Innholdsfortegnelse for Volume 76, Issue 10 i Firearms News

It has only been relatively recently that you’ve seen Glock “clones” on the market, simply because Glock’s patent had not expired, and they showed a willingness if not an eagerness to send “Cease and Desist” letters threatening lawsuits to anyone who produced any product which even remotely resembled a Glock, whether it was a toy or airsoft gun. When it comes to innovation, Glock has been their own worst enemy. Their pistol is “perfection,” after all, and that’s not just a slogan, a lot of people at the company (including those at the very top) believe it, which was why for years in the Glock Annual magazine you couldn’t find photos of any pistols which even sported aftermarket sights, much less the custom triggers, grip mods, etc. that were becoming…

It is a bit hard to believe that Springfield Armory unveiled the Hellcat series just back in September of 2019. Back then, things looked pretty darned good. The economy was pumping, the election projections looked good, ammo was available, and Bernie Sanders continued to beclown himself in public. Then came Covid. During all this time, Springfield has brightened the news with one new Hellcat after another, making the blursday schedule much better than it could have been. And here we are, with another Hellcat, and I’ve got to say this one is one I’ve been looking forward to, the Hellcat Pro. The Pro (can we just make things easier?) has all the goodness of the other Hellcats we’ve seen. The Pro has the same cold hammer forged barrel, rifled, chambered,…

If you vacuum up brass at the gun club (and serious shooters often do) you have to sort and do a proper job of resizing. And even then, some rounds will be, shall we say, dodgy. The problem usually comes with some other shooter who has a too-large chamber (“make it reliable” or “works even when dirty” or some such brain-dead alleged reason) and the resulting brass can be expanded too much. Or, they are loading their own, they think the reloading data is deliberately low, to steal fps from them (it isn’t, don’t be an idiot) and when you go to fire such a round, it wedges in your (properly-sized) chamber. How to deal with this? A round-checker. This is a block machined to have a minimum-dimension chamber or…

Now, it may come as a bit of surprise to those readers who are not familiar with my earlier scribblings on small arms but, over the past two centuries, the French have been responsible for some of the most important advances in military small arms. The Minié ball, pinfire cartridge and rimfire ignition were all invented by persons of the Gallic race. France’s navy was the first organization to adopt a cartridge firing revolver, the Modéle 1858 Lefaucheux, while their army’s Fusil Modèle 1866 Chassepot was a vast improvement over the famous German Dreyse Needle Rifle. It is also a little-known fact that they adopted a repeating rifle, the Fusil d’Marine Modèle 1878 Kropatschek, six years before the Germans took the Infanterie-Gewehr M.71/84 Mauser into service. Perhaps their most notable…

What if you are a fan of a red-dot that is not a Springfield sight? (These things happen.) Well, you can use an adapter plate from EGW (EGWGuns.com), and mount your other-brand red-dot sight to your Hellcat Pro. A quick check of their catalog shows me a slew of adapter plates, and even some that are meant for pistols that do not have the slide machined for a red-dot mount. That’s one of the things that we all love about America (and apparently, that some people hate) not only can you buy the pistol of your choice, but you can match it up with the red-dot optic of your choice. Even if you are not a fan of red-dot optics, you’ve got to love that kind of customer-centric approach.…

It’s hard for me to believe it’s been almost 24 years since Rex Applegate passed away. One of the modern masters of close combat, Col. Rex’s influence is still felt today in tactical use of the blade and handgun. I have fond memories of my wide-ranging conversations with him. Often, Col. Rex would settle down in his gunroom between 9 and 10 PM Pacific Coast time and call me to discuss whatever topic he was immersed in at the time. As I lived in the Midwest those calls often woke me around midnight. No matter how sleepy I was, however, I always looked forward to those calls. One call that I still remember was because the Col. wanted to tap my knowledge of French police units. He was especially curious…

One of the bedrock laws of Thermodynamics boils down to “you can’t get something for nothing.” Everything costs. So, the really compact Hellcat Pro magazine, that holds fifteen rounds? What does it cost? Loading it. That’s what. When I first opened the box, I noticed the inclusion of a magazine loading tool. Oh, OK, they toss that in, just in case. No big deal.” No, big deal. The Hellcat Pro magazine starts out like others, just a bit more oomph perhaps to get the rounds in. But once you get past eight or so, you really need the loading tool. And once you get past ten, you aren’t getting another round in there until you dig the tool out of the box and start using it. When I go to…

In a previous Firearm News article, I opined that the pump action shotgun was the most “American” of all firearms. Well, perhaps I should have said it was the most American of all “shotguns?” Because in the public mind the position as the most iconic American firearm is the lever action rifle. Winchester Repeating Arms Company (a subsidiary of Browning) proudly, and to a large degree justifiably, refers to their lever action rifles as the “Gun that won the West.” While the Sharps, Spencer, Marlin, Burgess and Remington were all present on the frontier, there is little argument that the various Winchesters were the most popular rifles then available. Reliable, accurate, fast firing, with high-capacity magazines (sounds a lot like a “modern sporting rifle” doesn’t it? But let’s not get…

While the AR-15 is by far and away the most popular box-magazine-fed semi-auto rifle in America, we have always had alternatives. Thanks to a decade of panic buying everyone and their brother and their brother’s cousin and their brother’s cousin’s mother have bought one or three or seven ARs, and the sales numbers would seem to indicate that everybody is AR’ed out. Which, ironically, has led to a renewed interest in non-AR designs. Case in point: the CZ Bren 2 Ms. Currently CZ-USA is importing six different versions of the Bren from the Czech Republic, all pistols. If you like the 7.62x39mm cartridge you can have it in a 14-, 11-, or 9-inch barreled pistol, and if you prefer the 5.56x45mm it’s available in a 14-, 11-, or 8-inch barreled…