Author: jmack97

This gun is absolutely awesome. This isn’t my rifle, but it’s a good friend’s gun. He has done some extensive modifications to it to make it look and shoot the way that it does. He put a match trigger in it, which makes it where you could breathe on the trigger and make the gun go bang, a really big scope that will pull a gnat in at 100 yards and make it look like a large bird, and a muzzle brake to take out the recoil a bit and make it more manageable. The .300 Win Mag is a very hot round, and it has been used in various branches of the military by snipers for well over 30 years. It has an effective range of well over 1000 yards, and people have even successfully made 1 mile shots. We had a target set up about 500 yards down range across a huge field, and this gun had absolutely no problem making the shot. It didn’t have any bullet drop whatsoever at that distance, and a lot of guns would. I’ve shot other .300 Win Mags before and they all had an insane amount of recoil, this one makes it feel like it’s not even close to a .300 Win Mag. The groupings were all within an 1/8th of an inch from each other, and there were a couple of times I was even able to put the bullet through the same hole a couple of times. Overall this gun is great, and if you think about buying one, they are great the way they come from the factory, but even better when you add a muzzle brake to reduce the recoil.

Ever since I was taught to shoot a gun the right way and the safe way, the ideas of how to do it properly have been ingrained into my brain, and they probably will be until the end of my days. The man who taught me always told me to teach others the same way because they may not know the proper and safe way to handle a firearm. I never really got the chance until more recently when a bunch of my friends all wanted to go shoot. I asked them before if they had ever shot a gun, and one of them had and the other two were brand new to it, so I decided to bring a whole bunch of guns out so I could teach them the right way to handle a large variety of calibers and types of firearms. I brought everything from a .22 pistol all the way to a 12 gauge shotgun with slugs. You always start someone on a very small gun so that they can get an idea of how a gun is going to work and how to hold it right, and gradually move them to a larger one so they can get an idea of how recoil works. I started them all off with a .22 rifle, since rifles are the easiest to shoot, and by the end of the day I had them all shooting a .30-06 rifle and hitting targets at 100 yards. I felt pretty accomplished. It was my first time teaching people to do something that dangerous and no one had a single accidental discharge or injury.

There’s tons of AK platform guns out there, and they mostly all look and shoot the same, however, that is not the case with this gun. It is sleek and tactical looking, it comes with black “furniture” as they call it in the gun world. Basically it means all the parts are black. It just looks like an AK that’s 20 years ahead of the original wood stocked AKs that you see all over shooting ranges in the US and in the hands of bad guys in the movies. The trigger pull is swift and clean, surprising you every time with the ease of it as it goes bang. It’s about as durable as you can find an AK, I didn’t want to do it with mine, but there are videos of people throwing this gun in mud pits, pulling it out, jacking a round in the chamber, and making it cycle completely caked in mud and with mud in the end of the barrel. There is a reason this platform has been around so long. It’s rugged, reliable, and packs a big punch. It’s effective range is not anything to marvel over, but that’s just due to the cartridge that it runs. It runs a 7.62×39 cartridge, it’s one that been out since 1943, and has not been changed even in the slightest since then. It bucks like a horse when fired, because it’s a slower moving large round fired out of a shorter barrel. Out of all the modern sporting rifles, it is definitely the most fun one to shoot because of it though. The ammo is also ridiculously cheap. You can pick it up for around 20 cents a round, versus it’s biggest rival, the AR-15, whose ammo costs in the ballpark of 40 cents a round. All in all, the AK, and this one in particular are a very fun gun to shoot. Some people even deer hunt with these things. I just target shoot with mine, it doesn’t have enough takedown power for me to take down larger deer. Really it’s just a very sleek, clean looking, clean shooting , cool gun that’s cheap to shoot, and that’s why I like it so much.

In many instances in life, you hear about how practice makes perfect, and in shooting, it’s the same. If you never pick up a gun and go shoot paper, you’ll never hit where you want to hit. If you go out and practice, you’re probably going to be better. But in reality, you can practice all you want, and if you never practice the right things, you’ll never get any better. It was instilled into me from a young age to take your time, let the gunshot surprise you, don’t jerk the trigger, but I was never taught the correct way to hold a handgun to be more accurate, or even how to properly gauge where you were going to hit at a long distance with a rifle. It took a lot of time, and a lot of instruction from people much better at shooting than I am to get me where I am today. It takes patience, and a realization that you are going to fail 10x the amount you will succeed before you finally figure things out. Shooting great is an art form, and to make great art, you have to practice, and make some really crappy art. If you want to get into shooting, or just get better at it, find someone who is good at it and get them to teach you. They will likely have good pointers that you could never figure out on your own.

This gun is one that’s been around a very long time, and will be around a whole lot longer. They started making it in the early 1980s and to this day, it continues to be one of the best selling revolver platforms that is on the market. It can shoot both .357 Magnum and .38 Special, which are two pretty different cartridges designed as self defense rounds. The .357 Magnum is a well known handgun cartridge and is known for it’s relatively low recoil in the magnum handgun cartridge family. It’s much more manageable than a .44 Magnum for sure. When I first shot the 686, I wanted to try the double action feature of the revolver out. On old school revolvers they only had a single action model, and you had to cock the hammer back every time that you shot it. Double action eliminates that need to cock the hammer back and makes it instead where you can just squeeze on the trigger and make it shoot. The trigger pull on the double action was very heavy, and had a whole lot of travel until the bang. It made my shot placement a whole lot less accurate as opposed to the single action, which if you were to even think about touching the trigger, would go bang. That’s how you make this gun accurate. The model I shot had a 4″ barrel on it, and it was huge. They make these guns with up to a 6″ barrel, which is insane! That gun would be a cannon! My father has owned this particular gun since the late 1980s, when he was a Faulkner County Sheriff’s Deputy, and used it as his duty gun. The grip was added later, it’d look a little strange for a deputy to walk around with a grip like that on a revolver. Not only has this gun been around for ever, it was reliable enough to be used as a duty gun. The gun speaks for itself when you shoot it, it basically screams reliability and accuracy mixed with a healthy amount of power. This is definitely not a handgun for someone to buy for their first handgun, I would only recommend buying something like this once you have become a seasoned firearms owner and operator, as it is very powerful!

The very reason which we are granted the right to own firearms in the Bill of Rights is the very reason we should never give it up. “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Do you know why that our forefathers included this amendment into our Bill of Rights? It was to fight away a tyrannical government, when they try to take away your rights or liberties, just like the British had done to them before. They didn’t want that for their new country, “America”, and I’m glad they didn’t. Otherwise I wouldn’t be allowed to speak freely and neither would anyone else, it’d be a “what the government says, goes” kind of thing. We do not have access to “weapons of war” as regular citizens of the United States of America, regardless of what some people in the media and in our government would like you to think. What we have access to is a dated firearms technology that fires one bullet every time you squeeze the trigger, no matter how scary the gun looks. AR-15s are not a gun capable of cyclic full auto fire rates. In fact, not even close. You can put it in fire, or on safe, and on fire it shoots out one bullet every time that you squeeze the trigger. News reporters like to call it “fully semi automatic”, silly gooses don’t know the difference between semi-automatic and fully automatic. It’s not real crazy, in fact it’s not even what would be needed to maintain a well regulated militia. In 1986 Congress passed the NFA act, which banned all machine guns and other devices that made any gun made to become capable of cyclic full auto fire, and suppressors (which aren’t anywhere near as quite as the movies make them out to be). Most people viewed it as an infringement upon our Second Amendment rights when this law was passed, because it took away some of our gun rights. Even when those things were legal before 1986, you still had to go through extensive background checks, pay a tax stamp, and jump through many other hoops to get a hold of one. It may sound ridiculous and partially radical, but they should not have banned any of those things for a citizen of the United States to own (as long as they aren’t a convicted felon or an evaluated crazy person of course). Those were the last things standing that would make it possible to fight off the government, should they become tyrannical, plus they are really fun to shoot. Our military carries fully automatic weapons and suppresses them in many circumstances, we can’t fight that off with our semi-automatic, fire one bullet at a time AR-15s. So when you see legislation pop up or a news reporter talk about banning a gun or all guns, just realize, they have already banned one thing that makes it possible to fight off a tyrannical government, it won’t be long before they try to take the next thing, which I’m sure will be AR-15s and AK-47s, which are already under heavy scrutiny because of the false information the media spreads about them. Just get informed before you form an opinion on something with false facts. Guns are here to defend us against our rights being taken away.

While this is not how it originally came from the factory, this gun came with most of the things that are on it, other than the sight and the angled fore-grip. It is a decked out gun from the factory. It comes with an 18″ match grade barrel with a rifle length gas system in it, unlike many other AR-15 rifles. Most other AR-15s have a carbine length gas system. It also has a 3.5lb trigger, from the factory, with a quicker reset rate than any other factory trigger at this price level. It also comes with Magpul parts, like the trigger guard, grip, and stock, all of which I have replaced and made better. The best part of this rifle, and the only one I haven’t upgraded because it is so great, is it’s muzzle brake. That thing throws it in park, quite literally, the gun doesn’t move when you shoot it. I bought this gun the day it came out. I have had nothing but good things to say about it the way it comes from the factory. At 100 yards with a magnification of 3x or greater, you can hit a 2″ grouping while standing up, which is very hard to do with a factory rifle. I put a really big scope on mine since I use it for competition shooting now, and have upgraded a few accuracy components to make it more accurate at longer distances. The first picture is the gun the day I got it, with the sight I bought with it and a angled fore-grip that I had in my closet, and the second is after all the upgrades that I have added to it.

When I first turned 21, I bought one of these little guys. They are small enough that you can fit them into your pocket, but large enough where you can fit an entire hand on it without your pinky hanging off the edge. It is small, light weight, concealable pretty much anywhere you want to conceal it on your body, even on your ankle with tight jeans. This gun is the all around perfect concealed carry gun. It comes in many different styles, two of which are pictured below. You can get them with or without a laser grip, in probably 20 different colors and some are even milled with a ported slide to give them a “competition gun” look. I own the one with the black slide and the rosewood grip. My mother actually owns the other one, it has a laser grip so that she doesn’t have to aim down the sights to be accurate. She loves shooting it and comes to the range at least once every other week with me to shoot it. It may be a very small 9mm, but it doesn’t beat you up when you shoot it like most guns this small do. It is very manageable and would be perfect for anyone as a carry gun. The price point is a little higher, due to the fact that it is a Kimber, but it is worth every penny. It will drive tacks at 15 yards with a competent shooter. The best part about it, that is very hard to find on most modern concealed carry guns, it that it has a manual safety. It gives you that extra peace of mind when you are carrying it in what you might call “more sensitive” areas. Overall, this gun is great, it is extremely concealable, lightweight, accurate, and looks great. I would recommend it to anyone that is looking to get a concealed carry gun.

Starting about two month ago, I started to realize that I had a need for a compact 9mm. I wanted something that I could conceal if I wanted to carry it, but something that I could also take to the range and shoot without having to spend a ton of money on ammo. I looked around at a few different guns starting with the Smith and Wesson M&P 9mm compact. I liked it, and I liked that the model I looked at had a physical safety, the grip was just too short for my hands, so that gun wasn’t going to cut it. I then looked at a Springfield Armory XD9 compact, and it was just too top heavy to justify in a carry gun. I finally looked at the Glock 19 Gen 4, it wasn’t the prettiest gun, but it sure had function and it felt good in my hand. I remembered having shot one in my qualifying for my concealed carry course and having shot all 10 rounds in less than 8 seconds and all were on target. If I can pick up a gun for the first time and do that, I’m already impressed with it. So I ended up buying the Glock 19 and now I carry it more than I carry my smaller 9mm Kimber. It’s a great gun, it shoots very accurately out to about 30 yards. The only thing that I don’t necessarily like about it, is it’s lack of a physical safety, but if you have sufficient firearms training, it shouldn’t be an issue. Just keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to fire.

I had always wanted a 1911 handgun in .45ACP, but I didn’t want just any regular one, so I took off to a gun range that also sold firearms in Little Rock in search of the perfect one last week. They had everything from cheap Taurus 1911s all the way to some very expensive Wilson Combat 1911’s. I told the salesman behind the counter what I was looking for and he told me that he’d get a few guns together for me to shoot and try out. I told him I didn’t want to spend over $1000 on one, but I wanted it to be really nice for the price. He brought out a Springfield Armory 1911 in a blued finish, a Kimber Custom II in a two tone color scheme, and a Ruger 1911 in stainless steel. I loaded the Ruger 1911 first and shot a magazine through it, I liked it but wasn’t impressed, the trigger was really heavy and it wasn’t the most accurate thing. Next I tried out the Springfield Armory 1911, I liked it too, but it just wasn’t overwhelming in terms of how it shot, it had decent accuracy and an acceptable trigger pull weight, but it just wasn’t something that made me go, WOW! Last, I finally shot the Kimber, it was definitely the looker of the bunch, it had rosewood grip panels on a stainless steel lower receiver and a dark black finish on the slide, and if a gun could be beautiful, that would be what this one was. I loaded up the magazine and aimed in to take my first shot. I squeezed the trigger just ever so slightly and it went off, after shooting it once I fell in love, it hit the bullseye every time I shot it, the trigger pull was only 3.5lbs, which it really light, and it had every single thing that someone could possibly want on an entry level 1911. I was sold. I asked the salesman what the price was, and he said it was the cheapest one out of the bunch that I had shot. It was only $750 while the others were $800 a piece. I told him to start the paperwork and I walked out of there with the gun. It an absolute work of art and a hand cannon in the .45ACP .