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Practice, Practice, Practice! That is what just about every article you read on how to improve your shooting will say. But how do you do that at 20 cents a round? There is no cheap surplus .ammo around anymore, so if you really want to punch paper or clang steel a lot you pretty much have to either be a trust fund baby, marry a trust fund baby, or find a way to shoot .22s. At pennies a round and available pretty much everywhere, there is no better tool for honing your shooting skills on the cheap than .22 Long Rifle ammo and a gun that shoots it well.

You can of course just go out and buy a regular garden variety .22, like a Ruger 10-22, Remington Nylon 66, Beretta NEOS, and numerous examples from Henry that are very affordable and shoot really well.

The problem with this approach however is that when you practice, most of what you are practicing is muscle memory and natural point of aim. Both of these will be different with a standard .22 than they will with your self defense or competition rifle. You can buy a gun that looks like yours, or even feels like yours, but there will be no substitute for being able to shoot your actual gun with .22 ammo.

Every year, the day before SHOT Show, several industry manufacturers gather at a remote range near the show to demonstrate some of the new stuff they have coming out that year. It gives you a chance to go shoot the guns that everyone else will only be able to handle at the show, and just about everyone in the firearms media makes it a point to be at “media day” before SHOT. Here are some of the highlights I found today at the range.

Starting tomorrow we begin shooting GunsAmerica TV with our host, Silver Medalist and worldwide shotgun trainer Josh Lakatos. Rather than be redundant talking about all of the big stories at SHOT I’m going to cherry pick some of the smaller stories for the blog that I can find around the show. Here are the ones I found today.

When the Taurus Judge originally came out most observers in the firearms industry laughed. Taurus is a very serious company, and because of their quality, prices and a lifetime guarantee, they are a mainstay of most gun shops. But the idea of a giant revolver that was made for both .45 Colt and .410 shot shells just seemed a little over the top. It had been made before as a novelty product, but nobody thought that it could be a commercial success. Several years later we now know that this was not the truth. The Judge is a runaway success and has become the primary home defense weapon for tens of thousands of households all over the country. The comfort of .410 buckshot apparently outweighs the gun by several pounds.

The Cobra Firearms Company is one of the top 10 manufacturers of handguns in the United States. Located in Utah, all of their guns are 100% US made and every gun carries a lifetime warranty. More than anything, Cobra is known for affordability, but don’t mistake affordability for cheap. Cobra guns work, and work really well. I have long considered the access they give working Americans to affordable personal protection a strong harbinger of 2nd Amendment rights. Not everyone can afford a $500 pistol or revolver. Getting a reliable gun into the hands of a hard working, law abiding, American for half that price or a fraction of that price does us all good, makes us all safer, and brings into our fold another shooter who will stand up for our gun rights.

Armalite Inc. https://www.armalite.com/ You may not know this, but the “AR” part of AR-15 comes from ArmaLite. Eugene Stoner, the inventor of the M16, AR-15 platform, was the chief engineer at ArmaLite in 1955 when his first design the AR-10 went head to head and lost to the M-14 as a replacement for the M1 [...]

Flexing your creative muscles is not always rewarded in the gun industry, and often the opposite is true. Entire gun companies have been founded on copying the 100 year old 1911 design, the 100+ year old Winchester and Marlin rifle designs, decades old Smith & Wesson revolvers, and now of course the expired Stoner patent with the AR-15 platform. On the flip side we have but one example of a new and innovative product that has caught on and made it big. Three guesses? Ok it’s Glock. But try to think of another. You won’t find one.

This video starts with an overview of the features of the new LC9 pistol from Ruger. If you look back to our SHOT Show Sneak Peak post from a few days ago you’ll see that I actually got a chance to shoot this gun, and we also did a post when the gun was released a couple weeks ago.

The other big story from Ruger this year is this .308 Scout Rifle. It has a 16” barrel that comes with a threaded muzzle break and is suppressor ready. Ruger is really thinking their new products through these days and this gun is not exception. It has a front mounted rail for up-head optics, but it could also be used for a forward night vision in front of a regular optic mounted on the regular scope ring rail on the receiver. It is the Ruger Model 77 platform, so a more reliable rifle doesn’t exist, and this light and handy bolt gun comes with a 10 round magazine. This is a feature you don’t see in many bolt guns, and though a lot of bolt rifles make very effective sniper weapons, the three to five round capacity of the magazines make them not so practical for many uses, including a police duty rifle.

CZ-USA has been doing videos with us since the beggining of GunsAmerica TV back in 2007 and their passion for firearms, competitive shooting and quality hunting guns always comes through in everything they do.

IDPA competition has become a popular sport in America over the past several years and a whole new crop of shooting enthusiast have begun to get involved as the next generation gives up their video games to get out to the range.