The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State …
… have to ambush some fish. This is pretty cool. It’s a Russian assault rifle they designed to shoot into water or from water. It’s called the APS Underwater Assault rifle.
The size of the magazine is a result of having to accomodate cartridges that look like this:
 
Pretty crazy. Â Apparently it can shoot 100 feet underwater, or shoot out of or into water, with lethal effect.
The M82A1 in .50BMG is generally considered most useful in anti-material operations. For long-rang anti-personnel work, you can’t beat the .408 caliber CheyTac M100 and M200 rifles. It’s portable too.
The M100 Rifle
M-200 Rifle
Both pretty attractive looking pieces, but at 14k a pop, I’d rather have a Barrett M82A1. Also, Ronnie Barrett will sell you the same rifle he sells the military, and I can respect a company that respects its customers. CheyTac sells a less accurate version to civilian shooters because “we never want our incredible technology to fall into the wrong hands.” Piss on that. If I were a terrorist with 14 large burning a hole through my pocket, I’m sure I could get a military version of the M200 from the right person.
The USS Winston Churchill, which was docked at Penn’s Landing this weekend and which Bitter and I took a tour of. Apparently Armed Canadian was there as well, but we missed him.
USS Winston Churchill. An Arleigh Burke class guided missile destroyer.
Michael Bane is going to the Ruger Rimfire Challange, and says:
 You guys are going to be kicking yourselves in your sorry butts for NOT signing up for this match…there are, like, 30 — count ’em — guns on the prize table, plus a whole crate of other cool stuff! NOOOOOOOOO, I can’t win anything, except the ever-lasting love of match direction Lisa “Boom-Boom” Farrell, plus a complete collection of Lisa Farrell trading cards…I don’t even get a freakin’ t-shirt, otherwise! Still…
Sounds like a lot of fun, except for the fact that the State of California considers my Ruger 10/22 to be a menace to society…
… and would quickly arrest me and throw me in prison upon arrival. Ruger should hold the Rimfire Challenge somewhere other than California.  Why would I want my shooting dollars to go to a state that believes I ought to be in prison?
My CZ82 pistol has arrived. I was rather disturbed to come home to find it between my security door and storm door. The Nagant came 21+ signature required, so I had to go to the UPS depot and pick it up. I’m glad I don’t have to drive anywhere to get it, but I would gladly do that to minimize the risk of it being stolen.
It arrived tucked away inside its holster. Like my Makarov holster, this one is designed to be collected. I find it hard to believe anyone would actually carry this. It would seem it’s designed to make it as difficult as possible to draw and fire the weapon.
It’s a good looking pistol. It fits nicely in my hand, and has a very nice trigger pull. I also like that the magazine is drop free, and can be released with the shooting hand. It also comes with a cord. I noticed in Paris the police having what looked like a phone cord attached to their pistols and then to their body. This seems to me to be ideas politicians come up with who don’t have much regard for the lives of their officers.
I’m a little disappointed that the importer’s markings chipped the paint up so bad. I think I can probably correct this though.
If this pistol is used, whoever it was issued to hardly ever fired it. The feed ramp, bore, and chamber are all bright and shiny, and there’s no sign of mechanical wear anywhere on the pistol. The rifling in the bore is very difficult to see, which is because the CZ82 uses polygonal rifling. To a casual observer, the bore would appear to be totally smooth.
The sights on the CZ82 are a marked improvement over typical Makarov sights. You can actually see the front sight post without having to twist your wrist around searching for it. The sites are a little yellowed, but a fresh dab of paint should fix that right up.
The only drawback to this pistol the fact that it employs a non-metallic biological decocker (your trigger finger and thumb). While the hammer is blocked if the trigger isn’t pulled all the way back, a slip up at the moment of truth and you have an accidental discharge on your hands. The pistol does have a safety for carrying it cocked and locked, but the hammer isn’t blocked when the safety is on. I wouldn’t carry it in this mode. Given it’s very smooth and gentle double action trigger pull, carrying with the hammer down would definitely be recommended. The firing pin is held back with a spring, so it won’t have the Makarov’s relatively scary sound of the firing pin moving back and forth.
Overall I’d say it’s a better carry gun than the Makarov, but the true test will be once I get it to the range.
UPDATE: Sailorcurt asks about ambidextrousness. I didn’t even consider that, but on that subject:
The pistol is completely ambidextrous. The contours of the grip are the same on both sides. Holding it in my left hand feels pretty good as well. Both the safety and mag release are ambidextrous.
The ATF recently reclassified the CZ-82 as C&R, so I decided to place an order for one.
I already keep 9×18 Makarov in stock, so this pistol doesn’t require me to keep yet another caliber of pistol cartridge in stock. I’ll get the Nagant revolver later I think. It comes with a spare magazine.
I’m pretty sure this pistol is safe for concealed carry. I’ll have to check it out thoroughly when it arrives. I can get used to the idea of ordering new carry pistols off the internet.
I ran across this video of some folks, at what appears to be a range outside the US, shooting the .577 Tyrannosaur:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQJSZs-euZU[/youtube]
You can find some background on the round here:
As A-Square loads the cartridge, it fires a 750-grain bullet at 2,460 feet per second, for muzzle energy of more than 10,000 foot-pounds. For the record, the case will hold 180 grains of H4831! No other company loads the cartridge or makes the brass, but since brass, bullets, and loaded ammunition are once again readily available from A-Square, securing a supply is less difficult than for many other big cartridges.
Jim Smith, the new owner of A-Square, says the first question anyone asks about the Tyrannosaur is “What’s the recoil like?†Since there are a couple of videos floating around the internet showing several people being thrown across a room when firing it, your long-suffering correspondent would like to assure you that it simply is not like that.
The Hannibal rifle employs Art Alphin’s “Coil-Chek†stock, which minimizes recoil in heavy cartridges through proper stock design rather than gadgets like muzzle brakes and recoil reducers. However, Art conceded the Tyrannosaur needed something more and put three reducers in the stock. So equipped, it weighs about 13 pounds.
10,000 ft-lbs of muzzle energy?  Holy recoil batman! But hey, if your goal is a last ditch defense against a charging elephant, I’d wager you’d need every bit of it. Now I really want to shoot one.
So it looks like the good Senator from Virginia had three loaded magazines worth of ammo snatched off his staffer. My main question for Senator Webb is: are you expecting that much trouble? If you are, them I might suggest you reconsider throwing a handgun in your bag, as we all know that handguns are really weapons of last resort.
For Senators who might be involved in a last ditch shootout with potential attackers, after the attackers have made their way through all the Capitol Police, I think we can all agree that this firearm is an excellent compromise between a pistol and a full sized rifle:
Of course, it’s a short barreled rifle, but you should have no problem with the NFA process as a Senator. (After all, it appears you have no problem getting around bans in federal buildings and in the District that apply to the rest of us peons.) It’s small, compact, and will even fit in a duffel bag, much like the one negligently handed off to your staffer.
I don’t want to discourage you from your gun nuttery, Senator, but if you’re figuring on two extra magazine’s worth of trouble, why not really be prepared? Besides, I’d be a lot more impressed if your staffer got caught with a P90 in you duffel bag going through the x-ray machine. We gun nuts are watching, Senator, and we don’t want you to let us down. If you’re going to get your staffers in trouble with the law by being careless about where you put your guns, at least make sure the gun is worth it!
Sometimes when you’re in West Texas with a lot of guns and ammo, you just have to get a few pictures of some Kalashnikov moments:
While I’m occupied, I’ll leave you with my video where I take out my technological frustrations on a bunch of hard drives.
[googlevideo]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3225840852266634757[/googlevideo]
Bitter got a picture of the undearly departed.
The IBM hard drives have glass plates instead of aluminum, so it was like breaking several mirrors.  I figure I have at least a century of bad luck coming to me now. Most hard drives these days are using glass platters, I think, because glass has a lower coefficient of expansion than most metals, so the magnetic tracks on the platter surface don’t move as greatly with the expanding platter.