Paul Helinski

Starting tomorrow we begin shooting GunsAmerica TV with our host, Silver Medalist and worldwide shotgun trainer Josh Lakatos. Rather than be redundant talking about all of the big stories at SHOT I’m going to cherry pick some of the smaller stories for the blog that I can find around the show. Here are the ones I found today.

Every year, the day before SHOT Show, several industry manufacturers gather at a remote range near the show to demonstrate some of the new stuff they have coming out that year. It gives you a chance to go shoot the guns that everyone else will only be able to handle at the show, and just about everyone in the firearms media makes it a point to be at “media day” before SHOT. Here are some of the highlights I found today at the range.

Practice, Practice, Practice! That is what just about every article you read on how to improve your shooting will say. But how do you do that at 20 cents a round? There is no cheap surplus .ammo around anymore, so if you really want to punch paper or clang steel a lot you pretty much have to either be a trust fund baby, marry a trust fund baby, or find a way to shoot .22s. At pennies a round and available pretty much everywhere, there is no better tool for honing your shooting skills on the cheap than .22 Long Rifle ammo and a gun that shoots it well.

You can of course just go out and buy a regular garden variety .22, like a Ruger 10-22, Remington Nylon 66, Beretta NEOS, and numerous examples from Henry that are very affordable and shoot really well.

The problem with this approach however is that when you practice, most of what you are practicing is muscle memory and natural point of aim. Both of these will be different with a standard .22 than they will with your self defense or competition rifle. You can buy a gun that looks like yours, or even feels like yours, but there will be no substitute for being able to shoot your actual gun with .22 ammo.

If there is evidence of an internet revolution in the firearms industry it is certainly coming from Ruger. Today they announced the new LC9 polymer pocket pistol exclusively online at 2pm. You will not find an story on it in any print magazines today. It is still two weeks until SHOT Show, so by then it will be old news. And the gun is actually shipping February 1, 2011, in like a month. In an industry where only a few years ago the print world ruled and you couldn’t get a gun for six months after it hit the magazines, this is a monumental approach that Ruger is using to launch a new product. They even bumped SHOT Show but a couple weeks, presumably to avoid the noise floor that SHOT creates.

When I first heard about the Teludyne Tech (TTI) “Straightjacket,” I was extremely skeptical. I have seen literally dozens of products come and go over the years that claimed to increase accuracy by “reducing barrel harmonics.” I thought that the Straightjacket, if I bothered to waste my time on it, would turn out to be just something else to throw on the pile with all of the bore treatments, weights, stocks, stock beddings, even something resembling electrical tape, that have crossed my path over the years. Nothing, in my opinion, could make a big difference in long range accuracy beyond what we knew up until now. If you want a rifle that would reliably shoot sub-MOA, you had to work up loads, build your own consistent match ammo, bed or free float the action, get the best trigger, the best stock, and especially the best and most expensive barrel. Teludyne wasn’t going to convince me that match grade accuracy would come out of a regular stock rifle with their “new technology.”

The most absurd about thing about the Teludyne story is what they want you to do with your gun. This is no “try it and see if you like it” product. They want you to send them your rifle, after which they will take it apart, press fit (at something like 50,000 pounds of pressure) a steel sleeve around your barrel, then they fill that sleeve with a proprietary compound, filling in all around your barrel. Then they weld a permanent cap on top, grind and sand your stock down to fit the new inch and a quarter thickness of your new “Straightjacket”ed barrel, then put the whole works back together and send it back to you.

Who in their right mind would send a perfectly fine but maybe not as accurate as I’d like it to be rifle out to be modified to such a degree, with experimental technology? This is a permanent deal. Love it or hate it, your rifle will never be the same.

Well it turns out that I was willing to do it, with two rifles in fact, and you aren’t going to believe the results. You are however welcome to come to sunny South Florida this winter and try them for yourself if you like. I know the discussion boards will be buzzing with disbelief as soon as this comes out and I welcome all comers. I feel priviledge to be one of the people who got a Teludyne gun “back when nobody knew about them” and I plan to keep my guns and shoot them a lot.

Imagine for a minute that the United States Treasury made a million dollar bill note. You know, like a hundred with Benjamin Franklin on it, but a million instead of a hundred. Then imagine that someone gives you one of those million dollar bills, tax free, yours to keep. The only other detail is that you aren’t allowed to spend any of the million bucks for ten years, but you can invest it in something or somethings for a potential return to live off of between now and then. Then, at the end of ten years you can only live off of the million bucks itself. You can’t keep any of the money you make between then and now after the ten years, and that includes a return on investing the million.

It may sound complicated but it isn’t. This is the story for many people facing retirement in ten years. They have a “nest egg” of principle and they need to keep the principle in tact for retirement, when they plan to live off of it. Until that time they would like to see a return on the principle, but the most important thing is to not lose that nest egg.

Would you take that million bucks and just keep it stored in that million dollar bill? Bank savings accounts have interest rates in the negatives right now and probably for the foreseeable future. You aren’t losing anything by not being able to earn interest on it. It’s not a bad little storage system, a million dollar bill. It is portable, compact, and you can hide it easily. Banks can fail, but do countries fail? Will that million bucks be worth a million bucks in ten years?

I have to admit that this column was not really my idea. I stole the idea from Wayne Lapierre, the Executive Vice President of the NRA, who writes about this very topic in “America’s First Freedom” this month.
GunsAmerica is Booth 837 at the NRA Show this weekend. From the entrance you jog right and it is towards the back.

In his version of this article, Mr. Lapierre explains to a fellow airline traveler what he feels the NRA has done for this person to protect his gun rights over his lifetime. Apparently the guy is not yet an NRA member. Mr. Lapierre himself admits in the article that he is painting in very broad strokes, and I wonder if the guy got it. I wonder if he went on to join the NRA.

How do we reach people who own guns, hunt, and who are even avid gun enthusiasts but who are not NRA members. I am a life member of the NRA, but even ten years ago I was not, and twenty years ago, even though I carried a gun every day, I would have argued with you that nobody needed a gun with more than seven rounds in the magazine. I carried an NRA membership intermittently during my twenties and thirties, a classic “lapser,” and you would think that I would have some answers. I don’t know if a laundry list of what the NRA does and has does any good.

You don’t hear “game changer” much in the world of production ammunition. But once again, Hornady Manufacturing Co. has indeed changed yet another game. If you have ever considered hunting prairie dogs with your AR-15 platform rifle but thought the cartridge slightly underpowered for 300 yard dogtown decimation shots, you can now get close .22-250 ballistics out of your .223 Remington chambered AR. The Superformance line of ammunition from Hornady now has a Superformance Varmint line (click here to download the PDF), and the possibilities that come from these “off the chart” new cartridges are truly amazing.

I try to think about “the gunfight” when it comes to concealed carry pistols and revolvers. At the end of day, we all may feel like we carry guns for peace of mind, or generic “self defense,” but we really just want to be prepared in case the need to start, or finish, a gunfight comes up.

That means that when we pick a concealed carry gun, we need to make sure we will a) actually carry the gun we choose, b) be able to accurately fire the gun we choose, and c) be able to depend on the gun we choose. d) Oh, and you really need to have enough firepower to be able to finish the fight, whether you started it or not.

Feeling safer in a hostile world isn’t enough. In order to actually be safer, and to be able to protect those around us, we need to achieve these four goals.

The first point, actually carrying the gun, leads me to suggest more often than not the option of the “pocket pistol” which is more commonly a pocket revolver, the Smith & Wesson J-Frame being the most popular, in .38 Special or .357 Magnum. I usually suggest a model with a bobbed or internal hammer, and that the best way to carry it is in a pocket holster, usually available at the local gun dealer.

There are arguments for carrying a gun in a holster on the waist, either in the pants or out, and many people do. So I will assume for arguments sake (and arguments do spring up when you mention pocket pistol) that if a pistol or revolver is pocketable, it is most likely also concealable on the belt more easily than a larger gun, and how you choose to carry should be a product of your willingness to carry it in that manner every day, in every situation.