Tabla de contenidos para May 2026 en Gun Digest

As I age, I’ve learned to pay close attention to how my perspectives change on all things in life. While I’m still a long way off from finding an affinity for Velcro shoes, I no longer like my music quite as loud, need my cars quite as fast or my Friday nights quite as late. And I’ve come to truly understand the “work smarter, not harder” mentality … that calculated precision almost always beats brute force. This last one has certainly served me well while learning to navigate around and raise teenage daughters, but it’s also deeply applicable to my shooting. I grew up hunting whitetails in a slug-only zone, which meant that if I wanted to hunt deer I had to learn to tolerate and manage incredible recoil from…

01 Vortex Viper Shotgun Enclosed Micro Green Dot Vortex’s Viper Enclosed Micro shotgun optic is now available with a green dot reticle for those who prefer it to red. The red-dot model was released last year, and many hunters have already found it to be a useful companion in the field. The most important feature of the Viper is still here, namely, its ability to be easily direct-mounted to tons of common drilled and tapped shotgun receivers. Its enclosed design will keep it protected from the elements in the field, too. Like the red dot version, the new green dot is available either with a 3-MOA reticle or as the multi-reticle version that allows for seven different combinations of a 3-MOA dot, a 32-MOA circle and a 65-MOA circle. MSRP:…

One of the many things we really enjoy doing in our industry is finding excuses to put together new guns for ourselves. Every so often, an existing category pops up with new bells and whistles. It’s usually a little bit wild, and people often take an interest. Just 10 years ago, the pistols that were commonly available with red-dot optics, lights and built-in compensators were considered exotic, with the concept being dubbed the “Roland Special” after a popular fictional character. Today, those setups are everywhere, and nobody bats an eye. Another popular class of arms that has grown in the past few years is the “truck gun,” a concept that started with the uniquely American “brush gun,” itself a very wide category. So, let’s look at brush guns and their…

HISTORICAL NOTES Officially announced in November 1988, the .416 Remington Magnum was the first American cartridge designed for use on African game to be introduced since the .458 Winchester Magnum in 1956, and the .460 Weatherby Magnum back in 1958. The .416 is based on the 8mm Remington Magnum necked up to .416-caliber. It was initially available with either a 400-grain pointed soft-point or a 400-grain solid bullet loaded to a muzzle velocity of 2,400 fps and a muzzle energy of 5,115 ft-lb. The company says that the 400-grain solid is exactly that, turned from solid brass and not a lead core with a heavy jacket. The cartridge has been available in the Remington Model 700 Safari bolt-action rifle, but retail listings of the model show it to be out…

OK, I’ll admit this is a bit niche, but man … it’s cool. So, there you are carrying an Officer’s Model or other short-framed compact 1911. Using a full-sized magazine as a reload would be nice, but you can’t. If you slam that mag home with the slide locked back (and when else will you need a really fast reload?), the mag will ride up over the mag button and wedge against the ejector. It won’t feed, and it won’t come out. Training to not do a slam-load is a good idea, but stress will make a mess of that plan. So, what to do? Simple. Get the Wilson Combat Lo-Profile basepads. They replace the existing pads on your Wilson or Mc-Cormick magazines, and the front lip of the new…

When we shoot from a bench rest, we’re usually sighting in a rifle or testing ammunition. When doing either, it’s important to get the best shot to shot results we can. The problem is that sustained recoil can negatively impact not only your shooting but also your enjoyment. There are some ways you can mitigate felt recoil when shooting from a bench rest, and these techniques become very important when you crawl behind a hard-kicking rifle. The general consensus among firearms trainers is that most experienced adult shooters can withstand about 20 shots from a bench rest with a .30-06 Spring-field rifle without experiencing excessive discomfort or a negative impact on accuracy and precision. The amount of free recoil energy the average .30-06 rifle with a scope will generate is…

Twenty years ago, I would have never thought there would be so many drop-in trigger options to choose from. If you’re a relatively new shooter, you’ve probably never have thought about it because, for about the past decade, drop in—do it yourself—trigger fixes for guns have been commonplace. But it hasn’t always been that way, and Timney Triggers is a big reason why you have so many aftermarket trigger options, to include some for handguns like the Ruger RXM. Timney has been around since 1946. For a long, long time they existed on customers who were sporterizing military Mauser rifles. This was a very common practice right after World War II. Many veterans brought Mauser rifles home with them, so Timney made their name by offering aftermarket triggers for those…

The 3.5-inch shotgun shell has long been marketed as the ultimate answer for hunters who believe that more power automatically translates into more success. Introduced as a way to push heavier payloads at high velocity, it promised longer range and denser patterns, particularly for waterfowl and turkey hunters seeking an edge. But in today’s hunting landscape, advances in ammunition design, shotgun technology and a deeper understanding of effective range have rendered the 3.5-inch shell unnecessary. Simply put, the 3.5-inch shell needs to die. HISTORY OF THE 3.5-INCH SHELL In the 1970s, there was a large push for lead ammunition to be banned. Specifically, this ban was focused on people hunting over water, as it had a negative impact on our waters and the fish and birds that utilized those waters.…