Articles by Paul Helinski

I’m not sure anyone has any faith in the free gun cable locks you get with most new firearms these days. The ones I have tested are a struggle to get the key into, and when you do get the key in and manage to open it the cable stubbornly clings to the side of the action. It is hard to get the gun from a safe and locked up condition to ready to fire.

MagVault, who you probably know from their biometric handgun safes, has recently introduced two products that take the place of those pesky cable locks for not a lot of money. If you aren’t locking your gun in a safe and you feel you need to provide a foolproof measure to keep your gun safe from firing, one of these might be for you. Neither can be eliminated with a $5 pair of bolt cutters from Wal-Mart, and one is even on sale for a few days more for $13.95 Read the rest…

With all the talk we have around here about long range accuracy and long distance shots, very little of it applies to actual big game hunting. Punching paper has almost no relationship to hunting in the field. Paper targets just sit there. You don’t have to work hard to find them. They don’t move. It is almost like they were made to sit there and let you shoot at them. Oh yea, they were. Most shots on deer, hogs and even most African game is taken well inside of 100 yards, and often less than 50 yards.

None of those things are true with actual game, whether it is a Whitetail deer in the Pennsylvania woods, or a hog in the Everglades, or a Kudu on the plains of Africa. Wild game is almost always moving somewhat, and they are usually pretty darned hard to find, especially the big ones. When it is time for your shot, the shot you worked really hard to get and probably prayed for by your bedside the night before, you don’t want to look down your rifle and discover that you have the wrong optic for the job. Even at 4 power magnification a moving deer 75 yards away can be a difficult target to find in your scope when split seconds count. Yet optics are preferable in many ways to iron sights, because you don’t have to align them.

Nobody wants to shoot someone by accident, not even if you already shot them once. But something that many people don’t understand is the criminal and civil liability that can arise from doing just that. It is hard to think about a concept such as “gunfight safety.” It is an oxymoron of sorts because a gunfight by nature is not safe. But when you choose a firearm, for concealed carry or as a duty gun, as a police officer or private security, you have to consider how likely is that gun to get you in trouble if you are in the heat of a potential or actual gunfight. Even if you are protected by statute from criminal liability as a police officer or if you live in a state with castle doctrine laws, lawyers can find a way to sue you regardless, and your ability to not fire the gun under stress could potentially effect your life as much as being able to fire the gun under stress.

High end optics have historically not done well in the American market, We will spend any number of hard earned dollars for the newest and greatest rifle in the newest and most devastating caliber, but when we go to buy a scope for it, we cheap out. Europeans tend to go the opposite way. They will take much more pride in a fine optic than a fine rifle, and that is where they prefer to spend their money. An American will put a $500 scope on a $3,000 rifle, whereas a European will put a $3,000 optic on a $1,000 rifle.

I don’t know when this changed, but it is recent. All of a sudden, right here in the good old USA, optics in the $1,500 plus range have come into focus in the market (pun intended), and people are buying them.

Making a gun cheaper doesn’t always add up to making a cheap gun. That is the point of the new Kahr CM9. Modeled after their extremely popular but pricey PM-9, the $569 MSRP clone CM9 has exactly the same external specifications, the same magazine capacity and is the same weight as it’s more expensive older brother.

This gun is how Kahr answers the question, how do you follow up a home run? The answer is “with another home run,” and they really have no choice. Coming out of SHOT 2011, where nearly every handgun company announced a new 6+1 tiny 9mm, the PM-9 now has much more competition in the marketplace where it had previously ruled the kingdom. The CM9 cuts corners only where the engineers at Kahr felt they could safely be cut, but is more competitive on price with the new entrants into the field in this size range. The CM9 still has the 7 patented features found in all of these small Kahrs, and it shoots exactly like the PM-9, recoiling lower in the hand than most guns this size, which drastically reduces felt recoil and muzzle flip. The CM9 differs from the PM-9 in 5 different ways.

ArmaLite Inc. https://www.armalite.com/ If something ain’t broke there is a strong argument to not fix it. Fortunately for .50 Caliber match shooters though, the team at ArmaLite must have played hooky the day they learned that in 2nd grade. Even though their ArmaLite AR-50 has already been a strong competitor in national matches, they decided [...]

Thompson Center https://www.tcarms.com/ As we reported in our article, Out of the Box MOA, in the last GunsAmerica Magazine, the TC Venture easily lives up to its claim of minute of angle accuracy in a factory rifle. Unfortunately though, most of us can’t shoot good enough to prove this out ourselves, so as a selling [...]

Springfield Armory https://www.springfield-armory.com/ We had an article about this gun from Range Day before SHOT this year. It was created by Springfield as a basic platform from which to build a true competition 1911, without all the bells and whistles you may not want if you buy a full tricked out gun. Rob Leatham, who [...]

Springfield Armory https://www.springfield-armory.com/ This is another of the guns that we checked out on Range Day before SHOT Show and as I explained there, it is more of a gun than it is a story. Last year Springfield released the XD-M 3.8, which was a short barreled gun with the same frame as a standard [...]