Gun Reviews

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.

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.

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.

Never underestimate a legend, and that legend is Colt. At first glance you would think that the Colt 901 is just a .308 Win./7.62 NATO version of a standard AR-15, much like any other .308 AR out there, but it is a lot more than that. The Colt LE901-16S is a “Modular Carbine,” which means it can be adapted to any AR-15 platform upper. This isn’t a new concept, because there are of course a whole bunch of different caliber uppers for ARs. The difference is in all the other ones, they have adapted a standard size AR magazine to boutique calibers and cartridge designs. The Colt 901 is different. It can be adapted from .308/7.62, using standard P-Mags, to .223/5.56, using standard AR mags, and back again, in literally seconds. The design uses one proprietary part, and you have to swap out the recoil system. It is that simple, and it works fantastic.

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!

Soooo, we finally got a Springfield XD-S to play with and shoot. To to make a long story short, really thin, really nice, pleasure to shoot, completely reliable, go buy one. The XD-S, as we said back at SHOT in January, is a slam dunk for Springfield and the gun is everything you could want in a concealed carry firearm. You get six rounds of .45ACP punch in a tiny package, 4.6 inches tall, 6.3 inches long, and all of an inch thick. Big hands, small hands, fat hands and tall hands will find the XD-S easy to shoot and surprisingly not punishing.

Teaching a child the fundamentals of shooting and gun safety is best kept simple. Many of today’s top shooters cut their teeth as a young child on a single shot .22 bolt action. And if you ask any of them, “would you have preferred something cooler, with more shots” they will answer you in the negative. When you have only one shot at a time to concentrate on, you shoot one shot at a time, and you concentrate. That makes for great shooters, and that is why Savage brought this nifty little single shot rifle called the Rascal, to market. We first saw this gun at Media Day at the Range the day before SHOT Show 2012, and now we finally got a chance to really shoot one. Nice little gun! And at an MSRP of $174, just about anyone can teach their child or grandchild the fundamentals of good shooting for pennies a round.

You can only buy so many guns (well, not really), so lately we’ve been looking into things that make the guns you already own more effective, and also look much cooler. I ran into this rail system from Black Aces Tactical while researching another article, and I have to say, the Black Aces Tactical shotgun rail is the best in its class that I have found for this application. If you own a tactical shotgun and have always wanted to have the ability to install lights, lasers, red dots, real sights, whatever, at a mere 16 ounces and currently on sale for $179, the Black Aces shotgun rail system is something you should look into. It is available for the Remington 870/1100, Mossberg 500/590, Benelli M1/2/4, and even the Saiga.

This is our KSG. It is a 12 gauge bullpup shotgun made by Kel-Tec that holds a total of 15 rounds, 7 in each magazine tube and one in the chamber. It is outfitted with a front and rear open AR-15 type sight from Leapers/UTG, and the front sight has a laser that is activated [...]

More than not, the decision to buy a new gun comes from inside your heart. Even if you need a duty gun, or you have to pick from a list of allowable weapons for a specific job, most of us are going to buy the gun that feels right to us. For several generations of American gun owners, there is no gun that feels better or more right to buy than a Colt. Last weekend I was listening to Gun Talk Radio, and sure enough, a geezer gun nut called in to let Tom Gresham know that he had finally broken down and bought an AR-15. Why? Because he was finally able to buy a Colt.

Finding the perfect tactical rifle isn’t so simple for some folks. We have to complicate matters, because we just don’t want what everyone else has. Trust me on this one guys and gals. Nobody you know has the Juggernaut Tactical Rogue M1A Bullpup stock from US Tactical Supply. It is an aluminum bullpup masterpiece that will not only add just over 2 pounds to your M1A/M14, it will also be kind enough to set you back a righteous $899. Who can resist that?

Now that the year 2011 has passed and we are handily into 2012, enough has been said about the 100 year anniversary of the 1911 pistol. We should all be able to just return to shooting these classic and ergonomically near perfect firearms for the next hundred years. The question remains, however, can you buy a bargain priced 1911 and have a good reliable firearm. The folks selling guns under the Iver Johnson name these days would answer that question with a resounding “yes.”

Not too many guns have been copied to the extent of the ubiquitous 1911. There is nary a gun nut without at least one in the safe, but these days they are expensive to shoot. A box of .45 ACP on a good day in bulk quantity is still over 30 cents a round, even with throw away steel cases. If you want to shoot a 1911 for just fun plinking, or to train gun handling for competition, you really need to get one of the .22 rimfire versions of the 1911 that have come out in the last few years. The first ones came from Italy and had some problems, but they have worked out the bugs with those, and this new German version is nearly perfect. It is called the GSG 1911, from German Sport Guns, imported by American Tactical Imports (ATI), and the MSRP is $399, with a street price a little less.

Back before SHOT Show this year we got a chance to take a look at the Springfield Armory XD(M) .45 Compact 3.8, but we never got to do a real test for a range report. So as we eagerly await the coming of the single stack XDS, before you decide that you must have it, let’s take a look at the Compact XDM .45 alongside the XDS first.

If any gun is quintessentially Ruger, it’s their .22 caliber pistol. Originally designed by Bill Ruger in his garage, it was the very first gun Sturm, Ruger and Company sold, and has been in production continuously for nearly 63 years. It was a huge success from the get go and has continued to get better as new materials, new manufacturing methods, and other refinements have been made in response to consumer demand.

The 22/45 Model variation was introduced in 1992 to provide a training gun for the venerable 1911 Government Model .45. It has the same grip angle and control locations giving 1911 owners a less expensive alternative for perfecting their pistolcraft. In fact, it’s so faithful to the 1911 that you can use 1911 grips on it. All you have to do to make them work is to relieve the upper front corner of the left grip panel to accommodate the slide stop button. So if you have a set of the new Crimson Trace laser grips on your 1911, you can put them on your Ruger for training.

It has been just over a year since we first posted an article about the bump stock from SlideFire Solutions called the SSAR-15. At the time, nobody knew if this cool new toy would still be legal a year later, but here we are. Not only is the SlideFire still legal, it has gone from an obscure product we had to stumble across to nearly a household word for those of us who think of gunshops as our second homes.

The Ruger 10/22 generally needs no introduction. There is no more recognizable and ubiquitous .22 rifle on the planet. Today Ruger released a new 10/22-TD, MSRP $389, which stands for “Takedown,” and it is a completely new design for the gun. It even comes with its own backpack. You probably already have questions formulating. Takedown designs can sometimes have issues with accuracy, returning to zero and long term reliability, but Ruger seems to have addressed all of these going into the design of this new gun. From what I can see so far, the 10/22-TD should be a great long term success and a reliable gun for those fortunate enough to get one. You may have heard already that Ruger has stopped taking new orders temporarily from distributors because of record sales, but there should be plenty of them available at least for a couple weeks.

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.”

If you are already a deer hunter but have never taken advantage of your state’s muzzleloader season, this spring might be a good time to get comfortable with a modern day muzzleloader from Traditions Firearms. Every state except Montana has a special extra season for muzzleloaders, and Pennsylvania even has two of them, one reserved just for flintlocks. Muzzleloader season is a quieter time in the woods, with fewer hunters, and though I was unable to find any kind of total for deer taken nationally with muzzleloaders, suffice to say that the muzzleloading market wouldn’t be so expansive and competitive if that extra week or so of hunting didn’t give you a competitive advantage.

At SHOT Show 2012 a little while back we got a brief look at the Gen 4 version of the Glock 21. Fortunately for me, I had just purchased a new Gen 4 G21 just a few days prior to the show, and we can now get a change to look at it from a more “hands on” point of view.

There are circumstances, often financial sometimes environmental, when having an expensive gun isn’t possible, or may not be the best choice. For those instances, Hi Point offers a value-priced—no, a low-priced–line of American-made handguns that prove time and again that—almost no matter what–they can be counted on to work when you need them. That’s exactly what the company’s owners set out to do—provide a safe, reliable handgun that practically anyone can afford. So what can you expect for about $150 bucks?

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!

You couldn’t miss Caracal at SHOT Show 2012. They had a big booth at Media Day, and all of the buses to and from the hotels from the show were wrapped in Caracal artwork. Their booth was downstairs with us, but it was very impressive, and this could be a gun that makes it to the US market this year. At $500, however, it will most likely be a non-starter.

We already saw the new Ambush hunting line from Daniel Defense and these are their new tactial guns. The .300 AAC Blackout round is getting widespread attention accross all of the shooting disciplines because it can be shot as a subsonic, meant for work with suppressors, and a supersonic for .30 caliber ballistics from a small package round. There is also a new Daniel Defense in 6.8 SPC, and some lighter options on their existing popular models. This is an end of the day interview and a little subdued, but you can see that it’ll be a strong year for Daniel Defense.

Finally nobody has to believe GunsAmerica that the Teludyne StraightJacket is nothing short of a miracle for rifle accuracy over sustained fire. If you read our original article, Ultimate Accuracy Makeover, but didn’t send your gun to Teludyne, you may want to beat the crowds now because they have enlisted the H.P. White testing organization to certify the results, and you can download the PDF of the report.

A first look a the new Rock River 1911 with a polymer frame and machined slide. It feels a little different than a standard steel 1911, but this was just a first look on a prototype gun. At the projected price point of about $800, this new 1911 will be a formidable competitor in the market at that price point, and higher price points. Rock River doesn’t mess around with anything they do and this gun is truly impressive.

Awesomeness is not a word you would think could make it through spell check, but it is actually a word. If there was one product at Media Day at the Range, SHOT Show 2012, that excelled at awesomeness, it was the modular rifle chassis system from Ashbury Precision Ordnance, or APO. It is called the Saber-FORRST, for Folding Rifle Stock System Tactical. They all don’t seem to fold, going by the catalog, so it is a little confusing. But they sure excel at awesomeness.

This Escort line of shotguns from Legacy Sports International is made in Turkey by Hatsan. It seems to be modelled after the Remington 1100 and since the brand has been in the market for several years, this appears to be an extremely mature product. The guy in the video is in one of those Sportsman’s Channel shows that those of us with Comcast, Direct TV, and most other cable/satelite systems don’t get, but he seems to have used the guns in the field quite a lot and believes in the quality of them. Googling around I found no bad reviews of them, and in general all the Turkish guns have been reliable and extremely well received. Hopefully we’ll get a review gun over the coming year and test these guns with a variety of hunting loads. They seem to be worth checking out if you are in the market for an auto-shotgun, and they do make tactical as well as hunting models.

You wouldn’t think that a gun would be made specifically to bang around behind the seat of your truck, to get banged and bumped on who knows what, and to get dripping wet, dirty, and still work, but that is exactly what Savage has done with the new Hog Hunter line of rifles. They aren’t pretty guns, but they aren’t for pretty game either.