Authors

We don’t usually have a lot of negative reviews here at GunsAmerica Magazine. There is no point in them generally. The old adage “any publicity is good publicity” rings true
for gun products like anything else, so if we get a product in that stinks, we usually just decline to review it. The exception is when a product is something you will stumble on most likely,
and it is really bad. This is just a heads up about the swinging targets currently in the gun isle at the Wal-Marts that sell guns and have a big gun section.
We bought the targets you see here in Okeechobee, Florida Wal-Mart, but none of the south Florida stores even have them.

As a Range Instructor for a medium sized department, I soon learned that shooters come in various shapes, sizes, experiences, and abilities. One aspect we found, was that many of our smaller stature officers, who happened to be female, struggled to use the department issue gun, a Glock 22 or 23 in .40 S&W. These days we have the Gen 4 Glocks with interchangeable backstraps, and 17 year old Team Glock member Tori Nonaka is shooting double stack Glocks in competition. This is a bit of an overview, and a short interview with Tori.

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.

This week Google announced a major change in the way it runs Google Shopping, which is the “Shopping” tab on the left when you search. Guns and gun stuff will no longer be allowed. Google Shopping will now comply with the rules for Google Adwords, which has not allowed advertising for guns for several years now. Google is an anti-2nd Amendment company. They always have been. This is not a new angle for Google. Like all of the Silicon Valley dogooders without a clue, Google is clueless.

At this point, who cares? As we explained in our Monday Memo that goes out to our stocking gun dealers here, this past week the Supreme Court said it was ok for the government to force you to buy something you don’t need or want. We aren’t going to cure America’s ills here at GunsAmerica, and 2nd Amendment freedom isn’t the worst of our freedom that the government has co-opted in the last several years. But we can explain what losing Google Shopping means for the gun industry, and for our 2nd Amendment freedom as it stands today, and for tomorrow.

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.