February 04, 2013
On Saturday night, I was absently checking Facebook when I came across a post from my friend Philip Schreier, “This is very sad and disturbing. Chris was scheduled to visit the museum and tape some TV segment in the near future.” There was a link to an item reporting the death of former U.S. Navy SEAL Chief Petty Officer Chris Kyle. News accounts allege that Kyle and his friend Chad Littlefield were murdered by a former Marine suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
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January 15, 2013
So jet-lagged and sleep-deprived is how I began my 20th SHOT Show in row. There are no prizes or ribbons for such things. A late departure (thanks to perhaps the most uncivil woman I have ever observed being ejected from my plane to Las Vegas) and the time change eating at me resulted in an even, seemingly, earlier start to Media Day At The Range, which was the best I have experienced in years.
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November 30, 2012
One of the firearms that has always fascinated me is the wheellock. If you have ever seen a Zippo lighter and a clock that has a key to wind, then you will understand the basic concept. The National Firearms Museum has a wheellock that is attributed to John Alden, which is called the “Mayflower Gun” because we are pretty sure that is how it got to North America. Sadly, the museum staff has no sense of humor about shooting national treasures, so we asked Dale Shinn to send us one of his excellent replicas, a Germanic, ornate wheellock pistol.
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November 27, 2012
Arsenal Firearms recently shook up the shooting world with the introduction of the “Second Century” pistol, the world’s first double-barreled M1911 pistol. The gun, made in Italy, is really two M1911s built on a common frame, with a shared slide assembly and a single wide hammer. It fires two synchronized rounds with every pull of the trigger—one from the right barrel and one from the left.
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November 20, 2012
Ever fired a matchlock? While I have handled them, no one has ever let me shoot one of these 16th century guns. For the next season of “American Rifleman Television” we are doing a four-part feature series on the development of firearms from the discovery of gunpowder to today. For that series, we borrowed a matchlock musket from Dale Shinn in California. A replica, it is an authentic copy of the kind of matchlocks used during the founding of the American colonies in Jamestown and Plymouth.
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October 17, 2012
So if “LOCK” and “LOAD” is part of only military high-power rifle range work, how did it enter the general shooter’s lexicon? I remember telling Boy Scouts to “LOCK AND LOAD, ONE ROUND OF AMMUNITION” more than two decades ago when I ran the rifle range at the Goshen Scout Reservation’s Camp Bowman, even though going back through my training materials only the command “LOAD” should have been given by the book at the time.
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October 15, 2012
There is a clear demonstration of what the student was asked to do as part of the Rapid Fire exercise in the 1942 U.S. War Dept. Training Film (T.F. 7 1094) “Rifle Marksmanship with the M1 Rifle –Preparatory Training.” Going from standing to prone, on the command “LOCK, SIMULATE LOAD,” the student retracts the M1’s bolt, depresses the follower to simulate the loading of an en-bloc clip, the bolt travels forward to simulate the loading of a round in the chamber and then the shooter’s right index finger presses the safety rearward to the “on” position. Both acts are done in one smooth motion, but clearly the rifle was loaded before the safety was engaged. The commands “READY ON THE RIGHT, READY ON THE LEFT, READY ON THE FIRING LINE” ring out, at which point the shooter disengages the safety. The range officer then says “TARGETS UP,” and the shooter drops from standing to prone and begins to engage the targets with dry-firing.
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October 10, 2012
There have been dozens of letters and e-mails on the topic of “Lock and Load.” While we cannot say what individual range commands were on every military and civilian range for nearly a century, we can rely on the printed War Dept. and Dept. of the Army sources.
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September 21, 2012
The “Tommy Gun” is one of the most iconic firearms in American history. But what is it about the Thompson? Stephen Hunter, a bestselling novelist and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for, of all things, the Washington Post, is a pretty serious and savvy gun guy, and he summed up much of the Thompson’s appeal in a March 22, 2004, article on the Exhibit at the National Firearms Museum.
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July 31, 2012
While working on the September issue (available in mid August), which includes a story by Rick Hacker on “Sequels: Replica Guns of the Hollywood West,” American Rifleman’s Associate Art Director David Labrozzi brought an article to my attention that he found while working on an unrelated project.
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