Gear Reviews

The Tac-Con trigger is way more than it appears. Yes, it allows you to blow through magazines full of 5.56. It doesn’t make your AR full-auto, but no one from the liberal media would be able to tell the difference. Once you’ve worked through a couple of thousand rounds and gotten the sheer joy of playing with the trigger out of your system, you’ll begin to see the 3MR’s real potential. It may be the most versatile AR trigger that exists.

When Tac-Con invited a passel of gun writers out to Phoenix to shoot the 3MR, I was dubious. I thought it was an attempt to control the message. I thought we’d get to shoot some and get a factory tour, but I assumed that everything would be closely monitored. Nothing could have been farther from the truth. They brought us in, fed us well, and turned us loose on the Ben Avery Gun Range with a truck full of ARs and 15,000 rounds of 5.56.

The appeal of the AR-15 is rooted in the rifle’s reliable performance. The timeless rifles are so dependable that many of us simply take that for granted. Instead, our focuses shift to how we can make that dependability fit each of us, exactly. Perfectly. Yet finding that balance of form and function can elevate the AR-15 to a work of art. If you’re thinking about customizing an AR, I’d suggest you take a look at ODIN Works.

In the USA, CR Speed may be best known for their championship-winning IPSC competition race holsters. CR Speed’s parent company, Rescomp Handgun Technologies of South Africa, also manufactures the Secure2 series of duty holsters and EDC belts that are suitable for Duty, concealed carry, and IDPA competition. As an occasional IDPA competitor, I was very interested in comparing the CR Speed rig with the gear I currently use for IDPA matches. Can a retention holster really be as fast as a standard holster without retention? I couldn’t wait to find out.

Organization is not my strong suit. Every time I leave for the range, I pack up random bags and backpacks. I do my best to remember what I’m putting where, but it is futile. Thankfully, there are companies like Seahorse that have my best interests in mind. Seahorse makes its cases here in America; they’re built to withstand any punishment you can dish out, and the cases cost less than most range bags.

We are so lucky to live in this time when precision machinery and quality materials allow for the production of affordable guns that give up little to their higher-priced brethren. Imported by TriStar Arms from Turkey, the new ATAC Raptor Turkey gun is a great example. As an extension of the company’s low-priced Raptor series, it delivers solid performance and dependability on a proven action.

This is a cup-half-full, cup-half-empty product. It all depends on the way you look at it. First of all, what is InteliSCOPE? InteliSCOPE is a smartphone holder that mounts on your picatinny rail, allowing you to use your phone as a sighting scope while providing you the ability to record video. The mount physically holds your phone on the top of the rifle, and a standard Google Play or Apple Store app does the sighting through the camera on your phone. We tried the Android version with a Samsung Galaxy S4, and it does what it says it does, with a few important caveats.

A couple of years ago, I decided I needed something larger than my bedside fast-access handgun safe. I inherited a couple of worthless pistols from my father’s estate, and I loved them more than anything else I owned. My bedside safe offered no real fire protection. Its size and relatively light weight made my little safe a convenient way for a crook to carry my valuables out of the house. So I went in to see my FFL. The refrigerator-sized safes that lined the floor of the shop were visually impressive. Yet the visual impressiveness was short lived. When I knocked on their sides, they rang like old tin garbage cans. They were bigger, but not much better than what I already had. I needed a real safe. So what actually makes a safe worth buying? Let’s take a look inside a Liberty.

Otis Technology makes a multitude of cleaning products and cleaning systems for firearms and optics. They offer task specific cleaning systems for Sporting, Law Enforcement, and Military applications. All OTIS products are made in the USA at the company’s facility in Lyons Falls, NY. One of the latest products, the RIPCORD one-pass cleaning device, was featured in the OTIS Technology display at the 2014 SHOT Show.

The RIPCORD is a pull-through-the-barrel dry cleaning system. Each end of the RIPCORD has a coated brass tip that is clearly labeled with the intended caliber. These tips feature 8-32 threading so they can accept most standard cleaning accessories like brushes, bore mops, and patch holders.

When I first got into shooting there wasn’t the wide variety of scopes and reticles to choose from that we enjoy today. While the elements that make up a riflescope haven’t changed in many years, the technology and features have changed and continue to do so. I believe that we’re now at a point where there is literally an optic for just about any shooting activity to meet just about anyone’s budget. Hunting scopes probably have the largest market share when it comes to the total number of optics sold, but they also have the fewest features to offer the shooter. The typical hunting scope is a pretty simple affair with covered turrets and a simple duplex reticle for aiming. For most shooters, this arrangement works well for those shots that don’t fall outside of 200 yards across the fields or in the backwoods. However if a shot has to be pushed past that distance, the only choices are to apply some Kentucky windage and hope you know the drop of the ammunition well enough or to attempt to close the gap.

This year, Burris released a new line of hunting scopes called C4Plus that provides options for shooters looking for more versatility from their optics in an affordable package. Featuring two popular variable magnification ranges, custom bullet drop compensating knobs, quality glass and a new reticle specifically designed for wind compensation, these scopes have the potential to reach past the hunting scope market. At first glance it appears that Burris has done its homework in the design and layout of these scopes, so lets take a closer look.