Innehållsförteckning för December 2016 från Gun Digest

Former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt’s famous “Big Stick Diplomacy” has sculpted much of America’s political and cultural ideologies over the years. The expression, “Speak softly and carry a big stick—you’ll go far,” may have even earned Roosevelt a Nobel Peace prize for his soft-spoken negotiation tactics to end the Russo-Japanese war in 1905. However, there are times when speaking softly isn’t an option and the big stick needs to do the negotiating. Echoing the latter part of Roosevelt’s ideology is CMMG’s new MkW-15 Anvil rifle, chambered for the beastly .458 SOCOM cartridge. As many know, the .458 SOCOM was designed to give U.S. military personnel greater close-range stopping power than the .223 Rem., while maintaining compatibility with most mil-spec M16 parts. Naturally, the civilian firearms market adopted the .458 SOCOM…

As the sun started its ascent into the vast Texas sky, deer started piling into the clearing in front of me, one after the other. My guide, Johnny, and I watched as first does and then smaller bucks entered the fields in front of our blind. It was an abnormally wet year for West-Central Texas, so even in the middle of October the grass was saturated with green and the deer were fat as ever. Finally, a mature buck cruised in from the left, sending the younger bucks skittering away. A seasoned veteran and long-time guide at Vatoville, one of the state’s most productive whitetail hunting outfits, Johnny immediately identified the buck as a shooter. “There’s our buck,” the veteran guide said. “He’s at 80 yards. Take him when you’re…

Innovative people in the shooting industry are always coming up with something new to explore. New guns, new cartridges, new bullets. One of the more interesting new developments is the polymer composite bullet offered by Polycase Inceptor and Ruger ammunition. Polymer is making its way into all aspects of the shooting sport, from polymer frames to polymer coatings on bullets. Now polymer is a major component of the bullet itself. Poly-case bullets are made from a mixture of powdered copper and polymer and are produced via injection molding. The bullets come in two flavors, solid bullets or fluted bullets. The solid bullets are either a round nose RNP (Round Nose Precision) or flat nose TNP (Truncated Nose Precision) configuration. The unique ARX (Advanced Rotational Extreme) bullet has three flutes in…

One of the most important skills a hunter can have is the ability to track wounded game animals. While being able to track without any form of assistance is great, an excellent tool to aid in this endeavor is a thermal sight, which can more easily pick up and follow the blood trail. Leupold’s new LTO Tracker Thermal Sight is designed just for this purpose, and for observing game in low light. The new optic is perfect for dark morning walks to your blind or deer stand to avoid spooking or disturbing game animals before the day. The LTO Tracker features an advanced thermal imaging engine for high-quality imaging, fast 30hz frame rates and detection of heat sources out to an impressive 600 yards. It has five different thermal filters…

First introduced in 2012, the M&P Shield line of pistols has been a huge success for Smith & Wesson, with the company selling 1 million Shields by November 2015. Slim and trim, the single-stack 9mm and .40 S&W models are a favorite with concealed carriers. But if there was one complaint, it was that the Shield wasn’t available in a larger caliber. Until now. At the NRA Annual Meetings, Smith & Wesson launched the M&P 45 Shield chambered in .45 ACP. It is a bit heavier than previous models but has essentially the same proportions as its smaller-caliber cousins. “We were often asked at trade and consumer shows, ‘When are you coming out with a Shield in 45?’” said Jan Mladek, Smith & Wesson’s director of marketing. “Listening to our…

The way you outfit your reloading bench is as personal as the way you reload your ammunition; there’s no true right or wrong answer, so long as it works for you. Invariably, you’re going to need the basic tools to get the ammunition made properly, but there are some newer tools that will definitely make the reloader’s life easier. We’ll take a look at some great options so you can make a better, more informed decision when investing your hard-earned money. You’ll need a reloading press, a means of trimming your brass cases to length, some reloading dies, a scale to weigh powder charges, and a means of measuring both cartridge cases and the overall length of assembled ammunition. It’d also be nice to have some form of eraser, to…

If you’ve ever examined some of the classic African safari cartridges, you may have noticed they seem to be rather large in comparison to their actual powder charges. The .416 Rigby, for example, has a huge case, while modern powders have trouble using all that capacity. The reason? Cordite, which was the common propellant at the time Rigby designed the case, was extremely sensitive to pressure fluctuations brought on by a change in temperature. In order to be effective in the tropical heat of India and Africa, Rigby over-designed the case size, to keep the pressures low in the extreme heat, for reliable extraction in a dangerous game situation. Our modern powders—even those developed by the time the Second World War came around—have made a drastic improvement over cordite, but…

It was a hot summer morning when I joined a gang of shooting-industry compadres at a backyard shooting range to prepare for a day of fast-paced wingshooting. Our six-man crew gathered around a picnic table full of clay pigeons, shotguns and ammo to burn. We would warm up on clays flung from a Champion WheelyBird trap before heading to a nearby dairy farm to help with a real pigeon problem. However, the core of our mission that day was to test the new Stevens S1200. We uncased four of the hungry 12-gauge autoloaders and fed them until our supply of clays turned to dust. INSIDE THE S1200 My invitation to this field trip came from J.J. Reich, communications manager for Stevens. Before we headed down the road to pound pigeons,…