Paul Helinski

Hi Everyone, Sorry for the late notice if you are here in Vegas already (…or have left). If you already stopped by the booth (1925), you saw our new in-store kiosks, which for us was a huge departure from “the virtual” to a material product. Don’t worry. There are no special deals at the booth [...]

By Paul Helinski American Tactical www.AmericanTactical.us One of the niftiest AR-15 products to come out this year is a hybrid metal/polymer receiver from American Tactical Imports called the Omni Hybrid. Like all of the best polymer firearm technology, the Omni relies on a metal-to-metal fit at the major stress points. The ATI approach is a [...]

SHOT Show may be still over a month away, but there are several distributor shows before SHOT where the new products for the year sometimes start to leak out. Here are a few that we found that seemed interesting, and that aren’t any info-embargo until 2014. Some of them are actually available now, or soon, so if you see something that you’d like to be one of the first owners of, be sure to ask your local gun dealer to get in touch with their distributors for a pre-order. We hope that 2014 will not be as crazy as 2013, because 2013, though very busy for guns, saw an unprecedented attack on our 2nd Amendment rights, and one that we barely escaped from unscathed. Going into SHOT Show last year was really scary, and President Obama actually gave his gun control address on the 2nd day of SHOT, that Wednesday morning. Hopefully that stuff is over for now, and we can just enjoy all of the new and useful guns and gun gear for 2014. Stay tuned for reviews of some of these products below, and we’ll again be bringing you two weeks of live coverage from the SHOT Show 2014 floor, with our host, Julie Mac.

Any new gun in the market should face extreme scrutiny. This is particularly true of a new design, and even more so of a new concept, engineered into a new design. Back in 2011 we got our first look at a bullpup 15 round pump shotgun in the form of the Kel-Tec KSG. At the time, most gunwriters who got one were elated with the gun, including us. But part of that elation was that this entirely new concept had come from Kel-Tec, an American company that had already pulled off groundbreaking products like the PMR-30 and another bullpup, the .308 caliber RFB rifle. Nothing about the KSG was a disappointment. The engineering made sense, and the gun worked fabulously. This year a new 15 round bullpup came into the market called the UTS-15 from UTAS-USA. It has the magazine tubes on the top instead of the bottom like the KSG. It has a built in flashlight/laser combo, and it is made in Turkey. We were finally able to get our hands on one this week, and like any other newly designed mechanical device, there are positives and negatives to the gun. Overall it worked well, but we did have some light strikes and mis-feeds. Understanding the differences between the UTS-15 and the KSG will be a big part of deciding which gun to try to buy. The KSG is still extremely backordered, selling for up to twice MRSP, while the UTS-15, MSRP $1200, is currently available in the market at close to that price. The UTS-15 is a lot of gun for the money, and if a 15 round shotgun is in your future, this may be the superior gun. Is it a KSG killer? No. But is it a viable option? Possibly yes.

Carrying a gun as a woman is nothing like carrying a gun as a man. Men can get away with wearing the same thing almost every day, and loose and comfortable men’s clothes naturally lend themselves to belt or front pocket carry of a firearm. Even men’s shorts generally have numerous deep pockets and a belt. A woman who wants to carry a gun every day has to navigate pants, shorts, skirts, dresses, and enough different types of tops to make your head spin. Very few of them have the cut and support to hide a firearm. Most women’s clothes are form fitting by design, and unless a woman wears bluejeans every day, there is no guarantee that any garment is going to have any waist support at all. We found an interesting company called “The Well Armed Woman” owned and run by Carrie Lightfoot, an active NRA certified trainer who works with women. Facing frustration with the male holster world, Carrie has found, modified and even created a whole bunch of products made just for the concealed carry needs of a woman. Female wardrobes being what they are, there is no way that a woman can just buy and use one option for concealed carry. CCW for a woman also requires a “wardrobe” of sorts. The holster you use for jogging isn’t going to work at the office, and the holster you use at the office isn’t going to work out on the town. We tried a number of options, including the belly band, a thigh holster, a camisole with holster built in, and even the famed inside the bra holster. Every option has its place, but on a limited budget you’ll have to choose a couple that fit most situations.

Please be aware that there are what we call “Bloomberg shills” lurking in the comments of gun blogs and forums at present. It has been going on since before the election, and we first noticed it as far back as our January 8th, 2012 article “2nd Amendment Voters Should Vote Ron Paul.” At first it seemed like fun because they got a lively discussion going, and many of our articles have over 400 comments just because of a few anti-gun comments peppered in by a shill here and there. But as more and more of them have come in, we have begun to realize that it is better to delete them. The anti-gunners have a plan, and that plan is to make gun people look stupid, heartless, and separate from the values of mainstream America. A recent “whistleblower” post about the Boston Marathon explosions is especially troubling. If you are part of a gun blog or forum, please don’t allow this post to spread, and beware that more attempts to make 2nd Amendment defenders look bad are coming.

Less than a week after Sandy Hook we published an article attempting to reach out to women and minority gun owners. The media and political reaction to the murder of bunch of cute white kids should have been overshadowed in the Black, Hispanic and Asian communities with an overwhelming “WHAT ABOUT US?” Unfortunately it was not, and it is time for minority voters to take their leaders to task for it. The worst offender is President Obama, whose is nothing short of a race traitor. Instead of trying to disarm honest and law abiding Americans, President Obama should be bringing jobs back to America by destroying all of the various, failed, free trade agreements and instituting a tarrif on Chinese goods that matches the ones they put on our American made products that enter their country for sale. If you want to address violence, including gun violence, in our inner cities, bring back opportunity and prosperity, and arm the victims. “God created man, but Sam Colt made them equal.” This should be the rallying cry of the leaders of minorities living under the rule of gangs, drugs, and crime. Thankfully some of what we have been explaining is finally making it through to the mainstream. This guy, Coloin Noir, started making his own videos, so NRA snapped him up for these high production level Youtube channel vids. They are very good, and you should try to share this with as many people as you possibly can. As we have explained before, it isn’t white middle class America that the NRA has been out fighting for all of these years. We have guns! Both the McDonald and Heller decisions were about inner city minority gun ownership. Please NRA, keep Wayne and the other old men in suits in the closet and let Coloin do the talking to America.

It would be very easy to think that the threat to our 2nd Amendment freedom is over now that the “assault weapon” ban has been removed from the proposed national anti-gun legislation. All we have left in the current version are “universal background checks, and everyone supports that, right? Wrong! Nobody wants guns in the hands of criminals and those who would harm others, but statistically those people don’t get their guns through legal channels, any legal channels. All this new “universal background check” scheme will accomplish is the creation of national mandatory gun registration system. Within a generation at most, every gun will be registered to an individual in America, and that is a disaster waiting to happen. Gun confiscation always follows gun registration throughout history, and there is nothing to say that today’s politician would-be dictators are any better than the despots of previous generations. And yes folks, it can happen here. It is crucial that we win this fight, and that means that everyone needs to contact their legislators by the beginning of next week. “Universal background checks” has got to be dead on arrival. The real Sandy Hook conspiracy doesn’t need a theory. We have now faced a sustained and well funded attack on our 2nd Amendment freedom that is unprecedented, and this is most likely only the beginning.

There were not a lot of rock star new guns this year at SHOT Show 2013, but one of them was the ArmaLite AR-30A1. It is an out of the box, sub-MOA sniper rifle that comes in either .338 Lapua Magnum or .300 Winchester Magnum. ArmaLite was kind enough to put us at the front of the list for testing this gun, and this week we shot the .338 Lapua Target version of the AR-30A1. Overall it not only performed flawlessly, but also handily beat every chassis and chassis-style sniper rifle we have ever tested for out of the box accuracy, recoil, ergonomics and just overall feel. The AR-30A1 is a tight, clean, long range sniper machine and will be equally at home in a SWAT truck gun rack as it will be on the line at a long range F-Class match. At a direct from ArmaLite price of $3,599, there is not an out of the box sniper rifle on the planet that compares to the AR-30A1 in this price range. I would even go so far as to challenge rifles twice the price to prove why they are worth more.