February 2012

9mm Practical Shooting Pistols: Glock, Springfield, and CZ USA
The sport of Practical Shooting is a game with roots in self defense. The challenge is to not only land accurate shots onto scoring zones that could represent an incapacitating wound, but do so in the fastest time possible. Of course no one is shooting back, but speed is rewarded on the assumption that the competitor has determined a bona fide threat and fired first. What makes the sport of Practical Shooting really interesting is that no two shooting matches are the same. But at any given event the shooter will have to draw from a holster, snatch the gun from a closed drawer or from a table top, and subsequently perform multiple reloads.

416 Rigby Rifles: CZ Fixes Its American; Ruger, Not So Much
Those of us who like big rifles have plenty to choose from, both in type of action and caliber. Some of us have found out that rifles bigger than 30 caliber are, for those prepared to learn how to control them, far more fun than those of 30 caliber and under. There are a few tricks to help you avoid being hammered by the big ‘uns, and we’ve published a few of those tricks from time to time on these pages. For the uninitiated, begin with a heavy-enough rifle, one that has appropriate weight for the caliber. In this test we are going to look at two rifles chambered for the 416 Rigby, and such a rifle could easily weigh over 10 pounds without being declared too heavy.

Super-Capacity Shotgun Mag: Is Roth's XRAIL a Good Buy?
Shooters into 3-Gun competition are driving a lot of innovation in firearms and performance accessories, arguably benefitting the shotgun segment the most. Practical rifles and pistols already have plenty of development to improve sights, speed, and capacity, and many of those improvements — beveled mag wells, lightened hammers, expanded magazine capacities, various optics, lightweight materials — have found their way into mainstream guns at nearly all pricepoints. Shotgun development has lagged the other two gun types, but scatterguns are now the beneficiaries of drop-in triggers, rail systems, high-viz sights, collapsible replacement buttstocks, and other refinements, but capacity has been an ongoing restriction. Shotshells are big in both profile and weight, so they take up a lot of space.