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Introducing the newest addition to the SP101 line. It has a 4.2″ barrel and an adjustable rear, and fiber optic front sight. If you know and love the SP101 series from Ruger, This is the same bulletproof reliable gun in a gun suited for all day holster carry, as a truck or pack gun, or as a backup for dangerous game.

Break out the party hats, Ruger’s LCR just got a little brother! The newest member of the LCR family shares all the great features of its brethren and is now available in .22 caliber. The LCR-22 is light, fast handling, and accurate for a 1.875” barrel, and it’s a ball to shoot.

If you’re not familiar with Ruger’s LCR (Lightweight Compact Revolver) which debuted in January of 2009, it is best known as the first production polymer framed revolver. Several others have come out since but Ruger was ahead of the pack with the LCR.

The polymer lower part of the frame houses all components of the fire control mechanism and is mated to an aluminum alloy upper which houses the stainless steel cylinder and barrel liner. Polymer is a rugged material, rust and corrosion proof, and light weight. The aluminum upper and heavy fluting on the cylinder contribute additional weight savings. My review gun came in at 14.8 ounces empty on my stamps.com electronic scale, but the reported weight is 14.9 ounces. The balance point is at the back of the cylinder which I consider ideal for a snub nose revolver. It comes on target out of the holster quickly, thanks in part to the great balance as well as the natural grip angle and excellent rubber grip from Hogue.

The hammer is completely enclosed making, this a double-action-only (DAO) revolver and eliminating a potential snag for anyone interested in concealed carry. The DAO trigger, like its bigger brothers, is very smooth with no stacking and little overtravel. It measured right around 12 pounds but didn’t seem that much thanks to the way they cam the trigger.

The LCR-22 is compact, little more than 6.25” long and 1.25” wide. It sits so lightly in a holster or in your pocket that you’ll forget it’s there

The big news, of course is that you can now get it in .22 caliber which opens the opportunity to do a lot more shooting since .22 ammo is inexpensive and widely available. The LCR-22 will handle .22 short, .22 long, and .22 long rifle ammo, including shot shells, which means that you can personalize it for your needs.

I see this fun little revolver filling a number of roles. The most important component to shooting any gun accurately, aside from the gun itself, is practice. No matter how good (or bad) you are, more practice will make you better. Unfortunately, center fire ammo can get expensive, especially if you want to shoot hundreds of rounds a month. With a .22, you can shoot for pocket change.

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As the New Hampshire primary approaches nobody should question who the real 2nd Amendment candidate is. It is Ron Paul. The mainstream media is ignoring Ron Paul as a viable candidate, and many of them have come right out and admitted that they will skip over covering Ron Paul no matter how many votes he gets, but you can’t silence the people forever. I don’t expect that Ron Paul will win my former home state of New Hampshire. But if you plan to vote in a primary this election and you vote for anyone other than Ron Paul, be very clear that you are not voting for a Constitutional America, and you are not voting for 2nd Amendment freedom.

What do you call a giant stainless steel .357 Magnum 1911 pistol? Well, if you listen to Coonan Arms, maker of this righteous beast called the Coonan Classic .357, the answer is that it may be many things, but it is for sure…

Not Your First Pistol!
The .357 Magnum is considered by many to be the most effective handgun round for human sized targets. But unfortunately the cartridge was created for revolvers, not pistols. So for fans of 1911 and other auto pistols, the .357 Magnum isn’t practical. It has a rim around the back of the case, unlike a .45ACP or 9mm that are flat and don’t. The extra lip that sticks out of the .357 Magnum and other rimmed cases creates trouble in semi-auto pistol magazines, and the .357 Magnum case itself is very long to fit lengthwise in the grip of a pistol as well.
This leaves 1911 fans who are also devotees of the .357 Magnum in a lurch, because though you can carry several guns at one time, you can only shoot one gun effectively at a time. Until now you had to choose between a 1911 and a .357 Magnum revolver. The Coonan Classic .357 seeks to combine these two choices, and they have done a really great job of it. If you are fan of both the 1911 and the .357 Magnum, you will be pleasantly surprised with this gun. It definitely isn’t for the uninitiated, but with a proper understanding of how the gun works and why, it isn’t a gun to be afraid of as a novice shooter . It works really well and is also a lot of gun for the money.

We are often so focused on the black guns these days that sometimes you miss what is going on in other parts of the shooting and hunting world. A lot of it is deeper and a more enjoyable than all of the tactical stuff combined. Cimmaron Firearms specializes in cowboy era firearms, from the percussion age of the 1830s through 1873, and the cartridge guns from Colt, Winchester, Smith & Wesson, Marlin, Sharps, and others through the turn of the century. The dawn of the repeating firearm is not only a lot of fun historically, you can actually live it and breath it through a very popular shooting organization called the Single Action Shooting Society, or SASS. Cowboy Action Shooting is a lot of fun, and if you are of the competitive bent, at the regional and national level the competition is fierce.

This “Evil Roy” model of the 1873 single action Colt Peacemaker is engineered to meet the needs of the discriminating SASS competitor. More than 90% of the people who shoot Cowboy Action are not competitive and have no interest in winning anything, but we all like to shoot good. And for that small percentage of serious competitors, they are really serious and like to shoot perfect, not just well, and win the prized trophy SASS belt buckles. All of the SASS shooting is on metal plates, not paper, and the plates are set as close to the shooter as is safe for splatter. This makes Cowboy Action really easy to shoot well, so the competition really boils down to speed. Hit the metal plates, every time, as fast as you can.

Every gun nut looks for that perfect .22 pistol that will always be a staple of their gun collection. Even if you have more than one, and most of us do have several, a .22 pistol is lifetime purchase, so even though they are less expensive than most centerfire pistols, you have to choose carefully.

The “old” Ruger .22LR pistol, currently called the Mark III, is one of those guns you can always advise someone to choose and they will never regret it. The classic Luger lines of the gun and the hefty weight of 30oz. and up make it easy to shoot for novice shooters, and steady and accurate for a lifetime of punching paper and eliminating the dreaded grey squirrel. The Ruger Mark III will never let you down. But the world has moved on from steel guns, and most people want a .22LR pistol that looks and feels like the centerfire pistol they use for home defense, concealed carry, or competition.

If you love to shoot it can get expensive. Factory ammo is not at its peak that it was during 2009 into 2010, but even cheap 9mm is still upwards of 30 cents per round. If you reload, you save the cost of the brass, and the savings are huge over factory loads, but you still have to buy the bullets. And while bullets have improved drastically over the last ten years in consistency and quality control, with these improvements have come higher prices. Spot metals on the commodity market have spiked as well, sending prices even higher. Bullets aren’t cheap anymore. You may pay almost as much for the box of bullets as you used to pay for the box of loaded ammo.

I started bullet casting about 15 years ago, and initially I treated it like some sort of black art, that only the gurus could get right. Back then you could get lead for next to nothing. Pipes were still being torn out of old houses that were made of lead, and every junkyard and tire shop had a good supply of used wheel weights, the kind with the steel clip. I tried my best to make perfect bullets with no lines in them, that all weighed the same, and I had some moderate success. But I can’t say I ever mastered that, and if I ever get back into being able to shoot BPCR (black powder cartridge rifle), maybe I’ll try again.

Recently it occurred to me that I don’t hear as much about bullet casting as I should these days. Did everyone forget about it? Jacketed bullets are too darned expensive to shoot all the time, but I like to shoot all the time, and I’m not alone. Once you start asking around, stopping in at tire places and developing a hawk eye for lead at the junkyard and flea market, you can usually get lead for free or extremely cheap. Once you buy the tools, you have them for life and they last. If you learn the basic skills of bullet casting, it could amount to a lifetime of free bullets.

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We don’t do a lot of opinion pieces in the GunsAmerica Blog. This is the first one in fact. New York City’s mayor Bloomberg announced the results of a new sting conducted by his office today, focusing on internet gun sales. He is using the same tactics he has employed to go after legal gun sales at gun shows, implying that American gun owners are by nature dishonest and willing to break the law to sell their firearms. Would you break a federal law for $450, or even ten times that? Probably not. American gun owners are law abiding citizens and proud of our long history of supporting law enforcement and the laws as they are written, even if we disagree with them.

As usual, the facts are skewed all over the place, vague where Bloomberg chooses to be vague, and specific and factual where he has an anecdotal soundbyte or video clip he can play. Thankfully they do not appear to involve GunsAmerica sellers, but this is only the tip of the iceberg and if we don’t say something nobody will. Unfortunately Diane Sawyer and the talking heads at ABC News don’t question the sketchy report as usual, and we have received no questions from them, from law enforcement or from Mayor Bloomberg’s office to request for comments. CNN seems to have lost the picture of me from 1999, but you may remember that Chuck Schumer tried to regulate internet gun sales back then. The article is here, and they even brought me into a little secret CNN studio in Boston to do an interview. As I explained to Mr. Schumer back then, the gun grabbers just don’t have their facts straight. American gun owners by and large are overwhelmingly honest and law abiding. At least Schumer in 1999 wasn’t deliberately manipulating the facts for political gains.

I wonder why GunsAmerica is not mentioned? Could it be that Bloomberg targeted unknown, old, dead and dying websites that have no supervision over who comes and goes, then targeted specific ads that appear to have been placed by people who own but know little about guns? He does mention Craigslist, which of course has a NO GUNS POLICY, similar to Ebay, Amazon and other national online for-sale and auction websites. And the article does mention our only major competitor, Gunbroker, as if they are the Kleenex of internet gun sales, but according to Compete.com, it is GunsAmerica that has the most unique visitors looking for guns these days, even without a NASCAR sponsorship. Go figure.

Bloomberg says that the BATFE is not doing their job, be we know they are, and they do it well. We are generally in weekly contact with the US Department of Justice. They know we have a “no subpoena” policy and they ask us to investigate suspect accounts all the time. We have also been involved with several cases over the years involving state and local police agencies, mostly to catch scammers who never possessed any guns, and BATF (now E) has always know that we have an open policy with anything they need from us. Since the Patriot Act, several federal agencies, including BATFE, monitor GunsAmerica every day. Over 3 million people come and go from here every month (about twice what is shown on Compete, as measured by Google Analytics). Even though we don’t agree with all of the laws, we support law enforcement efforts to catch the actual bad guys. Bad guys make law abiding American gun owners look bad, and we want them in jail as quickly as possible.

Yet despite our almost 15 year record of complete cooperation with law enforcement, no calls or emails from Bloomberg. I wonder why?

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Gunsmithing is not something you can just sit down and teach yourself through trial and error. Guns are a high ticket item, and a little too much sanding here or a little too much pressure in a vice there and your treasured and expensive firearm could be destroyed. The destruction of the American family has produced a difficult byproduct in our generation. Skills that should have been handed down from father to son weren’t, and as the last generation passes on, the next generation doesn’t know how to do stuff that the previous generation did. Now, at 30 and 40 plus years old, a lot of us wish we could do some of that stuff, yet sadly we have nobody to teach us. Everything from electronics, to woodworking, to leatherwork, even sewing, are falling away as things that hobbyists know how to do. In gunsmithing, for someone who has never been taught, even taking apart the guts of a 1911 slide can be mind boggling.

The American Gunsmithing Institute, or AGI, has tried to fill this generational gap by producing a series of extremely good videos on the disassembly and reassembly of most popular firearms, gunsmithing basics, and even advanced gunsmithing courses. Some of them are so advanced that you would expect to have the mechanics of a gunsmithing degree in place before ever having access to such advanced skills. Believe it or not, there are still physical gunsmithing schools in the US (very few), but for those of us who don’t have the time or freedom to go to school, with AGI you can get a real gunsmithing education in your own home, right on the screen, as you have time or it. Depth is optional. Just an armorer’s course at $39.95 might be all you need.

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