Category: All About Guns
Philadelphia gas station owner Neil Patel hired security guards with AR-15s to deal with all the “nonsense, drug trafficking, hanging around, [and] gangs” endangering his employees.
Patel, who has a Karco gas station, hired “Pennsylvania S.I.T.E Agents clad with Kevlar vest and AR-15s or shotguns” to keep his employees safe, FOX 29 reports.
“They are forcing us to hire the security, high-level security, state level. We are tired of this nonsense: robbery, drug trafficking, hanging around, gangs,” Patel said.
The guards he hired wear Kevlar vests and train regularly, maintaining firearm proficiency.
Prior to hiring the guards, Patel’s car was vandalized and an ATM was stolen from his gas station. But FOX News notes Patel’s observation that crimes–including loitering–ended once he hired security.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio and a Turning Point USA Ambassador. AWR Hawkins holds a PhD in Military History with a focus on the Vietnam War (brown water navy), U.S. Navy since Inception, the Civil War, and Early Modern Europe. Follow him on Instagram: @awr_hawkins. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.
————————————————————————————– If the state won’t do its job than somebody is going to have to pick up the slack. I really think that we are going see a LOT more of this coming down the pike! Grumpy
Blunderbuss – Buckshot Patterning
The top firearm manufacturer in America is not only an American company but one of the oldest. Established in 1852, Smith & Wesson now enjoys annual sales of more than two million guns of all types a year, enjoying a comfortable lead over competitors.
Smith & Wesson is probably the most historically significant, consistently successful firearms country in the United States, with a history of innovation that has brought iconic guns and ammunition into widespread use.
In 1852, Horace Smith and Daniel B. Wesson founded the Smith & Wesson Company in Norwich, Connecticut. The company designed and manufactured some of the first metallic-cased firearms using the “Volcanic” cartridge. The use of a self-contained cartridge that included bullet, powder, and primer streamlined the feeding system, leading to a rate of fire practically limited to the loading rate of the weapon.
The cartridge was combined with a tubular magazine and lever-action loading system and brought to market in both a pistol and rifle form. The company was renamed the Volcanic Repeating Arms Company before Oliver Winchester, a major investor, forced the company into insolvency, eventually spinning off lever-action guns into his own company—The Winchester Repeating Arms Company.
Smith & Wesson regrouped and started a new company, The Smith & Wesson Company, just as Samuel Colt’s patent on the revolving handgun cylinder expired. The two designed and began production of a new revolver, the seven shot .22 Rimfire Seven Shooter, eventually known as the Model 1, in 1857. Sales took off during the Civil War as soldiers purchased the compact pistols as backup weapons. Between 1857 and 1881 the company sold 261,000 Model 1s. In 1861 the company released a larger version, the Model 2, available in .32 Rimfire.
The company’s third revolver, the Model 3, catapulted it into the world of international recognition. The .44 caliber Model 3 was a so-called “top break” revolver, in which a lever caused the barrel and cylinder to rotate ninety degrees on a hinge, instantly expelling spent shell casings and making the revolver ready for fresh ammunition. The simplified reloading process made the Model 3 was particularly useful for mounted cavalry. In addition to the U.S. Army the Model 3 was also adopted by Russia, Argentina, Japan and Turkey. The Model 3 was also popular on the Western frontier, and fans included legendary lawman Wyatt Earp.
Smith & Wesson steadily rolled out new technologies in firearms, introducing a line of double action revolvers in 1880, a hammerless revolver in 1887, and in 1899 the .38 caliber Military & Police revolver, later known as the Model 10, which eventually gave birth to the .38 Special revolver round. Six million Model 10s were sold during the product’s lifespan.
The early to mid-twentieth century saw the company produce eight hundred thousand Model 10 revolvers for World War II and introduce revolvers in .357 Magnum (1935) and .44 Magnum (1955), then the most powerful handgun cartridge in America. The Smith & Wesson Model 29, designed for the .44 Magnum cartridge, saw sales explode after being featured in the 1971 Clint Eastwood film “Dirty Harry.” The year 1955 also saw introduction of the Model 39 double-action pistol, the first adopted by a law enforcement agency in the United States.
Smith & Wesson concentrated primarily on revolvers during the latter half of the twentieth century, which left the company poorly positioned to take advantage of the explosion in popularity of high capacity nine millimeter Luger revolvers in the 1980s, the so-called “Wonder Nines.” However, the company quickly recovered and launched its own line, the 4006 series. The company also released a new pistol round, the .40 Smith & Wesson, which subsequently became popular with law enforcement agencies interested in a round more powerful than nine millimeter.
Today Smith & Wesson fields a diversified line of firearms, from revolvers of every caliber to its own highly successful M&P 2.0 series of high capacity double action pistols. In 2003, the company began selling its own version of the iconic M1911A1 .45 handgun. The company also produces its own line of AR-15 rifles under the M&P line. The company was first overall in firearm sales in 2016, selling 1.7 million handguns and nearly four hundred thousand long guns. In an industry where corporate mismanagement has often lowered quality and instituted numerous, potentially dangerous recalls, Smith & Wesson has maintained a reputation for reliable, safe firearms.
Smith & Wesson’s appeal lies in its historical significance, record of innovation, and reliability. A wide product line means consumers looking for a particular type of handgun usually can count a Smith & Wesson among their choices. Add in a dollop of popular culture, from Westerns to the streets of San Francisco, and Smith & Wesson is a compelling choice. All of these factors combined will keep the iconic gun company ahead of the pack for the foreseeable future.
Kyle Mizokami is a defense and national-security writer based in San Francisco who has appeared in the Diplomat, Foreign Policy , War is Boring and the Daily Beast . In 2009, he cofounded the defense and security blog Japan Security Watch .
Carbines anyone?
The debate rages on: What is best for home defense, a pistol, a rifle or a shotgun? There are definite advantages and disadvantages to each of these when it comes to keeping your home safe. A pistol is easy to carry and easy to move around inside your home, but it lacks the fight-ending punch of a long gun. A rifle, such as an AR-15, is very familiar to most American gun owners, but .223 or similar calibers quite often require more than one hit to stop the threat. A defensive shotgun or tactical shotgun brings a heavyweight hammer to the fight, but it has a low ammunition capacity compared to a standard capacity AR-15 rifle, with more recoil.
Despite these apparent limitations, however, the power of the shotgun is a quite compelling argument for using it to defend your home. Pistol drills like the Bill Drill and Failure to Stop Drill exist because we understand that a pistol is often not able to stop the fight with just one shot. The same is true for the AR-15. It’s very common to see trainers teach that three, four or even five rounds on-target as a normal response to a lethal threat. This means that a 30 round magazine in an AR-15 (which is usually loaded to 28 rounds in the field) suddenly becomes a firearm that can engage 5-7 targets before it needs to be reloaded. Coincidentally, this is the magazine capacity of the typical tactical shogun. All of sudden, the ammunition gap between a defensive shotgun and a rifle or a pistol is considerably smaller, and using a shotgun as a home defense gun starts to make a lot of sense.
Tactical Shotgun Training Shows You What Your Gun Can and Can’t Do
A good tactical shotgun training class can get even more out of your defensive shotgun, which is why I attended a recent Defensive Shotgun Instructor class taught by Tom Givens. Tom is a former Memphis police officer and a legend in the firearms training community. He is a firm believer in the power and efficacy of the defensive shotgun, and his class is a “must do” for anyone who wants to learn more about using a shotgun for home defense.
In this three day class, Givens taught us why a shotgun loaded with a good buckshot round is an absolute fight-stopper, if you understand what it can and can’t do. We first learned to pattern our specific gun with our defensive shotshell of choice to see how large the spread of pellets was at 5, 10, 15 or even 25 yards. Any pellet which doesn’t hit the intended target will fly downrange, with possibly disastrous results. Keeping all our hits on-target, no matter what gun you’re using, is an important part of marksmanship, and with a shotgun, that means knowing when the spread of your pellets exceeds the area of your target.
One of the biggest benefits of a good tactical shotgun training class is learning how to tame the recoil of a full-sized shotgun firing full-power buckshot loads. Givens teaches a “push-pull” method, where the hand that grips the fore-end of the shotgun pushes out towards the target while the other hand snugs the butt of the gun up against your shoulder. This creates a “loaded spring” effect and allows you to rapidly bring the sights of the gun back on target after each shot.
Make The Most Out Of Yourself And Your Gun
The smaller magazine capacity of the defensive shotgun can be overcome by making sure you’re feeding fresh rounds into the magazine whenever possible, and just like other guns, there are two types of reloads, emergency and tactical. An emergency reload is when your gun runs completely out of ammunition and needs to get refilled right away, while a tactical reload is adding more rounds to your gun that is partially empty. An emergency reload with a shotgun means dropping a single shell into the chamber and closing the action, thus loading the gun. Shooting that round, or loading the rest of the magazine via a tactical reload will be dependent on your situation.
There was much more to this class than just those three concepts, as this wasn’t so much a class about shooting the shotgun as it was a class about how to teach other people how to use their shotguns in defense of life and limb. A shotgun can be an extremely effective home defense firearm but is definitely not “fire and forget.” Rather, it needs skill and expertise to be used to its fullest (and most devastating) effect, both of which can be acquired with good tactical shotgun training.