The Gun Thread

@Aprilla/Tuefel: I hated the 92 the one chance I got to handle it, but I think that was due to A: the grip being too chunky for me and B: all the buttons/levers being set up for a right-hander (I'm a southpaw).

Now, the H&K P7, on the other hand...

Joey: A crappy tool is still a crappy tool regardless of the skill of the tool user.

I like the M9, but then again I've also had years of use with it, military police practice pistol marksmanship more than they do rifles.

The trigger pull is a pain in the ass, and 9mm NATO rounds suck, but it isn't a bad gun. My XD 40 does blow it out of the water though.

I'm also curious about what Joey asked...can Glocks fire underwater? My understanding of firearms is telling me "no", but I'm far from an expert.

EDIT: since the GP-100 was the successor to the Service Six I enjoyed so much, I might look into that as well.

edited 19th Jan '12 10:19:20 AM by drunkscriblerian

I have an airsoft Beretta 92, fits my hand just fine - although since we're all not made to MILSPEC and STANAG standards, I suppose what works for one shooter may not with another.

I'd go for a Ruger GP-100 with a six-inch barrel instead, though, or a High Standard .22 for plinking.

EDIT: My dad has an SP-100 (although it could've been a GP, not sure now) with a snub barrel. Very nice firearm, felt like a bar of soap in my hands, very comfortable to hold. My only gripe was the short barrel.

Firearms underwater: Not recommended. You run the risk of spliting your barrel, as you're never suposed to discharge a firearm with any sort of obstruction in the barrel, ever. Handguns may not have so much of a risk with this, as the bullet isn't traveling as fast as you can get with a rifle, but still, why risk it? They can do that in movies becasue they're firing blanks, all they're doing is shoving hot gas down the bore.

I saw a guy get a bit of water in his hunting rifle crawling through some muck while hunting, and when he fired at whatever he was shooting at, he ribboned his barrel alll the way back to the breech. Cut up his hand, too.

I've seen an AR-15 blow up doing the over-the-beach test. Blew the side of the upper receiver right out, and that had just came out of the water.

edited 19th Jan '12 10:25:28 AM by pvtnum11

ASAIK, the only handgun ever claimed to be able to fire underwater was this thingIt fires little mini-rockets.

Best firearms fuckup I've ever seen was when I was TDY at Security Forces school, there's a blown apart upper receiver mounted on a wall with a cleaning rod and eyelet with it. I asked CATM for the story behind it, and they said a student had used the M9 cleaning patches(cloth that you push through the eyelet and rod the barrel with to clean it out) and because the patches were too big, the rod got stuck halfway through the barrel. The student just left it instead of alerting CATM, and so the next class that came through, the kid who got that rifle went to the range with it, pulled the trigger, and BAM, blew apart the rifle. Thankfully he wasn't hurt, but that upper was torn to shreds.

The cleaning rod flew out and punched a hole in the target though, hope they gave that kid expert.

@Barkey: , that's amazing. I've heard similar stories of black-powder competition shooters forgetting to take the ramrod out during fire-and-load drills...which sends the ramrod downrange in several pieces, usually.

We joked, while out in the middle of freaking nowhere, that if a wild boar decided to tear through our concerntina wire and pilfer our site for MRE's, that we could load our rifles with a cleaning rod and a blank round and hhopefully use that in self-defense - peacetime training exercise, we saw live ammunition all of like twice a year if we were lucky.

Probably would've just blown the barrel apart, but hell if you didn't see fifteen commo guys hurridly unscrewing their blank-fire devices and ramming single cleaning rods down their barrels, when our LPOP told us that two boars just tore through our perimeter and were heading for our tent.

Tense night. We all had a good laugh over that, later.

I thought you dogfaces had bayonets and shit?

Pffft, I saw real bayonets like, twice - once in Basic and the other time on some big change of command ceremony. Remember, I did my time during peacetime. About the only thing going on when I was in was Kosovo and the leftovers of Bosnia. The world went to hell only after I got out.

Anyway.

I recall plinking with a .22 in Boy Scouts. Once with single-shot bolt actions, and once after that with magazine-fed bolt actions. My Dad also has an AR-7, which breaks down and stores in the buttstock. Floats, too.

The time I shot that, my dad's friend was trying to zero his sporterized AK-47 (semi-only legal thing with goofball 5-round magazines) and he let me shoot it after he got frustrated not being able to hit anything.

I nailed two little pill bottles we had filled with water with the only two shots he let me take, before he grabbed it back. My dad found that pretty amusing. I don't really consider myself all that good of a shot, though. My vision sort of sucks.

I had less sucess with the replica Winchester '73 my Dad had. Stupid foregrip isn't really a foregrip at all, as the barrel is exposed and you'll end up burning your fingers unless you don't actually grip the fore-end. You sort of just open palm underneath the grip, and it's totally wierd shooting like that. Then you have to actually manipulate the lever to reload, and have to grip the rifle somehow, but don't burn yourself... Kicked like a mule, too, but I blame part of that on having to hold it all funny.

edited 19th Jan '12 1:31:06 PM by pvtnum11

Barkey: Your thinking of us crazy ass Marines. We have bayonets and ka-bars everywhere.

There are specific fire arms designed to be fired under water. The Russian Example

More Examples here

@Tuefel: huh, another area where the Russians kinda did better than we did.

Anyhow...Someone has far too much money, and I wouldn't mind being them. I was under the impression this thing had gone missing, nice to see it still circulating. Wonder who bought it.

From what I recall of the UK magazine, Combat and Survival back in the 80s, they made a big thing of the Steyr AUG being able to be fired from underwater without the barrel blowing up.

I thought the problem with firing underwater was the either it just won't fire or if it does it won't cycle a new round making them almost effectively useless, and that is discounting whatever the water does to ballistics.

Ballistics is all shot to crap with typical bullets, yes. But cycling the slide or bolt sholdn't be terribly difficult. I'd be more worried about bursting a barrel and the water messing with gas-operated systems.

I meant that they would have to be manually cycled since the water affects the blowback(?) required to automatically cycle the next round.

Which is why revolvers are just better, provided you don't burst a cylinder or the barrel itself. Seen a guy blow the barrel clean off a revolver once, he was using some reloaded ammo and [technical reasons beyond my understanding] made the gun kB! itself.

Myth Busters tried it, apparently.

Recoil is kinda similiar to blowback.

Blowback is where the breech is not mechanically locked to the barrel and the force of the cartridge against the breech face operates the action. Typically the barrel is rigidly attached to the frame/receiver. Some blowback weapons do not have proper case extractors, and rely on the residual pressure on the case to force it out of the backside of the barrel. Usually used only for low-power small-caliber pistols.

Recoil operation is where the breech and barrel are mechanically locked together and move to the rear as a unit until some mechanism unlocks them. The barrel will usually cease rearward moevemtn at that point, and the rest of the guts continue to the rear. Recoil guns can handle lots of power, and is used on rifles and such as well.

Then there's blow-forward, in which only the barrel moves, sliding forward under friction or something, and sliding back to strip off a frewsh round. This is rarely encountered, but some old turn of the last century oddball guns have this as a method of operation.

Hey we have a trope on that.

edited 20th Jan '12 6:11:39 PM by joeyjojo

Various types of fire arm actions Action- An action is the physical mechanism that manipulates cartridges and/or seals the breech.

Muzzle Rise What the front of the gun does when fired.

Muzzle Climb The muzzle rise caused by rapid fire semi-auto, burst, and automatic fire.

The General Fire arm article on TheOtherWiki If you follow the links and hyper text you can find quite a bit on your own.

I should also cruise through useful notes and find the various related bits.

Good resources, Tuefel.

I would say they are, at least for the common citizen interested in purchasing a handgun for self-defense. They tend to be less expensive, easier to operate, more reliable (though this gap is closing thanks to improvements in technology) and available in harder-hitting calibers.

Remember that tech that advances the automatics (term for self loading semi-auto pistols) also advances revolvers. There are more complex revolver designs out there.

There is one called the Mateba. It has mechanism that the action of firing rotates the cylinder and cocks the hammer rather then the trigger pull or manually cocking the weapon. It also has the barrel aligned with the bottom chamber for better recoil control. There are only a few Revolver designs like the mateba.

edited 21st Jan '12 4:29:08 PM by TuefelHundenIV

The problem is they kind of eliminate most of the advantages of having a revolver in the first place.

Also, I think that Mateba shut down.