Archive for the 'Guns' Category

Ducks.org.

For airline travel, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) requires that guns be transported in hard-sided, lockable cases. One way to maximize luggage space is to buy one of the top-quality bulkier cases, like a Pelican or Explorer, then remove the foam interior and pack your hunting clothes in the case. The clothes serve as padding for your shotgun while freeing up room in your checked bag for waders and other items. Gun cases commonly come in one- and two-gun models. The best field repair kit is an extra gun, and if you’re going on a long-anticipated trip, consider packing two guns. To maximize luggage space, many traveling waterfowlers wear their hunting coats and use a field backpack or blind bag as a carry-on. That’s a practical idea, but make sure that you don’t have any loose shotgun shells in your pockets or bags before you pass through security.

Interesting tips.  The article is oriented towards water fowlers, but this could just as easily go for travelling to Kansas to shoot upland birds (in that case, Pheasants), or Minnesota (for Grouse).  I can carry a Beretta A400 in the truck to do Quail hunting in S.C. or N.C., but that brings up another point.

Reader xtphreak made these remarks not long ago on another article.

MrGunsandgear also made a statement about 6:04 re: a “rule” requiring FedEx & UPS to mark packages containing firearms for shipping.

I posted a comment there asking for specifics on this “Rule”.

Their “Rule” doesn’t override 18 U.S.C. § 922 – U.S. Code – Unannotated Title 18. Crimes and Criminal Procedure § 922. Unlawful acts.

Specifically (e) which reads:

“…(e) It shall be unlawful for any person ….  No common or contract carrier shall require or cause any label, tag, or other written notice to be placed on the outside of any package, luggage, or other container that such package, luggage, or other container contains a firearm. …”.

Can you specify the Rules that require common carriers to mark packages that contain firearms?

I personally used this against airline policy (Piedmont Airlines) to tag luggage with a bright orange CONTAINS FIREARM tag prior to 911.

[ … ]

I listen to MrGunsandgear, but on this he is wrong.

I posted the following to his youtube under my previous comment:

the UPS site states: “The labeling and outer box markings on all Firearm Products shipments must not identify the contents as containing Firearm Products. Labeling, including the shipper’s and consignee’s abbreviated names on the shipping label or air shipping document, must be non-descriptive.”

https://www.ups.com/us/en/support/shipping-support/shipping-special-care-regulated-items/prohibited-items/firearms.page

FedEx site says: “Re-package the firearm case in an outer box with no identifying markers”

https://www.fedex.com/en-us/shipping/how-to-ship-firearms.html

I think this is important because I think we need to know if carriers, including airlines, can legally put labels on our firearms cases?

On a final note, say you are carrying a shotgun for upland bird hunting on an airline.  Let’s say that it’s a really nice one, like a Beretta DT11.  What do you do?  Purchase travel insurance for $12,000 to cover the gun?  Perhaps the answer to this is don’t carry a DT11 on an airline.  But then, how do the competition shooters do it?  Maybe we can carry a cheaper gun on the airlines (good upland bird guns go for > $2000 though), but a competition shooter will carry his expensive weapon.

One pistol, the other shotgun.

The Defender CCW is made from 7075 aluminum. “We did a lot of different material selection tests to find the optimal material. We found 7075 has some better impact characteristics than 6061,” Morell says …

I immediately proceeded to bash the front of the optic against the bench a dozen times. I loaded the gun and rechecked zero—it held. At 500 rounds, I once again bashed the front of the optic a dozen times and checked zero. At 1,000 rounds, I went back to hitting the front of the optic, but I didn’t go straight to checking zero this time.

I dropped the unloaded M&P 2.0 All Metal, weighing 30 ounces, optic down onto a concrete paver from chest height. I picked up the gun, checked for damage, and then checked zero at 15 yards. Not only did the CCW have no damage, it also held zero.

[ … ]

“I bet we have over 100,000 rounds of effective recoil testing on these. So, in addition to the drop durability, we have a lot of confidence in the entire electronics and mechanical design. We have some folks that we’ve given these out to for extended testing, and they have north of 40,000 rounds on them and they’re still running strong,” Morell says.

It appears to be rugged and it’s aesthetically relatively pleasing.

Here’s the catch.

The Defender CCW is made in China. Whether it’s American manufacturing pride, improved quality control, or avoiding supply chain issues, there are advantages to making a product on home soil. Of course, that would also come with a significant price increase.

It sells for $250.

Here’s an interesting idea for a shotgun optic if your gun isn’t designed for an optics attachment (most aren’t, although that’s changing).

If you’ve ever wanted to mount a red dot on your vent-ribbed shotgun but didn’t want to take the time to get it milled for a red dot, Burris has a new DIY solution for you. The new Burris SpeedBead Vent Rib Mount is an affordable solution for adapting your favorite shotgun for use with the Burris FastFire series of red dot sights without the need to permanently modify your shotgun.

It just attaches right to the rib.  The attachment device sells for $60 (no, not the Buris optic itself).  At Optics Planet that optic pictures sells for $380.

Okay we’ve covered this before.

So there is yet another post about magazine springs and whether they should be replaced, and if so, when.  This is in the same theme I wrote about several years ago when there was another little flurry of articles and posts about this.  I’m going to cover this ground one time for everyone.

Metal creep is caused from slippage of crystalline structures along boundary planes, whether FCC, BCC, or whatever.  One reader writes that “springs don’t wear out from compression.”  This is along the same lines as most of the [mistaken and incorrect] articles I linked the last time I addressed this issue that claimed that stainless steel doesn’t creep below the yield limit.

Do you know any piano tuners?  I do.  Yea, they have to go back a few days later and retune because of metal creep.  But most piano wires are carbon steel under high stress.  What about stainless steel?

Do not make the claim that stainless steel (like SS304) doesn’t suffer creep below the yield limit and at low temperatures.  Yes … it … does  (“In all tests at applied stress/yield strength ratios above 0.73 some plastic deformation was recorded”).

No offense, but don’t try to be an engineer if you’re not one. If you make the claim that SS304 (I presume the material of most magazine springs) doesn’t suffer from metal creep, you’d be wrong, and then you’d also be answering the question the wrong way.

The right way to look at the question is one of whether the creep is significant.  It usually isn’t, and it is less significant than for carbon steel.  It’s also not significant for applied stress/yield strength ratios lower than what the authors tested.  Where your specific magazine spring falls in this data set is best determined by the designer, not me (I don’t have drawings or any other design information).

Stop saying that it’s only the compression / decompression cycle that puts wear on springs.  Stop it.  Just stop.  That’s not true.

It … is … not … true.

It’s true enough that the compression / decompression cycle is fatigue wear, but it’s also true that this means slippage of the crystalline structures just like metal creep.

Again, the question is whether this creep is important under the specific design circumstances or not, whether the specifications are challenged or not.  It’s not about whether creep will occur.  It does, and it will, even if undetectable by you.

I’m not saying here that it’s a bad idea to leave your buffer spring compressed.  I’m not saying that it’s a bad idea to leave your magazines full of rounds.  Don’t misunderstand what I’m asserting.  I’m not even asserting that Brownells was wrong in their conclusions, even if they didn’t do all of the necessary analysis to properly arrive at their conclusions.

I am asserting that the justification for whether you do or don’t leave springs compressed has nothing whatsoever to do with whether the spring undergoes a compression / decompression cycle while it’s in the configuration it’s in.

It has to do with a materials and structural engineering analysis that most people don’t do (and probably don’t need to do), and which Brownells didn’t do for the video above.

This may sound like a nit, but not to an engineer.

As I’ve said before, I’d find Ryan interesting if he was talking about watching paint dry for 1.5 hours.  I didn’t intend to watch this entire video, but I did anyway because so many important questions were answered and so many salient issues were addressed.

First, he does a great job of shooting at that distance.

Second, as long as you get the holdovers rights, or otherwise adjust the scope for ballistics, the Marlin rifle is accurate and the cartridge looks like it would be effective.

I’d like to see ballistics gel evaluated at that range.

We’ve panned this gun as the wrong choice for all the wrong reasons, and I still believe that.  However, Tim Harmsen apparently likes the gun a lot.

We’ve covered this before.  Softer metals can wear down harder metals if they make contact long and vigorously enough.  And he tells you so again in the video.

Commentary at Army Times:

On all key technical measures, the Next Generation Squad Weapons program is imploding before Army’s very eyes. The program is on mechanical life support, with its progenitors at the Joint Chiefs obstinately now ramming the program through despite spectacularly failing multiple civilian-sector peer reviews almost immediately upon commercial release.

Indeed the rifle seems cursed from birth. Even the naming has failed. Army recently allowed a third-party company to scare it off the military designation M5. The re-naming will certainly also help scupper bad public relations growing around ‘XM-5′ search results.

Civilian testing problems have, or should have, sunk the program already. The XM-5/7 as it turns out fails a single round into a mud test. Given the platform is a piston-driven rifle it now lacks gas, as the M-16 was originally designed, to blow away debris from the eject port. Possibly aiming to avoid long-term health and safety issues associated with rifle gas, Army has selected an operating system less hardy in battlefield environments. A choice understandable in certain respects, however, in the larger scheme the decision presents potentially war-losing cost/benefit analysis.

Watch the mud test video above. It’s possible to tailor demonstrations and testing to sell any product, and that’s what many manufacturers do in Military arms contracts award trials. And there’s almost always a high-level ringer in uniform to urge his peers into acceptance.

Civilian testing, testing Army either never did or is hiding, also only recently demonstrated that the rifle seemingly fails, at point-blank ranges, to meet its base criteria of penetrating Level 4 body armor (unassisted). True, the Army never explicitly set this goal, but it has nonetheless insinuated at every level, from media to Congress, that the rifle will penetrate said armor unassisted. Indeed, that was the entire point of the program. Of course, the rounds can penetrate body armor with Armor Piercing rounds, but so can 7.62x51mm NATO, even 5.56x45mm NATO.

Everybody knew outsourcing manufacturing would have dire national consequences over time. All strategic negligence will result in tactical failures; it’s the nature of planning and execution. There’s really no way around it other than clever soldiers who are able to overcome bad decision-making. Having to overcome your own National Strategic Commander’s acquisition errors is no way for a soldier to be thrust into battle. But by now, we all know Washington doesn’t have the individual Soldier or Marine at heart. I sighed out loud, reading this next paragraph.

The fundamental problem with the program is there remains not enough tungsten available from China, as Army knows, to make the goal of making every round armor piercing even remotely feasible. The plan also assumes that the world’s by far largest supplier will have zero problems selling tungsten to America only for it to be shot back at its troops during World War III. Even making steel core penetrators would be exceedingly difficult when the time came, adding layers of complexity and time to the most time-contingent of human endeavors. In any case, most large bullet manufacturers and even Army pre-program have moved to tungsten penetrators for a reason, despite the fact it increases the cost by an order of magnitude and supply seems troubled. Perhaps Army has a solution, perhaps.

There’s this conclusion:

The slight increase in ballistic coefficiency between the 6.8x51mm and 7.62x51mm cartridges neither justified the money pumped into the program nor does the slight increase in kinetic energy dumped on target. Itself a simple function of case pressurization within the bastardized 7.62mm case. Thus the net mechanical results of the program design-wise is a rifle still chambered in a 7.62×51 mm NATO base case (as the M-14), enjoying now two ways to charge the weapon and a folding stock. This is the limit of the touted generational design ‘leap’ under the program.

And more at the source.

H/T Bill Buppert g/@zerogov

Source.

More than 58% of firearm owners stored at least one gun unlocked and hidden, while nearly 18% of firearms owners stored at least one firearm unlocked and unhidden, the study found.

The study found that gun safes were the locking device most commonly used among firearm owners, rather than other locking mechanisms researchers examined, like cable locks and trigger locks.

Nearly 50% of respondents who didn’t lock their firearms said locks are unnecessary, while more than 44% of respondents said that locks would prevent quick access in an emergency.

They act like this is some sort of great revelation, something worthy of an article or a “study.”  I could have told them that, almost down to the numbers.  In fact, I suspect these numbers are a bit low.

It’s a revelation to them that if you put a lock on a firearm or store it away in a safe, it’s not accessible to you in exigent circumstances.  You know, exigent circumstances – the time when you are most likely to need that firearm.

What good is a firearm if it’s locked?

Sure, it might be a great idea to lock them away with small children in the home, and there are biometric safes for that, but we oppose efforts to legally mandate such things.  The FedGov isn’t God, regardless of how much they want to be.

The Forerunner of The Modern Sniper Rifle at Forgotten Weapons

Snip:

In the 1960s, Steyr Daimler Pusch developed a modern sniper rifle for the Austrian military (and also for commercial civilian sale). It was adopted as the SSG-69 (Scharfschützen-Gewehr; sharpshooter’s rifle), replacing the SSG-98k in military service. Mechanically, the SSG-69 uses a bolt with six rear-mounted locking lugs in 3 pairs, giving it a short 60 degree throw. The stock is made of polymer and the barrel is cold hammer-forged, both fairly cutting-edge elements at the time of its design. It was a factory 1MOA rifle, also something considered typical today, but quite impressive ein the 1960s.

Includes two videos. The first from Mr. McCollum:

And this from Practical Accuracy: