INSIDER ONLINE

On Aug. 6, Washington State reported that the number of active concealed pistol licenses had finally topped 700,000 after a very long wait through a couple...

I don’t own an AR-15 and never have, but I’ve fired many of them over the years and found some to be a hoot, others to be remarkably accurate and one or...

I’ll preface this by acknowledging up front I’m kind of a frugal fellow when it comes to spending money on something I can fix or replace with a little...

PREFACE: Over the years, it has become something of a habit before I begin pouring powder charges to ask around to learn whether anyone else has tried the...

It was one of those campfire circles without the actual fire, but this group of devoted handgunners had enjoyed such gatherings in the past in different...

Self-control got the better of me and out came my son’s air pistol — a classic Marksman Model 1010, a pellet gun that had been around in one incarnation...

About 40-odd years ago, I read an article by Skeeter Skelton where he mentioned MMC had made a tiny adjustable rear sight for his Walther PPK .22. But alas,...

Many people stop there. They have one gun, they shoot it, they repeat “Gosh, I’m shooting a gun!” but don’t really ever get past that. It’s the...

I wrote about some experimenting I did with a S&W Model 10. I fired groups with the stock muzzle chamfer, then put an accurate 11-degree chamfer and fired...

If I had to wager, I’d wager at least 10 percent of the 1911s I’ve worked on over the decades have had safety issues. Some were even new guns. If I just...

The elections are over, but the dust certainly hasn’t settled on the legal battlefield where gun control has collided with the Second Amendment and the...

It wasn’t until a happy coincidence I had in the middle 1980s I realized there was another category of personal .22 auto I call “Little Big Guns.”...

I suspect Ruger had an inkling of the pending home run about to be hit when they released the price-point Wrangler SA .22 revolver. In one, well-thought-out...

American Handgunner, GUNS Magazine have been pulled off newsstands across the country by anti-gun retail chain store management.

To forget our past is to be ignorant of what’s transpiring now. We see things happening around us but we often miss the foundation.

When Springfield Armory introduced their SR-35 late in 2020 you’d have thought it was the second coming of something. Well, I guess it was actually....

Behold — the revolver. It appears I have peers among you who also suffer — perhaps not quite the right word, there — from an affliction I...

The old 1917 revolvers were dusted off yet the numbers were still far short. Smith & Wesson responded with a “Hand Ejector” .38 S&W Special revolver to...

What's the “funny three-tined spring thingy” in the 1911 grip? That’s the sear spring, so hang onto your seat and here we go for a simple explanation...

The “Buds” as they were fondly called, had all the features and benefits of something like a bigger S&W auto of the time, but were shrunk for shirt...

In 1894 S&W craftsmen-artists introduced the “Hand-Ejector” series of revolvers, assuring their places in wheelgun history.

There are no magic bullets and all bullets fail some of the time, so you need to be able to place any bullets you fire as accurately as possible.

I’ve got guns with warts on them. Nicks, a bit of rust, plating flaking off, signs of bad gunsmithing in the past or just plain honest wear — warts-all.

I’d always considered myself an amateur shooter — basically a gun-crank, as we used to be called — until one day in about the middle of my police career.

We are a burly, larger-than-life, muscle-bound country. America is populated with the off-spring of adventurers and the fearless people who took a leap of...

In light of all the “retro-this” and “retro-that” it suddenly dawned on me I was a “retro” myself. And, as a matter of fact, so are most of the...

A disconnector in a 1911 is a vertical bit of magic connected to the fire control system (hammer, sear, spring, etc.), moving up and down depending upon...

If we don’t take the time to build the foundation today, it will all die, now, with us. Don’t let it die. Take pre-emptive strikes. Reach out to new...

When the Colt Automatic Pistol, Pocket Model, Hammerless was introduced in Browning’s own .32 ACP cartridge in, oddly enough, 1903, America and the world...

Reader Alex Vrenios sent us a note asking to explain revolver “timing” as he recently had a problem with one of his revolvers having to do with that...

I honestly, really, completely wanted to dislike this gun. I mean, just look at it. It’s everything silly you can think up. It looks like a hose nozzle...

"Hey, um … uh … you’re talkin’ about a wood plane on a, um, you know, uh, like a gun website, you know?”

Amos lifted his welding helmet after working on a gouged side plate on a S&W revolver. Scout was always interested when Amos was TIG welding and although he...

Yeah, I know, we all have one or more of them, and there’s nothing wrong with that. In experienced hands — and I mean near-expert hands — they are...

If you read my Insider about putting a classic “Old West” patina on new guns, here’s a bunch of extra photos I had from the process.

It’s funny, but to many people — including me — a “cowboy” gun just doesn’t look right unless it has a certain patina.

This all started typically for me. I walked into a gun store on University Avenue in San Diego about 1980 and there, staring at me from the display case,

In about 1969 I was 15 “going on 16” as we used to say. I had a hopeless case of the “gun crazies” and had been suffering from the syndrome since I...

I sort of stumbled onto this .38 Special Colt Officers Model a couple of years ago. I did a favor for a friend and he asked if I wanted “Something in a...

What does your Every Day Carry gear include. Is your "pocket dump" one of these four sizes: Micro, Mini, Medium or Mondo?

I was casting about at a garage sale some years ago and my eye caught what I first thought was an air pistol of some sort. When I picked it up, I realized...

I’ve become enamored with the .32-20 cartridge of late and after some scrounging found a barrel in that caliber on eBay for my early first generation...

I’ve always been enamored — is it okay to be enamored? — with the Model 12. If you’re not up to speed, it’s a K-Frame S&W with an aluminum alloy...

Amos looked at the .38 Super he was working on. It had been vexing him, but he thought he might be onto why it was acting up for Jake Hughs, a good customer.

Other than making them go bang a few times for fun, it dawned on me I had never actually targeted one of the old break-top revolvers. Their reputations run...

"Uh, hey Roy, can you help me with my gun?” It always starts like that, doesn’t it? “Been there, done that,” you say?

A hunnert’ years ago on a graveyard shift I was engaged in a spirited disagreement with a bad guy. My new friend and I eventually fell out of a pick-up...

Not very long ago I stumbled onto a sort of “fixer” S&W Third Model Hand Ejector in .32-20. The nickel is worn, but once I cleaned her up some, tuned...

It seems we struck a chord when we published that Insider on how to fix buggered-up screws (Insider, May/June 2017) and you guys reached out to me wanting...

"Having a gun” is, indeed, a good idea if you need one. People who carry guns for defense (or even sometimes because they have to, like cops), often...

Due to an act of overt, shameless kindness on the part of J.J. Reich and staffers at Vista Outdoors I was able to scrape up a nice assortment of various .22...

I had fun shooting some old battle-weary Colt 1911’s — tossing in a Rock Island Armory basic mil-spec 1911 too — a few issues ago (Insider, July/Aug...

I find, as I season a bit, the more complicated gun “systems” are becoming less and less appealing. Not because they aren’t good, or fun or fancy, or...

You’ve seen them in our pages many times, from high quality factory 1911 models, to miracles of wood and metal from the likes of Ted Yost, Stan Chen and...