Special Purpose

Here's a look at the 2011 new products from Taurus.

We're not endorsing Gov. Rick Perry for president, but it is certainly refreshing to see an executive choosing a different kind of recreation besides golf. GunReports.com advertiser LaRue Tactical hosted Perry recently for a little sniper-rifle shooting.

The Minigun is a 7.62 mm, multi-barrel heavy machine gun with a high rate of fire (2,000 to 6,000 rounds per minute), employing Gatling-style rotating barrels with an external power source. FPS Russia shoots one in the video here.

The most outrageously devastating hand-held anti-personnel machine in existence may be the Atchisson Assault Shotgun, or AA-12. Fully automatic and drum-fed, the AA-12 fires five 12-gauge shotgun shells per second, with extreme reliability and so little recoil that it can be shot Arnie-style with one hand. And if that hail of hot buckshot isn't enough to make both shooter and target need a change of underpants, consider this: it has been developed in conjunction with the FRAG-12 - a new type of shotgun cartridge in which each round is a small, flighted high explosive or fragmentation grenade accurate up to 175 meters.

John Browning's last lever action design for Winchester made it to production in 1895. In this GunTec presentation Larry Potterfield, Founder and CEO of MidwayUSA, examines a Winchester Model 1895 Lever Action Rifle chambered in 30 Army. The gun used in this production features a 28 inch barrel, 5 round box magazine, straight grip stock, and a crescent buttplate. It has a steel bead front sight and a Lyman adjustable receiver sight. This model was made from 1895 to 1931 with over 400,000 produced.

Watch as Larry Potterfield, Founder and CEO of MidwayUSA shows how to safety handle a gun on the sporting clays field. The proper use of eye and ear protection is covered as well as using the correct ammunition. Safe gun handling is emphasized with specific examples unique to the sporting clays field.

Do you know the difference between a high-house and a low-house target? Learn more in this video about Men's and Women's Skeet.

(GunReports.com) -- In the world of 308 Win./7.62 NATO auto-loading rifles, the M14 and its look-alikes reign just about supreme. They have it all, looks, power, function, capacity, plus a great variety of stock and accessory configurations from wood to all manner of polymer that can convert an M14 or M1A into just about any configuration you might want, particularly if you have deep pockets. Gun Tests recently tested the Springfield Armory M1A, $1739. We tested with three types of ball ammunition, the only type recommended in these firearms. It was Federal Gold Medal match, Magtech 150-grain ball from Brazil, and mixed lot of recovered ammunition purchased in bulk with headstamps from Israel, Italy, Belgium, and Canada, which we used unsorted. Here’s what we found.

The bulk of our evaluations at Gun Tests consist of head-to-head match-ups of like weaponry. However, every once in a while we come across firearms that occupy such a small niche, that competing products are hard to find. The best that we can do is match them up by job function, and see which product we prefer.The job this month is long-gun self defense. The Kel-Tec SU-16 is, for all intents and purposes, a lightweight AR-15 that folds in half.

We also had access to a carefully built, match-grade Garand. It easily and consistently put eight shots (not just three) of the mil-surplus ammo into groups smaller than 2.5 inches. With military-surplus match ammo, we put six into a group that measured 1.7 inches, on a bad-light day. The most obvious differences about this rifle were its excellent trigger (5.25 pounds) and smooth-as-glass bolt operation. The rear sight had been bushed to give a smaller…

In our first review of handguns suited for the SASS Wild Bunch category—named in deference to the Sam Peckinpah movie, The Wild Bunch—we covered five traditional GI-type handguns from Springfield Armory, High Standard, and Colt. Prices ranged from $500 to $1000, a fairly large spread. In the 'modern' class of 45s we tested, quite a few SASS members probably already own such a handgun, and interested shooters from other disciplines may jump in to shoot Wild Bunch matches. In this class, we tested the Springfield Loaded Model PX9109LP 45 ACP, $1035, which was more than a GI pistol with good features.

(GunReports.com) -- The South Korean government, in an effort to raise money for its military, wants to sell nearly a million antique M1 rifles that were used by U.S. soldiers in the Korean War to gun collectors in America.The Obama administration approved the sale of the American-made rifles last year. But it reversed course and banned the sale in March – a decision that went largely unnoticed at the time but that is now sparking opposition from gun rights advocates.