Wilson Combat has announced a new flip-up front sight for your AR pattern rifles. The new sight is billed as the perfect compliment for their Flip-Up Rear Sight, and as such is appropriately named the Wilson Combat Flip Up Front Sight, or “FURS”. According to Wilson, even when fully deployed they will not interfere with your optics.
They retail for $146.95 on the Wilson website.
Apparently, Ashely Judd is involved with an ad campaign about how Sarah Palin is endorsing some kind of imaginary “wolf genocide”. To believe the anti-hunting/PETA hyperbole, Sarah Palin herself must be flying around in an Apache slaughtering wolves with the 25mm chaingun.
Of course, if you have two brain cells that you can rub together and make a spark, you might have guessed that Ashley Judd is completely full of crap. Thankfully, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game is smart enough to explain in simple words why wolf hunting is necessary:
In control programs, predators are reduced in number but never permanently eliminated from any area; viable populations of predators are a requirement of law. The long-term goal of a successful program is increased prey density, increased harvest, and stable populations of predators. Biologists determine the level of predator removal needed to allow growth of prey populations. Biologists determine predator population objectives for areas that can achieve desired levels of harvest. Intensive management efforts, including predator control, focus on achieving those objectives.
It’s also worthwhile to note that wolves 1) occupy their entire traditional habitat in Alaska, and 2) it’s illegal to shoot wolves from the air. That’s right, the ad is even more misleading than you thought – no animals are being shot from the air. In fact, the aircraft are used to spot the animals and direct the shooters to their targets. The reason that they do this is Alaska is a very big place (in Judd-speak) which means that using planes is a lot more efficient.
I have mentioned that I didn’t like the “3-Dot” sight picture on my Springfield XD (which means that I’m a dirty, dirty gamer). I ordered a set of Heinie sights to replace the existing sights on the gun, but what if you don’t want to spend $75 to get rid of that annoying sight picture?
If that’s the case, you go to the Wild E. Coyote School of Gunsmithing sight system. Use the following steps to get rid of your annoying “3-white-dots” sighting system.
Now you have a black rear sight, and a nice attention grabbing white dot on the front post only. If you don’t like the white dot, you can do what I did and take a neon green sharpie pen and color the sight green. While the ink will wear off with cleaning and shooting on the front sight, it’s a relatively cheap and low-tech solution to get rid of your three dot sight picture without having to lay out any cash.
The reason I suggest this is that the stock sights on the XD don’t suck in terms of sight picture. The rear notch is wide enough that it allows a significant amount of light in around the front post, allowing for relatively fast acquisition of the sights. My problem was always that damned three-dot sight picture; the rear white dots would drag my eyes away from the front sight dot, which is where they really need to be.
Downrange.tv has three great posts on the WSSSC – nothing like an all Single Stack to get your morning started.
Taran Butler took the overal win in the match, beating Robb Leatham by 24 match points. The final standings look like this.
I missed out on my weekend shooty goodness so tonight I’ll be treading to my friendly indoor shooting range to “bust a few caps”.
Primarily, I’m going to be focusing on practicing for Bianchi Cup; since I haven’t yet received the reduced targets, tonight I’ll be focusing on the 10 and 15 yard stages of the “Practical Event.” That means bringing a timer and setting the par time to keep me from shooting past the buzzer. I’ve ordered a bunch of “AP-2” targets, which are a reduced version of the standard NRA Action Pistol target. These allow you to practice the 25 yard and 50 yard stages at ranges of 25 and 50 feet, respectively if you are limited on the amount of range that you can use.
I guess tonight will be my first official practice session for The Cup – beginning my 3 month training regimen of “getting knee deep in brass.”
RULE II: Never let the muzzle cover anything you are not willing to destroy.
Uncle has also pointed out in the past that the 4 Rules are set up in such a way so that for something bad to happen, you have to be breaking at least two of them simultaneously. In the linked case, Rule 1 (all guns are always loaded) was broken.
Sort of as an aside, this is why you don’t practice “clearing your house” with your wife playing the badguy. No matter which way you look at this, it’s a tragedy, and I agree with Robb that the husband should be charged with manslaughter.
Seems to be a recurring theme in the blogosphere – minor league blogger posts “RARARARGHGHG GUN R TEH SUXXORS“, gets pwnt all over the place by pro gun people in the comments, and then takes his ball and goes home. Of course, the icing on the proverbial cake is the whole smarmy nature of his posts. I can also attest with 100% fact that he doesn’t approve comments he doesn’t like, as one of mine is still hanging out in moderation.
Throughout all of this, there seems to be almost a feeling of “why don’t these stupid gun nuts get it?”, as though you and I will wake up one morning and realize that we’d be wrong all along, and guns are evil.
Funny though…we’re not the ones deleting comments we don’t like and then shutting down the ability to comment on posts because we’re getting our lunch served to us.
This marks the second time in two years of blogging that I’ve moved, but I’m thinking that it will also be the last time. If you got here by typing www.nrahab.com into your browser, don’t worry this is the right place. It seems like every year I go to SHOT SHOW, I get an even better idea than I had the year before, and this is no exception. One of the things I encountered at SHOT was a bit of confusion over my old domain name – namely, what does “Ahab” have to do with Gun Nuts Media?
As I continue grinding developments on my budding media empire (note: not an empire), I realized that I needed better branding for the main blog, and so www.gunnuts.net was born. If you subscribe to Call me Ahab via RSS, the new feed URL is http://gunnuts.net/feed – and this one doesn’t have the formatting problems I was having with my old theme. I will miss the rotating header image though.
For what it’s worth, welcome aboard again. This should be a much easier transition than the last move.
In all seriousness, I was gearing up to write a post on why you need to maintain your gun, even if you shoot the most unbreakable of Ultimate CQB Tactical Death Rays. Then I clicked over to her site and saw this post. So I figured I’d just link to hers instead and save myself the trouble.
She is 100% correct – there is no unbreakable gun. I run about 15,000-20,000 rounds a year through various guns, and let me tell you; stuff breaks. This is why I keep a log book of the rounds I’ve fired through every gun, the malfunctions I’ve had, the last time I cleaned the gun, etc. That way I can track when parts need to be changed.
A gun is just like a car – regular maintenance is the key to continuing performance.
Marines looking to replace the SAW with an “Infantry Automatic Rifle”. They’re citing the issues with the M249’s weight and accuracy, and looking to replace it with a lighter, more accurate automatic rifle. According to the linked article, the new IAR would utilize the same 30 round STANAG magazines that the M16/M4 uses.
I have mixed feelings about this – on the one hand, no one wants to lug a 22 pound SAW around. On the other hand, if I were an infantry platoon commander, I would hate to lose the ability to put out the sheer volume of fire that you can do with said M249 and a 200 round belt.
I do find it amusing though that squad automatic weapon concept has come full circle. Starting with the Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR), which used the standard service cartridge at the time, it evolved into the M60, then the M249, and now the circle has been completed with the push towards the Infantry Automatic Rifle…which is essentially the same concept as a BAR, just updated for modern equipment and ammo.