Archive for Ransom Rest

Ransom Rest

The late Chuck Ransom was a very accomplished man. At various times, he was a U.S. Marine, firefighter, machine shop foreman, gunsmith, competitive shooter and inventor. At all times, he was a decent man and one of my best friends. I remember him for a lot of good times, but the world remembers him for a remarkable device called the Ransom Rest, a mechanical device that permits a scientifically oriented shooter to evaluate a pistol and/or the ammunition it is firing. The rest consists of a cast-steel base that the shooter attaches to a solid bench or pedestal and a movable rocker arm that is held in close contact to the base by a powerful spring. A handgun can be placed in the forward end of the rocker arm and held there in rubber-faced “inserts” made to the exact shape of the gun's butt. Built in this fashion, there was no possibility of marring the firearm.

April 20, 2012

The Measure of Accuracy

I stumbled onto a new website not long ago. The author was doing a pretty good job of evaluating the usefulness of a number of handguns that appealed to him. With an open-mind approach, he was shooting the subject pistols and revolvers in a number of different exercises, including accuracy at 25 yards and controlled pairs at 7 yards. Since I have been doing pretty much the same thing for more than 25 years, I appreciate the effort that goes into doing this, but I sometimes wonder about the precision of the information I have developed and reported over the years.

May 03, 2011