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Practice, Practice, Practice! That is what just about every article you read on how to improve your shooting will say. But how do you do that at 20 cents a round? There is no cheap surplus .ammo around anymore, so if you really want to punch paper or clang steel a lot you pretty much have to either be a trust fund baby, marry a trust fund baby, or find a way to shoot .22s. At pennies a round and available pretty much everywhere, there is no better tool for honing your shooting skills on the cheap than .22 Long Rifle ammo and a gun that shoots it well.

You can of course just go out and buy a regular garden variety .22, like a Ruger 10-22, Remington Nylon 66, Beretta NEOS, and numerous examples from Henry that are very affordable and shoot really well.

The problem with this approach however is that when you practice, most of what you are practicing is muscle memory and natural point of aim. Both of these will be different with a standard .22 than they will with your self defense or competition rifle. You can buy a gun that looks like yours, or even feels like yours, but there will be no substitute for being able to shoot your actual gun with .22 ammo.

If there is evidence of an internet revolution in the firearms industry it is certainly coming from Ruger. Today they announced the new LC9 polymer pocket pistol exclusively online at 2pm. You will not find an story on it in any print magazines today. It is still two weeks until SHOT Show, so by then it will be old news. And the gun is actually shipping February 1, 2011, in like a month. In an industry where only a few years ago the print world ruled and you couldn’t get a gun for six months after it hit the magazines, this is a monumental approach that Ruger is using to launch a new product. They even bumped SHOT Show but a couple weeks, presumably to avoid the noise floor that SHOT creates.

When I first heard about the Teludyne Tech (TTI) “Straightjacket,” I was extremely skeptical. I have seen literally dozens of products come and go over the years that claimed to increase accuracy by “reducing barrel harmonics.” I thought that the Straightjacket, if I bothered to waste my time on it, would turn out to be just something else to throw on the pile with all of the bore treatments, weights, stocks, stock beddings, even something resembling electrical tape, that have crossed my path over the years. Nothing, in my opinion, could make a big difference in long range accuracy beyond what we knew up until now. If you want a rifle that would reliably shoot sub-MOA, you had to work up loads, build your own consistent match ammo, bed or free float the action, get the best trigger, the best stock, and especially the best and most expensive barrel. Teludyne wasn’t going to convince me that match grade accuracy would come out of a regular stock rifle with their “new technology.”

The most absurd about thing about the Teludyne story is what they want you to do with your gun. This is no “try it and see if you like it” product. They want you to send them your rifle, after which they will take it apart, press fit (at something like 50,000 pounds of pressure) a steel sleeve around your barrel, then they fill that sleeve with a proprietary compound, filling in all around your barrel. Then they weld a permanent cap on top, grind and sand your stock down to fit the new inch and a quarter thickness of your new “Straightjacket”ed barrel, then put the whole works back together and send it back to you.

Who in their right mind would send a perfectly fine but maybe not as accurate as I’d like it to be rifle out to be modified to such a degree, with experimental technology? This is a permanent deal. Love it or hate it, your rifle will never be the same.

Well it turns out that I was willing to do it, with two rifles in fact, and you aren’t going to believe the results. You are however welcome to come to sunny South Florida this winter and try them for yourself if you like. I know the discussion boards will be buzzing with disbelief as soon as this comes out and I welcome all comers. I feel priviledge to be one of the people who got a Teludyne gun “back when nobody knew about them” and I plan to keep my guns and shoot them a lot.

When I was a young tadpole growing up on Hopalong Cassidy, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers westerns, when the guy in the white hat shot the guy in the black hat the bad guy would wince and fold slowly – that is unless the good guy decided to be magnanimous and just shoot the gun out of his hand. Later westerns and cop shows got a lot grittier and you saw a lot of blood and people being blown over backwards. Blown over backward has become the modern movie standard in most cases now, and third party tales on the internet about as to the impact power and “stopping power” of the various combat handguns with varying loads.

Well, it turned out that whatever those early movies lacked in good examples of gun handling they had the right when it came to the actual effect of a handgun bullet hitting a human subject. The truth of the matter, friends, is that bullets don’t blow up people nor do they physically knock them over backwards. Not to say that people cannot react violently at times to being shot, but this depends on exactly what is hit inside the body, and the mental and physical state of the subject being shot. Small animals may react dramatically to this impact but things that weigh 100 lbs or more often do not show any immediate reaction – other than to keep fighting or run faster.

Now this is not another article on 9mm vs .45. It is not about “stopping power” per se, but we all need to accept that the illusions we see on the silver screen are just that – illusions and for entertainment purposes. If you expect your .44 Magnum to bowl people over with a hit to the midsection you may be in for a rude and fatal shock!

So, would I say that caliber or “power” do not matter at all? I cannot bring myself to say that. I see a difference in cases that come across the desk and in the hunting fields, but that difference is subtle, not so drastic that you can say unequivocally that caliber A is so much better than caliber B that if you carry A you cannot go wrong or that B is a silly choice… within reasonable parameters.

OK…I’m not afraid to admit it; I grew up watching shows like Starsky and Hutch as a kid. The single coolest point of that show was watching “Hutch” pull out that 6-inch Colt Python – probably one of the highest “cool factor” pistols out at the time. As I recall, every cop and detective show from Andy Griffith to Cannon had the hero carrying a trusty wheelgun into harms way back then.

Yet now, when I train new officers, I show them my J-Frame snubbie and they give me a look something like that old Steve Martin – Bill Murray skit from Saturday Night Live, “What the Hell is that Thing…”

It’s true, if you ask most new gun buyers who are looking for their first handgun, my experience has been that they want some semi auto, and they look at the revolver as some antiquated piece of history. Oh how wrong they are. The revolver is still a viable, potent, and downright best choice for many applications, and for the majority of shooters.

Welcome back the to the “pro tip” column for GunsAmerica Magazine from the U.S. Army Marksmanship Unit (USAMU). This is our fourth article for GunsAmerica and if you haven’t been following the previous columns from the USAMU you should take a look. There is a lot of good information in them.

My name is SFC Jason Parker and I shoot on the US Army Marksmanship Unit International Rifle team. We are currently in the middle of a very busy competitive shooting season and our team has done very well. So far in 2010 our team has combined to win 6 International World Cup Medals and captured 2 National Championship titles. We have seven shooters that will be competing at the World Shooting Championship in Munich later this summer. In case you are interested in our results you can follow all of the USAMU’s highlights on Facebook.

This month’s article is about some general shooting tips to help improve your marksmanship skills. No matter what kind of weapon you will be shooting, whether it’s a rifle, pistol, or shotgun, there is one way to improve. Practice. I once had a coach that told me that the best way to get to Carnegie Hall was to practice. I have applied these simple words of wisdom to many aspects of my life and they have always proven to be true. Even if you are already a good shot, practicing more often will improve your shot accuracy, guaranteed.

So… you have finally saved up enough money and made up your mind to take that hunting trip of a lifetime. If you have never taken an extended hunting trip …you ask yourself “What do I need? At this point, you probably have already picked a game species to hunt and the state or province where you plan on pursuing that game animal. If you haven’t, don’t panic, you still have time to put something meaningful together but you need to start right after you finish reading this article. In order to point you in the right direction I have listed the top tips to help you plan for that memorable hunting trip you are about to take. If you are going with friends or family members make sure that everyone is on the same page. Make your plans and coordinate your equipment together. Proper planning and preparation will benefit everyone. I can go on and on about this topic, but I will touch upon the main points of groundwork in order to keep things in perspective.

As many of you know Lipsey’s is a large firearms wholesale company in Baton Rouge, LA. They have a history of creating interesting and useful limited edition firearms and before us is one of the best and most interesting I have encountered. The guns are flattop target Bisley-Blackhawk revolvers reminiscent of the good old days and are chambered for one of the most wonderful cartridges of all time, the .44 Smith & Wesson Special. Said another way, they are guns that Elmer Keith, Skeeter Skelton and perhaps even Bill Jordan would have gone to a lot of trouble to own. Beyond, they are very close facsimiles of what I think is the finest revolver ever created, Elmer Keith’s No. 5 Colt.

What makes these revolvers so unusual, rare and wonderful is the combination of all three of these features: .44 Special, flattop target and Bisley. With these things we have a wonderful cartridge housed in an elegant target-sighted frame, with the Ruger “Bisley” grip; that to me is the most efficient and shootable revolver grip ever made. It is extremely close to Elmer’s wonderful No. 5. With that I realize many of you are not familiar with this revolver, so we will set the stage.

Imagine for a minute that the United States Treasury made a million dollar bill note. You know, like a hundred with Benjamin Franklin on it, but a million instead of a hundred. Then imagine that someone gives you one of those million dollar bills, tax free, yours to keep. The only other detail is that you aren’t allowed to spend any of the million bucks for ten years, but you can invest it in something or somethings for a potential return to live off of between now and then. Then, at the end of ten years you can only live off of the million bucks itself. You can’t keep any of the money you make between then and now after the ten years, and that includes a return on investing the million.

It may sound complicated but it isn’t. This is the story for many people facing retirement in ten years. They have a “nest egg” of principle and they need to keep the principle in tact for retirement, when they plan to live off of it. Until that time they would like to see a return on the principle, but the most important thing is to not lose that nest egg.

Would you take that million bucks and just keep it stored in that million dollar bill? Bank savings accounts have interest rates in the negatives right now and probably for the foreseeable future. You aren’t losing anything by not being able to earn interest on it. It’s not a bad little storage system, a million dollar bill. It is portable, compact, and you can hide it easily. Banks can fail, but do countries fail? Will that million bucks be worth a million bucks in ten years?