While reflex sights are regularly used in competitions from Camp Perry to the Bianchi Cup, you don’t see them very often on law enforcement or defensive handguns. Michigan-based Trijicon—maker of the ACOG (Advanced Combat Optical Gunsight)—is hoping to change that with its RMR. In case you aren’t familiar with it, RMR stands for Ruggedized Miniature Reflex sight, introduced last year.

While I held the camera, American Hunter Managing Editor Jeff Johnston handled a rifle—and handled it well at the NRA National Defense Match on August 14 and 15 at Camp Perry, Ohio.

In our offices, we often discuss issues that matter—at least to us—such as carry guns. One American Rifleman staffer carries a Ruger LCP in .380 ACP with Winchester PDX1 on a daily basis. While this staffer was visiting the office of American Hunter Managing Editor Jeff Johnston (we don’t have the budget for a water cooler), the host came up with a line that is not entirely original, yet completely relevant. “You carry a .380? That’s what you use to fight your way to your pistol.” This is, of course, is a play on firearms trainer Clint Smith’s axiom: “The only purpose for a pistol is to fight your way back to the rifle you should have never laid down.”

We here at the magazine are 100 percent behind Ruger CEO Mike Fifer’s  “Million Gun Challenge” to benefit NRA. Ruger has pledged to donate $1 million to NRA if 1 million new Ruger firearms are sold between the 2011 and 2012 NRA Annual Meetings and Exhibits. Fifer recently came to NRA HQ to meet with Wayne LaPierre and Chris Cox to drop off the first $300,000 installment.

As this is written, I am less than 24 hours away from a very long airplane ride that will put me, with stops and layovers, in the fabled Caprivi Strip in Namibia three days from now. The rifle I am taking—the Kimber Caprivi—is named for that strip of land in Northeastern Namibia that linked what was formerly German South West Africa to the Zambezi River and Germany’s former colony on the East African coast, Tanganyika. Named for German diplomat Leo von Caprivi, who negotiated a deal with the British for the land in 1890, the Caprivizipfel in German remains one of the wildest parts of Africa, chocked full of African game, including those of the dangerous variety.