Educational
Your New Gun is Broken. Now What?
So you’ve got that shiny new gun you’ve been wanting for years now. You take it to the range and it stops working after a dozen rounds. It’s not your average bad ammo or bad technique type of thing either. Nope, you saw something important looking fly off. If it was a Nerf gun, you could just take it and the receipt back to Toys R Us and exchange it for a new one. Unfortunately, the store (and the law in some places) isn’t too keen on taking guns on return. At least not according to the huge signs all over the store that says “No returns or exchanges”.
So have you just flushed a few hundred dollars down the toilet? What is a consumer supposed to do? Continue reading
Like what you read? GunNoob is now part of Pew Pew Tactical. Check out the rest of our awesome resources:
NSSF Announces S.A.F.E Summer To Promote Firearms Safety
NEWTOWN, Conn. — The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) is kicking off a “S.A.F.E. Summer” effort to focus attention on the importance of safe firearm storage–particularly while children are home from school and more likely to be unattended–and has pledged an additional $1 million to provide half a million free firearm safety kits, including a gun lock, to firearms owners throughout the U.S. as part of the campaign. Continue reading
Like what you read? GunNoob is now part of Pew Pew Tactical. Check out the rest of our awesome resources:
Sight Radius?
I’ll be willing to admit that I have a tendency for long winded introductions to my articles. In fact, I’ve made fun of myself for it on more than one occasion. Case in point, the first draft of this article on sight radius was a shining example of that tendency. You know it’s bad when I was like “get to the freaking point” even before I was halfway through the opening text.
It was glorious.
I was going into geometric principles and pythagorean theorem. I was even able to fit in a relation to quantum physics. In hindsight, I probably would have lost some readers.
So let’s trim things a bit…
You might have heard someone say they prefer gun A over gun B because gun A has a longer sight radius. So why is that a good thing? How does sight radius affect your shooting? What is sight radius anyway? Are you sure you don’t want to see that opening with the quantum physics discussion? Continue reading
Like what you read? GunNoob is now part of Pew Pew Tactical. Check out the rest of our awesome resources:
What is “Trigger Weight”?
If you spend any time reading gun magazines or other websites, you’ve probably come across the term “trigger weight”, usually expressed in pounds. You’ll see something like “this gun has a strong, 8 lb trigger” and such. Does that mean that the trigger weighs 8 pounds? Not exactly. Let’s spend a few moments to talk about trigger weight and what it means for you.
Side note, did you know that the abbreviation of “lb” for pounds is an abbreviation for the Libra constellation which is depicted as scales?
Fun facts aside, the trigger weight has tremendous influence on the performance and accuracy of your gun. When you hear someone talking about that trigger weight, that’s ultimately referring to the amount of force you’re going to have to apply to that trigger in order to fire the gun. The weight is greatly influenced by not only the manufacturer of the gun but the style of gun as well. Continue reading
Like what you read? GunNoob is now part of Pew Pew Tactical. Check out the rest of our awesome resources:
Just Hanging Out (How to Deal with Hang Fires)…
Oh boy! It’s a perfect day to be at the range. There’s no one here and you’ve miraculously scored a pretty hefty box of ammo. Line is hot, you’re loaded and ready. You pull the trigger and “click”. Nothing.
“That’s odd” you say to yourself. You could have sworn there was a round in the chamber. Right as you go to rack the slide “BLAM!” the gun fires. Thank goodness you still had it pointed down range.
Welcome to the wonderful world of “hang fires”. Continue reading
Like what you read? GunNoob is now part of Pew Pew Tactical. Check out the rest of our awesome resources:
Schlick Schlock for very little cha-ching (Cheap Guns Part II: Shotguns)
My original intention was to write a quick guide to some quality cheap guns. Boy and howdy did I open up a can of worms with that one. It turns out, there were a large number of guns that met my requirements and that was just in handguns. Far too many to cover in just one article, even! As I kept looking, I saw numerous shotguns and rifles and even more handguns. I’m trying my best, however, to restrict the list to guns that I personally know to be of good quality. At the same time, there just isn’t a way to list all the individual guns that are within my search restrictions.
But that won’t stop me from trying… Continue reading
Like what you read? GunNoob is now part of Pew Pew Tactical. Check out the rest of our awesome resources:
Grab the Bull By the Pup (Get It? Bullpup?)
Every now and then, you get a trend that seems to pop up out of nowhere. Once one company latches on to it, more and more come on board. Next thing you know, it’s the new standard. The fun thing is, often times that “new trend” is nowhere near new. It’s just someone took an old concept and finally got it right. Take smartphones, for example. They’ve been around, sort of, for a long time now. The Palm PDA by 3Com was a big jump in technology and eventually came with cell service for email and such. This was years before Apple even started considering the iPhone. Believe it or not, there was one of those “House of the Future” type of videos in the 1950’s that almost perfectly described the iPhone as it exists today! There truly is nothing new under the sun. Continue reading
Like what you read? GunNoob is now part of Pew Pew Tactical. Check out the rest of our awesome resources:
Credit Crunch: Inexpensive guns to get you started
Let’s face it: money is tight. Even in the best of economies, people like me still have a tendency to live paycheck to paycheck. That means we might not always have the cash on hand to get that shiny H&K or Wilson 1911 we’ve been staring at in the gun store’s cases. Granted, most stores offer layaways but trying to come up with $1000 over a couple of months is still a large order.
So if you want to get a gun, what’s the cash strapped to do? The good news is, there’s a couple of options. In even the worst times, I can generally come up with $550 over a 3 month layaway so I’m setting that as a budget. By the way, I’m going solely by the MSRP prices. Remember, the street value is always lower, even in this panic buying time we have now.
So let’s see what’s out there, shall we? Continue reading
Like what you read? GunNoob is now part of Pew Pew Tactical. Check out the rest of our awesome resources:
Let’s Get to the (Natural) Point…
If you ever get the chance to shoot a variety of guns at one range session, you might notice that you’ll do better with some pistols than others. For example, I can shoot quite well with a Springfield XDm but I can barely hit anything with my friend’s FNX-45. Now, I’m not going to sit here and say my distinct lack of skill isn’t a factor. At the same time, it might not be entirely my fault.
Yes, I’m going to show you why you might be able to blame the gun (up to a point). Continue reading
Like what you read? GunNoob is now part of Pew Pew Tactical. Check out the rest of our awesome resources:
Clip vs. Magazine
I’ve touched on it before but it’s time to go in depth. I’m hearing it so much lately that now it’s like hearing fingernails on a chalkboard. Hollywood gets it wrong, the media gets it wrong, video games get it wrong and even firearm instructors get it wrong. This only goes to further the problem. Should it bother me as much as it does? Probably not. At the risk of being annoyingly pedantic, however, I want to set the record straight:
“Clip” and “Magazine” are not interchangeable terms. Continue reading
Like what you read? GunNoob is now part of Pew Pew Tactical. Check out the rest of our awesome resources: