Tag: Guns and such

My favorite toy

Good Riddance

The Gun Thing

Apparently, the .40 S&W cartridge is in a death spiral:

[S]ub-compact .40 S&W pistols are not very comfortable to shoot. They can generate as much as 30 percent more recoil than a 9 mm pistol, without offering that same level of increase in terminal performance. Not only are .40 S&W pistols less comfortable to shoot, they do not hold as much ammunition as a comparably sized 9 mm. The .40 S&W, which was not all that long ago the darling of law enforcement, is now falling from grace. One could argue that its time in the spotlight is over.
A substantial contribution to the .40 S&W’s decline in popularity was the announcement by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that they were returning to the 9 mm. This was shocking to folks who have followed and trusted the FBI’s work with regard to the terminal performance of handgun ammunition, especially considering that the FBI is the reason we have the .40 S&W. In case you didn’t know, after the 1986 FBI shootout in Miami, the Bureau began a search for the ultimate bullet and defensive handgun cartridge. The .40 S&W and the popular FBI guidelines for defensive handgun ammunition performance was the result of these efforts.

This is what happens when you let a government agency decide anything:  you get a compromise between two options which is somehow worse than either.  9mm Europellet:  marginal effectiveness but easy to shoot and lotsa boolets, as opposed to the .40 S&W:  not as easy to shoot, more effective than the 9mm but fewer boolets to spray around and injure/kill innocent bystanders.  (The exact same could be said for the .45 ACP, but don’t get me started.)

Simply stated:  there is no magic, do-it all cartridge because of Isaac Newton and the laws of physics, and the variety of tasks the cartridge is required to fill.  This is especially true of handgun cartridges because of the portability / concealability of the guns involved.

Also note that the rush to replace the 9mm Europellet was a result of a single incident — the 1986 Miami Shootout — and the knee-jerk panic that ensued among the Fibby top brass when faced with a pair of well-armed and -motivated mopes.  (See also the North Hollywood Bank Shootout a decade later, where law enforcement was similarly under-armed and essentially outfought for nearly an hour by another pair of choirboys.)  The Miami thing was notable for the fact that the Fibbies were using mostly handguns against rifles — never an optimal situation from a handgunner’s perspective — but instead of equipping all FBI cars with trunk guns (even M16s would have been okay), the idiots decided instead to change the handgun cartridge to a more powerful — and at the time, nonexistent — cartridge.  (Couldn’t go back to the .45 ACP or .357 Mag because that would have been tantamount to admitting that they fucked up in the first place by going to the wussy Europellet so as to make their handguns more palatable to the Bureau’s Dickless Traceys a.k.a. female agents.)

Speaking personally, I can’t say I’m too sad about the .40 S&W situation because I never could shoot the stupid thing worth a damn.  (At the time, I considered getting a Browning High Power in .40 S&W, but when I discovered that no matter what gun I used — Beretta 92F, Glock or Kahr — I couldn’t get all the boolets into the good part of a silhouette, I changed my mind.)  I found the hard snap  of the .40’s recoil less manageable than the push  of the .45 ACP (the 9mm barely recoils at all by comparison).

A couple of days ago I visited a new Scheels store just down the road from the range, and out of curiosity browsed in the Ammo section.  Amongst all the bare shelves, the most heavily-stocked items in the handgun section were .460 S&W (another dud) and the .40 S&W, which is I guess the only upside for you if you have a gun thus chambered.

(I also saw a gently-used Winchester 94 in .32 Win Special, and if I’d had a spare grand in my pocket, it would have come home with me.  But let’s not go there.)

My suggestion to the Fibbies would be to let agents carry either .45 ACP, .357 Mag or 9mm guns, with a “minimum ammo carry” of, say, thirty rounds. I know:  what if there’s another Miami shootout?  Two words: trunk rifles.

Anyway, the chicks and girlymen would probably end up with 9mm pieces and two 15-round mags, while the 1911 guys would have four mags and the revolver guys five speedloaders.  I doubt that the goblins would know the difference.

But that would make way too much sense for a Gummint agency which insists on caliber uniformity, for no good reason.  Idiots.

Range Report: Savage 94F (.22LR) & Firefield 1×22 Impulse

Gun/Ammo Tests, The Gun Thing

Having established that Ye Olde Eyes were no longer up to the task of using a rifle’s iron sights to actually hit anything, I decided to quit fooling myself and accept that Time Marches On, and leaves one’s eyesight in the rearview mirror.

I had an old Firefield 1×22 red-dot scope lying around, so I mounted it onto the Savage 94F wot my kids gave me for the latest birthday, thus:

…and headed off to the range.  I decided to try the Aguila ammo this time:

(Note the price… ugh.)

I first messed around at the pistol range, simply to get the bullets “on paper”, then moved to the rifle range, which can accommodate things like rests and such to get the job done properly.

Now the Firefield, as its description indicates, has 1x (i.e. no) magnification (which really doesn’t help Men Of Failing Eyesight such as myself), so I wasn’t sure just how precisely I would be able to zero the thing.  Nevertheless, I persevered.  In order of shooting, 25 yards at 3″ targets:

Played around a bit (two 5-round strings):

Then I got a little more serious, shooting the smaller 2″ targets at 15 yards (because at 25 yards, the red dot was almost larger than the 2″ target):

But try as I may, I couldn’t get groups to tighten up any more than that — always four decent rounds and a flyer.  So I started to get irritated, and got really serious — except that I was getting worse, not better:

I gave up, and did two “torture tests” — rapid fire, one shot per 1″ target, then repeated the exercise in the same order:

I’ve done better with a damn pistol, shooting offhand.  I was getting seriously angry at myself.

I was done for the day but I had five rounds left over, and I hate having loose rounds rattling around in the gun bag — you know what’s coming, right?

I loaded them up, put one round into some white space on the target, then shot off the last four as quickly as I could pull the trigger, using only the first bullet-hole as the aiming point:

Okay, I have to admit that I felt a lot better after that.

Afterthought:  I forgot to mention that this Aguila variant is consistently accurate in pretty much all my rimfire guns.  All flyers are therefore very definitely the result of “operator error”…

Range Report – UK Edition

Friends and Family, Hunting, The Gun Thing

Mr. FM was engaged in ritual slaughter at one of his estates (in Devon, I think) over the past weekend:

…which is all well and good, but I have two serious issues with this:

1) According to the Daily Mail, Britishland is supposed to be suffering near-Arctic conditions at the moment:

…but clearly they’ve been lying again, or else Teh Weather doesn’t have the necessary permits to wander onto Mr. FM’s properties.

2) I wasn’t there to join in the festivities.

[exit, eating his liver ]

Dept. Of Righteous Shootings

Righteous Shootings

So you and three of your compadres / homeboys / members of the choir decide to get together for a little undocumented property redistribution.  What happens next?

Hey, it’s Louisiana, baby:

A homeowner in Lacombe, Louisiana, shot and killed two alleged intruders Tuesday morning and sent two others to the hospital with gunshot wounds.

While some may think that a 50% kill rate is a little low, I think that putting all four down — especially during what seems to have been a gun battle — is quite laudable.  Note that the two who didn’t snuff it will now face the death penalty anyway, so there’s that.

Damn… this ammo shortage may force me to use my new Savage .22 rifle to celebrate the Happy Dance, instead of the customary AK-47.

These are tough times we live in.  A little less tough than if we were burglars in Lacombe LA, though.

Gratuitous Gun Pic: Carcano Model 91TS (6.5x52mm)

Gratuitous Gun Pics, The Gun Thing

While browsing through Collectors recently, I came upon this old girl:

I have often sung the praises of the Mosin-Nagant M44 as a short and handy carbine, but I have to say, the Carcano (often incorrectly called the Mannlicher-Carcano) Model 91TS as pictured would do pretty well in the same role.  I’ve shot quite a few in my time — one even back in South Africa — and what impressed me most is the pure handiness of the carbine.  One of the common complaints about battlefield carbines is their recoil — less mass means more recoil, because Sir Isaac Newton will not be denied — but the M91’s little 6.5x52mm cartridge is an absolute gem, and I have no idea why the Italian Army replaced it with the larger (and not much more effective) 7.35x51mm cartridge in the reworked Model 38.  (Maybe they thought that size mattered.)

Anyway, that long, thin 156gr boolet means excellent sectional density and therefore quite adequate penetration on humans:

…but as with all old cartridges, there’s always that availability problem.  And with the state the ammo industry is in now, it’s even more scarce than usual.  Graf & Sons, normally my go-to guys when it comes to old military ammo, doesn’t have any in stock (surprise, surprise) and even when they do, it runs about $2 per trigger pull — unless you go with the lighter Prvi Partizan variant at a very reasonable $0.83 per round.

Had I known then what I know now (back in the early- to mid-2000s a.k.a. The Happy Times), I’d have snapped up a decent M91 carbine for about $95, which is about what they cost back then compared to over $400 nowadays, and a few hundred rounds of ammo for less than half of what it costs now.

But that hindsight is a bugger, innit?  Here’s the much-longer M91 rifle, just for comparison’s sake: