Paul Helinski

It is amazing that one of the most scarce and in demand pistols today is the Kel-Tec PMR-30. You can’t get one, and many gun dealers have even created sign-up lists for customers to get them as they come in. The PMR-30 isn’t a cheap gun. The MSRP is $415, yet the demand for the PMR-30, after literally years, seems unquenchable. But if I asked you to play word association on guns, and my hint was “plastic 22WMR pistol with orange and green fiber optic sights and a 30 round magazine,” what would you say? Nothing, right? Nothing comes to mind. So what on earth is this gun for? That’s the point. The PMR-30 is for just about everything.

Back in January the Akdal MKA 1919 shotgun rocked GunsAmerica Magazine & Blog with the most reads of any SHOT Show article the first day. It is an AR-15 style design, with an M-16 ‘esque detachable handle, and 5 round box magazine. With the tactical and 3 Gun shotgun marked filled with tradition semi-autos and the thought to be fickle Saiga, a new, light (6.5 lbs.) and quick shooting tactical shotgun was big news, especially with AR-15 controls. Six months later we finally got a chance to actually shoot the gun, which is imported from Turkey exclusively by RAAC Firearms. The MSRP is $799 and the street price is slightly under that. Out of the box, our experience with the gun wasn’t very positive, but customized for 3 Gun, the MKA-1919 is said to be a good choice, and a good investment. It is hard to recommend a gun that isn’t always reliable out of the box, but the story on this gun isn’t that simple.

Metallurgy isn’t a fuzzy science. When it comes to mixing metals, certain rules give you guaranteed certain results. But when it comes to casting bullets, the metalurgy isn’t as simple as you might expect. Small variances in temperature or handling can affect your bullets a great deal. But to a certain degree, you can count on a usable product with a given set of set variables, and that has been our focus here. For this article we decided to take a look at the mechanics of common casting alloys. You can buy completed alloys for just over $2-$3 per pound, but if you can find a free source for the main component of cast bullets, the lead, you can bring your cost down substantially. With the additions of small amounts of additional metals, your bullets can be made harder than pure lead, and this makes them able to handle more pressure and velocity. With virtually no sacrifice in performance, you can shoot just about any handgun caliber, and even some rifle calibers, using cast bullets, at a fraction of the cost of jacket rounds.

This coming week the UN is set to meet to agree on an international arms treaty on “small arms,” called the ATT. The treaty was engineered by Hillary Clinton, and is the second shot from the Obama White House to covertly take our 2nd Amendment rights away through indirect means. The first was of course the “Fast & Furious” program that walked guns into Mexico in hopes that our gun freedom, and gun dealers, would be blamed for spilled blood across the border. Thankfully that one failed thanks to a brave whistleblower, but this one is even more serious.

You need to immediately contact your Senators for your state. The Senate, not the House of Representatives, ratifies international treaties. This link gives you the phone numbers and a link to the web form for the Senators themselves:

https://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

Even the most diehard American gun nut will be hard pressed to have heard of the Turkish gun manufacturer “Sarsilmaz.” They are, however, the third largest firearms factory in Europe and have been making guns since the 1880s. Sarsilmaz makes over 40 different firearms, pistols, revolvers, and shotguns, and they are the makers of the Armalite AR24, which is a CZ75 clone. The Turkish military is the second largest military in NATO and it is supplied by Sarsilmaz exclusively for duty pistols. So why haven’t we heard of Sarsilmaz? Who knows. But the guns are recognized worldwide for their quality and durability, and it looks like they are finally going to come into the US market in a big way. The European American Armory, or EAA, is introducing some of the Sarsilmax guns this year under the name SAR Arms. We got to take a look at the 9mm ST10 that carries a street price around $500 for the all black one. I have never owned an HK USP, which this gun is nearly an exact copy of, and I thought it felt like a cross between a CZ75 and a Sig 226. Sarsilmaz has several international patents themselves for firearm design, but this gun is clearly a side by side copy of the HK USP. Since this is a very expensive firearm, the Sarsilmaz copy coming in around $500 is probably a good buy if you love the USP. We can’t compare it directly because we have no test HK gun, but overall the ST10 is a great gun, and could owe some of its biggest positives to HK engineers, who made the USP similar to a Browning Hi-Power action, which this gun is also a decendant of now. The most interesting note about this gun is that it has no decocker. You have to let down the hammer with your thumb if you want to fire it double action first shot. This is an option on the USP (#9) but not common, making this Sarlsilmaz and interesting and high quality gun at a reasonable price.

The European American Armory, or EAA, is introducing some of the Sarsilmax guns this year under the name SAR Arms. We got to take a look at the 9mm ST10 that carries a street price around $500 for the all black one. The gun feels like a cross between a CZ75 and a Sig 226, though it doesn’t appear that Sarsilmaz copied any particular gun for the design. They have several international patents themselves for firearm design, so they don’t need to just copy guns. We offer the comparison just to give you an idea of how the gun feels.

Sometimes a silly idea turns into something really useful. You probably remember back at SHOT Show we ran across “bleeding zombie targets” at Media Day at the Range. Even back then the company making them knew that the zombie craze would eventually die out, but that they had stumbled onto something significant in the area of firearms training. Their marketing and product development company, Maddox Defense, has from the start envisioned these nifty targets, made by ZMB Industries, as a three dimensional training tool.

Sans the blood and zombie graphics these genuinely three dimensional training targets give you a unique perspective at the training range, and show you just how hard it can be to get the shot when the shot is what is required. This example you see here is the basic “Jacob” model. It is currently being used currently by the Navy SEALS and the US Border Patrol. The basic foam core torso with 4 extra skins carries an MSRP of $249.95, and the legs unit is $99.95. They aren’t cheap, but they are completely unique as a training tool, and when you compare them to the cost of finding something else 3D, that gives you this unique perspective, the price isn’t that high for five targets.

If you stop by just about any outdoor gun range in America on a Sunday, you will find any number of tricked out tactical rifles driving tacks at 100 yards and more. Generally these are custom rifles and some have a detachable box style magazine along with other high end, law enforcement-type features. Savage Arms, the industry leader in out of the box notoriously accurate rifles, has integrated these and other custom style features into their new Model 10 FCP-SR. It comes in .308 Winchester and has a free-floated heavy fluted barrel threaded for a suppressor, set in a digital camo simplified version of the Savage Accustock . The drilled and tapped receiver is supplied with a pre-mounted 20MOA one piece Picatinny base. It comes with a ten round detachable box magazine and a Savage Accutrigger. This makes for a gun just under 9 pounds that leaves little to be desired. The MSRP is $1213, and if you can find one, the street price is well under that. For an out of the box law enforcement style sniper rifle you couldn’t really ask for much more.

We don’t usually have a lot of negative reviews here at GunsAmerica Magazine. There is no point in them generally. The old adage “any publicity is good publicity” rings true
for gun products like anything else, so if we get a product in that stinks, we usually just decline to review it. The exception is when a product is something you will stumble on most likely,
and it is really bad. This is just a heads up about the swinging targets currently in the gun isle at the Wal-Marts that sell guns and have a big gun section.
We bought the targets you see here in Okeechobee, Florida Wal-Mart, but none of the south Florida stores even have them.

Sometimes you are browsing in a gun shop and two pistols look very much the same, yet you really wish you knew the differences. That is the case with the HK45 and the HK P30. Both pistols look pretty much the same, except one is .45ACP and the other is a slightly smaller 9mm. When HK sent us these guns for general review, we thought, as you might, that they are exactly the same, but they are not. If you find yourself standing in a gun shop deciding to impulse buy a brand new HK pistol, this is a bit of an overview as to what is the same in the two guns and what is very different. The HK P30 and HK45 are the new era of Heckler and Koch pistols. HK took the strengths of the ubiquitous USP and added some of what have become standard features on modern polymer pistols, and these two guns were result, along with a few other models that are also very similar. Both are great guns, and caliber considerations aside, the differences in the guns are mostly semantic. Several of the features on the P30 and HK45 are exactly the same and either would be a good choice in a duty, security, or personal defense pistol.