Firearms and other Weapons

[Demon of Undoing]

At this point, the .45 is for old folks and people that hold a place for them. I run an XD .45, with a 13 round mag. Night sights and light, it is an offensive pistol, and I would rather clear a house with it than my AR. But the worm has turned; that stays in my duty rig. I'm of late, since getting to practice enough, taken to carrying a .25 Mauser where my wallet goes, and as always my knife. If it happens any slower or any farther away than that, I'm either leaving or have time to get in my bag of tricks. But I'm tired of toting a two pound piece and between 16-51 rounds, depending. Damn that. I keep getting reminded of the words of a scarred up old Israeli, when asked what he preferred for self defense. " Three .22's," he said, " to the tip of the nose". My brother runs a Walther .22 and agrees.

As to rifles, the AR is versatile enough to where if you want sights brought up to eye level, you can do that ( though you parallax at your peril). More than that, though, I think of it as a good balance between a specialists' weapon and a peasant tool. The versatility can't be beat, though the next step is the AR10/Sr25 level. We shall see.

Did some late spring ( this is Florida, summer is days away) rifle workups. Two new rifles, new range, new gear, old knees and back. Currently using bourbon as analgesics. But we ran a pretty good string of drills, worked out some kinks. Probably scared the hell out of some people out on the C25 canal, hanging out on their party barges. Three round solutions, one mag to a setup, a few mags and pistol to boot. But WTH, it's Florida. Guns. Go figure.

Sparky

Tomorrow at the office, I'll get to work on that. God knows I won't be wandering around, but instead chained to my desk. I feel like cow bubblegum.

[Mr. Perfect]

Well my carry gun is a Kahr TP 40, and I love it. I have a couple of IWB holsters, and the Crossbreed is winning that fight. I have no problem with it, if recoil starts getting awkward with any gun you just run some rounds through the DE and it isn't a problem anymore.

As for the AR, my two complaints with it are 1) the buffer tube, when you have to raise an ACOG a full inch it just starts looking and feeling weird 2) It jams. Mine jams, at the range any gun that jams is an AR. Sampling error perhaps, but. Having said that, I will admit that of all my guns it gets shot the most, it is just darn handy. Small, easy to handle, low recoil, and yes modular it gets used a lot. It's just not the gun I would necessarily reach for in real life. As for the modularity, I have come to see that as a shaky argument, any gun can benefit from that if the market is there to support it. What DS Arms is doing with the FAL is really cool for example, there isn't hardly anything you can do to an AR you can't do to their FALs.

But enough griping.

[Antipatros]

No concern, I am also in the minority in my opposition to the AR. I have grudgingly come to accept a role for the 223/light rifle, but the AR is never going to do it for me.

I think 5.56mm is the wrong calibre for a military rifle, but the Armalite family are very practical weapons, and as comfortable to hold as a buxom redhead.

My thought when watching the FAL video was that burying it or throwing it in a puddle is all very well if one maintains it to NATO standards. It didn;t work out so well in the field for the Argies.

Still, if a particular calibre and rifle meets your needs, more power to you.

[Demon of Undoing]

Well my carry gun is a Kahr TP 40, and I love it. I have a couple of IWB holsters, and the Crossbreed is winning that fight. I have no problem with it, if recoil starts getting awkward with any gun you just run some rounds through the DE and it isn't a problem anymore.

As for the AR, my two complaints with it are 1) the buffer tube, when you have to raise an ACOG a full inch it just starts looking and feeling weird 2) It jams. Mine jams, at the range any gun that jams is an AR. Sampling error perhaps, but. Having said that, I will admit that of all my guns it gets shot the most, it is just darn handy. Small, easy to handle, low recoil, and yes modular it gets used a lot. It's just not the gun I would necessarily reach for in real life. As for the modularity, I have come to see that as a shaky argument, any gun can benefit from that if the market is there to support it. What DS Arms is doing with the FAL is really cool for example, there isn't hardly anything you can do to an AR you can't do to their FALs.

But enough griping.

I know I'm swimming against the current here, but I've never seen the AR as being a reliability issue when used properly. In my junior year of HS, I did a thesis paper defending the selection of the AR series right at the beginning of Vietnam ( I was an odd, odd child in those heady days of Madonna and Ronald Reagan). What I was contending with was this very issue, as it developed into a situation that killed too many good young men back then.

The improvements to ammunition and the rifle itself fixed that, along with proper training and maintenance gear. When my oldest brother went into the Marines in 1983, still using the A1, I expected it to present problems for him somewhere along the line, and it never happened ( well, maybe not never). When my next oldest brother went in, and by that time they were using the A2, I expected problem stories. He was in the field a bunch around the time of Desert Storm, bouncing between dust, sand, and then out of the blue, Okinawa and the Philippines. So, a pretty wide array of conditions, and he never experienced real problems, either.

This may come down to what I said to my partner yesterday as we were cleaning our stuff.

" I'm not spic 'n' spanning this thing. Get away from me with the white Q-tip trick, nobody cares if it's a bit dirty over the gas tube in the upper receiver. It touches nothing, nothing goes in there. If I wanted to clean it to a sergeant's standards, I'd have joined the Army."

My friend the former Marine: " Pfft. It wouldn't be clean even then. I've white-swabbed these things spotless with soapy water and a pair of underwear."


But intraservice rivalries aside, and even allowing for my not-quite-Paris Island cleaning regimen, I don't see it as too much of a problem, even after running the squat out of mine. Mine is an undistinguished M4gery, though I have a few touches on it. They tell me that, to be a serious operator's rifle ( and I don't know if you can really grasp the esteem in which I hold the opinion of the bulk of the gun community), it has to be of a certain few manufacturers, with this mod, and that rail, and that coating, and these pins. Damn that. I can drink water through my bolt carrier and swallow it clear. Haven't had a stoppage yet, except with new PMags that have to be push-pulled in, not slapped on the baseplate. But that was mostly operator error and new plastic,ahem, polymer.

If rifles are jamming up at a range, then something is seriously wrong. You want to talk about being overrun by Muj at 9k ft of elevation, burning 750 rounds at near cyclic rates, then yeah, I can see wanting something more like a steam locomotive. But short of that, meh. Keep a mag in, dust cover closed, and make it clean as your immortal soul.

Oh, and get a ceramic coating on the receiver. It's cheap and damn does it work.

[Demon of Undoing]

Sparky

By way of comparison, how many people do the (illegally?) armed bad guys shoot?

From wikipedia

There were 52,447 deliberate and 23,237 accidental non-fatal gunshot injuries in the United States during 2000.[4] The majority of gun-related deaths in the United States are suicides,[5] with 17,352 (55.6%) of the total 31,224 firearm-related deaths in 2007 due to suicide, while 12,632 (40.5%) were homicide deaths.[6]

And lawfully-owned firearms don't show up in those killings much.

Just all bad guys, really. I was just wondering if the sharpshooter league table went:

Without a doubt, much more unlawful killings. It's just that civilians use weapons in self defense more than police do. The DoJ stats to 2005 don't show that, and I'm trying to find the study that I saw on more civilian justified shoots, but at any rate, it has to be stipulated that we are talking about maybe <1k justifiable shoots a year. Applying that to the figure above, that leaves something close to 11k unlawful homicides.

Something stood out from the Wiki article that I think is incredibly pertinent but overlooked:

Gun-related homicide rates in the United States are twenty to thirty-five times higher than they are in countries that are economically and politically similar to it. Higher rates are found in developing countries and those with political instability.[21][25][26]

First off, the " similar" comment is Wiki bullshittery. The general consensus among criminologists is that comparing the US to other nations in terms of contributing elements is a fool's errand, it can't rationally be done. Too many differences.

However, the bolded part.

This has been my beef all along. This is what I mean.

There were at least 30,000 gangs and 800,000 gang members active across the USA in 2007,[4][5] up from 731,500 in 2002 and 750,000 in 2004.[6] By 1999, Hispanics accounted for 47% of all gang members, Blacks 34%, Whites 13%, and Asians 6%.[7]

Now, even keeping in mind that the legal apparatus has every reason to overstate what a gang member is, we have something like half a million bangers ( what we called them in my day). None of these guys are into butterfly catching. The way stats are collected, you can't say a definitive number of homicides are " gang related". However, various studies in the bigger cities ( where most violent crime per capita is centered) have shown gangs being responsible for anywhere from a third to a half or more of all violent crime reported.

So, even assuming gangs are only doing a third of it ( and in my estimation from decades of eyeball use in and out of the related zones, it's higher, but whatever), that means some ~3k a year dead in turf wars or what have you. The big cash cow and thus the point of argument in most all of these situations will wind up coming back to drugs. So basically, you have a small scale war going on, with more annual casualties afoot than we have in Afghanistan or even the big years in Iraq.

And we'll leave alone the idea that most gang neighborhoods could easily be compared to many places in the developing world. The stealth insurgency is enough. Just because it is not specifically directed at the state doesn't mean it's not happening. This is my reasoning behind the thought that, sans drug war prosecution in the inimitably American style, you'd have about ~7k homicides per year. In a nation of > 300 million, I'd say that, while even one is unacceptable, considering the other elements of the case, it's within tolerances.

Personally, I wish the law of physics were such that gunpowder were not possible. I prefer that, if you mean to kill someone, it contain the full investment of intent required in older tools. But, you can wish in one hand, and crap in the other; see which gets filled first.

[Demon of Undoing]

No concern, I am also in the minority in my opposition to the AR. I have grudgingly come to accept a role for the 223/light rifle, but the AR is never going to do it for me.

I think 5.56mm is the wrong calibre for a military rifle, but the Armalite family are very practical weapons, and as comfortable to hold as a buxom redhead.

My thought when watching the FAL video was that burying it or throwing it in a puddle is all very well if one maintains it to NATO standards. It didn;t work out so well in the field for the Argies.

Still, if a particular calibre and rifle meets your needs, more power to you.

I think it's mostly taste ( what taste is always the fun part- ever seen a Krag-Jorgensen?). Any significant rifle caliber will do for humans. Any decent hunting rifle will take enough abuse to outlast most people.

Let's face it. An infantryman isn't given a rifle and ammunition with which to dominate the battlefield. In the modern wars, that was the place of artillery. It has always taken thousands of musketballs, or ten thousand M-16 rounds ( during Vietnam) to achieve a single kill ( look at body count vs theater ammo expenditure). No. The physical point of a rifle is to have an infantryman defend himself in a truly crap position that (hopefully) only exists because there is no other option. Generally, even today, not everybody shoots all the time. The rifle is there mostly as a confidence piece. The faith imbued to it creates a small feeling of command of destiny in an environment where fate has lost all promise. Without a rifle, even a shitty one, a soldier could hardly be compelled to do the near suicidal things command will inevitably demand of him.






The aforementioned Krag-Jorgensen.

[Demon of Undoing]

This is why gun control only works so much

And if we need to, we can make ammo, too. Remember this when Skynet pops up.

Anybody want to translate relevant bits?

[Antipatros]

Language warning.

The AAC Honey Badger!
zn3KCSm3ui4

Introducing the Advanced Armament Corp. 300 AAC Blackout (300BLK). This system was developed to launch 30 caliber projectiles from the AR platform without a reduction in magazine capacity and compatible with the standard bolt.

Full power 115-125 grain ammunition matches the ballistics of the 7.62x39mm AK, and eclipses 5.56mm with much higher-mass projectiles for a more dramatic effect on the target. Or choose subsonic cartridges for optimal use with a sound suppressor - 220 grain Sierra OTM (open-tip match) bullets vastly outperforms a 9mm MP5-SD in penetration and long range accuracy.

Ammo and brass prices are low - Remington 115 grain UMC ammo is $12.99 a box MSRP - and it is not bare bones. It has waterproofed primers, crimped and cannelured open-tip match bullets, and a low-drag design.

At 300 meters, 300 BLK has 16.7% more energy than 7.62x39mm. Max effective range, using M4 military standards for hit probability, is 440 meters for a 9 inch barrel, and 460 meters for a 16 inch barrel. 300 BLK from a 9 inch barrel has the same energy at the muzzle as a 14.5 inch barrel M4, and about 5% more energy at 440 meters - even though the barrel is much shorter.

FOR MORE INFO: http://300aacblackout.com/

[Demon of Undoing]

Nice. I'd heard about it but never looked into it.

[Antipatros]

1853 Enfield load and shoot
PM-zmKYtse4

shooting civil war enfield rifle musket
tM1PS1EZ71M

Civil War Target / Sniper Enfield Rifle
yU6TjAfKVUw

[Sparky]

-uV1SbEuzFU

rTpP412fM8U

The navy of tomorrow? Railgun Dreadnaughts, escorted by Guilded Laser Cruisers?

[Mr. Perfect]

Sparky, out of curiosity (this is not a bait or a trap) have you ever fired a gun?

[Sparky]

Yes. I used to do a bit of target shooting with 22 rifles as a kid and I've fired a 303 a few times in the RAF CCF as a teenager. Haven't touched a firearm for twenty years though.

[Mr. Perfect]

303, very nice, I used to have one. Well I gifted it to a family member, so still have access. He likes them old ones.

I'm curious, are there any legal avenues for you to take up recreational shooting? How does one do that in Jolly Old England?

[Sparky]

Oh yes - it's pretty easy. There are loads of shooting clubs throughout the land - target and sport(pheasant, deer, grouse, pigeons - both feathered and clay, etc.). You can use club guns, or a landowner's guns when shooting on his land without requiring a firearms certificate, providing the club / landowner has the required certificates. Target shooting is cheap, whilst sports shooting is very expensive.

Owning your own gun is not quite so easy. You need to get a firearms certificate from the police, and you need to demonstrate you have reason to do so (.e.g hunting, target shooting but *not* home defence or the like), you have to have the approved facilities to store the guns and ammo in. People with criminal records, histories of mental illness or substance abuse and the like needn't apply. You can't own any sort of handgun, automatic or military grade weapon at all.

[Typhoon]

Project Sentry Gun

Open source.

[Demon of Undoing]

Project Sentry Gun

Open source.

This is exactly why I dropped getting into Arduino. Every single project I thought up has not just been done, but done to death. Cool for curiosity factor, but I'm a practical guy, and there are already wheels that have been invented for every application I could think of, so...

[Typhoon]

-uV1SbEuzFU

rTpP412fM8U

The navy of tomorrow? Railgun Dreadnaughts, escorted by Guilded Laser Cruisers?

That does seem to be the plan.

However, one can't help but wonder how vulnerable such a group would be to a swarm of low-cost high-speed torpedoes and [supersonic] cruise missiles.

[Mr. Perfect]

Oh yes - it's pretty easy. There are loads of shooting clubs throughout the land - target and sport(pheasant, deer, grouse, pigeons - both feathered and clay, etc.). You can use club guns, or a landowner's guns when shooting on his land without requiring a firearms certificate, providing the club / landowner has the required certificates. Target shooting is cheap, whilst sports shooting is very expensive.

Owning your own gun is not quite so easy. You need to get a firearms certificate from the police, and you need to demonstrate you have reason to do so (.e.g hunting, target shooting but *not* home defence or the like), you have to have the approved facilities to store the guns and ammo in. People with criminal records, histories of mental illness or substance abuse and the like needn't apply. You can't own any sort of handgun, automatic or military grade weapon at all.

Interesting, thank you.

Always trying to get more cultured in these sorts of things .

I saw once that John Bonham's son Jason once refused to shoot guns with Ted Nugent on the grounds that it was too "vulgar", so I am quite interested in people's attitudes and where they come from.

[Simple Minded]

Not the kind of tech savy, weaponological advice that my betters would normally post on this thread, but a great reminder that one should never discount the human factor. Tactics and creativity often compensate for a lack of hardware.

Adapt, improvise, overcome. not sure if Demon would be proud of me or ashamed of me.....


What is the smallest caliber you trust to protect yourself?
The best answer:
My personal favorite defense gun has always been a Beretta Jetfire in 22 short. I have carried it for many years including while hiking. I never leave without it in my pocket.
Of course the first rule when hiking in the wilderness is to use the "Buddy System". This it means you NEVER hike alone, you bring a friend, companion, or family member because if something happens there is someone to go get help.

I remember one time while hiking with my girlfriend in northern Alberta out of nowhere came this huge brown bear charging us and was she mad. We must have been near one of her cubs. Anyway, if I had not had my little Jetfire I would not be here today.
Just one shot to my girlfriend’s knee cap was all it took . . . . . the bear got her and I was able to escape by just walking at a brisk pace. That's one of the best pistols in my collection...

[Marcus]

My idea of fun shooting:

Hatfield.gif (115.34 KiB) Viewed 1918 times

.36 cal. Hatfield . .

[Simple Minded]

My idea of fun shooting:

Hatfield.gif

.36 cal. Hatfield . .

Marcus.....Nice...... you obviously fall into the "its not the number of shots you fire per minute that count..... its the length of your barrel" camp!

[Marcus]

Marcus.....Nice...... you obviously fall into the "its not the number of shots you fire per minute that count..... its the length of your barrel" camp!

Thanks, SM . . actually I fall into the "it's not how many, it's where" camp. Once shot the plates* down in nine seconds using a S&W .357 with an 8" barrel, fired single-action.

• *That's six, 6" steel plates @ 15 yards
  

[Demon of Undoing]

We were talking about this before, but I won't tell anybody with experience not to carry a pocket pistol. You never know who you're talking to. I know people that, if you've been shot by their .22, you probably got off lucky. I will tell a beginner or even intermediate shooter to not carry an 8- application ice pick, all day long.

And that's what it is. But one hit in the right place, and they just switch you to " off".

[Sparky]

Even if it doesn't switch you off, it must be extremely discouraging.