Category: Guns and Gear

Caracal Model C Pistol Recall

Last year a Middle Eastern firearm manufacturer called Caracal opened a subsidiary here in the United States, which gave us access to Caracal’s pistol line. I was very interested in the pistol because it was something new and shiny although the weird way the rear sight was a physical part of the striker assembly put me off. As it turns out, I’m glad I didn’t invest in one of their pistols because I would have almost certainly purchased a Model C and those are all being recalled:

Caracal is now issuing this recall of all Model C pistols in all markets, following the completion of a full investigation. Caracal is initiating this voluntary recall of Model C pistols because the safety of its customers is paramount.

This recall affects all Model C pistols, including but not limited to those with serial numbers which start with the following letters: HM, AA, AD, AG, CA, CB, CC, CD, CE, CF, CG, CH, CI, CJ, CK,CL, CM, CN, CP, CR and CS.

If you own or have access to a Caracal Model C pistol, PLEASE DO NOT LOAD OR FIRE YOUR PISTOL. Please contact Caracal customer care immediately to arrange to have your Model C pistol returned. Caracal will provide you with a full refund of the purchase price of your Caracal Model C pistol or vouchers for other Caracal products. Unfortunately, the potential safety issues cannot be addressed through a repair of the Model C pistol and all Model C pistol’s must be returned for refund.

I can’t remember the last recall where the company said they were unable to fix the problem. Most firearm recalls today tend to be upgrades to internal parts that failed under very specific conditions. To have an entire line declared bad and unrepairable is concerning. Hopefully their full size pistols aren’t found to be dangerous in a few months.

Smith and Wesson M&P Shield Recall

I’m beginning to have flashbacks to the slew of jokes made in the shooting community about the Ruger LCP when it suffered failures that resulted in a recall. Now Smith and Wesson can join Ruger because they’re issuing a recall for early the M&P Shield:

SPRINGFIELD, Mass. (August 22, 2013) — Smith & Wesson Corp. announced today that the Company has identified a condition where the trigger bar pin could damage the lower trigger in certain M&P Shields in a way that may affect the functionality of the drop safety feature of the firearm, potentially allowing the pistol to discharge if it is dropped.

This Safety Alert applies to all M&P Shield pistols manufactured before August 19, 2013. We believe this condition is largely limited to recently manufactured M&P Shield pistols. However, out of an abundance of caution, we are asking all consumers of all M&P Shields manufactured before August 19, 2013 to immediately inspect their pistols for this condition.

Any unintended discharge of a firearm has the potential to cause injury, and we ask that you STOP USING YOUR PISTOL IMMEDIATELY UNTIL IT HAS BEEN INSPECTED AND, IF THE CONDITION IS FOUND, REPAIRED.

To determine whether your firearm was manufactured before August 19, 2013 and to receive video instructions for inspection, please go to MPShieldSafetyAlert.com. All firearms must be inspected to determine whether it exhibits the condition identified in this notice. You can also find this information on our website at www.smith-wesson.com under the product safety button.

If you are uncomfortable conducting the inspection outlined above, or are unsure whether the condition described in this notice applies to your firearm, please take your firearm to your local M&P Certified Armorer or send your firearm to Smith & Wesson for inspection. M&P Armorers can be found on the smith-wesson.com website under the Find a Dealer tab

If after inspection it is determined that the condition outlined in this safety alert exists, the firearm must be sent to Smith & Wesson for repair. If your firearm is affected by the condition outlined in this notice, please send your pistol to Smith & Wesson. Your firearm will be inspected, and if necessary, repaired at no cost to you. Your firearm will be returned within 5 to 7 business days. All shipping and repair costs will be covered by Smith & Wesson.

Please contact Smith & Wesson directly at 877-899-6259, or at MPShieldSafetyAlert.com to arrange for the repair, if necessary, of your pistol.

Ironically the website the recall redirects Shield owners to, MPShieldSafetyAlert.com, doesn’t present any information unless JavaScript is enabled. A safety recall shouldn’t subject a user to potentially unsafe situations such as requiring JavaScript to be enabled in order to view a new, and therefore unknown, website. It almost makes me want to register MPShieldSafetyRecall.com, or another similar domain name, and load it with web exploits.

Oh, and you should probably check your Shield. Guns that fail to operate in their expected manner are pretty good at maiming their users.

EDIT: 2013-09-23: 13:00: I misread the date. The recall affects almost all M&P Shields, not just early ones. Also, I can’t properly close HTML tags. Thanks Zerg539 for pointing those issues out.

Prototype Automatic Gauss Gun Developed

Although I love firearms I must admit that I’m beginning to find old fashioned chemical propulsion to be rather boring. Thankfully the hacker community has been working on this issue by developing exciting new electromagnetic propulsion systems. Meet the fully automatic Gauss gun:

While it may only be able to shoot a few cans right now, we certainly wouldn’t want to be in front of [Jason]‘s fully automatic Gauss gun capable of firing 15 steel bolts from its magazine in less than two seconds.

The bolts are fired from the gun with a linear motor. [Jason] is using eight coils along the length of his barrel, each one controlled by an IGBT. These are powered by two 22 Volt 3600mAh LiPo battery packs.

Here’s a video of the weapon firing:

Obviously the weapon isn’t very deadly at this point in time but it’s a prototype developed by a hobbyist in his spare time. As technology tends to do, this design will continue to advance until it becomes a viable weapon platform. These are the things I get excited about in the firearm industry these days, new prototypes that make actual advances.

3D Printed Rifle Successfully Fires 14th Round

Prepare for more pants shitting hysteria from the idea because another 3D printed firearm, this time a rifle, has managed to fire more than one round without harming its operator:

Just the opposite: Designers have moved beyond handguns to produce rifles with 3D printers. The world’s first 3D-printed rifle, named “The Grizzly” after Canadian-built tanks that were used in World War II, was fired in June, but the first shot fractured the barrel receiver.

The creator, a Canadian man who goes simply by “Matthew,” refined his design and posted a video Friday on YouTube of the Grizzly 2.0 successfully firing 3 rounds of Winchester bullets. The video description says the Grizzly 2.0 fired 14 rounds before it cracked. The new rifle was also safe enough for Matthew to fire it by hand rather than by the string system used in the first test.

Here’s the video:

Before the media begins its fear mongering by telling everybody that this gun can get through airport security and will be used to hijack planes let’s stop and think logically for a minute. Although it has successfully fired 14 rounds without maiming its operator, the Grizzly is still a plastic gun, which means the extent of its life is going to be relatively short. Like the Liberator handgun, the Grizzle rifle is cumbersome to reload. The barrel has to be twisted and removed, the spent cartridge must be pushed out with a rod, a new round must be placed in the barrel, and the barrel must be inserted and twisted back onto the rifle. In other words it’s very slow to operate. With that said, the design is almost certain to advance quickly. We’re in the infancy of 3D printed firearms and it’s an exciting time to be involved in the shooting community.

The Liberator Pistol

On Thursday some of us Defcon attendees went to Sunset Park for the Toxic BBQ (the food wasn’t toxic but the 100 degree weather was pretty brutal to this Minnesotan). During the BBQ I met Dallas, a speaker at Defcon who invited us to attend his Skytalk at 0900 the next morning. His talk was about this little guy (pardon the shitty photography, I’m not a photographer and the lighting in the hallway wasn’t ideal):

If you don’t recognize it it’s the 3D printed Liberator Pistol. While I’ve read and written about the Liberator many times on this blog, this was the first time I was able to look at and touch one. It’s a rather crude weapon, which I expected since it’s a prototype, but a novel idea. If you look at the picture you’ll see the main pistol, which was printed in black polylactide (PLA), and the internal parts, which were printed in green PLA. The green parts were printed smaller than the design requires so assembling the parts wouldn’t allow one to have an operating weapon (this was done because security at the Rio was apparently uncomfortable with the idea of bringing in a working pistol).

The two presenters, Dallas and Sean Wayne, did a marvelous job of presenting the weapon. They covered the legal matters involved with manufacturing a Liberator (namely you must include at least 3.7 oz. of ferrous metal in the design and you cannot transfer it), the capabilities of the pistol, their adventure with getting the pistol through airport security (as checked baggage, which is what you must always do to legally fly with a firearm), and why the Liberator, at least as it currently stands, is impractical.

The Liberator isn’t the most capable weapon. Considering the entire weapon, with the exception of the firing pin and the legally mandated chunk of metal, is made of plastic the weapon has some notable weaknesses. During the presentation we were told that 10 firing is the generally accepted maximum a Liberator can handle. Since the pistol brought by the presenters was printed on a MakerBot with PLA, instead of something like acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), it wasn’t safe to fire (PLA is brittle and the pistol at the presentation would have exploded if one tried to fire it). Furthermore, the pistol has an issue with leaking gas from the trigger cutout, which is likely to burn the person shooting it. Once again, being a prototype, none of these issues surprised me.

I found their experience trying to travel with the pistol interesting. Because they didn’t want to chance being locked in a cage the pistol was transported just like any other firearm, by declaring and checking it. What was interesting was that the employees at the airline were rather baffled by the plastic pistol (in my experience airline employees are often baffled by any firearm) and ended up calling over a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agent. Unlike the entirely clueless airline employee, the TSA agent recognized it as a pistol and allow the declaration and checking to commence as usual. This may be one of the few times an agent of the TSA performed a competent job. It’s also nice to know that flying with a Liberator is treated no differently than flying with any other firearm.

The Liberator is a cool concept but, as it currently stands, is impractical. Reloading it is a ponderous task because you must remove the barrel, and the gun can’t survive many firings. As a member of the audience pointed out, one would have better luck going to the hardware store, buying a few dollars worth of metal parts, and slapping together a zip gun that would almost certainly be more reliable than the Liberator.

Of all the presentations I attended this was one of the most interesting (in part because I’m a gun nut but also because I love the concept of 3D printers). I’ve wanted to look at and touch a Liberator since it was first unveiled by Cody Wilson. Now that I have seen one I can say that my initial impressions were correct. It’s a really cool idea that will only get better in time. According to Sean and Dallas, the Defcad community is has already released a fourth major version of the Liberator design. With such rapid improvements it’s likely that we’ll see a reliable single-shot 3D printed pistol in no time. Once that’s been accomplished it’ll be time to move on to a semi-automatic 3D printed pistol.

It’ll Get You Killed

How many times have you heard somebody tell you that USPSA will get you killed, IDPA will get you killed!, or some firearm instructor’s training will get you killed?

I don’t think any of those things will actually get you killed. You know what will get you killed? Living.

I think the shooting community needs to take the game of life less seriously. In the end, no matter what gun you carry or what kind of training you have, you’re not going to survive the game. Carry what you want, compete in whatever shooting sport(s) you want, seek out whatever training you want, and let everybody else enjoy themselves. We’re all dying so let’s not make life miserable for our fellow corpses in the making.

Do it Yourself Glock

Have you ever thought to yourself, “Man, I really want a Glock but I don’t want to register a firearm.” Fear not, the same man who brought up an AK receiver fabricated from an old shovel has now posed instructions for building a Glock frame out of scrap metal pieces.

Have I mentioned the fact that gun control is dead?

3D Printed AK Magazine

Via The Firearm Blog I learned of some great news, Defense Distributed has successfully printed an AK magazine:

Since all but the most expensive 3D printers lack the ability to work with metal (that will change) you still have to supply a spring but the rest of the magazine can be printed. You can count this as yet another nail in the coffin of gun control. Advancements like this effectively render New York and Colorado’s recent magazine bans meaningless.

Head over to Defense Distributed’s website and download the plans.

DEFCAD for Your Firearm Related 3D Printing Needs

Late last year it was announced that design files for firearm related objects would no longer be allowed on Thingverse. This decision came after 3D printer designs for AR-15 lowers were posted. In response Defense Distributed has launched DEFCAD, a site to host 3D printer designs for firearm related items. As of this writing designs for a shotshell holder, an AR-15 pistol grip, an AR-15 lower, and many other items are available.

The best thing about the Internet is the fact that no information posted to it can ever be completely killed. Despite Thingverse’s attempt to censor firearm related 3D printer designs they are still available.

PMC Ammunition Review

Like numerous other gun bloggers I was contacted by Anthony at LuckyGunner with an offer of free ammunition in exchange for a review. My guess is that these offers are being sent out as part of a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy. I’m OK with that, offering free ammunition in exchange for a writeup that gives another link to LuckyGunner is a perfectly fair trade in my opinion. Unfortunately due to holiday craziness and rather unpleasant weather it took me some time to get to the point of actually testing the ammunition. LuckyGunner sent me 100 rounds of PMC .45 Auto, which I tested in my Glock 30SF, Glock 21, and Beretta CX4 (because I’m the only person dumb enough to get a CX4 in .45 Auto). Due to the weather we’re currently subjected to in Minnesota I did a simple function test. That is to say I just tested if the ammunition worked or not, I didn’t haul out my chronography to get muzzle velocity reading. Needless to say the ammunition worked in all three guns without any trouble. Granted my Glocks have eaten everything I’ve fed them and my CX4 only gets cranky when fed Wolf ammunition so I wasn’t expected any problems.

With all of that said there is one thing I want to mention about PMC .45 Auto ammunition, they use large pistol primers. I reload almost all of my own ammunition and have noticed several companies moving to small pistol primers for their .45 Auto brass. This move pisses me off because nothing puts the brakes on a reloading run like a brass case refusing to accept a primer. One of my biggest criteria for .45 Auto ammunition is whether or not the brass uses large pistol primers. If the brass does use large pistol primers it’s good, if it uses small pistol primers it’s bad. This is because .45 Auto, being a low pressure cartridge, can be reloaded numerous times. Buying factory ammunition is a painful ordeal because it involves paying far more than I can reload for so I try to recoup some of the costs in reloading the casings. The more times I can reload a case the more of my costs I can recoup.

In conclusion I have no problem recommending PMC ammunition. It functions and the cases can be reloaded, which are my only two major criteria.