This Week

Flexing your creative muscles is not always rewarded in the gun industry, and often the opposite is true. Entire gun companies have been founded on copying the 100 year old 1911 design, the 100+ year old Winchester and Marlin rifle designs, decades old Smith & Wesson revolvers, and now of course the expired Stoner patent with the AR-15 platform. On the flip side we have but one example of a new and innovative product that has caught on and made it big. Three guesses? Ok it’s Glock. But try to think of another. You won’t find one.

Armalite Inc. https://www.armalite.com/ You may not know this, but the “AR” part of AR-15 comes from ArmaLite. Eugene Stoner, the inventor of the M16, AR-15 platform, was the chief engineer at ArmaLite in 1955 when his first design the AR-10 went head to head and lost to the M-14 as a replacement for the M1 [...]

The Cobra Firearms Company is one of the top 10 manufacturers of handguns in the United States. Located in Utah, all of their guns are 100% US made and every gun carries a lifetime warranty. More than anything, Cobra is known for affordability, but don’t mistake affordability for cheap. Cobra guns work, and work really well. I have long considered the access they give working Americans to affordable personal protection a strong harbinger of 2nd Amendment rights. Not everyone can afford a $500 pistol or revolver. Getting a reliable gun into the hands of a hard working, law abiding, American for half that price or a fraction of that price does us all good, makes us all safer, and brings into our fold another shooter who will stand up for our gun rights.

When the Taurus Judge originally came out most observers in the firearms industry laughed. Taurus is a very serious company, and because of their quality, prices and a lifetime guarantee, they are a mainstay of most gun shops. But the idea of a giant revolver that was made for both .45 Colt and .410 shot shells just seemed a little over the top. It had been made before as a novelty product, but nobody thought that it could be a commercial success. Several years later we now know that this was not the truth. The Judge is a runaway success and has become the primary home defense weapon for tens of thousands of households all over the country. The comfort of .410 buckshot apparently outweighs the gun by several pounds.

Starting tomorrow we begin shooting GunsAmerica TV with our host, Silver Medalist and worldwide shotgun trainer Josh Lakatos. Rather than be redundant talking about all of the big stories at SHOT I’m going to cherry pick some of the smaller stories for the blog that I can find around the show. Here are the ones I found today.

Every year, the day before SHOT Show, several industry manufacturers gather at a remote range near the show to demonstrate some of the new stuff they have coming out that year. It gives you a chance to go shoot the guns that everyone else will only be able to handle at the show, and just about everyone in the firearms media makes it a point to be at “media day” before SHOT. Here are some of the highlights I found today at the range.

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.

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?