Pistol Engineering and Advertising Adventures

Much like rifles, pistol manufacturers have a need to sell more. They use more machining and have sometimes complex locking systems to prevent them going off until the right sequence of devices are used. In general, pistols are very safe. There are exceptions, but even a 1911 has a couple safeties on it, plus a another one mostly known to the military called Out Of Battery. As a marksman, I am very much in favor of good safeties, but I'm also not very good with pistols and mostly focus on things with rifle stocks. I don't even like pistol grip stocks. I learned on classic rifles, not military arms.

Way back in the 1840's, the 44 and 45 cap and ball were carried into the gold fields and by pioneers heading west for California or Oregon, to be farmers or miners. The Civil War proved the utility of brass (metallic) cartridges rather than paper ones. They worked in the rain. This was a huge advance, and also made for faster loading revolvers and repeating lever action rifles. They are classics, though not inherently accurate and had a number of flaws which were gradually fixed.

There were all sorts of attempts made to simplify support of the cavalry after the Civil War, which was then fighting indians, who saw pioneers moving onto their lands and killing them off, so the indians started killing settlers or dying of plague (typhoid was common then). It was nasty, and raids tended to be sudden and violent, like most Westerns like to depict. Having lots of rounds to shoot back when attacked is a big part of why Westerners are pro-gun, even today. We know stuff goes wrong, and Eastern gangs and mafia types tend to attack in packs. See Legends Of The Fall for examples. There were also Civil War veterans who became raiders, using what they learned to attack towns, with a massacre in Kansas called the Jayhawk Massacre as a famous example.

Black powder was measured in grains, still the unit of measure today, and you had to limit how many per cartridge. The .30-30 Winchester was a 30 caliber bullet and 30 grains of black powder. This round has killed more wild game than any other, period. It remains popular in woodsy area hunters in the East. Its not that popular here because it has a very limited range. Most folks here hunt with a .30-06, even though it is overkill for our small deer. A .243 is plenty. In any case, that nomenclature of the caliber size and the dash, then the grains of powder, got used in a bunch of rounds. The 38-40, the 38-44, the 40-40 and 40-44, and 45-70 and 45-110 are all rounds that existed. The .44-40 Winchester became a popular official cavalry round which was used in their carbines and pistols, both. It wasn't enough range in a rifle, and a bit much recoil in a revolver, but militaries tend to do things wrong before they get them right, usually after lots of people die. The modern .44-40 is popular with historical recreationists in a type of sport called "Cowboy Action Shooting" which is a multigun shooting sport where competitors shoot targets while being timed and scored on that and accuracy for a combine score to determine the winner. Ham and spam shoots are common for this. Most wear a leather glove on their left hand in order to fan the trigger without burning off their fingers by the side-blast. Some of these revolvers had a cylinder set into the gap of a C-shape, with the barrell down the far side. When more powerful rounds were fitted, these would explode. This was fixed with a top strap, and original hinged versions like the Smith and Wesson Model 3, copied by the english Webley revolver, sort of fixed the issue, until strong rounds were fired, making the thing metal shear off and explode again.

Contrast this with the gunfighter's special, which was a smaller caliber .35 revolver, with better quality workmanship and better accuracy and sights, meaning a gunfighter aimed carefully and shot once, killing their target. .35 caliber is also 9mm, and the Germans made a cartridge in 1880 called the 9x19 Parabellum, still in use today. This round has killed more people than any other. Every military has a gun chambered in this cartridge, even ours, though lots of troops hate it because they want a .45 ACP 1911, despite it being very hard to hit things beyond 30 yards. A beefed up .45 like the 45-70 is too much for a handgun, and rounds in between still suffer at ranges over 60 yards since its big, heavy, and drops a lot being so slow. All rounds drop at the same rate vertically (1 G) but slower rounds drop more noticeably, so anything around the speed of sound is going to have problems. Rifle rounds are typically longer and narrower with more powder so they can go a lot faster and further before the drop is noticed, thus the .223 is magnificent at making nuisances like coyotes explode at 200 yards, and 243 at 350 yards. When you try and combine a pistol cartridge and a rifle cartridge into one or two guns you get all sorts of problems, with the mild utility of exchangeable ammunition and possibly magazines.

You also get lots of muzzle flash in a revolver, so you get one shot then you're night blind. Modern calibers like the 357 Sig is a 9x19mm length cartridge in a wider case with a bottle neck to hold the bullet. This is meant to go faster, but is usually shoved into a short barrel for self defense, utterly defeating the purpose, but adding the problem of severe night blindness.

More extreme bottleneck cartridges attempting to hold onto the power and speed gains of small caliber high velocity carbines result in things like the FN5.7, which is a modified short .223 in a bottleneck case duplicating the power of a .221 Fireball or .22 BOZ, which is a 10mm necked down to .223. A variation of this cartridge is used in the famous P90 Grendel, which is only used by TV shows and Saudi Arabia, much like the Desert Eagle .44 Action Express handgun. And this gets to a side issue of interest.

A pistol caliber in a rifle is called a carbine. A carbine is similar to a rifle, usually having a stock or a folding stock, made popular by paratroopers in WW2, used by both sides of the war. They were usually spray and pray weapons, not known for accuracy. The Nazis had their 9mm submachine guns. The allies had their Sten guns and other similar cheap weapons, and more effective rifles like the Garand. After the War a lot of designs came out with interesting value, like the AK-47, which was based on a captured German concept light rifle called an assault rifle. The Soviet version of that is still being fiddled with and there's been a couple other calibers for it. The Germans and Belgians came up with a roller-lock design for a semi automatic rifle which was picked up and used in big .308 rifles around the world, and shrunk and minified for a 9mm version called the HK-MP5, which we've all seen in those Die Hard movies, especially the first one. The setup is limited by the magazine well, and there's been a lot of variations of it, including the MP40, which is that chambered in a .40 S&W cartridge, commonly used by police. Its too slow for a rifle, but better than 9mm. It is somewhat baffling that nobody seems to make a longer version of this and magazines to support 10mm, .45 ACP, .460 Rowland (like .45 magnum), and various other cartridges to take advantage of the longer barrel and buttstock so you can aim it properly. You'd think there was a market for that, but so many Law enforcement and veterans would rather upgrade to a cheaper AR pattern rifle and avoid the expense of the Short Barrel Rifle single-exception. And the AR lets you shoot a lot more calibers.

Incidentally, the Desert Eagle is a miniature AR system on a pistol frame. No kidding. This is also why they cost $1500 each and weigh in pounds, not ounces. No military arms itself with a Desert Eagle. Its JUST in movies, and IMI enjoys the profits of selling this ridiculous movie prop to rappers and action movie fans. Sorry if that hurts your feelings. Consider a Raging Bull instead. A big ported revolver in 357 is probably as much recoil as you can stand and costs a fraction as much.

When it comes to powerful revolvers, there's a market. The .454 Casull is dangerous junk, due to being based on the .45 Long Colt and having very finicky loading, too much or too little powder or bullet slightly too deep or too shallow and it will explode on your hand like a grenade, taking your fingers with it. I don't recommend this firearm, ever. It is too unsafe. It sometimes kills a Kodiak bear in Alaska when someone is out walking their dog on the island, or fishing. Bears have personality. Bears don't have a trustworthy setting. Sometimes they leave you alone, and other times they eat you. They have a lot of brain parasites, which contributes to this problem. Arming yourself when in bear country is a life-extending move, even if it offends your Vegetarian friends. Be sure you can run faster than them. Quite a few of the above cartridges were used in revolvers against bears. Experts recommend a shotgun with buckshot and slugs if you have to travel in bear country, but a .357 is enough for a black bear, and a .44 magnum will do for a brown or black bear. Just keep in mind that you might have less than 2 seconds to draw and fire, and people with dogs pay for those seconds with the life of their dogs, and are much more likely to survive because of it. However, dogs and bears are enemies so the bear is more likely to attack a dog than a person without one. Just to make things more complicated. And before you laugh about the lack of bears where you live, a tourist in New Jersey filmed the bear that ate him at a park within sight of Manhattan, bears eat pets in Florida. Bears have been spotted swimming in pools in the edges of Los Angeles, and bears run 40 mph, which is much faster than you can sprint, and possibly pedal on flat ground. So don't laugh at bears. They think you are tasty and crunchy, and your kids even moreso.

Surprise! Mama bear with cubs charges cyclist on mountain singletrack trail, no warning, less than 2 seconds to react or die. He reacted and lived. Others try bear spray or the wrong shot placement with a gun and they get badly mauled. Bears have personality. They aren't consistent.

The dangers of the oft-exploding .454 lead to the creation of more safe rounds like the .450 and .460 S&W Magnum, and 475 Linebaugh, or .480 Ruger, all of which kick like a mule in a revolver and are probably safer in a lever action repeater. The .44 magnum is well liked for good reason, because you can load it up or down using combinations of powder and projectile to .45 ACP power (aka .44 Bulldog/Special), or up to full magnum (and hurts your wrist) and anywhere between. The recoil is bad enough but its better than harsh language. The Winchester repeater rifle is available in .357 and .44 magnum for a reasonable sum, though its safety is problematic, and racking the action when a bear is attacking is probably your final action before dying, since they run 40 mph. The shotgun is cheaper and more effective, but a .44 magnum or .357 is much more handy.

Police and deputies swore by the .357 revolver, but they were forced to "upgrade" to 9mm, which was not good enough for bears, and later got to upgrade again to .40 S&W, which they mutter about but admit is "adequate". I think most would prefer a 10mm or to go back to the .357 they all carried for decades and still own as their personal firearm for off-duty. I know deputies used to things here, and they are sensible folks. You don't live to retirement if you aren't sensible, though some of the new guys need to spend more time at the range, practicing.

The 45-70 was an inadequate round on San Juan Hill in Cuba, and Teddy Roosevelt who carried one to great disappointment there, was a big proponent of the .30-06 Springfield, which served this country through two world wars and remains a popular big game hunting round today. The .357 is the pistol equivalent, being effective, popular, hard recoilling but acceptable for most people. It ended up getting fiddled with for size, but longer tends to work better and its a couple or three times more powerful than the old western 45 revolvers. For modern times, the .357 is a peacemaker. If you needed to do this dual-use trick, you'd probably want the full power 10mm. That will drop a target at 150 yards, and maybe at 200, but keep in mind those cartridges are $1 each trigger pull. This is not a hobby for people who care about money. You can buy a nice bottle of wine for 6 rounds of that. Or a quality microbrew 6-pack of bottles for less than a magazine. And when you start comparing the cost of firearms to food, it really does make you ponder your choices. Is it that hard to avoid bears during the time of year when they're most active and dangerous? Give that some thought, before you invest in the perfect calibe for your pistol and rifle.

If you want to do cowboy action shooting, load your own and save. Making ammo with a reloading press is more fun that knitting, and 38-55 or 38-40 have their followings, much like 44-40, and that might be fun. But after I spent lots of time and money experimenting I got it out of my system and took up photography. I can "take a shot" and post it on the internet. And I suspect most people interested in this would probably do well to take up bicycling rather than buy yet another firearm. Its good for your health, and a great motivation to insure the Communists never gain control of your life. They want everybody to bicycle or stay home, like good serfs. Just keep this in mind.

Rifle Engineering and Advertising Adventures

The trouble with running a gun company is that you need work for your staff to do, and most guns, having expensive ammunition, aren't fired often in practice, and rarely if ever in anger, so they tend to see little use and become heirlooms, handed down to kids and grandkids as time passes. Lots of sheepherders and ranchers in the Great Basin and Sierras do this. This cuts down on your sales. There's also military arms, but I think those are mostly collectors items of dubious quality. Hunting arms are better quality most of the time, easier to fit a rifle scope so you can hit something beyond 100 yards (I find most iron sights suck), and this puts them in the position of drumming up interest, and you get fad calibers to sell guns. Some examples?

6.8 SPC (left cartridge). This is a short .277 bullet fitted to a fatter .30 Winchester, necked down (cartridge neck is placed in a die and the brass opening is reduced to a smaller size through mechanical force).
The SPC cartridge was made to deal with the failure of .223 (aka 5.56 NATO) carbines in Afghanistan for the last 16 years. Most soldiers who want to LIVE through Afghanistan pay for a .308 rifle (aka 7.62 NATO), usually M-14 or M1A (semi-auto commercial copy) if they can't get the LE version with some sort of form. The .308 is brutal in a light rifle, btw, so all full power .308 rifles are heavy. The AK-47 is NOT a full power .308 rifle. Its a .310 (7.62x39mm) bullet, very light for caliber in a similar sense to the 6.8, which is also short. This bullet is better than the .223 at range, but still too light for shattering engine blocks or adobe bricks, like a .308 does pretty well and is needed for pretty often. There are heavier rounds for snipers, like 50 BMG and .338 Lapua, but those take VERY heavy rifles, usually require a muzzle brake which makes a big cloud of dust and LOUD noise when fired. It is possible to put a muzzle brake on a lighter .308 rifle, but the noise is deafening, and most soldiers need their hearing to tell when bad guys are approaching beyond their field of view. Good hearing is important.

Another caliber of interest is the 6.5 Grendel (center), which is a x39 case necked down to 6.5 and chambered in an AK or AR rifle with the appropriate bolt face. These vary based on the bottom of the case size, called the Case Head. This was created to be a caliber with similar intent to the 6.8 SPC and competed with it in the military contract. Its a heavier bullet, so retains energy further, but is slightly slower as a result and needs more correction in its arc. The downside is the bullet is seated deeper into the case, and this is inherently dangerous as the round might decide not to move and kaboom instead. That's very bad. Shrapnel in the face, probably horrible or deadly wound resulting.

But lets step away from the STANAG magazine of the AR platform, a huge limitation. Upgrading the rifles to the AR-10 or something similar gets into a bigger magazine which takes .308 length bullets like the 6.5 Creedmoor, famous for accuracy, and 264 USA, which is too long for STANAG and shorter than .308, but also lighter recoil so can be fitted to much lighter rifles without all the noise issues. 6.5mm isn't used much in military rifles recently, but was in the past. The rifle that shot Kennedy was a 6.5mm Carcano, which is a smaller version of the Russian bolt action rifle adopted by the Italians, with a heavy bullet in a low velocity, which meant bullets didn't deform much, ergo "magic bullet" later debunked by simple geometry and examination of the film. There was also the 6.5 Arisaka, which was also too slow and put in a really badly made rifle by the Japanese. The best 6.5 was the 6.5x55 Swede, made by Nobel (yes THAT Nobel peace prize), and beloved of moose hunters in Scandinavia and the USA too. Light enough recoil but full rifle power able to shoot big non-dangerous game like moose and elk. That round was magic, and its the origin of many attempts to duplicate it. The .260 Remington was a .308 case necked down to .264 (bullet actual size) and get the same ballistics. The 6.5x284 was what happens when several stories cross. The .284 was a necked down .300 something, with a rebated rim to fit into a .308 bolthead and length magazine, but having the powder capacity of a .30-06. This was unnecessary and didn't sell. Necked down to 7mm, it became the .284, which was more interesting, since it was a hotter and shorter version of the 280 Winchester, which is what you get when you take a 270 Winchester and open the neck slightly from .277 to .284 for 7mm bullets. Effective, but not enough to justify owning instead of a .270 or .30-06. And by then there was the 7mm Remington Magnum, which was a really fast 7mm with lots of reach and hitting power, and recoil and noise, too. Only time I got a concussion firing a rifle was a 7mm Magnum in a Savage hunting rifle. Thankfully it wasn't mine, but the headache was noticeable. Worse than an '06.

The 6.5x284 was a darling of 1000 yard rifle matches. It was a nice balance in power and reach with heavy bullets (140 grains), and less destructive than the 264 Magnum, famous for melting barrels in less than 1000 firings. That gets expensive. I was quite interested in this one. If you wanted to snipe a villain in Afghanistan this would do the job, but the military has upgraded to 338 Lapua and 50 BMG since anti-material weapons are legal against terrorist since they aren't Geneva Convention signatories.

Another foray into advertising was short magnums (and super short magnums), a magnum power round fitted to a short action rifle, which is cheap to make. The .25 WSM and WSSM were hype and useless. The 270 WSM was apparently much better than a .270 Winchester, faster and more accurate, but not enough to justify rechambering or selling off your family heirloom. There was a .30 WSM, but not a .338 WSM that I can remember. It was created by wild-catters. A wildcat cartridge is one spec'd up and tested by hobbyists. The 6mm Creedmoor is like that. So is the 6x45mm, though its somewhat production in weird places like South Africa. The 6x45 is slightly slow so makes less meat damage and mostly gets used for poaching game. Loaded with a lighter bullet it fits nicely in the AR rifle magazine and holds more energy downrange. It was tested by the Army for use in their FN machineguns but was eventually discarded because of Reasons like caliber confusion and stupid grunts. You don't want too many calibers in the military. They ended up with lots anyway.

The weirdest of the WSMs was 325 WSM, which was an 8mm bullet, not very popular in the USA. There were lots of 8x57 German rifles brought back during the war. Its a fine round, though there's a lot of variation if power thanks to being around for more than a century, and the oldest rifles would explode with new ammo, like the IS or JS loadings in the Small Ring Mausers. They aren't strong enough. Kaboom. I have a VZ-24, able to comfortably fire IS and JS 8x57 ammo. It has a lot of range in ammo you can fire, from 170 grain to 220, able to take a polar bear. I still prefer the .308 for pure accuracy at the same recoil. And I liked the 7mm08 BLR for pointable rifle, even if the Browning action was begging to fail with that LONG pinion gear. The 7mm08 was another wildcat, a .308 necked down to 7mm, duplicating the 7x57mm, the round that the Spanish were using in Cuba against Teddy Roosevelt over a century ago. Those captured rifles were modified into the .30-06 Springfield, and failed to win their court case against Mauser so the USA paid fines to Mauser while we were fighting WW1. There was also a 8mm-06, once upon a time. It was a wildcat but wasn't really needed. A better round is the 338-06, which is a .30-06 case with a .338 bullet mounted, able to duplicate .308 ballistics but hits hard, mostly used for bear defense in .30-06 length rifles, like the BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle) and was chambered in it a few years for Alaskan fishermen. In Alaska you can die while fishing because Kodiak grizzlies also fish, and don't always like competitors. Its common for a fisherman in Alaska to bring a guard with a serious rifle to protect them. A .338 Winchester Magnum is a lot of rifle for most people to deal with, but a .338-06 is less recoil.

In the fantasy world, military rifles are wonderful. In the real world they're often heavy, clunky, with bad safeties, and very difficult to mount a rifle scope. In the real world, sporting rifles are more accurate, lighter, cheaper, more comfortable to handle and point and hit targets at range, and mount any number of good rifle scopes to. The only thing sporting rifles lack is spray and pray and big magazines of bullets. The upside is sporting rifles actually hit things if you do your part to aim and cooly fire. Sporting rifles are in the exact caliber you need for the things you intend to shoot. Here in the West, that means our small blacktail deer and coyotes because they attack cattle and sheep. For our needs, a 243 Winchester is enough, but most people have more. A 6.5 caliber round makes sense for a first time shooter, and bolt action is usually just fine, and much more accurate than an auto-loader. The 260 Remington should have been more popular. The 6.5 Creedmoor is slightly different but largely identical performance. The name is better, and its selling well. There aren't many critters in the lower 48 you can't hunt with this. Canada north is another story, but that's what the .338 is for.