Home Defense

If you can’t or don’t want to carry a handgun, consider these other defensive tools.

Feeding from 5-, 10-, 15- or even 20-round magazines, this shotgun offers drum mag volumes of ammo in a tidy, compact package.

  I must confess that sometimes I am a bit of a gun snob, especially as it relates to rifles. I don’t have any full custom second mortgage guns, but I generally look well above the price point of the M&P 10 that came in for review this week. As a retired military sniper and [...]

You are well trained, but there is always something you don’t know.  You get out and move to the passenger side of the Lexus.  Your hand goes to the butt of your pistol without even thinking and you are halfway to the Lexus and you hear, “he’s been shot.” You jog the rest of the way and when you look inside all you see is blood.

Though Tim Kennedy is still an active duty Special Forces sniper, he puts a great deal of energy into Sheepdog Response. The organization conducts training for civilians, law enforcement, military personnel, and first responders. The objective is to provide practical, real world, effective techniques in armed and unarmed combat.

What I want to provide to you today, however, is what I learned about accessories for an AR-15. Some of these things may seem like an obvious need (and they did to me too). But during and after the training, the usefulness of the accessories and the need for them to be integrated into a training regimen became much clearer and more real.

The .40S&W arose as the indirect result of the FBI’s 1986 Miami shootout. If you aren’t familiar with the details surf on over when you’re done here. Any student of small arms is well served to read up on it. Google is your buddy. During the Miami shootout, two FBI special agents were killed and five wounded by a pair of bank robbers wielding a variety of weapons.

It doesn’t matter if you’re out hunting, on the range practicing, or driving down the highway, when chaos strikes, it strikes fast. One missed step along that ridge, a ricocheting bullet off a steel target, a distracted driver, a slip of a blade, and you can find yourself in a life and death situation. Beyond gun safety, first aid training is more useful than any other training you could attend, though most of us put it a ways down the list of our planned training.

by Mark Miller I have been to some bad places around the world and have seen bad things happen. When I lived on the Gulf Coast, I went through the aftermath of several major hurricanes. I now live in a rural area near a volcano and maintain a wide selection of weapons. When I hear [...]