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Rock Island Auction Company (RIAC) is holding an auction later this month that it’s billing as “The Great Firearms Sale of the Decade.” That’s a pretty bold claim, even for the “nation’s leading auction house for firearms, edged weapons, and military artifacts,” so I did some checking to see what all the hype was about. I wanted to know not only what was going to be auctioned that makes this one so great, but also what the auction is like for sellers and buyers. Was this an auction just for well-heeled collectors and museum staff, or could an ordinary gun owner such as me simply find a deer rifle? Why would someone choose to sell a gun by auction in the first place, and of the major gun auction houses, what should I look for if I was going to sell off a collection?

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.

Once you understand the basics of bullet casting, which we covered in Part One of this series, you are well on your way to a finished bullet you can actually shoot. The next two steps are sizing and lubing the bullet, which we will cover here. I will also go over the basics of “hardness,” which will determine how much pressure and velocity your finished bullet can handle. If you are already a handloader/re-loader, you should be able to load up your bullets after this installment. This is not rocket science as you will soon see, and a lot of the mythology of bullet casting you can pretty much ignore for simple range rounds. Remember we started this series with the concept of “free bullets for life.” The more you complicate anything the more expensive it becomes, so at first, let’s just keep it simple.

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.”

As ammo has gotten more and more expensive over the past few years, a lot of people have begun to consider re-loading, and well they should. Because when you buy loaded ammunition, part of what you are paying for is the bullet you shoot downrange and the powder and primer that burn, and part of that cost is also the brass case. Re-loading, or for the purpose of discussion here, “handloading,” allows you to reuse that brass case for more loaded rounds, thereby saving you money on re-buying the brass. Not all cases are brass of course. These days some cases are aluminum or steel, and these generally cannot be reloaded (That is why steel and brass cased ammo is cheaper). But almost all brass ammunition is capable of being re-loaded, and when you get right down to it, brass ammo was created to reload. Leaving brass on the ground is just plain old wasting, and these days who can afford that?

Once upon a time paper targets were boring. Concentric circles are fun and all, but if you shoot regularly, especially with friends, finding other stuff to shoot at is always a welcome addition to our sport. Birchwood Casey has for some time been experimenting with ideas for targets that not only make hits more detectible, but also give you multiple positions on the target to shoot at.

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.