Innehållsförteckning för August 2023 från Gun Digest

What is it about a revolver that seems to capture the attention of nearly everyone who’s ever pulled the trigger on a firearm? Even people who are CCW-focused, one-gun poly semi-auto gun owners rarely fail to spend a bit of time drooling at the gun counters over wheelguns. I think a large part of it has to do with the “visibility” of the gun. I want to say “simplicity,” but that’s not quite true, but I do think visibility plays a big part. Think about it: In a semi-automatic handgun, there’s a lot that goes on within the grip and under the slide. Ammunition gets fed, loaded, fired and unloaded behind a curtain of polymer and steel. But with revolvers … well, revolvers shower behind a transparent curtain: You can…

Ah … the revolver. Timeless and still highly trusted. Why not? Outside the side-by-side shotgun, few firearms have more on-the-ground, behind-the-trigger practical testing backing up their prowess. Old West gunslinger Wyatt Earp and modernday New York lawman Jim Cirillo bet their lives regularly on the wheelguns. Both came out winners. Far from outdated, the revolver is tried-and-true. Even so, the handgun has remained relevant to modern shooters, evolving into more useful and convenient forms. Next to light alloy frames and hammerless designs, one adaptation gaining favor presently is the 9mm revolver. Though, truth be told, the concept is nothing new. Gun designers have squeezed in the 9mm and other semiautomatic pistol cartridges into wheelguns for decades, creating classics along the way. The .45 ACP M1917, for instance. While the 9mm…

Twenty years ago, Smith & Wesson regained its place as the proprietor of the most powerful commercial revolver cartridge on earth. I say regained to note that Dirty Harry’s famous words detailing the .44 Magnum as the most powerful had been overshadowed by the .454 Casull in the Freedom Arms Model 83 single-action revolver a few years after Mr. Callahan’s classic line. Stating the .500 S&W cartridge is powerful is akin to mentioning King Kong was just an ape. In a revolver, the .500 S&W is an awesome handful of force capable of pushing 500-grain bullets well over 1,400 fps. This mention of bullet weight and velocity is merely one example of the cartridge’s strength: There are several factory offerings of lighter bullets at even higher velocities. I currently have…

An old man once told me that he had lived to see the death of romance in gun culture. Paul was one of many men of the same name with whom I shot during my formative years as a competition shooter and hobbyist. He had the same rough mannerism I imagined Hemingway had in his day: a surety of his actions and a deep sense of the world and its nature. Unlike many I spent time listening to, he was, in fact, an academic. How ever, he’d given up trying to make sense of things and fell into nostalgia during the 16 years I knew him. His wisdom was something I took for granted in my youth, and I didn’t know what he meant when he said that the “elegance”…

HISTORICAL NOTES After a half-century of production, millions of shooters use Bill Ruger’s firearms—but only one very special pistol cartridge bears the man’s name. The .480 Ruger was never intended to be the biggest and heaviest-recoiling handgun cartridge on the block. It splits the difference between the .44 Remington Magnum and .454 Casull cartridges. GENERAL COMMENTS Using a Hornady 325-grain XTP Magnum bullet (0.475-inch diameter) and Hornady brass, the .480 Ruger offers a significant velocity and energy increase over the .44 Remington Magnum cartridge, but without the recoil disadvantage of other super-powered handgun cartridges. The key to delivering the two-thirds of a ton of muzzle energy is a well-reasoned balance between bullet weight, velocity and operating pressure, in a cartridge derived from the venerable .45-70 case. The cartridge is chambered…

I still remember the first time I saw an HKS speedloader in action. I was working at The Gun Room, and the boss, Mike Karbon, found and stocked them. When we made a sale for a duty-type or defensive revolver (which were most sales back then, being next to Detroit in the 1980s), he’d say, “You’ll want a speed loader with that.” Most were dubious, as it was a new thing, and most were suspicious. Mike had a demo loader he’d pick up, hurling it across the shop floor to ricochet off the floor, into a corner and off a strategically placed wooden ammo crate. The customer would pick it up, and then Mike would hold it up, turn the knob and the rounds would drop free. Sale made. Made…

01 Bond Arms Cyclops .45-70 Gov’t Well-known for its derringer-style handguns, it should come as no surprise the Texas concern has a new pocket pistol on the market. What should raise an eyebrow is what it comes chambered in: .45-70 Government. Yes, the hallowed buffalohunting cartridge is now available in a 28-ounce hammer-fired pistol Bond Arms has dubbed the Cyclops. The monocular moniker is due to the pistol only having room enough for one of the relatively elephantine straightwalled cartridges—compared to the two-round variations most think of with Bond derringers. The pistol is plenty demure, measuring in at a tick under 7 inches, with a 4.25-inch barrel. Bond has slapped on B6 resin grips and outfitted the pistol with a 7-pound trigger. If your arthritis isn’t already flaring with that…

The quintessential image of the gunslinger, with a pair of nickel-plated sixguns hanging about his waist, able to take the 10-gallon hat off his opponent with a hipshot from 100 yards, might just be slightly exaggerated. Even if Hollywood did stretch the truth a bit—OK, maybe a lot—one small fact does remain: The centerfire cartridge surely made the handgun not only much easier to reload, but it also made it much more reliable. If you’ve spent any amount of time with a cap-and-ball pistol, you understand the pitfalls associated with the design. Fouling—both leading in the barrel and the corrosive mixture of burnt powder and lubricant—is a real issue, and you might spend more time scrubbing than shooting. Caps can fall off their nipples at the most inappropriate time, not…

There was a time when Beretta’s 13-round, .380 ACP Cheetah pistols were arguably the best concealed carry guns available, but that was many years ago. Today, the market is dominated by smaller and lighter polymer handguns with similar capacities of 9x19mm. This is worth mentioning early on, because the new Beretta 80X Cheetah isn’t for everyone, and it was never intended to be. The 80X is a compact pistol, but it’s not tiny by any measurement, and that already says a lot about the philosophy behind it. This wasn’t designed to be the most concealable gun you can carry; it was designed to be the most shootable gun you can still conceal. For those who have difficulty making good hits with micro-compacts that disappear into your palm, the revamped Cheetah…

I began working in law enforcement in the early ’90s. At that time, competition pistol shooting and tricked-out pistols were the rage, and the things that worked in competition were the marketplace and training. Though you don’t hear so much about it now, at that time there was a running debate about which shooting stance—isosceles or Weaver—was the best. The Weaver stance was developed by Jack Weaver of Lancaster, California, in 1959 for the purpose of ensuring quick and accurate shot placement with a handgun. It was later codified by Jeff Cooper and very much resembles a fighting stance that might be used by a boxer or mixed martial arts fighter. This stance allows you to deliver force quickly, while maintaining balance and the ability to move. The isosceles began…

My friend, Mike McNulty, had come over to my house, as we were planning to do the necessary load development for an upcoming safari to Zimbabwe. With his beloved Heym Express .505 Gibbs in tow, we knew we had a great load using the standard 525-grain bullets—long proven in the voluminous case—but Mike was interested in using 570-grain slugs on this hunt. We’d obtained some premium bonded-core softpoints, and the solids of correlative weight, and consulted the data published by the manufacturer in their own reloading manual. In order to be safe, we decided to stay 2 grains below the published maximum and carefully loaded up a half-dozen of each bullet. Grabbing the Oehler 35P chronograph and heading (optimistically) to the range, one could only imagine our dismay as the…

Of all the so-called Western gun slingers, I was always drawn to Bat Masterson. His professional gun toting career, which included hunting, policing, railroading and sports writing, sort of mirrored mine. And it always seemed to me that, though over shadowed by the exploits of his friend Wyatt Earp, Masterson’s life was just as exciting … and he was just as capable. Cimarron has decided to honor this frontier legend with a replica of what’s thought to be one of his Colt revolvers. You must also admit that Masterson had the best nickname. When my son was born, I was in the middle of my railroad detective career and thought a nickname of “Bat” combined with a last name of Mann, was an opportunity that could not be passed up.…

Sig Sauer released one of the first truly revolutionary handguns we’ve seen in a long time with the Sig P365. A new genre of handgun, the micro-compact, was born. Since then, the rest of the handgun industry has been scrambling to release a micro-compact of their own, as Sig churns out more and more variants of the hit P365. Here, we look at one of the newest additions to the P365 lineup, the P365-380 Rose—a special edition plus some accessories all specifically for women looking to carry for the first time. Is Sig pandering to the growing market of female gun owners, or has a major industry player finally released something that addresses the needs of women, without a lot of firearms experience, looking to defend themselves? NOT ANOTHER PINK…

Fulton Armory is known for its match-grade builds of American service rifles, and the company’s newest addition to its catalog is particularly exciting. Fulton already had quite the spread of various M14 and M1A rifles for sale, but now the M14 Black Hawk DMR is available as well. The rifle is inspired by the weapon carried by U.S. Army Delta Force soldier Randy Shughart of Black Hawk Down fame, who died fighting in Mogadishu in 1993. Fulton Armory says that the rifle “brings together cutting-edge technology, unrivaled accuracy, and a tribute to one of the nation’s heroes.” The Black Hawk DMR is built on a Fulton Armory M14-marked receiver that meets all USGI heat treat and material specifications. The receiver also features a Fulton Armory DMR Picatinny scope mount that…