Gun Nuts

When I built my tactical turquoise AR-15 last year, I had no idea that this year I would be preparing to use it for a 3gun competition. What I built is a fun, pretty gun, that is nice and light and easy for a beginner to pick up and try out. However, I have a feeling some changes should be made.

Currently, my AR has a 14.5″ gov’t profile barrel with a 2″ compensator pinned to it. The gas system is mid-length as is the free floating hand guard. I installed very little Picatinny, but now have backup front and rear, flip up sights and a tiny Burris red dot attacked to the upper reciever. The lower is billet with a deluxe LWRC kit installed. The Ergo grip and Mission First Tactical stock are still my favorites. I doubt those need changing, but I’m questioning almost everything else.

So what do you think? I’ve been told that a competition trigger is a must. What weight would you consider “best” and let’s talk “favorite” brands. I am questioning the need for a longer heavier barrel and a serious muzzle device. This would probably mean the need for a

Yes, I know the Ruger is a modern gun. I don’t have any vintange Colt SAAs lying around the office, sadly.

I’m a fairly accurate shooter. Thanks to my introduction to shooting coming from the traditional bullseye sports, I can shoot pretty consistent groups on the reg, which is a valuable skill to have when I’m testing and evaluating guns. It’s also a huge mental crutch for me, because it’s my default setting for when I can’t think of anything better to practice.

See, if I’m actually practicing, I need to be practicing the things that I suck at, not the stuff I’m already good at. Spending my practice sessions shooting tight groups in controlled slow fire doesn’t really make me better at anything other than shooting tight groups in controlled slow fire. Which is a cool skill and everything, but it’s not really applicable to my personal shooting goals.

To really get the most out of your practice session you need to find a balance point of “doing hard stuff” and “reinforce stuff you’re good at.” I don’t believe that you should ever practice for the shooting sports with a session that does nothing but frustrate you. A bas

The other day, I wrote a post about how .22 LR is back and how people should calm down and stop panic buying every box they see. That led to a bunch of comments that all start with “well I went to Wal-Mart and they” etc.

The real idea of that post was to talk about how the price of .22 will never likely be as low as it was before the triple panics, and hopefully get people to calm down and stop buying every box of .22 they see. How silly of me. But that does bring me ’round to my main point, which is “why are so many people getting their ammo from Wal-Mart?” I understand that in some small towns Wal-Mart (or Walmart as they now prefer) is your only option. But that’s not true, because I know for a fact that if you’re on this blog telling me in comments that “Walmart is my only hope” you have access to this magnificent invention called “the internet.”

It took me mere seconds to find a 525 value pack of Federal .22 LR for

Buying guns is frequently an emotional choice, and people tend to get wrapped up in those choices. However, since here at Gun Nuts part of mission is to tell the actual truth about guns, it’s important to sometimes remind people that some guns are just better than other guns. But maybe not in the way you think…

Yes, there are the obvious “things that are better”: Glock is better than Taurus, Colt is better than Kimber, etc. But that’s not what we’re talking about here – what I’m actually talking about is letting your mission dictate your gear. For example, let’s say your mission is to become a Production Grandmaster in USPSA (a noble goal): your “best” gun won’t be the same as someone’s whose goal is kill a bear with a handgun. For example, a Glock 34 is certainly better than a Ruger Redhawk for USPSA competition, but the Redhawk is better if you’re going hiking in places with things that like to eat people. There are even situations where a Hi-Point could be the best choice. In fact, if someone is searching for a cheap pistol because they need

10 years ago, Bianchi Cup was in danger. The match had fallen from its former glory as one of the crown jewels of the shooting sports into a specialist’s match with limited participation. Now, fast forward to 2014, and the Cup is bigger and better than ever. It has resumed its place at the top of the heap of the pistol sports, with a massive prize table, cash prizes, and the sort of pageantry you would expect from a national championship. What changed?

It’s hard to say exactly what changed, but the most obvious contributing factor to the revitalization of the Cup is good leadership. The man behind the curtain is Tom Hughes, and he and his team have poured more blood, sweat, and tears into making the Cup into the pinnacle of pistol shooting championships in a few years than other organizations invest in a lifetime. I attended my very first Bianchi Cup in 2009, and in a short five years I’ve seen participation grow massively among shooters, media coverage has increased tremendously, and of course sponsorship dollars are rolling in as well.

In 2014, it’s a pretty

Things a civilized man should at all possible times. Watch, knife, and pistol.

A while back I used this space to discuss thinking critically about what we’re doing when handling a firearm, inspired by a discussion of someone who had an accidental discharge during a match. Safety is always a good topic for discussion, but a few things have happened lately that makes it timely for us to revisit the topic now. We’ll start with this:

Frequently when you see discussions of firearms safety online you’ll hear people repeat something about keeping one’s “booger hook” (finger) off the “bang switch” (trigger) and that seems to be as deep as the discussion goes. Any attempt to mention that perhaps there are more concerns than that when one is carrying a handgun with a roughly 7 pound trigger and no manual safety is usually met with dismissal. People seem immune to the idea that something other than a finger can find its way into the

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If you could have a gun that as simple as “Generic Gun, 9mm, for personal protection” it would probably be the Glock 19.

If you follow my Facebook page, you’ll know that I recently added a new member to the team. He’s a boxer/pitbull mix that we named Ruger, because that’s just a great name for a dog.

This brought up an interesting conversation on lethal force, pets, and animals. There are a lot of different directions to go with this, and we’ll probably revisit this conversation again later. There are four parts of this topic that I’ve identified:

1. Using force to defend your pet from other animals
2. Using force to defend your pet from people
3. Using force to defend yourself against someone’s animal
4. Using force to defend yourself against an animal’s owner

There are sub-tangents in those, but today I want to tackle number one and two. I’m doing this with the clear statement that I am not a lawyer, so what I want to do is have a discussion of deadly force and provide you with my opinion, based on conversations and research. Definitely not legal advice. So first we’ll look at defending your pe

A little over a year ago I wrote a post about a concealed carry pistol for which, I had fallen. The XDs 3.3 9mm was introduced at SHOTShow 2013, I shot it, and as happy as I was with my Walther PPS, I couldn’t stop thinking about how well the XDs fit. For the past year I’ve thought about buying the gun, but just couldn’t justify the expense of two concealed carry guns. Then Springfield issued a major recall on the new 9mm as well as the previous year’s release, .45ACP. Fast forward one year and I find myself buying an XDs 3.3 9mm.

It’s understandable that one might ask: Why would anyone knowingly buy a gun that had been part of a recall? But I can truely say that I have no qualms about ordering my XDs in the last weeks of the recall repair schedule. This is not to say that the recal wasn’t major. Springfield realized that there was a chance that any of their XDs 3.3 9mm or 45acp models could accidentally

Yesterday I mentioned in passing that .22 LR is hitting shelves. I had no idea that an off-hand comment would raise such an outcry, two comments on the blog, facebook messages and emails came in telling me “well I can’t get .22 LR” or “it’s still expensive” and that sort of thing.

Here’s the thing: .22 LR is available. It’s on the internet, it’s in stores, it’s out there. GunBot.Net shows loads of different .22 LR in stock at various outlets. “But Caleb, it’s more expensive than it used to be! I remember when you could get 3,000 rounds of .22 LR for three shillings and a piece of bread!” I have sour news for you, but the days of 50 round boxes of quality .22 LR for $4.99 are over and they’re not coming back.

9mm ammo is finally now starting to stabilize in price, and it’s about ~$2.00 more a box than it was before the Great Panic of 2008, the Derp Panic of 2012, and the Post-Newton Ammo Clown Show. It’s just a fact that the “new normal” of major reta

As .22 LR ammo begins to hit shelves again, it’s time to start breaking out the training pistols!

In this semi-recurring series, I will take three guns that are completely unrelated, compare meaningless statistics about them and then arbitrarily declare one a winner!

1st up: the Smith & Wesson Model 640 Pro Series

• Weight (loaded) 25 ounces
• Capacity: 5
• Caliber: .357 Magnum/.38 Special
• Lasers available: Yes (CTC LaserGrips)
• Factory Night Sights available: Yes
• Trigger pull: 12 lbs, DAO

Verdict: The perfect expression of the belt-carried J-Frame, the 640 Pro Series is what every compact defensive revolver should be.

2. Lionheart LH9

• Weight (loaded): 35.2 ounces
• Capacity: 15+1
• Caliber: 9mm
• Lasers available: Yes*
• Factory Night Sights available: Yes
• Trigger pull: 14 pounds DA, 6.5 pounds DA+, 5 pounds SA

Verdict: This South Korean import seems to be designed s

This is one of the more interesting features of the LH9, the Double Action+ system. It gives you the safety benefits of a DA trigger with the shootability of an SA trigger. I like it quite a bit.

AUSTIN, Texas – Freedom Munitions, manufactures high-quality new and remanufactured ammunition, has been named the official ammunition supplier for the 2nd Annual A Girl & A Gun Training Conference, Presented by Smith & Wesson. “A Girl & A Gun welcomes Freedom Munitions as the official ammunition supplier for the 2nd Annual A Girl & A Gun Training Conference, Presented by Smith & Wesson. With live-fire events an important part of our program, we’re pleased to work with Freedom Munitions to insure all our attendees will have the ammunition they need to fully participate in this year’s conference,” said Julianna Crowder, president of A Girl & A Gun Women’s Shooting League.

The 2nd Annual A Girl & A Gun Training Conference, Presented by Smith & Wesson, will bring together some of the top women in the shooting industry and offers participants training sessions, live-fire instruction and presentations on topics relevant to women participating in the shooting sports today. The conference takes place March 21-23 at T.I.G.E.R. Valley, the premiere training facility in Central

Shall be the rightful king of…Romania!

Pulled a brand new WASR-10 out of the box today. AK prices have finally started to fall back to the pre-panic point, as this gun is streeting for around $500. That’s actually a good deal, and puts the AK back in the “sensible purchase” category. When a new WASR was going for the same price as a decent AR15, it didn’t make any kind of sense to buy an AK, unless you just wanted to be different.

At $500, the WASR has a decent feature set. This gun has unusually nice furniture for a WASR, comes with the side-rail scope mount (that I won’t use), a slant-brake, hard-chrome lined barrel, and for giggles…a bayonet. For five hundred bucks, that’s a lot of Rifle for Glorious People’s Revolution. For 922(r) nonsense, the WASR also has a Tapco trigger and pistol grip, as well as some other parts that are installed because Rules.

The real question is “what to do with this AK?” Well, I could go one of two routes. It’s sufficiently different from the AR15 that I could just shoot the wheels off it and do all my tactical carbine training with an AK just to be different. Alternatively, I could build

I don’t normally comment on articles written elsewhere, but there’s an article on Cracked I read over the weekend that actually depressed me. It’s called 5 Manly Things That Are Going Away Forever, and it discusses how cultural changes are eliminating some of the things that are traditionally considered bastions of “manliness.”

What depressed me wasn’t that these things are going away, but rather author’s gleeful, nearly hopeful tone that they will go away. All these evil, un-PC things like loud cars, red meat, and eewwwww icky war heroes. It’s about there that you realize that the author really wants these things to go away, and though he tries to hide it behind a veil of jokes, you can really tell that he views all of these things as “bad.”

Now, we can discuss at length whether or not the author is right or not that those things are going away. I don’t necessarily think he is, but that’s not really what we’re talking about with this article, or h

This year at SHOTShow, some manufacturers were still questioning how to appeal to the “new shooter” (aka not-yet-a-gun-geek) while others were already hitting it out of the park. Enter, W by Winchester Amunition. They cought my attention at Media Day at he Range, where Rob Pincus was offering something of a Pepsi Challenge. This was a brilliant way of presenting a product that might otherwise blend into the background.

Many shooters go to the range and shoot whatever “range” ammo they have there. This is unfortunate because there are so many differences between that stuff and they self defense rounds they load into their gun as they leave the range. Nervous beginners often ask how different the experience will be if they have to pull the trigger with the good stuff. Winchester obviously heard this concern and did something about it.

“W” is a line of traing and defense ammo that has been engineered to feel exactly the same. This allows the new shooter to have one less worry on their minds. The boxes are marked with a “