Paul Helinski

In the American Revolution, the principle battle longarm was the Brown Bess musket. A musket is different from a rifle because it has no rifling, so the bullet doesn’t spin. The Brown Bess is .75 caliber, which is essentially an 11 gauge smoothbore shotgun, used to fire, historically, a cast .69 caliber lead ball weighing just over once ounce. The range on a Brown Bess is a couple hundred yards, but because the ball isn’t spinning, the musket wasn’t used as an aimed weapon past 20 yards or so. Companies of men fired batteries of musketfire to rain lead balls down upon the opposing force, hoping that someone would hit something. This would be followed by a charge with bayonets, because after a couple shots with traditional black powder (smokeless wasn’t invented until 125 years later), shooting a musket more than a couple times without cleaning can be difficult. This mode of war made for bloody battlefields, and a lot of hand to hand, in your face combat.

If we learned anything this past election it was that people aren’t as stupid as the politicians expect them to be. Almost all of the elected officials who supported the anti-gun legislation that followed the Sandy Hook hoax were thrown out of office. Even more got thrown out because the public has woken up to [...]

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Hello from Dealer Services at GunsAmerica! SCCY Partner Connect Map Code: ############ View at SCCY.com Sometime in the next couple weeks you should be getting an email from SCCY Firearms inviting you to participate in the inventory locator on the https://www.sccy.com/ website. They asked us to email you in advance, in case you want to [...]

I have pondered the subject of perimeter security for some time and I have decided that it is probably the hardest to come up with a hard and fast rule. You have to sleep at some point. And even if you have enough people to keep watch, how much advance notice will you have? I have looked into 12 volt motion detectors, but so far I have not found a better option than these hand welded alarms on Ebay. They use a standard .22 short nailgun blank, available at Home Depot. If you are handy you could make them yourself, but at $20 each they are a pretty cheap investment for a pretty important aspect of long term survival.

When it comes to shooting gadgets it is very seldom that I want to jump up and down on my roof and yell “look at this look at this look at this!” But this is the way I feel about the Leatherwood M-1000 scope. I almost wish it was a $2,000 thing, because people would take it more seriously, but though it is based on technology going all the way back to 1970, and the MSRP is $459, with a generalstreet price under $400, it is one of the most excitingly nerdy thingamajigs I have ever encountered in the shooting world. It may be a little ugly compared to the more elegant scopes of today, but this largish awkward looking scope can give you the ability to “frame, aim and shoot, ” point of aim, point of impact between 100 and 1000 meters without ever having to lift your eye from the eyepiece. And you can change from one load to the next, or even one rifle to the next with two minor adjustments. Does that totally rock or does that totally rock?

We know how viruses spread. If you stay in your house and don’t have contact with other humans, it is impossible to get a virus. Viruses need a host organism, therefore they cannot be spread through water supplies, especially chlorinated water supplies which most of us drink. Out in public, Ebola can most likely spread through the air, from sneezing or coughing, but there are simple precautions you can take if you absolutely must go out to the store, which I will get into below. Treating Ebola is a crapshoot at this point, but I will explain the splintered logic as to what your options are should you contract the disease.

Sometimes we take for granted some of the most obvious things, then when you find out that what you took for granted doesn’t actually exist anyway, it can be terribly disappointing. A lot of people have been asking our resident guide Dwayne Powell of Kissimmee River Hunt & Fish about “free range” game lately, as opposed to fenced in game. The guided hunt market exploded a couple years ago, and this far down the line some people are getting wise to the fact that a lot of guided “hunts” aren’t hunts at all. They make it feel like a hunt, but really what you are shooting are caged animals on very small parcels of land. There are guys selling “open range” hog hunts, turkey hunts, deer hunts, and even alligator hunts, on from 100 down to even 5 acres of land. Around the property is a high fence, and none of the game is native and wild on the property. it has all been deposited, to be caged and killed. On the smaller properties the “guide” will drive around in circles, then take you a feeder you would swear is deep in the woods, but is really only a couple hundred yards from where you started.

This past week there was a lot of hype about Ebola because Lakeland Industries a released a press release that claimed the US State Department ordered 160,000 hazmat suits from them. “Lakeland stands ready to join the fight against the spread of Ebola,” said Christopher J. Ryan, President and Chief Executive Officer of Lakeland Industries. [...]