition for the 224 Valkyrie, but who knows?

Via David Codrea, this dreadful statement.

“Nobody wants dangerous people to have access to firearms, which is why the NRA supports risk protection orders with adequate due process protections and ensure those adjudicated to be dangerously mentally ill receive treatment,” Jennifer Baker, a spokesperson for the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, said. “The NRA believes that any effort should be structured to fully protect the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens while preventing truly dangerous individuals from accessing firearms. We will only support an [Emergency Risk Protection Order] process that strongly protects both Second Amendment rights and due process rights at the same time.”

Echoing Mack’s comments, why would bearing arms be a deterrent if folks didn’t think I was dangerous?

The NRA: the most well-funded, well-connected, effective, best-resourced gun control organization on the planet.

I just wish folks would learn to make videos without the head-banger music.

Seattle Times:

County sheriffs who say they won’t enforce Washington’s new, stricter gun laws could be held liable if they refuse to perform enhanced background checks and someone who shouldn’t buy a gun is able to buy one and uses it in a crime, Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson said on Tuesday.

In an open letter to law enforcement, Ferguson wrote that he was confident the wide-ranging law was constitutional and would withstand court challenges, but that he was concerned about threats — mostly from county sheriffs — to not enforce the new law.

At least 13 county sheriffs have said they won’t enforce the law, Initiative 1639, which voters passed by a wide margin in November.

Are you going to let him talk to you like that?  Oh … probably so.

It is unclear how many of the sheriffs and police chiefs who have vowed not to enforce the law planned to not conduct the background checks.

For instance, Franklin County Sheriff Jim Raymond called the law unconstitutional and said he wouldn’t enforce it, but said he supported the 10-day waiting period and the enhanced background checks.

“Certainly we’re going to follow all of those type of things,” Raymond said.

If other sheriffs do not, however, Ferguson said they could be held liable if a gun sale that would have been prevented by the new background checks goes through and then someone uses that gun in a crime.

“The taxpayers of your city or county assume the financial risk of your decision to impose your personal views over the law,” he wrote.

Take note that surviving a challenge doesn’t mean that the law is constitutional, it just means that some tyrant, or gaggle of tyrants, lets it go.

So that’s the plan, just as I have said all along.  They will come after your money, your licenses, your reputation, your job, and your ability to do business.

In this case, he’s bullying the citizens of those respective counties to force compliance with the law by the Sheriffs out of fear of financial liability.

It’s almost as if they want to fight, or something.

Reason:

This week a North Carolina mom told the Raleigh City Council that police “terrorized” her parents and her 6-year-old special-needs son.

A Selective Enforcement Unit (SEU) team—Raleigh’s version of SWAT—had a warrant to search Michael and Wanda Clark’s home last November. Michael’s nephew, Brian Clark, was a suspect in a recent armed robbery. Police found a box Brian had left at the scene of the crime with his uncle’s name and address on it, Indy Week reports. So they paid a visit to the Clark home, where Michael and Wanda’s daughter LaDonna had dropped off her son, who has autism and cerebral palsy, before going to work.

Brian Clark did not live at his uncle’s house and was not there at the time. Nonetheless, police forced Michael, Wanda, and their grandson to walk out of the house and sit on the ground. “On a 35-degree and rainy night, my son with autism was forced out of the home with military-style rifles aimed at him and made to sit on the cold, wet ground for over an hour by RPD SWAT,” LaDonna told the city council Tuesday.

“You can sit down there, or I will handcuff you,” an officer told her father, according to a complaint Michael Clark later filed with the department.

“Having guns pointed at a six-year-old was extremely frightening and completely unnecessary,” Wanda Clark wrote in a complaint of her own. “Even now, I still have nightmares about those guns being pointed at me and my grandson.”

“Not only was I not allowed to see the footage of my son being terrorized,” LaDonna told the city council, but the police wouldn’t give her an internal affairs complaint number unless she specifically stated which department policies had been broken and agreed to an in-person interview. At this point, the police already had three written complaints describing the incident.

That’s because you’re not special and they are because they are cops.

Why didn’t they just walk up the sidewalk and knock on the door?

I think the entire unit, including cops who didn’t participate in the raid, should be forced to strip naked and parade through the streets of Raleigh from one side of the town to the other, with the entire city watching, wearing signs that say, “I am a toad.”

Right before they are all fired and hauled into court for breaking and entering, assault with a deadly weapon, and carrying firearms to the terror of the public.

Fox Business:

Alienating firearms backers would “cause the greatest reputational and financial harm” to American Outdoors Brand Corp., the manufacturer disclosed in a federal filing on Friday

“The one overriding factor mitigating the effectiveness of gun control groups to damage the reputations of those in the firearms business is the passion and strength of firearms owners in defending their rights at the ballot box, in the course of legislative debates, and in the marketplace,” Smith & Wesson’s parent company wrote.

The candid remarks encapsulate the difficulty proponents of new gun laws have faced in their quest. While such campaigns often garner intense media attention, the core support among gun owners and the significant political weight the group carries has stymied any significant legislation on the issue.

It also highlights the difficulty firearms producers and retailers face in trying to navigate the intense political landscape on gun control. Dick’s Sporting Goods’ decision in 2018 to ban the sales of AR-15-style rifles helped contribute to a 4.5 percent decline in sales in its hunting business. The backlash among conservatives and others firearms supporters “could affect future results,” the Pittsburgh-based sporting goods retailer disclosed in November.

Friday’s study from American Outdoors Brand Corp. (AOCB) was released following a successful effort by shareholders, including a group of nuns, to force the company to analyze how its products are associated with gun violence and what steps the Springfield, Massachusetts-based firm is taking to make its firearms safer.

In the report, the company disputed the need to direct resources towards developing so-called “smart gun” technology, which includes facial recognition software to only allow an authorized user to fire it. Doing so would “require a significant investment” and the products would come at a cost that could alienate many of its key consumers.

“This pricing difference alone, at best, limits the commercial viability of ‘smart guns’ to a very small niche market. AOBC’s reasonable business judgment is that an investment in such an unknown, niche market is not a sound business decision,” the firm wrote, adding that it will “continue to regularly assess the market.”

Why would they have to make a “federal filing” over a stockholder vote?  The article doesn’t say.

As for what the author said in the article, it isn’t clear if Smith & Wesson really, really want to invest in “smart guns” and just can’t because of the financial damage (which would be very real and potentially deadly to the company), or the author is just making up this supposed conundrum for gun manufacturers.

As for Smith & Wesson, I’ll make the same observation I have for Ruger, Savage and all other manufacturers.  Hedge against this sort of thing by ensuring that if you do go public in order to raise revenue, your employees own a majority of the stock.  Make it an employee-run company.

Most manufacturers won’t have the wisdom to do that.

Spent Saturday with friends and neighbors in the field.  It was nice to bang steel (12″ diameter) at 100 yards and 200 yards with 5.56mm, and nice to hit steel at 340 yards with 6.5 Creedmoor (Ruger Precision).  That Ruger is a nice gun, but heavy as a load of bricks.

It was also nice to bang steel at 100 yards with a Marlin 30-30 lever-gun using iron sights.  And it was especially nice to hit the same steel at 100 yards with my CMMG PSB .45 ACP, using only an EOTech 1X red dot holographic sight.  The gun is very accurate, and the EOTech will reach out to at least 100 yards.  Beyond that I’ll have to practice a little bit of “hold-over” of the dot.

One final comment.  I shot 450 SMC out of the gun on Saturday, and I cannot say that there was any real difference in felt recoil between that and .45 ACP (it’s a good thing to pick up 300 FPS over the .45 ACP, but the cost of the Double Tap 450 SMC ammunition isn’t trivial).

How is your range time going?

Opinion by Rick Windham:

I have picked up several classic rifles at gun shows. They are rifles I read about as I grew up dreaming of big game hunts. They are chambered in calibers that may not be totally forgotten, but they are off the radar of most younger hunters. For example, I was in an antelope camp a couple of years ago and there was a younger hunter (early 30s) in the group. Most of the other rifles in camp were calibers like .243, .308, 7mm Mag, but I had a .264 Winchester Magnum. The guy looked over my rifle and made all the appropriate comments on its looks and feel, but as he handed it back to me he said. “A .264 Win Mag, huh? Never heard of that caliber.”

It caused me to think about the other proven cartridges that may be fading into history. There is nothing wrong with them, it is just that they are not the cartridges hunters read about in today’s gun magazines.

I first thought about the .270 Winchester. Jack O’Conner, one of the most famous gun writers for Outdoor Life Magazine, constantly wrote about the .270 and the hunts he had with it. He made the .270 famous. Ask someone you know who owns/shoots a .270 why they chose this cartridge. I bet a lot of them with mention Jack O’Conner — but he died 41 years ago. A couple of generations of shooters have grown up without O’Conner and his writings and the .270 is fading away.

There are other calibers that are fading into history. Calibers like the Savage .250-3000, the .257 Roberts, 7×57 Mauser, 8×57 Mauser, .35 Whelen and to some extent the .30-06 Springfield. Most of these calibers are just overshadowed by marketing and the hype surrounding newer calibers like the .224 Valkyrie, 6.5 PRC, .338 Federal or the .350 Legend — to name a few.

The .25-06 is another fine cartridge that fits into this discussion and the category of almost forgotten deer rifles. I look for rifles like this for two reasons: I don’t want them to become the has-beens of hunting traditions and because they are not highly sought after, you can find some really good deals.

Read the whole thing.  I have several thoughts in response.

First of all, I really love the .270 Winchester, and I don’t really think it’ll ever go out of style for bolt action rifles.  It’s fast, powerful, and flat-shooting.  It’s also got a fairly stiff kick given that it’s a necked-down 30-06 cartridge.  But given that it isn’t a plinking gun, that’s not really a problem.  It’s readily available just about everywhere.

But it’s a long-action cartridge, so it won’t readily fit into a semi-automatic rifle without re-engineering.  I think part of his objection may be that many of the firearms in use for hunting now are semi-automatic guns and thus use more short-action cartridges.  If he simply prefers long action cartridges, then good.  But if his objection is merely that guys shouldn’t be using semi-automatics for hunting, I disagree and he needs to bring his views in line with current thinking.

Besides, I don’t really think that bolt action rifles are going out of style.  Long range precision shooting is growing as a sport, and a whole host of very nice guns (and new cartridges to go along) have been engineered for that purpose.

But I grok where he’s going with the proliferation of cartridges.  The 6.5 Creedmoor isn’t good enough – we need a 6.5 PRC too.  And the 300 Win Mag isn’t good enough – we need 300 PRC too.  Maybe we do, for very specific applications, but I’ll likely never push my cartridges to that extreme.

News from Colorado:

A Denver police officer will be suspended for 10 days without pay for almost shooting a man in the head by accident.

The Denver Post reports Asher Rose will begin his suspension later this month for the Dec. 15, 2017 incident.

The officer joined the department in January 2017 and did not have any previous disciplinary issues.

Investigators say Rose and another officer were responding to a report of a drunk man trying to stop traffic in south Denver. The man ran away and hid under a truck.

According to Rose’s disciplinary letter, the officer accidentally fired his gun as he was turning on his weapon-mounted light.

For the 3648th time, do … not … do … that.  It’s dumb and it violates the rules of gun safety.  If you need illumination, find another way to get it, like carrying a tactical light.

Prior: Gun-Mounted Flashlights Linked To Accidental Shootings

John appears to like the Holosun, and it’s cheaper than the competitors.

I did a little time with a pistol red dot sight on Saturday for the first time, and reflexively looked for the front post and tried to co-witness it with the dot.  That’s wrong, but breaking that habit will be tough if I get a pistol red dot sight.  I’ll need to spend some time turning training time into muscle memory.