Innholdsfortegnelse for Volume 71, Issue 7 i Firearms News

As I write, it is exactly one month past the Presidential election. Sales of CCW-type handguns have remained steady (Black Friday NICS checks broke another record), but sales of black rifles are slumping. I suspect this is because just about everybody who wanted to buy an AR-15 has pretty much done so, with the rush starting just after the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012. If I am right, it will be a great disappointment to a couple large manufacturers who have just introduced ARs of their own. Sales of AR-15 accessories, however, have never been stronger. This only makes sense, as there are more ARs in private hands than ever before. And the great thing about the AR-15 envelope is that it is so easily modified. Someone of little…

Even 125 years ago, ballisticians understood the advantages of 6.5mm bullets. Cartridges in that caliber were adopted by Italy (1891), The Netherlands (1892), Sweden (1894), Japan (1897), Greece (1903) and Portugal (1904). Even with the powders and metallurgy available at the time, the long, thin bullet of a 6.5mm cartridge offered high ballistic coefficients and sectional density that let it punch well above its weight. Those 6.5mm military rounds faded away after World War I, but the driver there was the need for larger calibers in heavy machine guns. So you saw Italy adopt the 7.35mm, Japan the 7.7mm and Portugal the 7.92mm. Sweden retained its 6.5mm rifles, but adopted a separate 8x63mm cartridge for machine guns. Since suitability for belt-feds is of only theoretical importance to most of us,…

Small, crowded, with limited land suitable for agriculture and meager resources, the island nation of Japan had long coveted the territory and natural resources of the Asian mainland. In the late 19th century, it established a protectorate over Korea, which was annexed outright in 1919. After victory in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), Japan obtained the Kwantung Lease Territory in China and the strategically important South Manchurian Railway. To protect the region, a garrison of regular Japanese army troops was established in 1906 that was referred to, after 1919, as the Kanto-gun (Kanto Army).1 The Kanto-gun was a stronghold of the radical “Imperial Way Faction” that advocated political change in Japan to bring about a society and the economy along fascist lines and a more aggressive, expansionist foreign policy regarding the…

It was wet, the range was a sea of mud and a hurricane was closing in. None of that mattered, though. We had one of Wolf Performance Arms’ (WPA) new Gas Piston A1 upper receivers mounted onto a selective fire lower and a stack of loaded magazines. Let the foul weather come, there was fun to be had! Two well-known digital bloggers, Nick Chen and Jim Grant, were busy filming full automatic mag dumps while I watched how Wolf ’s new 5.56x45mm piston upper functioned. Its cyclic rate was rock steady as brass streamed from its ejection port. Muzzle rise seemed insignificant. When it was my turn behind the gun, it was already smoking from the abuse heaped upon it. Even so, it continued to run flawlessly on full automatic…