Category Archives: Gun Fun

Online Ammo Bank

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This is a little different:

AmmoSquared Addresses Growing Demand for Alternative Assets

Nampa, ID – AmmoSquared Inc., the pioneer in online ammunition backed holdings, is answering the call from consumers seeking non-traditional ways to diversify their assets. The company offers a unique service by allowing customers to accumulate and store physical ammunition holdings off-site, providing an innovative way for individuals to build and protect tangible wealth while hedging against economic uncertainties.

As the global economy faces unprecedented challenges, many individuals are turning away from traditional asset accounts that can be vulnerable to fiat currency shocks such as stocks, bonds, and money market accounts. AmmoSquared’s ammunition-backed digital wallet offers a new approach for those concerned about the declining value of fiat currencies and the risks associated with conventional financial institutions.

“Ammunition is a physical, tangible asset that will never be worth zero,” says AmmoSquared CEO Dan Morton, “It’s more stable than cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, which are still too volatile for most people to reliably use as an alternative store of value. Ammunition is more like gold, with intrinsic value based on the effort and cost of raw materials. It will never be worthless, nor will it vanish due to a tweet or hacker.”

AmmoSquared has developed a user-friendly platform that allows customers to build, store, and manage an ammunition inventory online. The company offers over 60 different caliber options to cater to the diverse needs of its customers. Asset holders take advantage of AmmoSquared’s secure, climate controlled, storage facilities, ensuring their ammunition holdings are kept in optimal conditions to preserve its value.

The company has also introduced features typically found in financial products, such as limit orders, percentage gains and loss tracking, and the ability to exchange between different calibers with just a few clicks. These features, combined with an easy-to-use interface, make AmmoSquared an attractive option for those seeking to purchase and store ammunition as an alternative safe haven for their excess funds.

AmmoSquared, which started in 2015 as an ammunition subscription service, has evolved into something akin to an ammunition bank. They offer customers a unique way to diversify their savings into a tangible, useful asset. As dollar dominance wanes and people seek alternative safe havens for their excess cash, AmmoSquared provides a practical, secure solution that helps protect customers’ wealth in these uncertain times.

For more information about AmmoSquared and its innovative ammunition solutions, visit https://ammosquared.com/.

About AmmoSquared Inc.:

AmmoSquared is pioneering an online ammunition wallet or “bank account”, offering customers an innovative way to purchase and store ammunition while still meeting their everyday shooting and hunting needs. With a wide variety of calibers available, AmmoSquared’s platform provides a user-friendly experience that allows individuals to manage and diversify their assets with ease. The company is dedicated to providing secure storage solutions and exceptional customer service, positioning itself as a leader in the burgeoning ammunition depository market.

For further information, please contact:

marketing@ammosquared.com

www.ammosquared.com

Better than New

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I loaned a rifle and case to a Boomershoot Staff member who doesn’t own any guns. His were all stolen out of a moving trailer shortly after he got out of the Navy and he hasn’t replaced them yet. This was his first Boomershoot, and I figured he had to do some shooting. Loaned him a suppressed AR with a suppressor. After the first High Intensity event, I cautioned him to wait until the suppressor had cooled off before putting it back in the case.
After the second High Intensity event, he didn’t wait a sufficiently long time, and it melted a hole through the lining of the soft case. He felt terrible about it and wanted to buy me a new case. I decided I would talk to Barb and maybe we could repair it rather than replace it. It wasn’t catastrophic damage:

Barb thought a patch probably would work. But she didn’t have any. I went looking on Amazon for patches. Then I thought, I really should look for something that can tolerate high temperatures.
TA-DA!!! Meet FLASLD Aluminized Heat Shield Thermal Barrier Adhesive Backed Heat Sleeve Up To 2000 Degrees Fahrenheit:

For $20, I got enough adhesive backed shielding to line multiple cases.
Here is the finished product:

It is better than new.

Broken Hammer

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I don’t know how or when this happened but the gun has probably fired 100,000 rounds so that is a decent run for the one part. The replacement, from a different manufacturer, is on the left. The original is on the right.

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Boomershoot 2023 registration is open

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Just a reminder, Boomershoot 2023 registration is now open to everyone. With over four months until the event (May 5th, 6th, and 7th) the event is already nearly 40% full.

If you sign up now you still have a great selection of shooting positions. If you wait too much longer the positions best suited for your equipment and skill level may be much more limited.

Learn more about Boomershoot and then sign up. It is a real blast!

Shooting a dead bolt

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Via Widener’s:

Mythbusting: Shooting A Deadbolt

We never get tired of watching movies, but we often watch scenes play out that aren’t realistic. Their approach is believable, but the way they go about solving problems defies logic, engineering, and sometimes physics. Take deadbolt locks as an example. When a character shoots a deadbolt lock, it disintegrates and the door busts wide open. It looks good on screen, but what happens when you shoot a deadbolt in real life?

That’s the question we set out to answer with this project: Whether the action we’re presented with on the big screen has any authenticity to it. We wanted to find out what really happens when you shoot a deadbolt with various calibers to see if Hollywood did their homework.

They shot at the lock which never resulted in gaining access through the door and most of the time cause the lock to be inoperable. Basically, shooting a shot or two make it less likely for you to gain access.

I would have thought you could do better by shooting at the doorframe just inside where the bolt engaged the strike plate. They sort of addressed that idea:

Why Not Shoot The Bolt Out Through The Door?

For starters, it’s not that easy to hit it. The bolt itself is only about an inch tall, making it a very small target even from a few feet away. If you do hit it, it’s going to take multiple shots to cause it to fail, and even more shots to cause the door behind it to fail.

In any case, if you are serious about opening a door via a projectile, a few ounces of Tannerite or Boomerite over the strike plate would open the door on the first try.

Barrett Firearms is now Australian owned

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NIOA Acquires Barrett Firearm

Australian defense contractor NIOA Group announced today that it had acquired 100 percent of Barrett Firearms, expanding the company’s global reach. In the same announcement, NIOA Group CEO Robert Nioa confirmed that Barrett would continue to operate under its own brand. All management and staff at Barrett’s Murfreesboro, Tenn., manufacturing facility will be retained, and production will continue as normal. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.

It sounds as if civilian sales will continue.

I don’t really have the money to buy and feed a Barrett but I want that possibility to exist for other people.

There could be a problem here

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Via Rolf who says, “I detect a problem”:

Meme-TargetShooting

I think someone needs to put a little more spin on their bullets.

Although, if the distance is short enough and/or the target big enough this probably has more stopping power than a soft or hollow point bullet.

Boomershoot 2023 entry opening soon!

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Registration opens for staff 1/9/2023 6:00:00 PM Pacific Time.
Registration opens for previous year participants 1/14/2023 9:00:00 AM Pacific Time.
Registration opens for everyone 1/21/2023 9:00:00 AM

As Boomershoot 2022 participants know we had some issues with placement of long-distance targets.

Due to issues mostly beyond the control of the landowner we were only able to place a few targets near the 700-yard area berm. Most of the details have been worked out for this year with a different area for some of the long distant targets.

You can see the new target area by visiting the entry website Available Positions web page.

Select an available position and you will find an image with all the target areas for a given position. Some shooting positions will have parts of one of the available target areas blocked by the tops of trees. The shooting position specific image (the bottom image) is several years old, and the trees have grown. The top image of available target areas is from August 2022 and closely represents the view from the East (left) side of the shooting berm. Choose your shooting position to take this limitation in mind.

Prices have increased. Boomershoot was losing a lot of money on the dinner and breaking even on the High Intensity event. There have been donations offer to cover the price of dinner for ALL participants. If one of these generous offers comes through refunds will be given to everyone who has signed up for dinner at the new price.

Let me know if you have questions or see typos or errors on the website.

Sign up here.

Quote of the day—Just the News Staff

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Democrats with ambitions of broad gun control in the United States face a major stumbling block in their efforts to enact those policies: American voters themselves.

Gun rights remain broadly popular in the United States, even after years of Democratic efforts to turn high-profile mass shootings into major gun control initiatives.

A long history of gun ownership, coupled with robust constitutional protections for firearm ownership here, have led to one of the largest private gun stocks in the world.

The enduring popularity of guns in the U.S. was underscored by a recent RMG Research poll conducted by Scott Rasmussen, one that earlier this month found some support for new gun laws among voters  but far more overwhelming favorability toward gun rights.

Just the News Staff
December 30, 2022
As Democrats ramp up gun control, a supermajority in U.S. think gun ownership good for society
[This is essential. Over time, SCOTUS rulings will match the culture more than the culture will match SCOTUS.

Keep up the good work. Take a newbie to the range.

Yesterday I took a new coworker to the range. He is former military and likes guns but all his guns were stolen a year or so ago and had not replaced them. I took him to the range and let him shoot several of my handguns and introduced him to Steel Challenge like shooting (with multiple paper targets) and USPSA stages. He said he really enjoyed that and it was nothing like he had ever done before. He plans to get a new gun soon. I plan to take him to a Steel Challenge match when the weather gets better.—Joe]

Supersonic rifle bullet at 5000 meters

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Via email from Rolf.

The 14.9x102mm SOP wildcat cartridge:

.. is made by necking down a 20mm Vulcan autocannon shell casing. It was developed as a collaborative project among members of the Snipers Hide online forum. It has undergone several revisions since 2010.

It’s usually loaded with a hand-crafted low-drag 1,690 grain solid copper bullet, which it fires at roughly 3,350 fps. The projectile itself is roughly 4 inches long, with driving bands and an aggressive rebated boat tail to reduce base drag.

The sectional density is around 0.70, which is an astoundingly high measure of the mass-to-diameter ratio. It’s very heavy for it’s caliber, nearly a quarter pound.

The ballistic coefficient is about 1.85, which is an astoundingly high measure of how aerodynamic the bullet is during flight.

And, of course, because it is more that .50 caliber (for now) it must be registered as a “destructive device.”

Wow. Nice ballistics! But I wouldn’t want to pay the price to feed it.

Quote of the day—Tom Gresham @Guntalk

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Mental Health Reminder: Before you get into an online shouting match with someone, remember that it’s quite likely that there is no one there. It’s a bot. Often best to move on, putting your efforts into something that’s actually productive. Like reloading. 😉

Tom Gresham @Guntalk
Tweeted on October 21, 2022
[This is probably good advice.

Reloading, practice, and building your underground bunker.—Joe]

Free stage design tool

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This stage design tool is cool:

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This is a web application. No installing on your local machine is required.

Other features (from an email I received from them):

  • Easy to use – Simply drag and drop the props onto the stage and arrange how you like. 
  • My Stages Library – By creating an account in our Stagebuilder software, you will be able to save stages in your own “My Stages” library to come back to later.
  • Custom Props – We have included a wide selection of props to use in your stages, and you can even upload your own images to use as props. You can also add a text box to the stage to include specific instructions or notes if needed.
  • Stage Descriptions – You are able to include: a stage name, start position, stage number, round count, number of strings, number of paper targets, type of scoring, procedure notes, and setup notes. This description is added to the bottom of the page when you print or save your stage.

If you scroll down while on the web page there are a lot more target types to chose from.

You can save your stages online, include a stage description, print them out.

25 years ago when I was working for Microsoft on Direct X I fantasized about writing an application like this but with the added feature of using 3D and allowing you to walk through the stage and visualize it from any angle.

There are many other stage design tools. Some even use augmented reality which would be cool because you could superimpose your stage over your shotting bay using your phone camera.

Another type is, basically, Legos for stage designers.

With my own range now I think just the simple web app works for me. I can do the 3D visualization in reality rather than virtual space.

.22 LR ammo via Widener’s

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Last month I received an email from Widener’s. This is the important part of our conversation:

I’m reaching out to see if you’d be interested in reviewing some ammo on blog.joehuffman.org. Product reviews are an opportunity to increase website traffic and build a stronger relationship with your audience.

Think of your readers for a minute. They likely see ads for ammunition placed by manufacturers every time they go online. Wouldn’t it be better if they were receiving real information from a trusted resource like your website? Given your experience in the industry, I thought you would be interested in receiving some free ammunition to review.

If you are interested in receiving some free ammo for an unbiased product review. I’m sure we can find a caliber or two to send your way. 

If there’s anything I can help you with, just let me know. Thanks!

—

What type of ammo do you have in mind?

My primary calibers are .22LR (Steel Challenge type matches and practice), .40 S&W (Steel Challenge and USPSA matches) , .223 Remington (precision rifle out to 500 yards), and .300 Win Mag (precision rifle out to 700 yards).

—

Thank you for the fast reply. That sounds great, below is a $250 gift card code for you to use to get started. After you add items to your cart, enter the gift card code and the website will walk you through the rest of the checkout process. Orders are processed through a secure server and fulfilled remotely by our warehouse, so your blogger identity remains anonymous to us.

I ordered 1,000 rounds of CCI Mini-Mags 22 LR 40 Grain CPRN and 500 rounds of Federal American Eagle Suppressor 22 LR 45 Grain CPRN. That was on a Tuesday. The following Tuesday the ammo arrived at my underground bunker in remote Idaho:

image 

I was a little concerned because the package had been damaged in transit. I’ve opened ammo shipments that looked similar to this and found hundreds of rounds rattling around loose in the box.

This time the interior packaging was more than adequate and the ammo was contained:

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I’ve fired many thousands of rounds of the Mini-Mags with excellent results. Because of the high reliability it’s the only .22 ammo I use in competition. Hence, I didn’t bother to test it.

I was really interested in the Federal American Eagle Suppressor 22 LR 45 Grain CPRN. Would it work in my somewhat finicky competition gun? I had thought I had my suppressor in my range bag but I couldn’t find it. Without the suppressor to give some additional backpressure I thought there was zero chance of it working. I was wrong. I fired two magazines without even a hint of malfunction and with excellent accuracy.

That was almost a month ago.

Last week I put in an exhaustive search for my suppressor to finish off the review. I finally found the suppressor laying on a shelf in the gun safe rather than in a range bag or gun case like I expected. I went to the range for a late lunch one day (it’s about five minutes from work) and, as I had hoped, I had a few minutes when I was the only person in the bay. I put on the suppressor and took off the ear protection. There was the usual mildly intense pop with the first round then the rest of the rounds were not much more than the sound of the action of the gun cycling. Again, with perfect reliability and excellent accuracy.

Nice!

Thanks Widner’s!

Hearing loss reversal

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Restoring Hearing: New Tool To Create Ear Hair Cells Lost Due to Aging or Noise

Hearing loss caused by aging, noise, and some cancer therapy medications and antibiotics has been irreversible because scientists have not been able to reprogram existing cells to develop into the outer and inner ear sensory cells — essential for hearing — once they die.

But Northwestern Medicine scientists have discovered a single master gene that programs ear hair cells into either outer or inner ones, overcoming a major hurdle that had previously prevented the development of these cells to restore hearing, according to new research published today (May 4, 2022) in the journal Nature.

This is great news! I grew up driving extremely noisy tractors without hearing protection. And even with hearing protection after shooting some guns under certain conditions I can tell I had too much exposure.

I like living in the future.

Boomershoot 2022

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Boomershoot went reasonably well this year.

Dinner was good. I really like this food vendor. This is the second year for them and will probably will continue to be the vendor of choice.

MTHead (frequent commenter here and sometimes quite quotable) showed up and helped with Saturday target production.

Our Saturday night dinner speaker Kim du Toit spoke on how he believes individuals can help Make America Great Again. He says there is a Boomershoot report to follow once he returns to Texas. Also, he has a plan to sponsor a free Boomershoot dinner for all participants. We will discuss the details and give his idea serious consideration.

The weather was mixed with showers on Saturday but Friday and Sunday was dry and a bit cool. The targets had a high detonation rate. We did not find any targets which failed to detonate when they received a solid hit. There were the usual targets which were torn and lost content when hit by projectiles of wood, rock and ammonium nitrate prills from other targets which detonated.

We had a last minute problem with the land owner on the hillside informing us the USDA Conservation Reserved Program had recently informed him the rules were being interpreted much more strictly than in the past. Hence we couldn’t put any targets on the grass. This limited the most distant targets to about 690 yards to 700 yards and about 30 feet in width. We put targets in this area out in two batches.

The muddy 375 yards berm was handled in a special manner as well. In previous years with extreme mud we found the blast from targets would completely coat remaining targets with mud which was near perfect camouflage. To prevent this we put targets in this area out in three batches. The targets were given greater spacing in depth as well as elevation. This was a huge help. There was virtually no mud coating of nearby targets.

The first two batches at the 375 yard line were the usual mix of small (4″x4″ and some 3”x3”) and a few 7”x7” targets. The last batch was a last minute idea of mine. Instead of putting the remaining 140 7”x7” targets out near 700 yards we put them at 375 yards. This made the end of the event easy, fast, and exciting. A Boomershoot Grand Finale! It seemed to be a great hit.

I had one shooter tell me, “I had my bench and everything packed up and then I saw there were a whole bunch of big targets at 375. That’s like a bank setting a bunch of cash out in the open for everyone. I had to unpack my gun and shoot from the ground. I got another 10 targets and one probable.

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Some of the more elaborate setups.

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One of my co-workers and his wife with heads down.

The remainder of this post is high in image intensity and so I have split it to save people bandwidth.

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