Gun Nuts

“Ladies first,” is no longer a term that carries any meaning. Doors are not heald open anymore and checks are split on dates. One could say that these were signs of the women’s liberation movement winning the equality battle, but that’s only if we make the mistake of equating genteel behavior with inequality. It’s the fault of both parties involved. Men should be holding themselves to a minimum standard of gentlemanly behavior. Women should demand the treatment due to a lady…As long as she acts like a lady.

However, we lady shooters face a conflict. While we work to represent women as respectable members of the shooting community, with little differentiating us from our male counterparts, we don’t want to be thought of as less feminine. Unfortunately, the availability of pics of half naked, gun toting models creates a comparison in which we would rather not be involved. Those models could hardly be accused of ladylike behavior, but they are being viewed as more feminine and that’s a problem.

Of all the gun slinging gals out th

One of the things I like most about the LH9 is that it can be carried cocked and locked. The safety also operates in the correct direction, down for fire and up for safe.

Beretta USA is currently running a promotion on the Px4 Storm line of pistols: buy a Px4 Storm, get $50. Here’s how you do it:

Starting April 1, through May 31, 2014, when you buy any new Px4 Storm in any size and caliber, you receive $50 back from Beretta.

Simply visit your local dealer and purchase a new Px4 Storm. Any size, any model, any caliber.

All you have to do is fill out the online form, providing the appropriate documentation, and we’ll send $50 back to you. It’s our way of saying thank you, and rewarding you for having chosen the most reliable, accurate and durable polymer handgun on the market.

Eligible models include: Full, Inox, SD, Compact, and Subcompact.

Eligible guns include all new Px4 Full, Compact and Subcompact configurations purchased NEW at retail, in the United States, between the dates of April 1 and May 31, 2014. Offer limited to one (1) free $50 rebate per Beretta Px4 Pistol purchased. No substitutions or exchanges permitted. Groups, organizations, businesses or government agencies are excluded from and are not eligible for this offer. Offer does not include used, close-out, or discontinued models. Submissions must be submitted online by June 30, 2014. Late or incomplete submissions will not be processed nor returned. Please includ

Probably my favorite gun at SHOT Show 2014 was the Beretta ARX-100. Its clever design and neat features made it stand out for me from a sea of ho-hum business as usual AR15 products. You can read more about the ARX-100 in the March issue of GunUp the Magazine. Good news for everyone that’s excited for the gun, because yesterday Beretta announced on their Facebook page that the ARX-100 is shipping!

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MSRP on the ARX-100 is $1950, no word yet on what they’re going to street price for. Needle

At SHOT Show 2013, Sig Sauer announced a version of the MPX Carbine that would have a 6.5 inch barrel and come standard with a permanently welded 9.5 inch long muzzle brake. The get up looked like this:

The ATF took one look at the gun and said “that’s not a muzzle brake because those are clearly the baffles from a suppressor, and we’re saying that device is officially a suppressor.” Usually when that happens, companies will return to their offices, tails tucked between their legs, duly chastised. But not this time. Not Sig. In fact, Sig has gone the opposite route, deciding instead to spit in the tyrant’s eye sue the ATF.

[Sig Sauer's] suit, filed in the U. S. District Court of New Hampshire, states that it submitted a rifle, with its muzzle brake, to the ATF on April 4, 2013 for evaluation. The device is described as 9.5 inches long and permanently attached with a weld to a 6.5 inch barrel, making the overall barrel length 16 inches.

The ATF responded, by letter dated Au

The inner workings of a Crimson Trace LG305 J-frame laser grip. I hope you get a mild chuckle from the title of this post. Get your own sweet beamz here.

True story: Went to Brownells to buy a couple of spare mags for the gun, and I ended up only spending $300! I got out easy.

A few years back, I attended a defensive shooting class where one of the students asked an instructor where they should aim if the badguy was only presenting a partial target. The instructor had this to say, and it has stuck with me ever since:

If you can hit him in the meat, take the shot. You might get a more important piece of meat to shoot at next.

We all tend to think that if we need to use our gun in self-defense, we’re going to get a “classic” bad guy presentation, where we get a full presentation of the upper thoracic area to do a bill drill at five yards into, and then cooly re-holster our gun while checking to make sure that everyone around is 1) okay, and 2) saw how badass we looked smoking that mugger.

The reality of self-defense is often a lot uglier than that, which is where the real concept of center mass comes from. We think “center mass” means “center mass of the person”, aka the upper thoracic cavity. The reality of “center mass” as it was taught to me means “center mass of the available target” – or more simply

I’ve been thinking about the past a lot recently. I found this image online when searching for some unrelated flintlock pictures, and it jarred my memory, taking me down a road I’d not traveled in some time. For those that don’t know, that photo is from Season 1 of Top Shot, and right after it was taken I missed a 125 yard shot with that flintlock. I’d like to go back in time to April 2010 when that was filmed and tell younger me to aim a little higher.

And then I realize that I don’t want to do that at all. Yeah, I missed that shot, and we lost the challenge, and I ended up getting eliminated. I went home to Indiana, and I could have kept going with my boring life, in the suburbs, selling insurance. But I didn’t. I think that miss had something to do with it. I don’t particularly enjoy failing at stuff (who does) and knowing that I’d missed a difficult but makeable shot lit a fire inside me that hadn’t burned in a long time. So when the show came out months later, I had a shot at the brass ring. I went for it.

I’d started th

There is much to hate about the 1911 as it exists in the market today. Shoddy materials, poor quality control, incompetent assembly…it’s all pretty easy to find if you look at enough pistols. If, however, you look beyond the modern marketplace’s perversions at what the 1911 is really supposed to be, there’s quite a lot to love.

People don’t seem to grasp that the 1911 comes from a completely different era of manufacturing. Try this: Name 5 current products off the top of your head that are made of high grade steel parts, hand fitted into an assembled product by people who have decades of experience building them. Yet that’s how you manufactured things at the turn of the 20th century. They didn’t have injection molded plastics. In the 1880′s cast aluminum had the same value as silver because the tech necessary to produce en masse was still being developed. The 1911 is a product of an era where anything durable was made by forging big chunks of steel, beating them into the rough shapes you needed with enormous hydraulic presses and then carefully whittling away at the forging with a series of ever more precise machines until you had the shapes you needed. Then skilled assemblers took all the parts and worked them over with a file to make them all fit toget

Here’s the 90 Second Gun Review for the Lionheart LH9, one of the most interesting new guns to hit the scene recently!

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I hate dry fire. It’s boring, repetitive, and I really don’t enjoy doing it. That’s a big part of why I don’t dry fire as much as I should, because it’s just not fun. I had a short conversation recently with OrigamiAK, the King of All Junk Carry and Wizard of Oregon about dry fire, and how he’s come to enjoy it. He sees it as part of the challenge of getting a good hit in live fire, and for him that drives him to dry fire more. The other day, I was doing something I enjoy, and while resting between sets I picked up my gun and did a little dry fire. As it turns out, if I introduce push-ups into the mix, I like dry fire a lot more.

Right now, I’m on my “in-season/road friendly” training plan, because I’m at the point of the year where regularly finding a gym can be problematic. So workouts are as simple as I can make them – focusing on push-ups, pull-ups, squats, and running. These are things that I can do in pretty much any gym or hotel room. Yesterday, I started mixing dry fire into the equation. Resting between sets up to 90 seconds gives me ample time to put on my C

While working on my interior design degree I saw a lot of unrealistic projects. Often, students who attempted to create something utterly original, forgot about things like gravity and good taste. My perusuit of an education in an applied design (instead of a major like painting or sculpture), was specifically chosen to avoid such work.
Outside the box designs are impressive because they acknowledge and respect the definition of a box. That begin said, it was this time last year that I was sent an image of the AR-15 pistol Brace from Sig Sauer. It came with no explanation, branding, not even a title, and my initial reaction was, “Great! Now all the tacticool fools, can play Robocop on the weekends.” Until I was told that the design was created for use by the disabled I continued to be bothered by it. It seemed like an unneccisary act of defiance aimed at the ATF.

I am all for designs that offer freedom to those who are differently able. In interior design we had and entire class dedicated to learning to create spaces that follow rules that allowed those folks to

Maggie Reese, now of Team Colt rocking the Barricade at the 2013 Bianchi Cup.

Guns come and go. Through most gun owner’s lives, they’ll own tons of guns. Some they’ll keep, some they won’t, and some they’ll regret selling. Sure, we all have our favorites, but there are few guns that every gun owner should own at least once. It doesn’t matter if you keep them or sell them, just to have owned them is special in itself.

1. A Colt 1911
1911s are not created equal. You can buy a cheap, off-brand 1911 for $500 and you will get 500 dollars worth of 1911. That’s not very much. But the real 1911 experience, to actually own a part of the legacy that made the 1911, that can only be had when you own a 1911 with a prancing pony logo and the word “Colt” stamped on the slide. Preferably a Series 70.

2. A Ruger Vaquero
Why a Ruger and not the classic example? Because a classic SAA is ridiculously expensive, and the Vaquero is beautiful, shootable, and excellent in every way. It gives all the sensation of the classic single action six-shooter w

Yesterday in the Space Gun Showdown the Beretta Cx4 Storm edged out the FN P90 as the more practical choice in the real world. I always thought it was amusing watching BSG that their guns of choice for shooting 8 foot tall killer robots were 5.7 pistols with underbarrel “grenade” launchers, and a pistol caliber carbine. I suppose that’s why they call it “fiction” though.

After reviewing a number of laser training systems, I now have the pleasure of testing Next Level Training’s SIRT Pro Training Pistol. I got a few minutes with this tool at SHOTShow 2014, and was very impressed with the realism of the product. The SIRT Pro is shaped just like a Glock 17. The slide is metal and the frame plastic, just like the real thing. Even the weight is similar and it has a detachable weighted magazine. The SIRT has two built-in lasers. The laser that comes from within the muzzel is green and appears when the trigger is fully depressed. A red laser appears from just below the muzzel and is activated anytime the trigger is touched. It is called the “trigger prep laser”. A small switch on the top of the slide allows the user to turn the trigger prep laser on or off. These are the only function options the SIRT offers. Why would you want the trigger prep laser on or off? Well, if you want to see the difference in the movement of the gun from the beginning to end of your trigger press, the first light ca

The FN PS90 is a thoroughly modern gun in every way. This photo came about because I thought it made a great contrast with JoAnn (of GunUp the Magazine) and her retro outfit.

After seven months of working exclusively with wheelguns, it’s time to get serious with semi-auto pistols again. One of the most important pistol skills for competition shooters in the Production and Single Stack divisions is the reload. An average USPSA stage will have 2-4 reloads, IDPA stages will usually have at least one. My reload technique has evolved over time, today we’re looking at the “workspace” reload.

For novice shooters, your “workspace” is the area directly in front of your face – it’s the stuff you can see without moving your head up or down. Keeping the gun “up in your workspace” is considered an advantage by some tactical trainers so that you can keep your eyes downrange even while looking the magazine home into the gun. Here’s a pretty good photo of me reloading in my workspace.

I got pretty good at reloading up high like that, and could consistently stick reloads around 1 second from an open mag pouch. The advantage to reloading up high like that is that you don’t have to look down – even if you take