Articles by Herschel Smith

We were recently discussing barrel whip and barrel harmonics.  Here is a good video on this.

Americans have been making their own firearms since the founding of the country. The SCOTUS needs to get this one right, or else they relegate themselves to the trash heap of history. The communists already disregard what they don’t like out of the SCOTUS. When they lose the rest of the base, it’s a short hop and a skip to everyone just completely ignoring them. They have no reason to go to work with that kind of reputation. They should just stay home.

Outdoor Life.

Many commonly-used terms in the shooting community aren’t widely understood or used in a consistent context, so it’s important to define what we are talking about. The technical term “node” refers to the points on a wave at which the amplitude or displacement is the smallest. In terms of a vibrating object like a rifle barrel, it’s the point at which the vibrating barrel moves the least. A rifle barrel does have nodes as it vibrates during and after a shot is fired, but when someone refers to “finding their rifle’s nodes,” they’re referring to finding the charge weight and velocity that causes the bullet to exit at or near that node or dead spot in the barrel’s movement as it vibrates back and forth.

[ … ]

When I brought up the subject with Shooting Editor John B. Snow, he said that all his data had supported the idea that chasing nodes doesn’t gain you anything. He and other high-level shooters at team events will even tailor their loads to target matching velocities to simplify drop and windage calculations between shooting partners …

He goes on to discuss a number of interesting points – interesting to me, at least, including whether a 3- or 5-round group is really sufficient to show anything of value. I agree with him. It’s not.

This is true for a number of reasons. Let’s move past the implications of chaos theory. Atoms are moved by Brownian motion. Atoms bond together to form crystalline structures. Crystalline structures can slip against each other. The barrel heats as it is fired. This motion changes each time the barrel sustains a round being fired through it.

There are other effects as well. This all means that a 3-round group isn’t really relevant for anything much except inflating your ego. Now, let’s move past the issue of repeatability due to physical effects and ponder whether the action of a bullet travelling down a barrel is governed by a deterministic process or a Monte Carlo process. That is, if you could exactly measure the grains of powder charge, exactly govern the bullet weight, and exactly control the barrel temperature, each and every time a rifle is fired, would the bullet go into exactly the same hole each time? Or would the group behave as a random process in which the grouping is always described by a standard distribution?

I think about things like that.

I prefer to just do the best I can and shoot the best equipment I can find within reason. I am not a performance precision rifle competition shooter. If I was, I would probably do the things he’s talking about.

But I wouldn’t assume that a 3-shot group meant much of anything.

I have found the trigger on the FN pistol to be squishy and with too much take up, whether in single action or double action. Even though hammer-fired, it’s not a 1911. But they make the 460 Rowland conversion kits for multiple handguns.

He tests JHPs, so it’s not a fair test for penetration (hint: the 460 Rowland dumps all of its energy in the first five inches, which would be good for personal defense). But wait until the end when he tests the penetrator round. The temporary and permanent wound cavity is enormous.

David Codrea.

“Thomas Engle is the owner of Hunter’s Warehouse in Bellefonte, and he says he supports the change, saying it puts everyone ‘on equal footing,’” the report explains. “At gun shows, he says people could buy and sell without licenses and insurances. He says background checks do not equal registration.”

“Well, a lot of people say it’s an infringement of their rights and stuff, but the problem is, the public wants to feel safe,” Engle elaborated in the accompanying video.

You know, I don’t think this guy has the gift of gab at all. Even if he felt that way, it’s smartest not to say it out loud around gun owners who know better.

On another topic, I would avoid someone like that. Avoid being around them, avoid buying from them, and in fact not even befriend them. He seems rather impulsive, imprecise and dangerous if you ask me.

Finally, the degree to which Form 4473 doesn’t equal registration is debatable. Up until now, with person-to-person sales, this may actually have been true. But with the most recent rule changes, I would disagree with his assertion.

It reminds me of where they really want to go with all of this, quoting from the Kos kids (who are no doubt as much fans of the ATF as the FFL David cited above).

The only way we can truly be safe and prevent further gun violence is to ban civilian ownership of all guns. That means everything. No pistols, no revolvers, no semiautomatic or automatic rifles. No bolt action. No breaking actions or falling blocks. Nothing. This is the only thing that we can possibly do to keep our children safe from both mass murder and common street violence.

Unfortunately, right now we can’t. The political will is there, but the institutions are not. Honestly, this is a good thing. If we passed a law tomorrow banning all firearms, we would have massive noncompliance. What we need to do is establish the regulatory and informational institutions first. This is how we do it.  The very first thing we need is national registry. We need to know where the guns are, and who has them.

Ban civilian gun ownership. Go ahead. Welcome to ThunderDome, kid.

They like it a lot.

I have to say it’s a good looking gun and seems to run very well.

However, I also have to say that I would rather they come out with a commander size 1911 with the bobtail design and the SS slide rather than the aluminum slide. A 1911 carrier has already accepted that the gun will weigh more and has decided that he’s okay with that. In fact, I don’t consider it a detriment to the gun. I think it’s an advantage.

I also have to weigh in with one more comment, and it agrees with their comment. They should have put an optic cut on the gun. Most modern 1911 owners are not purists. I’m not.

Finally, in this reddit/Firearms post, Kimber is just taking a beat down in the comments for unreliability, FTF and FTE.

This reportedly happened yesterday in Carlsbad, California. A group of mostly military age males invaded our country illegally via boat and then dispersed throughout the city in cars.

Are any of them on the terror watch list? Do any of them have a criminal history?

We don’t… pic.twitter.com/MQHqpF27Gu

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) April 14, 2024

I’m sorry this is a YouTube short so I can’t embed it. The owner is complaining about his Mossberg 940 with FTF.

I simply won’t have any gun that has FTF/FTE problems. And I’ve heard this a lot with Mossberg semiautomatic shotguns.

For the record, I’ve never seen any problems with Beretta semiautomatic shotguns, and I’ve shot them a lot.

He does say you can see more about this shotgun at this site.

Mossberg has never given me a shotgun to test so I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of the problems to which he speaks.

Source.

Roughly 125,000 migrants have been released onto the streets in the San Diego area since September, which has been unsettling for Firearms Unlimited California owner Cory Gautereaux and his customers.

After Texas worked to seal off large swaths of its border with Mexico with razor wire and boots on the ground, more migrants started making their way to California.

[ … ]

“The problem for people that live around the gun store is the street dropoffs,” Gautereaux said.

So you support these idiotic policies and send folks to government who institute them, and it’s all okay until your Ox gets gored? Okay, I see how this works.

This might make you feel better for a time, but here’s what a gun can’t do for you. Restore a broken medical system. You see, all of these migrants are heading first to their local hospital where it will forever be their PCP. It will overwhelm the system, and this includes surgical services too. Nay, it has already overwhelmed the medical system in the country. Ask me how I know.

You are literally watching the destruction of the medical system in America, and it will never come back. Not ever. We will pay for all of those services. In addition to perpetual votes, the uniparty gets a new slave class to fund the already bankrupt SS system.

See how this works? You paid for entitlements while “paying into social security,” because there was never a “lock box.” Now you pay for medical entitlements for the slave class who will return a pittance of what you paid in.

These two stories were published on the same day a few weeks ago https://t.co/262uDBIJZbhttps://t.co/262uDBIJZb

— Not the Bee (@Not_the_Bee) April 15, 2024

The Captain’s Journal has obtained secret video documentation of a counseling session for the legacy media concerning dishonesty. Here it is. Remember you saw it here first.