Tactical Lifeの August/September 2020 の目次

As many American cities remain in a state of chaos and calls to defund police departments grow stronger, the U.S. Supreme Court recently declined to hear a number of Second Amendment cases that are critical to the right of law-abiding Americans to protect themselves and their families. That decision was a travesty and a slap in the face to all lawful gun owners. Five of the 10 cases dealt with whether government entities can restrict the ability of law-abiding citizens to carry a firearm outside the home, while two addressed the important issue of banning semi-automatic firearms and so-called “high-capacity” magazines. Of course, we all know that restrictions on concealed carry and ownership of semi-auto firearms run counter to the Bill of Rights. Outlawing the right to “keep” and/or “bear”…

“LANGDON TACTICAL HAS TAKEN THAT ONE STEP FURTHER WITH ITS LTT ELITE, A CUSTOM VERSION THAT MIGHT JUST BE THE PERFECT 92 SERIES PISTOL.” I HAVE A BIT OF HISTORY WITH BERETTA’S 92 SERIES SINCE IT WAS MY DUTY GUN FOR QUITE SOME TIME. As my agency moved to semi-autos, our first choice was just not for me, especially the model issued to detectives. We could carry our own but it had to be a DA/SA in .40 caliber, and the Beretta 96 was my choice. It was smooth, as DA/SA’s go, and accurate with a high capacity. It was big for concealed carry, but having carried a Smith & Wesson 686 until then, it was all relative. It served me well until we approved single actions, allowing me to…

The AR-15 is good for many purposes. However, it doesn’t reach its full potential until you step away from the standard 5.56mm chambering. While this classic NATO cartridge has served us well for the past 50 years, it has a few shortcomings. At the top of the list are noise and over-penetration, both of which are liabilities for self-defense. In 2011, SAAMI approved a new cartridge that got the 5.56mm closer to 7.62x39mm energies. By reshaping the 5.56mm case to accept a .30-caliber bullet, the 300 Blackout was born. This new cartridge was capable of delivering heavier payloads at slower speeds, translating to greater energy transfer and an easy venture into subsonic load development. Since the round shares bolts and magazines with standard 5.56mm rifles and carbines, the cartridge quickly…

IMAGINE FINDING YOURSELF IN THE MIDDLE OF A PRISON RIOT, OUTNUMBERED 50-TO-1 AND YOUR MAIN DEFENSE WAS A SCHNAUZER! That’s right, a schnauzer! It is a situation STL (senior team leader) Joseph Garcia has found himself in many times, and those who know him and his dogs will bet on them every time! A senior team leader for Corrections and Special Applications Unit (CSAU-1), Garcia heads a quick-reaction team, always on standby to respond to correctional mayhem across the nation. One of the team’s strategic assets is its highly trained cadre of giant schnauzers. Garcia is a 25-year veteran of law enforcement and attributes his success to being in the “wrong place at the right time.” “CHANCES ARE, ONCE WE UNLOAD, THINGS ARE GETTING RESOLVED PRETTY QUICKLY!” How did you…

i MET MICHAEL O. HUMPHRIES AT THE SHOT SHOW ABOUT 15 YEARS AGO AND WE HAVE STAYED IN TOUCH EVER SINCE. In late 2019, he told me that Springfield was coming out with an AR pistol in .308, but I had to keep it secret. He said he would get me one to shoot as soon as he could. Mike should know patience is a virtue and no one describes me as virtuous. I bugged him for months until he finally said, “It is ready to go,” and it soon landed at my local FFL. The next day, I was on the range. Why would you make a pistol in .308? First, because 5.56mm sucks. No, I’m not completely serious. The 5.56mm is good for a lot of things. It…

WITH ALL THE RECENT MEDIA coverage of Conan, the Belgian Malinois military dog that was recently injured when helping U.S. special forces find and kill ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in October 2019, military animals were once again thrust into the spotlight. In fact, Conan even earned himself a trip to the Rose Garden for a ceremony with President Donald Trump. “Conan did a fantastic job and we’re very honored to have Conan here and to have given Conan a certificate and an award,” Trump said at the ceremony. In the Syrian raid, Conan helped military special forces track al-Baghdadi down a tunnel, where the terrorist leader blew himself up. Conan was injured during the mission but has since made a full recovery. The fact is, many people know about…

In the early 1990s, Fabrique Nationale rocked the world with something other than big hair and acid-washed jeans. The company’s new cartridge, the 5.7x28mm, was introduced with the hope of replacing the NATO 9mm as it produced substantially more velocity, accuracy and magazine capacity while exhibiting similar dimensions. Although it never reached the success FN would have wished with the military, the civilian market fell in love with the lightweight, low-recoiling cartridge and its companion handgun and carbine from the same manufacturer. For 30 years, FN owned nearly 100 percent of the marketplace, especially in the handgun realm. That all changed in 2020 when Connecticut firearms manufacturer Ruger took a crack at chambering this zippy round with the new Ruger-57. NEW COMER For starters, Ruger is behind in the originality…

ISRAEL WEAPON INDUSTRIES makes a lot of eye-catching firearms. They constantly end up in the movies because guns like the Desert Eagle, the Tavor and the Uzi all look pretty sexy. But IWI should be known for the quality of its products. The country was literally born in battle, and millions of lives depend on them every day. So, I was a little surprised when I learned it was making a pretty standard M4-style rifle called the Zion Z15. I knew the Israel Defense Forces fielded a lot of American made M4 rifles so I was interested to see IWI’s take on this classic. The Z15 uses direct gas impingement with a 16-inch barrel, free-floated handguard and six-position buttstock, and comes with a Magpul Gen M3 PMAG and without sights.…

JUST A FEW YEARS AGO THE TERM “CHASSIS RIFLE” DIDN’T EXIST. Today, rifle manufacturers large and small are racing to get into the market. The latest to throw its hat into the ring is Shaw Precision Guns (SPG), a division of Shaw Barrels, the big barrel manufacturer in Bridgeville, Pennsylvania, just outside Pittsburgh. Two models were rolled out recently, both being based on an all-stainless-barreled action, one carrying a naked matte finish, the other a CeraKote camo cloak. For review purposes we chose the former, which arrived sporting a spiral-fluted 24-inch heavy varmint (Shaw’s 3.5 contour) barrel chambered in 6.5 Creedmoor. Spiral fluting, for which Shaw holds two patents, is of course optional, as is straight fluting, in a choice of barrel lengths from 16 to 26 inches. One can…

Shotguns have been around for centuries, and because shotgun ammo just keeps getting better, scatterguns are likely to be around for a long time to come. Of course, the versatility of shotguns doesn’t hurt their popularity. Load your gun with the appropriate slugs or buckshot and you can use it for anything from home defense to hunting big game. You can also use that same scattergun to eliminate varmints and dangerous snakes, hunt birds and small game or shoot skeet, trap, five-stand and sporting clays. All you’ll need to do is pick ammo with the appropriate birdshot load and use the right choke tube. Fortunately, ammunition manufacturers understand the many uses of shotguns very well, and they introduced something new for almost every shotgun owner this year. BARNES Barnes announced…

It wasn’t that long ago when I first got my hands on the new Walther Q5 SF match pistol. To make its striker-fired, polymer Q5 match pistol even more suitable for competition, the folks at Walther released the new steel-frame model to help dampen recoil for faster shooting, and it was an instant success. From the matchgrade trigger to the phenomenal ergonomics to the quite reasonable price point, the Q5 SF was, as they say, the cat’s pajamas. In fact, after being reviewed by several shooters, the Walther Q5 SF took first place in our sister publication’s annual Ballistic’s Best of 2019 edition for full-size pistols. I was among those reviewers and was quite taken with the pistol. With its wrap-around rubber grip molded to the curves of the steel…

If you haven’t heard of Rise Armament, there’s a good chance you’ve been asleep at the wheel for the past five or six years. Admittedly a relative newcomer to the firearms industry, Rise started off by making an extremely high-quality drop-in AR trigger and selling it for a very reasonable price. Now, Rise, located in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, makes everything from triggers to gun parts to complete AR-style rifles and pistols—all exhibiting the same quality as the company’s original trigger. I became aware of Rise early on because the company is located only about 15 miles from my suburban Tulsa home. But for some reason, I’d never taken the time to visit the company’s manufacturing facility. That is, until a recent opportunity found me decked out in safety glasses, recorder…

THE AK-47 in its original format is a dated rifle by anyone’s standards, but that doesn’t mean you need to settle for a gun with crude, antiquated features or drop some real cash to customize it with aftermarket parts. A few AKs have sensible upgrades right from the factory, and the Century Arms C39V2 Zhukov model is among the best examples. Named after a Russian General, the C39V2 Zhukov is one of 12 C39Vs AKs in Century’s line and the most advanced thanks to adopting Magpul’s Zhukov buttstock, grip and handguard. Like all of the C39V2 variants, this rifle uses a milled receiver and 100 percent American-made new parts rather than imported parts kits of dubious quality. GUN DETAILS The Century Zhukov weighs 8.65 pounds and measures 35.5 to 38…

The popularity of the 6.5 Creedmoor is no secret. Only a decade ago the .308 Winchester was undeniably the cartridge of choice in factory precision rifles, and any new precision shooter would have been well advised to purchase his first rifle in that chambering. With decades of proven service as a military and competitive round, a generally amenable nature where accuracy and reliability were easy to find and enormous industry support including ammo, bullets, load data and gunsmithing, the .308 just made sense. If it had been suggested that the 6.5 Creedmoor would dethrone the .308, I think most shooters would have laughed at the assertion. Well, here we are at that very point. The 6.5 Creedmoor is now solidly the king of short-action precision rifle cartridges, at least from…

The year 1776 saw the first recorded use of the term “shotgun.” Later, James Fennimore Cooper, the author of The Last of the Mohicans, used the term in his writings. The English Brown Bess musket sported a 0.75-inch smooth bore and served the British Empire from 1722 to 1838. This bore diameter is the rough equivalent of a contemporary 10-gauge shotgun. While these early muskets were frequently loaded with combithe shotgun as we currently imagine it was essentially a 19th-century nation buck-and-ball loads, contrivance. The shotgun was originally a utility weapon used to put meat on frontier tables. The first widespread use of shotguns in com-bat, however, fell to cavalry units during the American Civil War. Nathan Bedford Forrest’s Confederate cavalrymen preferred red the scattergun for the same reasons armed…