Innholdsfortegnelse for Volume 71, Issue 5 i Firearms News

1980 was a leap year that began on a Tuesday. American hostages were being held captive in Iran, Magic Johnson was a rookie in the NBA, and CNN launched the world’s first 24-hour news channel. In November of that year, Ronald Reagan was elected President. The subsequent decade would see the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the eventual fall of the Iron Curtain, and the dawn of the Information Age. For those of us who lived it music has gone steadily downhill since the 80s. Def Leppard, Aerosmith, Bon Jovi, Queen, and Van Halen all found their stride around that time. It was a time for big hair and music loud enough to make your ears bleed. This was, in my admittedly biased opinion, the Golden Age of Rock and Roll.…

Fall, 2008. I stood in my driveway watching a FedEx truck disappear around the corner. On board were 13 M14 National Match rifles I had shipped to Anniston Army Depot in Alabama. Our local NRA affiliate for competitions, the Pine Tree State Rifle and Pistol Ass’n, had these rifles on loan from the Army for decades to support marksmanship activities as part of a program initiated by the old Director of Civilian Marksmanship. The idea was that the rifles could be loaned to individuals to get them started in competitive shooting. New shooters participating in High Power Rifle matches for the first time often lacked a competitive rifle. Maine competitors, myself included, had campaigned these rifles in matches for many years. As the unofficial armorer for the state association, I…

People talk about the Kalashnikov series of rifles being not just simple but so agriculturally simple that even a Russian peasant can make them. After all they are nothing more than some bent sheet metal and a barrel, right? Evidently those Russian peasants are smarter than most give them credit as American companies have had a rough go at producing this 1940s Soviet design. The problems American companies have experienced should not come as any great surprise. The Soviets themselves experienced great difficulties that took years of hard work to solve when they first put the design into production. Everyone I have ever spoken to who is/was actually involved in Kalashnikov rifle production, Russian, Pole, Serb, Finn. and now American all state the rifle is much more difficult to properly…

When I began this odyssey into firearms, Ruger was the exemplar of conservative. While they were at the forefront of manufacturing technology and metallurgy, Ruger designs looked backwards. Back then, that was what a lot of shooters wanted. Now? Not so much. If, when I was first learning how to mount scopes onto M-77 hunting rifles, you had told me that there would be Ruger-branded and made ARs, polymer-framed striker-fired pistols, and sniper rifles, I’d have asked what you were drinking. Ruger suppressors? Getouttahere! And yet, here we are. It was something we could have predicted (and hey, I had) some time ago, once we realized just how many Ruger firearms came right out of the factory already threaded for suppressors. What took them so long? Ruger did their due…