Category: The Gun Thing

Not just the guns, but all the stuff that goes with them

The Browning Conundrum

Gratuitous Gun Pics, The Gun Thing

We all know that I’m a huge fan of the Browning P-35 High Power pistol (despite its piddly Europellet chambering) because to me, it is the absolute zenith of John Moses Browning’s engineering handgun design (albeit with a huge assist from Dieudonné Saive).   It is one of my favorite guns to shoot, and is much easier to disassemble (and reassemble) when it comes to after-action cleaning.

I also love my Browning 1885 High Wall rifle in .45-70 Govt:

That “bank-vault-closing” feel as you pull the lever back up and close the action after reloading:  not much feels and sounds much better in the firearms world.  And the satisfaction one feels when pulling the trigger to send a giant 405-gr bullet downrange… ah, my friends, if you haven’t experienced it, it would be like trying to explain the beauty of a desert sunset to a blind person.

And everyone knows of my love for Browning Auto-5 shotguns like the Sweet 16 or the Light 20:

And yet those are the only three Browning guns I’ve ever owned.

That’s not by design, by the way.  I’ve fired many Browning rifles and shotguns — all belonging to other people, either at the range or while hunting — but for some inexplicable reason, I’ve never felt compelled to own a Browning long gun or pistol in the way that I am drawn to, say, a Mauser 98 or WinMar lever rifle.

It’s inexplicable, really;  there is no reason for me to turn my nose up at, say a Browning lever rifle (BLR), especially when chambered for a manly cartridge like the .308 Win:

…especially when the BLR’s stacked mag allows for spitzer-tipped bullets while the WinMar’s tube mags do not.  Would I feel in any way disadvantaged with the BLR out in the field?  Hell, no;  and yet for some reason, I’m drawn more to the Henry/Winchester/Marlin offerings than to the BLR.

That also goes for Browning’s bolt-action rifles.

Combat Controller uses one of these, an X-Bolt chambered in -300 Win Mag, for his Scotland hunts with Mr. Free Market, has never had a problem with it, and his deer tally over the years would certainly give one no reason not to use one (especially in those difficult conditions).  Yet I’ve never owned one, nor come close to getting one;  and the same is true for the excellent semi-auto BAR / Safari models:

(For some reason, I’m not a fan of hunting with semi-auto rifles, but that has nothing to do with Browning.)

Needless to say, I would never turn down a Browning double-barreled shotgun, except that they make mostly over/under models — but once again, my preference for side-by-side shotguns has nothing to do with Browning.  Their reputation and success in shotguns is very well earned, and thousands of people use them as religiously as I use Mauser rifles or John Moses Browning’s 1911 Government pistol.

This, by the way, is one of my “lottery” shotguns at Steve Barnett’s:  a rare older “BSS” model in 20ga:

…which has absolutely everything I desire in a SxS:  splinter forearm, double triggers and straight “English” stock.  The only thing that has stopped me from getting it is not the fact that it’s old and second-hand:  it’s the price:  $5,750.  Which, for an old secondhand gun, pushes me away a little.

And here, finally, may lie the the answer as to why I’ve never owned many Browning guns:  cost.

Loyal Readers know that I always go for quality in my guns — and nobody seems to have any arguments against Browning guns in that regard — but at the same time, Brownings always seem to cost just a little bit too much when compared with guns which are functionally their equivalent and whose quality is as good or in some cases better.  Once again, I have no problem with quality costing more than average;  where possible, I always go for quality (in all things) even though I know that it does carry a higher cost.  But Browning always seems to be just a tad over that tolerance, and I walk away.

How say you, O My Readers?  Is this your experience too, or am I missing something here?

Why Not The .243?

Gratuitous Gun Pics, Military, The Gun Thing

I was sucked into the Forgotten Weapons Matrix a little while ago, and during Ian McCollum’s dissertation on the Sig-Manhurin 542 rifle, my train of thought went off down a branch line — I’m an old guy, it happens — and I ended up wondering:  why was the .243 Win never adopted as a military cartridge?

(In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out here that I am a HUGE fan of the .243 Win, especially when loaded with a 90gr bullet.)

Run with me on this one.  The .243 Win is based on a necked-down .308 Win casing so that it can shoot a smaller 6mm (.243″) bullet. Here’s the side-by-side comparison:

That’s a lot of powder (assuming that it stays the same amount as in a .308 Win cartridge) to send a much-smaller bullet downrange, which means of course that there’s a lot of velocity involved — and, as a welcome side-benefit, because there’s less inertia to overcome to get a smaller bullet moving than a bigger one, less recoil.

The latter was given as being one of the reasons that the 5.56mm NATO was adopted, by the way (that and the reduced weight of the cartridges themselves), but it came at the expense of knockdown power.  Also of interest is that the 5.56 NATO generally uses a 55gr bullet — but, for that matter, the .243 can handle a 55gr bullet as well, and it really races out of the barrel.  Once again, a comparison:

The only problem with the 5.56 NATO is that if you try to increase the knockdown power of the poodleshooter by shooting a heavier bullet like (say) one of 90gr, that little casing can’t hold more powder to make up for the severe loss in velocity — whereas in a larger casing like the .308 Win, bullet weight could even be doubled to 110gr without too much effect on velocity, or recoil.

So just as an intellectual question, I ask myself:  why would the .dotmil settle for a hot .22 cartridge when a downloaded .308 would do the same job (at worst), and could easily do a lot more with only a modest increase in bullet weight (say, from 55gr to 75gr)?

If we accept the fact that the earlier .30-06/.308 Win battle cartridges were just Too Much Muscle (or required too much muscle) for our soldiers (as suggested by the military brass), and we ended up adopting a vastly inferior cartridge (the poodleshooter .223);  then why should we not have compromised and used instead a 6x52mm / .243 Win cartridge?  (Of course, I am still of the opinion that the British suggestion of a .276″/6.5mm chambering was the best of all, but let’s not revisit that old story.)

Frankly, I think we missed a good opportunity here, and I think that had we adopted the .243 Win chambering in something like the aforementioned SIG-Manhurin 542 (essentially, a higher-quality AK-47 design) as our mail battle rifle, we would have been a lot better off.

For that matter, the AR-10 (suitably barreled) would have been just as good a choice, if the thought of dumping Eugene Stoner’s rifle for Sergei Kalashnikov’s gives one the vapors.

Either way, the question is this:

Social Distancing

Behind Enemy Lines, The Gun Thing

Over the past weekend, Mr. Free Market obeyed the BritGov’s stupid social distancing rules in the proper manner:

Yes, I am insanely jealous.  Why do you ask?

Also, re: my post about the Beretta 687 a week or so ago, he sent me this snippet:

…and a bonus pic from one of his earlier shoots, this time for vermin:

Fit For Purpose

The Gun Thing

Reader JohnO asks the question:

I just finished reading “Vengeance” about the Israelis’ revenge operation for the Munich Olympic massacres. One aspect that piqued my interest was the agents’ use of a .22 for close combat fire. I found myself reading the eliminations via the .22 and thinking, “Kim duT would never approve”. But it seemed effective for the operation. So what’s your opinion on this? I mean, I already ditched my Glock 19 9mm in favor of a Springfield 1911 and a Walther PPQ both in .45 based. Is the .22 a viable self defense calibre?

No.

Now, is a .22 a better self-defense weapon than a Whiffle bat or a rolling pin?  Of course, but as a self-defense caliber, it falls far behind pretty much all the larger ones.  Would I like to be shot with a .22?  Of course not;  but I’d far rather be struck in, say, the leg or arm by a .22 than by a .357 Mag or a .45 bullet from your 1911.

All that said:  the .22 LR cartridge is a nigh-perfect assassin’s caliber.  At any distance under twenty feet and especially at very close ranges, a head shot with a .22 bullet — properly placed, as opposed to a glancing blow — will generally result in instant death:  the little boolet will penetrate the skull easily, and then pretty much bounce around inside the cranium, turning brain tissue into something resembling rice pudding, functionally speaking.  (In passing, I should note that when my Dad lived on the farm, they used a .22 rifle to slaughter cattle — a close-range single shot into the animal’s skull had the above result, every single time:  drop, a couple of kicks, and then game over.)

The .22 has a couple of other advantages for the assassin:  in a silenced semi-auto pistol, the noise is negligible compared to a shot from a 1911, for example (a “silencer” doesn’t do much to attenuate the blast from a larger caliber);  and using a .22 revolver means that you don’t have to bother about leaving expended cartridge cases bouncing around the room as clues for the investigators.  Likewise, it’s easier to conceal a .22-sized handgun about your person than a large-frame revolver or semi-auto pistol.  Using even a 9mm pistol shooting subsonic rounds requires a longer moderator to achieve the same degree of noise reduction as a much-shorter .22 moderator, so even a silenced .22 pistol is less bulky and more concealable.

And it’s in that capacity that the Mossad agents used .22 pistols, with excellent results, rather than as self-defense weapons.  Certainly, the end result seemed satisfactory to all except the deceased terrorists.

National Ammo Day In Jeopardy?

The Gun Thing

While reading through this report about how the recent spike in gun sales has affected the share prices of both S&W (+133%) and Ruger (+42%) — which is all good stuff, by the way — I spied at the bottom of the report this little snippet:

Moreover, on September 21, 2020, Breitbart News reported that ammunition sales were up 139 percent the first six months of 2020 as compared to the first six months of 2019, as Americans sought bullets and shotgun shells for the guns they were buying at a record pace.

A couple of days ago I went into Academy to check out the lay of the land with regard to their ammo stocks, and in a nutshell, they don’t have any.  A few lonely boxes of .270 Win, .30-06 and some 6.5mm Creedmoor were all they had on the shelves.  Forget any handgun ammo, and other than .22 CB (which are basically cartridges with no gunpowder in the cases, the bullets fired by the primer compound alone) and one (1) box of .22 Mag, there was no .22 ammo of any usable sort.

When I asked the counter guy when he was expecting a fresh shipment of ammo, he just shrugged.

So, Gentle Readers:  whither National Ammo Day this Year?

I have to admit to mixed feelings about the whole thing.  While the thought that Americans have basically bought all the spare ammo in the country should fill my heart with joy, it’s a  fact that I can’t even perform a full-bore [sic]  Happy Dance because I’d not be able to shoot my AK into the air à la  some Iraqi wedding guest, having to count off the rounds like some Gun Powder Scrooge Of Ammo Day Present.

Even worse is that a cursory scrutiny of my favorite online ammo pushers’ websites reveals that not only are they out of stock of most ammo calibers, they aren’t even letting us know when the replacement stocks will arrive.  And frankly, going to four different websites just to scrape up five boxes of 6.5x55mm to make the mandatory 100-round NAD minimum seems to be not worth the effort.

Here’s Lucky Gunner’s offering:

…and I’m not even going to talk about the per-trigger-squeeze cost… sheesh.

But I am going to talk about cost when it comes to .22 LR.  Here are the only two options available from LG:

So much for the “7-cent solution”…

Fortunately, I’m not strapped for ammo (of any caliber) because well, you all know the reason.  But National Ammo Day has always been a symbolic purchase — to remind the gun-confiscators and ammo-taxers that they face an uphill battle, so to speak.

But I think only a few complete idiots among this ungodly crowd will not have got the message this year.

So… is it worth the expense to buy .22 ammo at 18 cents per squeeze (instead of the usual 6-8 cents), just to make a point?   Should we cancel National Ammo Day this year, not for lack of interest, but because of over-enthusiasm?

After I’d written the above, I thought to myself:  why not get an obscure cartridge?  They must have stocks of those.  So I went to Midway to see about some .45-70 Govt, and found this:

None to be had, at any price.  Ugh.

 

 

Gratuitous Gun Pic: Beretta 686 Silver Pigeon (20ga)

Gratuitous Gun Pics, The Gun Thing

As I grow older, I find myself torn between holding onto what has always worked for me, yet often having said experiential wisdom undermined by pesky things such as facts.

Take shotguns.

As Loyal Readers all know, I prefer side-by-side shotguns to over-and-under shotguns, illustrated by my own maxim:  “Shotgun barrels should be side by side like a man and his dog, and not over and under like a man and his mistress.”  (Yes, I coined that phrase.)

Actually, it’s bullshit.  While I yield to no man for my love of fine side-by-side shotguns, the plain fact of the matter is that when it comes to sustained usage, the old SxS just doesn’t cut it.  No matter how costly the gun, or how hardy, they all break after thousands of rounds;  the much-maligned over-and-unders, much less so.  (Ask yourself why Olympic shotgunners like Kim Rhode have always used over-and-unders — in fact, nobody in serious shotgunning competition uses a side-by-side, and that’s for good reasons.)

Which brings me to today’s gun under discussion, the shotgun which is pretty much the international gold standard for the ordinary shotgunner:  the Beretta 686 Silver Pigeon.

 

From a pricing perspective, it’s always difficult to pin the 686 down, because the addition of different Roman numerals makes the price shoot up faster than the options list on a Porsche 911.  The one in the picture is the bottom-of-the-range “Silver Pigeon I” in 20ga, and it typically retails for around $2,000.  This, by the way, is common in the shotgun business:  adding a couple inches to the barrel can double the price, as can asking for superior wood for the stock.

The dirty little secret about the 686 is that it probably represents the best value for money of any O/U shotgun.  (Its closest rival, sales-wise, is the excellent Browning 725 Citori, which typically retails for nearly a grand more.)  I use as an example Mr. Free Market, who each year shoots thousands of rounds through his 686 (he actually shot out his earlier 686 to the point where it would have cost more to repair than just buying a new one), and despite my constant needling, he steadfastly refuses to change to another brand.  (This post was in fact triggered by me saying to someone that we should learn from others’ mistakes or equally, by the example of others, and in the matter of O/U shotguns, I therefore bow to his experience.  If you wish to do the same, feel free to browse here.)

Where I will not change, however, is in the matter of barrel length.  I’ve always though that the longer the barrel, the better.  A 29″ or 30″ barrel will add many yards to the effective range of a shotgun over a 26″ barrel, and the increased range (and efficacy) far outweighs the weight and handling disadvantages.  Save short barrels for the self-defense pump-actions;  field guns should have longer barrels.

This doesn’t mean I’m going to run out and buy an over-and-under shotgun, by the way.  I don’t shoot clays often enough to warrant a change over to an O/U, so I’ll stick to my side-by-side companion.  Yes, I’m preaching form over function, which should surprise precisely nobody.

But if I was looking to buy an O/U, the 686 would get a very close look.