Editorial

The hunting seasons are now upon us, and we hope you’re ready. Of course, you’ve got your rifle all ready to go, lots of ammunition loaded for it, and it’s all sighted in. Or is it?

How many of you have made the very common error of using cheap ammunition to sight in your rifle, being careful to use the very same bullet weight you’ll be using in your premium hunting ammunition? If you think the two different loads — the inexpensive stuff and the premium-bullet expensive hunting ammunition — will shoot to the exact same point of impact, you’re almost certainly wrong. Here’s why.

The two types of loads will use different powders and achieve different pressures, the barrel vibration and...

I’ve just returned from the 1999 Shooting, Hunting, and Outdoor Trade Show, better known as the SHOT Show. In terms of new-product introductions, it was one of the better fireams-industry efforts in recent memory. We’ll be examining many of those products in the coming months, including Walther’s expensive answer to the Ruger 10/22, a GSP-based .22 LR pistol/rifle combo, Winchester’s newly formulated X-2 shotgun, and a raft of new handguns.

Though the new-product introductions were certainly the whipped cream on my trip, a not-very-tasty main course was served away from the crowded aisles of the Georgia World Congress Center. As we reported last month, Atlanta’s municipal government was p...

Most gun owners I know are jammed up about the elevation of New York’s Charles “Chuckie” Schumer from the U.S. House of Representatives to the U.S. Senate. In fact, the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine recently cited Schumer’s win as one of the gun-rights organization’s high-profile losses in the November 1998 elections.

But there’s another person who poses a much graver, much more insidious threat to gun ownership than even Schumer the schemer: Elisa Barnes. Ms. Barnes is the lead attorney for Brooklyn plaintiffs who are suing the gun industry under a novel theory. In the Hamilton lawsuit, eponymously named for the lead plaintiff, the gun fascists are going after the industry as a whole,...

We just got a flyer from Remington, and that financially beleaguered company has come up with some darned good magnets for your money. Hottest of their offerings for 1999 is the .300 Remington Ultra Mag. This is a beautiful, non-belted .404 Jeffery case necked to .30 caliber. You don’t really need that belt, and rounds without it feed smoothly. The new Remington round has a 30-degree shoulder and 20 percent more case capacity than the .300 Winchester Magnum. The result provides ballistics that significantly beat even the .300 Weatherby. The .300 Ultra Mag propels a 180-grain Nosler Partition bullet at 3,300 fps from the 26-inch standard-length barrel that Remington uses in all five of the pr...

If they can’t get around the 2nd Amendment, the gun-control crowd may seek to re-enact the days of Prohibition.

There’s an ongoing push to equate gun criminality with some sort of gun-related “disease,” for lack of a better description. Example: A recent Reuters article, which moved on the wires as “US Health System Fails To Track Gun Violence-Study,” uncritically accepted the conclusions of the Handgun Epidemic Lowering Plan (HELP) Network. The HELP study purported to find an “information gap” that hobbled efforts to combat gun violence in the United States. Translation: The HELP study was searching for some ruse from which to enact more gun laws. Now this oblique attempt to reach in our...

Charlton Heston, president of the National Rifle Association, spoke at the Harvard Law School Forum on Tuesday, February 16. Though his speech, “Winning The Cultural War, ” didn’t exclusively focus on gun topics, he made some points about liberty and fighting for our rights—including gun rights—that made me say, “Yes!” as I read his text. Herewith, then, are a few points from Heston’s speech we should all consider, especially in light of continuing efforts to demonize gun owners and gun ownership, and to strip our gun rights from us.

-Todd Woodard

About a year ago I became president of the National Rifle Association, which protects the right to keep and bear arms. I ran...

The latest school shooting has fostered a new set of regulatory proposals from anti-gun activists, which includes the president, of course. There is no pretty way to describe what Bill Clinton did in the aftermath of the Columbine High School massacre — plain and simple, it was political ambulance chasing. He climbed up on the graves of 13 innocent teenagers to advance his anti-gun agenda at their, and our, expense. Would that he had the manners of Charlton Heston, who chose not to comment about gun issues out of respect for the families. Oh, well, this president oozes plenty of things, but honor isn’t one of them.

Instead, half-baked policy throwaways are Clinton’s mainstay, especially w...

One of the advantages we enjoy at Gun Tests is our ability to compare firearms and other shooting equipment head to head. We think the best way to purchase firearms is to shoot them side by side and learn about the warts on a particular product, and then determine whether a competing product, shot at the same time with the same ammunition, is better or worse than its stablemate. But darned few of us can afford to do this individually, mainly because of a lack of money and time.

As a consumer, I have shot many concealable pistols, hunting revolvers, competition shotguns, big-game rifles, and top-end .22s, since those are my favorite pursuits. However, I was never able to spend the time wit...

One of the frustrating aspects of the recent gun-restriction debate has been the astounding timidity of the gun industry, gun-industry trade groups, and political supporters of guns to speak out against the erosion of our gun-ownership rights. Basically, the assumption by the other side is that anyone who owns a gun is simply a criminal in waiting. They portray gun owners-me and you-as being cocked and locked, needing only a bit of trigger pressure before we go off on a killing spree.

Of course, that characterization is personally insulting, and the irritation of law-abiding citizens being described that way is only compounded by the accommodation of gun representatives in the political a...

One of the tough questions that will go unanswered as the result of the recent Atlanta shootings will be this: How would more regulation have prevented this tragedy? The answer is, of course, that more laws wouldn’t have done a darn thing.It has been reported that Mark Barton, 44, who killed his wife, his children, and nine other people in two brokerage offices, left a rambling letter at his home in which he said he suffered unnamed terrors and wanted to kill people who “greedily sought my destruction.” He used a hammer on his family and two as-yet-unidentified handguns in the shootings, which ended when he killed himself in his van surrounded by police. He had another two guns and 200 bull...

There are few gun-related items in the mainstream media that make much sense to me. But a recent column by Jill “J.R.” Labbe, senior editorial writer and columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, was the exception. I thought you’d like to read some of her thoughts, which pretty well sum up my own. Ms. Labbe writes:

Within hours after the shootings at the Wedgwood Baptist Church, a letter arrived at the Star-Telegram expressing the wish that I had been inside the church on that deadly Wednesday night.

I wish I had, too, but for a different reason than the writer’s desire for me to witness the carnage left by two handguns wielded by a raging paranoid.

At least the se...

I was torn when I initially proposed a more aggressive gun-sales program that would dry up supplies of firearms and ammunition for law-enforcement agencies in municipalities that are suing the gun industry (July 1999). On the one hand, I wanted gun makers to do something that pointed out the hypocrisy of the big-city mayors. Petulant? You bet. The flipside, which I recognized at the time, was that it was unfair to penalize the cops for their bosses’ actions.

I expected to hear thunder from law enforcement, criticizing my suggestions as irresponsible, which, in fact, they were. Instead, I’ve heard mostly whispers from policemen, constables, sheriffs, BATF and FBI trainers, military instruc...