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Sighting in a rifle is an important thing to do if you want your rifle to be dead on when taking a shot. Which brings us to the Carlos Hathcock way of sighting in a rifle. For those that don’t know who Carlos Hathcock is, he was a United States Marine Corps (USMC) sniper with a service record of 93 confirmed kills. What many people don’t realize is that the Unertl scope back in the day doesn’t have glass amplification. There also isn’t any internal adjustments to zero. The scope adjusts with turrets integral to the rear scope mount, and...

Small hideout guns tend to be small caliber and that means ineffectual stoppers. The current crop of ultra-light polymer-framed .32s and .380s with double action only trigger mechanisms are also very hard to hit anything with. There is a more effective alternative available. American Derringer has beefed up the traditional Remington Double Derringer to .45 Colt caliber and it also will chamber the 2½-inch .410 shotgun shells. The .45 Colt is a one-shot stopper with a hit to the vitals, and you have two shots. It is a close range weapon, but then most gunfights are also close range and...

A knife is a tool, and you must choose the correct one for each specific job. While you can dig a hole with a spoon, a shovel works a lot better, and the same goes with knives. Also, I don't jump out of helicopters with a tactical knife clenched in my teeth to cut off the heads of the bad guys. I just like to hunt and fish, and gut, skin and cut up what I kill, so my advice comes from that perspective. - Just because you skinned your first bear with a certain knife doesn’t automatically mean that...

In the Land of the Midnight Sun, those who traverse the Last Frontier must choose to carry or not carry, and they must choose wisely. What are big bear guns that you would carry in Bear country? Here’s the short list with the full story below. Remington 870Mossberg ScorpionWinchester Defender SXPBenelli Nova.375 H&H.375 RugerMossberg PatriotCZ-USA .375 H&H As I coast into what may be my sunset years, I have come to realize there are two kinds of people in this world. Some of us believe there are things out there that will hurt or kill you, and there are some...

The 19th century's legendary Colt Single Action Army Revolver rides on in the 21st. Why would anyone today want to stake their life on a gun with a 146-year-old design and a 183-year-old lock work design? Well, there are good reasons, such as power and ease of hitting with the best pointing and fastest revolver ever made. I’m talking about Colt’s legendary M1873 Single Action Army .45 revolver. Its .45 Colt cartridge was designed to put down a cavalry horse at 100 yards with one shot. The original load was a 250-grain bullet over 40 grains of black powder that...

Is your Shotgun ready? Like many of you, I am much better at just doing stuff than getting ready for it. I guess it’s all about being prepared, and I was never the sharpest Boy Scout in the troop, or something like that. But some things are too important to not prepare for. Depending on what and where you hunt with your scattergun, your season is either coming up fast, or is already here. September is often the last call for getting shotguns and other paraphernalia ready, so let’s talk about what you need to do to get out there...

The Little Badger's overall design principal is minimalistic. The Chiappa engineers gave the little gun everything it needs. I first encountered the Chiappa Little Badger single-shot, I pegged it as a survival rifle. It comes in basic black, either in 22LR or 22WMR, both of which are fine for small game. With an overall length of 31 inches, it is already small, but it also folds over and onto itself, creating an extremely compact triangle about 16.5 inches tall and 8 inches across the base. It weighs less than 3 pounds, making it only slightly heavier than large center-fire...

Handheld Armor Has Come A Long Way Since Roman Times - Turn on the 6 o’clock news, and eventually you’ll see a "bulletproof" shield in use. They're standard equipment for law enforcement entry teams, but thanks to Sandy Hook, civilian-market shields now include everything from bulletproof clipboards and backpacks to full-on police-style shields. School districts in a number of states have started working shields disguised as whiteboards into their "lockdown” strategies. "For the past 15 years, most of what we've done is for the military," says Emily Heinauer with Hardwire LLC (hardwirellc.com). We armored the sides of many of the...

Silencerco aims to Upend thoughts on Suppressors - Guns have been around in one form or another for 800 years. Much has changed, but the firearms industry cannot be accused of being on the leading edge of technology. The 1911 handgun is still widely used and adored, as is the AR-15. The 1911 by its name alone tells you that it has passed the century mark, and the AR-15 is more than 50 years old. These are just two examples of the antiquated technology employed by most firearms industry manufacturers; but not all of them. THE BEGINNING What happens when...

Volquartsen's .22LR Featherweight - The original function of the basic Ruger 10-22 was reliable shooting with passable accuracy. Over time more specialized models appeared, such as heavy-barreled target versions for utmost accuracy, and lightweight take-down designs for portability. Gunmaker Scott Volquartsen’s genius was to find a way to combine light weight with high accuracy. His UltraLite .22 is a featherweight even by rimfire standards, with the barreled action massing under 2.5 pounds, and the lightest of the stocks adding less than a pound to that. The lighter weight is mainly attributed to the materials used for the barrel: a carbon-fiber...

From his roots in the Green Berets, Larry Vickers has spent a lifetime training civilians and law enforcement alike for the rigors of real-world threats. Internet videos have launched numerous people into stardom, many for doing silly and stupid tricks while inebriated. When I need a good laugh at someone elseÂ’s expense, I go to the internet and look for the latest rube who has skirted death and videoed it. But the internet has also introduced some interesting people who we would have otherwise never known about. Larry Vickers is one of these people. By now, most people in the...

The Savage 220Y And The Winchester SX3 Provide Accuracy And Power Where Rifled Shotguns Are Needed Or Required In modern America, rifled shotguns are hybrid creatures spawned mainly by regulatory compliance. Several states require them for deer hunting, with the justifications ranging from reduced range for densely populated areas to deliberately limited effectiveness to give deer a fighting chance. Their technical provenance, however, goes back quite a bit further. The first bolt-action rifle adopted by Prussia in late 1840s, the Dreyse "needle gu", used projectiles somewhere between 16 gauge and 20 gauge – a 1-ounce bullet riding a paper sabot...

Despite The Rise Of The 6.5, The 7mm Remains America's Favorite Metric Hunting Cartridge - It's hard to pick up a shooting magazine or wander through a large gun store without coming face to face with one of the myriad of popular 6.5 cartridges. Some, like the 6.5 Grendel, 26 Nosler and 6.5 Creedmoor are relatively new. Others, like the 6.5×55 Swedish Mauser, are practically historic. But the 6.5s are trending right now in every platform for hunting and competitive shooting. I won't take anything away from the 6.5s. They're versatile cartridges that are accurate out to long range. But...

Our man with the black powder on his hands tests loads for the 'new' .50-95 1876 Winchester manufactured by Uberti. One big difference between the old and new .50-95-caliber rifles is that the original Winchesters from 1879 had a rate of twist in their barrels of one turn in 60 inches. That was for the very short 300- or 312-grain .50-caliber bullets. Today’s copies of those guns, namely the Uberti version of the old Winchester Model 1876, have barrels with one turn in 48 inches. That simply means the new .50-95s will perform with slightly heavier bullets. When it was...

What are the merits of these two major types of rifle actions? There are many choices when it comes to selecting a long gun for multiple uses. Many of the questions and inquiries are from preppers, and survivalists that are gun users attempting to buy a firearm(s) that can yield effective results for many applications, including home defense, ranch, farm or homestead protection, as well as hunting for food and predator control. That is a pretty tall order for sure. After much thought, counseling, and work in the gun related industry these past 40 plus years, the basic conclusion I...

In the plinking and precision long range world we all like to talk about which gun or caliber is better than the other. This goes the same in the hunting world as well. Something that hunters and semi-seasoned hunters talk about is the best or versatile deer rifle/caliber. For the non-hunters most will only think of the .30-06 or .308. All the old favorites are normally there, like the classic Marlin, Remington and Ruger rifles. They go back and forth on what’s better between a .270 Winchester, a 308 Winchester and a 30-06 Springfield. But, some experienced hunters will tell...

It may be true this pistol was a piece of junk. But for its size - only 5 inches long & weighing a pound, this single-shot pistol was conceived as an instrument of chaos in the darkest times of World War II. THE FP-45 PISTOL was inexpensive by design. Constructed mostly of welded, stamped sheet metal parts with a die-cast zinc cocking piece, each gun cost the federal government a bit over $2, boxed for delivery with 10 rounds of .45 ACP ammunition. Only 5 inches long and weighing a pound, this single-shot pistol was conceived as an instrument of...

What's feared more than a Sniper Lurking in the Darkness? A sniper that shoots an exploding bullet, sounds far fetched out of a James Bond movie. Exploding rounds have been around since World War II. The Germans made an 8mm rifle ammunition which exploded upon impact. Which originally was design to help zero machine guns on an aircraft or as a replacement to tracer rounds out of a belt-fed so that you are making a bi-directional identifier from where you’re firing from. Though the round was banned by the Hague Convention this didn’t stop the usage of it. During World...

Guns are much more than guns to die-hard hunting folks. Sometimes they help define the love of a family as grandfather passes their guns from one generation to the next. And, more often than not, the gun that is cherished the most as a symbol of tradition and collective wisdom is the "humble deer rifle". The following hunting rifles are no longer in production yet still find their way to the the hands of hunters who value both tradition and well-design sporting arms. Maybe this is what the younger generation rifle lacks. Savage 99 Savage’s Model 99, preceded by the...

Conversion kit unit that gives CZ-75 owner two guns in one. While there are many dedicated .22 LR pistols on the market, one of the best for everyday use is not a pistol in the pure sense, but instead is a conversion kit for the popular CZ-75 from the Czech Republic. And although this is not a new product, it remains one of the best of its kind on the market. The CZ-75 Kadet (and the more recent Kadet II) .22 LR conversion kit is a CZ factory-made unit that allows a shooter to quickly and easily convert a CZ-75...