“Tag: Keefe Report”

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.

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.

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.

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.”

So if “LOCK” and “LOAD” is part of only military high-power rifle range work, how did it enter the general shooter’s lexicon?

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.

Arsenal Firearms recently shook up the shooting world with the introduction of the “Second Century” pistol, the world’s first double-barreled M1911 pistol.

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.”

As you may have noticed, this is the first time a Colt’s Automatic Gun, Model 1895 has appeared on the cover of American Rifleman. As Philip Schreier’s March 2013 cover story points out, this was the first machine gun model (mechanical guns such as the Gatling are not self-loading, fully automatic machine guns) used by the U.S. Army in combat. Of course we have Gatling video here, too.