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You may never have even heard of the biggest innovation in terminal ballistics since the hollow point. It has been around for more than five years, and the bullets are made from compressed powder, wrapped in a standard copper jacket. Loaded ammunition is available in most common rifle calibers, as well as the usual handgun suspects and even some exotic hunting calibers. The bullets alone are also available in bulk for the handloader. The company is called DRT, or Dynamic Research Technologies. If you hit a living being with a DRT bullet, it will become our definition of DRT, “(D)ead (R)ight (T)here.”

In the first installment of this series, if you missed it, I ordered six M1 Garands from the Civilian Marksmanship Program, or CMP. The premise is that now is the time to buy this historical treasures, before they dry up and get really expensive, like the 1903 Springfield has since it dried up through the CMP. There are a few details I have learned since that first article, partially from a post on the CMP forum. I wish the members had commented on our article, which was read over 45,000 times the first day it was out. So we will correct a couple things, and lets go shoot the guns!

Calling all hunters! While most of the hunting world is off thinking about whitetails in the fall, varmint and predator hunters are gearing up for an exciting summer. I decided to write this article in collaboration with our regular hunting contributor Carlos Lopez, and our newest discovery, Dwayne Powell, who runs Kissimmee River Hunt and Fish in Okeechobee, Florida, to see if you guys would like to see a summer full of hunting here at GunsAmerica Magazine & Blog. Carlos and Dwayne are passionate hunters and hunt all year, and if we all would like them to share some of their summer experiences with us, they have agreed to put it together. Some folks would argue that hunting goes away until after the kids go back to school, but we disagree. Varmint and predator hunting is all year round, and even if you can’t get out this summer, there is a great deal of merit to keeping your head in the game. Please comment on this article, like it on Facebook, and tweet it on Twitter if you feel like you’d like to see the tactics, the guns and gear in action that you will use this fall, or during the summer yourself.

Did you wish you bought real estate in 1999? What about gold in 2001? Well the same thing is happening right now with the rifle known as the M1 Garand, the primary battle rifle of the US throughout both WWII and Korea. On the consumer market Garands have already begun to rise in price, but what many people don’t know is that the US Government, or rather a quasi-governmental non-profit corporation who took it over from the US Army in 1996 called the Civilian Marksmanship Program, or CMP, is currently selling off what are probably the last batch of government Garands to the public. All you have to do is apply, supply the required documents, pay, and you can have a certified authentic M1 Garand shipped right to your door, in most states.

The folks at Gibbs Rifle Co. have a history of taking surplus military rifles of arguably minimal collector interest and turning them into sport specialty rifles that have a serious “fun gun” factor and “tough as nails” demeanor. Perhaps the best known of them are the Summit and Quest chambered in .45-70 and .308, respectively. Those were built on surplus Enfield actions and were not attempts to reproduce any sort of historical military gun at all. Instead, they were practical, utilitarian rifles that made good use of surplus military and some new parts. “Commercial sporterizing,” probably best describes it, and as Gibbs puts it, they “…take the best features of historic military arms and translate them to meet modern sporting needs.”

While I will never claim to be anything close to being an expert in turkey hunting….I have pursued the quarry on more than a few occasions. I’ve named all those turkeys the “Roadrunner” which of course, makes me “Wile E. Coyote” and no… I am not the “Super Genius”. Far from it, according to my wife. I do give myself an “A” for effort though. How an animal whose head houses a brain the size of a pea can beat me and thousands of other hunters time & time again…for that I definitely do not have an answer. I make no excuses for not being able to routinely beat this Old World majestic game bird. I suppose that is what draws the strange breed of turkey hunters that obsess, scout, gear up, & lose countless hours of sleep and family time to outsmart a gobbler. It can be done and gets done thousands of times each year every Spring and Fall all across this great country of ours. While I will never claim to be anything close to being an expert in turkey hunting….I have pursued the quarry on more than a few occasions. I’ve named all those turkeys the “Roadrunner” which of course, makes me “Wile E. Coyote” and no… I am not the “Super Genius”. Far from it, according to my wife. I do give myself an “A” for effort though. How an animal whose head houses a brain the size of a pea can beat me and thousands of other hunters time & time again…for that I definitely do not have an answer. I make no excuses for not being able to routinely beat this Old World majestic game bird. I suppose that is what draws the strange breed of turkey hunters that obsess, scout, gear up, & lose countless hours of sleep and family time to outsmart a gobbler. It can be done and gets done thousands of times each year every Spring and Fall all across this great country of ours.

As much as I love, own and shoot modern shotguns, there is really nothing like a classic side by side doublegun. If you have never tried one, do yourself a favor and go heft one up to your shoulder in a gunshop. You may say eh, no big deal, but you also may fall in love, I warn you. The side by side shotgun has a contagious kind of energy to it, something like a built in romance, for a lot of us anyways.

Smith & Wesson re-launched their “E” Series of 1911s this year and they have been very well received in the market. With an MSRP in the $1300 range and street price much less, you get a lot of advanced features in this new 1911 that you would have to pay a gunsmith for with most other guns. These are 100% “nextgen” 1911s, and besides the modern looking fish scale serrations and the accessory rail that many of the guns have, the intereals of the gun appear to have the best of the good of the classic 1911 design, without including some of the bad ideas that have crept into the gun over the years. The Series 80 firing pin safety has been replaced with a titanium firing pin, so rather than block the pin with a problematic safety device, they just made the firing pin too light to set off a primer when the gun is dropped. They have also cleaned up the trigger housing and each of these guns has a hand fit trigger. Is it truly the quality of a $1,000 1911 with $2,000 worth of work as is claimed in the video? Could be, but we hope to see one of these come in the door for some real-world testing. They look to be a really great buy in a 1911, and hey, they say Smith & Wesson on them, so they will retain their value and eventually become collectible. That’s a lot of selling points on a gun that has so many variants and options out there. Check out the video, and please don’t harp on George in the comments. He’s a big, tough, sensitive guy!

This is one of the brands in the Lyman family of products, Pachmayr, perhaps the most recognized name in aftermarket grips. The Pachmayr Grip Glove is an aftermarket grip company’s answer to the one piece polymer grip, one that you wouldn’t think would be a candidate for aftermarket grips. The plastic on a lot of the new polymer pistols is slippery, and even the ones that are as slippery are going to leave a lot of people wanting for something more substantial to grap onto. The ruberized grip sleeve has been around for a while to fill this purpose, but many of them tend to twist and turn as you shoot the gun. We have not had any of these in for review yet, but in general, if there is going to be one grip sleeve that doesn’t do this, it will be a Pachmayr, and we hope to follow up with them and get some review product in soon. Note that the models are gun specific, so they will be much likely to be ergonomically friendly than a “one size fits all” kind of thing. This video introduces three new models into the line, for the Smith & Wesson Bodygaurd, Ruger LC9 and Glock subcompact models.