By David E. Petzal

In my post of May 13, I touched briefly on high pressure, undesirability of, and I think it’s worthwhile to elaborate on that. As a rule, if you manage to blow up a gun, you are guilty of such horrendous negligence that you should not have owned a gun in the first place. The corollary to that is that most modern rifles are enormously strong, so if you do manage to generate enough force to shatter one, the results will be dire.

If you’re a handloader, excess pressure is not something that sneaks up from behind you in the night. There are several warning signs that you are getting in over your head. First is cratered primers, although this is not infallible. Second is primers that are flattened, or are bashed so flat that they fill the primer pocket. Third is difficult extraction. Fourth is case head expansion that you can measure with a micrometer. Usually, you get a couple of these symptoms simultaneously. [ Read Full Post ]

By Ben Romans

How much would you pay to own a knife carried by a Navy SEAL on the raid in Pakistan that finally took Osama Bin Laden off the Most Wanted list?

One auction bidder thought $35,400 was the right price for this history-laden folder (an example of the knife model is pictured above).

According to ABC News, the knife is an Emerson CQC-7B, a model popular throughout the Special Forces, and was carried as a secondary blade by a former SEAL Team Six member, indentified by his author pseudonym Mark Owen. He's the same retired SEAL who wrote the first-hand account of the mission, "No Easy Day". (The New York Daily News has reported Owen's real name is Matt Bissonnette.)

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By David E. Petzal

Memorial Day is a time to honor bravery, and we have shown plenty of it in the history of our republic. But you wonder, sometimes, who was bravest? The soldiers at Valley Forge, freezing and starving with no hope of victory? The men who survived Bataan? The troops who charged Omaha Beach? Maybe. But here’s my nomination:

At the end of 1863, the enlistments of many of the original Union regiments was coming to an end. These were the men who had put on blue in 1861 when it was assumed the coming war was going to be short and glorious—one or two big battles, and then everyone except for an unfortunate few would march home with their flags to much fanfare. [ Read Full Post ]

By David E. Petzal

Q: What is the most demanding game animal for a rifleman?
—Cole Karsins, Pine Bluff, Arkansas

A: Your question is vague and imprecise. You need to focus. In terms of which North American big-game animal have I seen the most lead flung at in vain, it’s the antelope. That’s because they’re small, and always in the open, and people think you have to shoot at them from a long way off. The highest number of consecutive misses at one goat that I know of is 19, at a yearling buck that was 100 yards away.

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By Phil Bourjaily

Season IV of “The Gun Nuts” begins filming this week. That is me on the set last season, shooting trap with a camera attached to my gun using electrician’s tape. This year we will have an all-new much improved gun camera (the ShotKam) and, I hope, some other improvements to the show, which is a lot of fun to do.

Once again I will be answering viewer/reader questions that is, if you have any.

Ask me your shotgun questions. This season I’ll be picking four or five and some fabulous but as yet un-named prize will go to the people whose questions I answer.

If the question can best be answered by me shooting something, that makes for much better TV than me talking, which can be boring. I have answered questions in the past about cross-dominance, what happens when you put a 20-gauge shell in a 12-gauge barrel, if there is such a thing as shot string and many other topics of earth-shaking importance. So, please ask away, and you may be the winner of some useful shooting-related widget that web editor Dave Maccar or I can scam from some willing manufacturer. [ Read Full Post ]

By Phil Bourjaily

Because no good idea goes un-copied, today we present the first installment of Gunfight Friday based on (and by “based on” I mean “shamelessly ripped off of”) the Wild Chef’s Food Fight Friday. The format will be eerily similar: You send us pictures of your gun (see below) and write a little about the gun and why you like it for a specific purpose. We’ll pair up two guns, and readers will decide which is their choice. Unlike Food Fight Friday, which sometimes pits, say, venison vs. fish, we’ll try to confine this to guns for similar purposes like, say, elk rifles for black timber or squirrel rifles.

I have wanted to get pictures of readers’ guns onto this blog for a long time, and this seems like a good way to do it. I hope you agree, participate, and enjoy it. Because we don’t have any reader pictures yet, Dave Hurteau and I are going to face off on the first installment, which pits my 20-gauge turkey gun against his. [ Read Full Post ]