AR magazines worse than murder in NY

Army veteran Nathan Haddad, who suffered a career-ending shoulder injury whilst trying to qualify for Special Forces, is facing a few other challenges. Five of them, to be precise: felony charges for possessing AR-15 magazines left over from his Army service. A politically ambitious and rabidly anti-veteran local prosecutor in New York State is pressing …

Read more

Rangers Also Use the Glock 19

Saturday, we told you, “It’s Over. Glock Won,” in reference to the ubiquitous use of Glock pistols, mostly the G19, by American Special Operations Forces. Not having good hooks into the Ragnar community, we weren’t sure if they were running G19s, too: [W]e are not 100% certain the Rangers are on the Glock bandwagon, but …

Read more

Revenant Rifle

With the new movie, The Revenant, about to open, we found on the Contemporary Makers blog a fascinating story by Ron Luckenbill about the two identical rifles he built for the movie — in less than 60 days for both. Ron is justly proud of the work he’s done here. This is the gun that I built for …

Read more

Is it Time to Scope Out Scopes?

Iron sights are obsolete. Britain saw this one, and acted on it, before the United States did. (So did Germany, even earlier; but then they backed off). The plain truth is that iron sights are obsolete, outdated, dead; they’re not just resting or pining for the fjords. They’ve shuffled off their mortal coil and joined the Choir Invisible. They’re …

Read more

How reliable are US small arms?

Thing is, it works: M4 Carbine with accessories as used by Big Green about 10 years back (the accessories are also under continuous improvement). Click to, etc. One gets weary of seeing forum commandos and gunshop experts spouting nonsense about current issue weapons. Most usually, this is in the form of bad-mouthing the M4A1, a …

Read more

What Dunn Done Wrong

This is a subject of great interest to all of us who carry in self-defense, because what Dunn done wrong came around and done Dunn wrong in the end. He’s almost certainly going to die in prison, and he didn’t have to. Somewhere along the way some bad ideas took root in his head; perhaps he got …

Read more

HK’s Other 4.6: the HK36 in 4.6 x 36

Around 1970, Heckler & Koch was doing well, but their restless engineers were thinking: what’s next? One thing we learn from history is that no weapons system lasts forever, and there was maybe one more go-around in the company’s present line of roller-locked weapons, trading some militaries’ 7.62 NATO weapons for 5.56 NATO ones. But what could offer …

Read more

What Happened in Kenya’s Westgate Mall?

It turns out, what happened in September, 2013, is not what we’ve been told. The official line goes something like this: that up to a dozen armed jihadis attacked, killed hundreds, holed up with dozens of hostages and blew the place up, and were taken out in a determined assault by Nairobi SWAT. “Fucking Americans!” …

Read more

Soviet ATGMs and October, 1973 (Long)

So far in this series, we’ve looked at the development of US and Western European anti-tank guided missiles, from their origins in a German WWII design program to their introduction to combat — just in time to encounter Russian missiles designed along similar lines — in the Vietnam War. (The Russian missiles got the first kill, by …

Read more