Indholdsfortegnelse for Volume 77, Issue 16 i Firearms News

Behind The Scenes, Gunwriter Edition—picture the gunwriter in his natural habitat: sitting behind his desk at home, clad in a stylish Hawaiian shirt but having neglected to put on pants, cup of strong coffee at hand, banging at the keyboard like an epileptic monkey, only drooling a little, frantically trying to meet the required word count for an article by his deadline. And he gets an email from a manufacturer: “Hey, we’re sending you a new top secret gun.” And…that’s it. No details about the gun, just the name. In this case, let’s say the manufacturer was Springfield Armory, and the new gun was the Echelon. Said drooling, overcaffeinated, pantsless gunwriter would immediately forget about his looming deadline and start wondering what the ‘Echelon’ was. ECHELON of course is the…

Due to their close connections to Great Britain, Australian police and militia traditionally used British pattern small arms. As in most British colonies, handguns did not play a large part in the armament of local police and militia units who were normally armed with rifles and carbines. During Australia’s 19th century gold rushes numbers of percussion revolvers were imported for use by militia and police. The most popular were various Adams, Webleys and Colts. The first metallic cartridge revolver to see wide service “Down Under” was the Pistol, Adams, Centrefire, BL, Mark I, which was followed by the improved Mark II and Mark III revolvers. A solid frame design with a DA/SA trigger the six round cylinder was loaded through a hinged gate on the right side of the frame…

When the average American firearms enthusiast thinks of gun shows in Europe, the first things that will come to his or her mind are trade shows like IWA in Germany, or for the more strictly defense-related events, DSEI in the UK and EUROSATORY and MILIPOL in France; events that are strictly “trade-only,” accessible by a selected number of business operators, government officials, and members of the press, much like the NSSF SHOT Show. And yet, trade shows dedicated to the civilian firearms market and open to the general public do take place in Europe. There’s the Waffen-Sammlerbörse in Lucerne (Switzerland), the British Shooting Show in Birmingham (UK). And then, there’s Italy. A Long Story The first major trade show of the European civilian firearms industry was the Internationale Waffen Ausstellung,…

The M249S Para from Fabrique Nationale is the semiauto version of the US military’s longest-serving 5.56x45mm belt-fed light machinegun. The gun is universally referred to as the SAW (Squad Automatic Weapon). The M249S Para sports a 16.1-inch barrel and weighs 16 pounds empty. It feeds from a 200-round linked belt or a standard STANAG M-4 magazine. The trigger pull ranges between eight and 15.5 pounds. It also sports an MSRP of $11,094. There is nothing the semi-auto M249S Para SAW can do that a $550 M-4 won’t do more efficiently. Then why are these bulky monstrous guns still tough to find? Spoiler alert—because they’re just so freaking cool. War Story Specialist 4 Diego Martinez had previously been terrified. Now he was just angry. SP4 Martinez was assigned as a SAW…

The SIG Sauer P226 is an icon of a pistol, a stalwart of the late Cold War era that once owned the lion’s share of the federal law enforcement market, in addition to winning, in various forms, military contracts. Unfortunately, it is a pistol that has mostly been forgotten about. Even though SIG is still making several different models, they’ve put most of their marketing budget (and manufacturing efforts) into the P320 and P365 series, so the P226 just sort of hovers in the background. While the Beretta 92 design seems to be seeing a resurgence and popularity among people who were kids during the Cold War, the same thing can’t be said for the SIG Sauer P226, and that’s a shame. I’m a huge fan of the P226 and…

“OpenAI has been slapped with its first-ever defamation lawsuit after a ChatGPT “hallucination” generated a bogus embezzlement complaint against a Georgia radio host,” the New York Post reports. “Mark Walters was shocked to learn ChatGPT created a false case that accused him of ‘defrauding and embezzling’ funds from the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF).” That “chatbots” can “hallucinate” sounds like something out of science fiction, and what that actually means and how it differs from program corruption, coding errors or simply bad source inputs is still not clear: This is all new stuff. Walters’ complaint against the proprietors of an emerging technology opens a unique chapter in American jurisprudence and raises questions about the moral responsibility and legal liability human beings have for seemingly independent actions by their creations. When they…

(Tombstone, Arizona, July 17, 2023) Joe Biden and Senate Democrats have been ramping up their anti-gun rhetoric. Democratic governors and state legislatures are doubling down on defending old, and passing new, unconstitutional gun control laws, all while the legacy media runs a steady barrage of “gun violence” stories that demonize guns and gun owners. In the midst of all of this, the question in many gun owners’ minds is this: “Where’s the NRA?” Surprisingly to some, the NRA is still there in DC and in state capitals fighting for our rights. Despite the chaos and corruption at the top, there is a cadre of sincere Second Amendment defenders working for the right to keep and bear arms for all Americans. Due to the chaos and corruption, they’re just much lower…