Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2024 i Gun Digest

When I first started working for Gun Digest, I was having a late-night conversation with our CEO about gun content, and my vision for what this brand could become. It was a challenging and very good chat, during which he asked me, “How do you make potentially mundane gun content interesting?” As an all-in gun enthusiast, the question initially struck me as damn near offensive. After all, guns, by their very nature, are interesting. How each works is interesting. Learning about how to get that bullet to go exactly where we want it is interesting. They’re guns, duh! But to his point, what can be said about, say, a Glock 19—perhaps the most functionally and visually uninspiring handgun ever created (albeit one of the most popular)—that hasn’t already been said?…

Liberty Lubricants has a slick cleaning kit (see what I did there?). The firm-sided zippered case holds the essentials for cleaning: solvent, oil and grease, patches, brushes and pull cables, as well as a handle and rod segments. Firm-sided? You know, formed textured nylon cases with a zipper around three sides that opens and lies flat. It’s firm enough to offer protection to its contents, but not so firm that it can’t be forced into a range bag. With it, you can do the cleaning you need at the range. Using the Liberty cleaning kit, you can clean all of your various pistols and your AR-15, which covers pretty much any day at the range but that “special” one. Which one? There’s no knowing, but that’s one aspect of the…

The M1903 Springfield is one of those guns that just about every shooter knows, and for the most part, it needs no introduction on these pages. It’s certainly not the last bolt action rifle issued to American forces, though to truly appreciate it you must understand just how advanced this rifle was at the time it was introduced. What follows here is the story of not just the M1903, but the significant thinking that spawned concepts we now use today. The rifle was on the edge of technological advancement in its day, and it was called to do some incredible things … including transforming into a semi-automatic, pistol caliber rifle. THE PRETENDER TAKES THE THRONE In the turmoil and uncertainty of the late Industrial Revolution, most of the world’s great…

How is it possible that a handgun design that’s more than a century old is still one of the most popular? The answer is simple: The 1911 is still with us because it still works. Of course, modern 1911s are a bit different from the original, and over the years a collection of custom modifications are now mostly standard. Some might wonder which of these modifications are important. Well, the oldest and largest civilian firearms training academy in the world has answered that question with the return of the Gunsite Service Pistol (GSP). ORIGIN & HISTORY In 1976, Jeff Cooper, Marine, international firearms trainer and founding president of the International Practical Shooting Confederation (IPSC), took a ranch in Arizona and turned it into a shooting school. The American Pistol Institute…

HISTORICAL NOTES The .30 Remington AR was designed by Remington as a big-game cartridge specifically for the company’s R-15 rifle. It was introduced in 2009. Remington engineers started with the .450 Bushmaster case and went from there. A pointed .30-caliber bullet of reasonable weight is longer than a blunt-nosed .45-caliber bullet, so, to keep overall cartridge length compatible with the standard AR-15 magazine, the case was shortened to 1.525 inches from the original 1.7 inches of the Bushmaster design. Back at its base, the .30 AR case starts with a diameter of 0.500 inch, and from there it tapers to 0.488 inch at the juncture of the body and shoulder. Neck diameter is 0.341 inch, and the case has a shoulder angle of 25 degrees. The AR-15 rifle in .450…

A friend recently purchased a used rifle—a cool, old Remington 700 in the classic .280 Remington—which proved to be particularly finicky. He got his hands on what factory ammunition he could find, and the gun just didn’t seem happy. It was struggling to print 1½ MOA, though the previous owner had insisted it was a “tack driver.” Scratching his head, my pal asked the previous owner exactly what ammunition it shot so well, and the older gentleman proudly told him, “My handloads.” “Um, sir, do you by any chance have that data for the rifle you sold me?” The gentleman proudly nodded in the affirmative and ambled off to find “the book.” Thumbing through the pages, he stopped on a page that contained a rather detailed record of the old…

It was the early 1970s, and European police forces had a new problem: terrorists. Those LE officers had a miscellaneous assemblage of .32s and .380s in their armories … while the bad guys were starting to use 9mm SMGs. Not good. So, the West German Federal police issued a request for a new sidearm, and it was to be in 9mm Parabellum. HK offered up the PSP (which we know as the P7), and Walther offered up a newly built P38 with a shorter barrel, dubbed the “P5.” In-between, the tasking authority dubbed the Sig entry as the P6, the model we know as the P225. All of the new pistols accepted for use were single-stack 9mm pistols, and that was considered a big step up by the police forces…

The barrel is the rifle’s delivery system, the steel guidance mechanism that sends the projectile spinning toward the target. Barrel technology has come leaps and bounds in the last century, to the point where the accuracy has become both highly predictable, as well as repeatable. It’s important to know how barrels work in order to better understand how a bullet will perform within its confines. THE THROAT Starting at the breech end, your barrel has three or four main parts, depending on the type of firearm. For rifles, as well as semi-automatic pistols, there is a chamber, throat or leade, and the rifling itself, all terminating at the crown. The chamber is a mirror image of the cartridge to be fired and is sealed by the breech bolt or block…

The military and law enforcement have long used qualification courses to validate a soldier’s or cop’s shooting skill. Qualification is also a part of most defensive handgun training courses and, in some cases, it’s a requirement to obtain a concealed carry permit. The difficulty of these shooting evaluations varies; there’s no universal standard, and a passing score is subjectively set by the responsible administrating body. So, what specifically does the successful completion of a qualification course really mean? I’m not exactly sure. This is partly because of the varying requirements, but it’s also because of the tendency to rank performance—based on score—with identifiers such as marksman, sharpshooter, expert or master. It’s hard to divine any real meaning from these scores or ranks, which are mostly used to incentivize shooters to…

01 WOOX Titano Heirloom looks with state-of-the-art performance, the WOOX Titano stands out in competition stocks. Tailored for Benchrest and F-Class shooters, the stock boasts a stunning American walnut stock and an aircraft grade aluminum chassis. With a 3-inch fore and wide barrel channel supporting up to 1.20-inch diameter barrels, it accommodates large fire tubes common to comp rifles. Furthermore, WOOX’s Suspense weight system allows you to precisely balance the system with six 2.5-ounce weights. The buttstock is fully adjustable for both the length of pull and cheek rise. Other notables include a smooth-bottom bag rider butt and Integrated thumb rests to enhance grip comfort. MSRP: $999 02 Taylor’s & Company 1875 Outlaw Revolver A collaboration with Uberti, Taylor’s & Company offers up a faithful reproduction of a classic Remington…

The rapid proliferation of reddot sights on pistols has truly been something to watch. Not many years ago, the first attempts were made (usually by tinkerers) to integrate compact optical sights into pistol slides. The Trijicon RMR was probably the first of these “micro” dots that was added to pistol slides directly … not as part of a frame “race gun” mount. In doing my research, a few people can claim to be among the first to try it, but I couldn’t find any evidence that it was the unique idea of any one individual. In fact, the RMR models at the time weren’t expressly designed to go on pistols, and some, including my own dual illuminated model, ended up back at the factory for repairs from being battered. What…