February 07, 2012
When the automatic pistol was a fresh new concept, designers of that time faced the same problem that modern designers also face—feeding. Since the slide and breech face of a pistol are directly behind the chamber end of the barrel, the pistol magazine has to be below and behind the chamber. A round of ammunition must come off the top end of a magazine, slide up a feed ramp and enter the chamber. At the same time, the rear end of the cartridge must clear the magazine feed lips and pivot upwards so the rim slides under the hook of the extractor. It is a complex series of mechanical functions that must happen in sequence or a serious malfunction will ensue. Many things can go wrong and any of them constitute a bottleneck in the feeding cycle. Curiously enough, designers of yesteryear worked out those problem bottlenecks with the help of yet another bottleneck. This one, however, was in the cartridge, not the gun and it was a shape, not a problem.
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February 01, 2012
I know that it is considered unmanly, but we are all going to have to accept the necessity for reading the little book that comes with our new firearms. Modern automatic pistols are examples of advanced design and engineering, but they are also different from the handguns of years ago. I can clearly remember a time when all readily available pistols had single-action triggers and manual safeties, high on the left side of the frame. The operating procedure was pretty much the same for the all. But then the GIs started coming back with souvenir P38s and PPKs in their dufflebags and everything began to change. For the first time, we had semi-auto pistols with both DA and SA triggers in the same gun. It was all in the name of progress, but it could be confusing.
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January 23, 2012
There are several games in which shooters can compete with handguns. There's the bullseye game for pure marksmen, PPC for policemen and IHMSA for long-range fanatics. Defensive shooters like to hone their skills with IDPA or IPSC, while Frontiersmen prefer SASS and its derivatives. I encourage all handgunners to try their hand at some form of competition because it teaches you about your ability to shoot under pressure, and that's very important. Plus, the atmosphere surrounding a match is great, particularly in the exchange of ideas, techniques and the like. It is indeed unfortunate that certain people always look for ways to get an edge, usually by shading the rules, if not actually breaking them. However, once there was a game that kept shooters from breaking the rules by severely restricting the number of rules in force.
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January 11, 2012
A reader responded to a blog with his concerns over proper use of the terms “automatic” and “semi-automatic.” In terms of describing the type of action used in many magazine-fed firearms, automatic means continuous fire as long as the trigger is depressed and ammo is available in the gun. Semi-automatic means one shot for each trigger press and reset.
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January 09, 2012
Taurus hit a real home run with the Judge revolver. Inside a few years, Taurus has sold tens of thousands of the guns which had all three of our major ammunition manufacturers creating special Judge loads. The idea of a special cartridge-firing revolver in .45 Colt with an extended cylinder that can take .410 shotgun shells apparently touched something very deep in the American shooter. Mostly, I think folks are seeing the Judge revolver as a multiple-projectile shooter, although I have no hard data to support this belief. Americans have always liked multi-function guns going back as far as the Revolutionary War, when George Washington 's soldiers sometimes used buck-and-ball loads in their muskets.
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December 22, 2011
It is really amazing how many cartridges have long service lives. During this centennial year of the great .45 ACP cartridge (and the gun that shoots it), we remember a full century of service for this legendary problem-solver. Students of the .45 know that the basic idea is more than 100 years old, since Colt made early relatives of the 1911 as far back as 1905. The desirable ballistics of a big, slow-moving .45 slug for military service goes back as far as 1875 with the .45 Schofield round and 1873 for the .45 Colt. That turn of the century era was fertile time for ammunition designers. We saw the .38 Spl. introduced in 1898, the 9 mm Luger in 1904 and the .44 Spl. in 1907. The .38 Spl. became the top police cartridge of the 20th century in America. It also was the basis for .the famous .357 Mag., which ushered in the Magnum handgun era.
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December 15, 2011
The Baughman front sight was created on special order for a senior agent and firearms expert for the FBI. Frank Baughman was well-known in the Bureau as a close confidant of J. Edgar Hoover in the tumultuous time before World War II.
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December 14, 2011
For as long as automatic pistols have been in existence, designers have come up with many different ways to make them work. And by “work,” I mean handle or operate. Another term that I have often used is lockwork, which is the functional relationship between the various components of the action—hammer, trigger, sear, etc. Basically, we are talking about a series of hand motions or manipulations that make the gun shoot, reload and return to a safe, carrying condition. When it all started, the guns were almost always pure single-action, where the hammer was cocked by the movement of a recoiling slide, then released to fire by a crisp single-action trigger. Since the hammer was cocked, the designers usually provided a manual safety. This is the system used on the enduring Model 1911 and the one preferred by many professionally trained pistoleros.
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December 07, 2011
Older revolver catalogs used to list two basic butt shapes for their products—round and square. This actually meant slightly different things in the literature of the two big pre-World War II gunmakers—Colt and S&W.
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December 06, 2011
Handgunners in search of a new target for informal plinking and impromptu competitions need to take a look at a new device I recently found. Made by a company called Do-All Outdoors, this new target is known as a bouncing ground target.
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