Know what Desert Eagle firearms are worth with this up-to-date 6-page .PDF download from the 19th edition of Standard Catalog of Firearms.
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Know what your DPMS firearms are worth with this up-to-date 6-page .PDF download from the 19th edition of Standard Catalog of Firearms.
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Are You in the Market for a Star-Bonifacio Echeverria Firearm?
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Are You in the Market for an European American Armory Firearm?
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Know what your Fabarm firearms are worth with this up-to-date 6-page .PDF download from the 19th edition of Standard Catalog of Firearms.
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Know what your Ithaca firearms are worth with this up-to-date 17-page .PDF download from the Standard Catalog of Firearms.
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The Earl from NAA, a retro .22 minigun that’s a hoot to shoot.
My regular readers (both of them) know that I have a deep, abiding affection for the mini-revolvers of North American Arms (NAA). I really like the North American Arms Earl.
I don’t hold with the assumption that the only reason for a gun’s existence is self-defense. If that were true, we’d have no use for more than half the guns on today’s market. There’s plenty of room in the shooting sports for fun guns, those used for pure recreation. And if you, like I, appreciate the pure pleasure of just plain shooting, NAA has a real winner for you: The Earl.
Also available is a cavalry-style flap holster that’s similar to those made for the 1858 Remington.
The Earl is the most imaginative take on the mini-gun concept ever offered. The brainchild of the late Earl Hubbard, an NAA assembly technician, and his son Dustin, The Earl is a slender, stylish .22 that bears more than a passing resemblance to a shrunk-down 1858-pattern Remington percussion revolver.
Actually, it looks to me more like a half-scale, stretched-out Remington New Model Pocket .31 cartridge conversion, but that’s splitting hairs.
The beauty of The Earl lies not in its historical accuracy, but in the fact that it occurred to the imaginative Mr. Hubbard in the first place how striking the basic NAA .22 revolver would look if you put a faux loading lever, four-inch octagonal barrel and square-butt grips on it.
The Earl incorporates many of the features found on revolvers of the mid- to late-Victorian period: spur trigger, pinched barleycorn front sight and milled groove rear sight. Unlike all those Otis Smiths, Hopkins and Allens and Remington Smoots, however, The Earl is constructed of low-lustre 17-4 pH stainless steel, a material that’s preferred by the aerospace industry for its toughness and durability.
Mini-gun fanciers may remember something similar offered back in the 1980’s, the Freedom Arms Boot Gun. Designed by Dick Casull, the Boot Gun was a nifty .22 four-shooter with a three-inch round pipestem barrel.
Unlike the discontinued Boot Gun, however, The Earl has an unfluted five-shot cylinder; safety notches between the chambers; a somewhat heavier, longer octagonal barrel; a heavier frame; and a loading lever that serves as a cylinder pin lock. (Yes, I know it’s not a loading lever in the cap-and-ball sense, but that’s what I’ll call it.) Now highly regarded as a collectible, the Freedom Arms Boot Gun was a total hoot to shoot. So’s The Earl.
My prototype sample of The Earl is a convertible model with separate cylinders for .22 LR and .22 WRM, aka .22 Magnum. (According to Sandy Chisholm, NAA’s affable and erudite CEO, a single-cylinder version chambered for .22 WMR will also be available.) Its manual of arms is a bit different from that of NAA’s other minis. To load, put the gun on half-cock, pull back on the loading lever lock, and pivot the lever downward.
The Earl convertible will digest a wide array of .22 ammo, from the tiny .22 acorn blank to the .22 WMR.
Roll the cylinder out of the frame and fill it up with your favorite ammo du jour. Roll the cylinder back into the frame, making sure that bolt protruding upward from the bottom shelf of the frame recess catches one of the bolt notches on the cylinder. Align the cylinder and insert the cylinder pin. Then flip the loading lever back into position, making sure it locks into place.
To put the gun “on safe” (i.e., with the hammer resting in a safety notch), pull the hammer back just far enough that the cylinder bolt retracts and the cylinder rotates freely. Look down through the firing pin recess in the topstrap and rotate the cylinder so that a safety notch – NOT the brass rim of a live cartridge – is visible through the firing pin recess in the topstrap. Then, holding the hammer firmly under your thumb, squeeze the trigger. Carefully lower the hammer all the way into the safety notch and release the trigger. This may sound complicated but it’s not, really. Do it a few times and you’ll be a pro.
To shoot, cock the hammer – like all .22 mini-guns, The Earl is single-action-only – and squeeze the trigger. To extract empty brass, put the gun on half-cock, retract the loading lever, remove the cylinder pin, roll out the cylinder, and use the pin to poke out the empties.
My sample The Earl – it sounds weird to write it like that, but that’s its name: “The Earl” – had a rather stiff trigger pull that caused me to pull left with every shot. Part of this heavy trigger is undoubtedly due to the scant leverage afforded by that tiny spur trigger, so I’ll have to adjust my firing technique or apply a little Kentucky windage. That, or have a gunsmith do a little stoning job. However, even with its trigger pull, The Earl was commendably accurate at 15 yards off a rest. With high speed .22 Short ammo, my first five-shot group was a tad left of center and measured just over an inch in diameter.
Credit for The Earl must go not only to Earl and Justin Hubbard but to Ken Friel, NAA’s production manager, and all of NAA’s workers way out there in Provo, Utah. Every NAA mini I’ve ever owned has been tight as a drum, giving off all those metallic clicking and snicking sounds that characterize a well-fitted pistol.
Call me a nut, but I use .22 Shorts for most of my mini-gun shooting. I have a long-standing preference for the Short, one I acquired over many boyhood years spent shooting a Remington Model 514 single-shot rifle. Back then, Shorts were cheaper than any other .22 ammo, and even today the sight of a flat little box of Shorts does my heart good. The Earl convertible model will handle an amazing array of .22 rimfire ammo, but Shorts and CB caps suit me just fine most of the time. Hey – we’re talking plinking here!
15-yard groups with The Earl ran about an inch with .22 Short ammo.
Personally, I have little use for the .22 WMR in a mini-gun, with the possible exception of the .22 WMR shotshell. Those little numbers throw a pest-killing pattern at 10 to 15 feet, and I once dropped a mouse with one at close to 30 feet.
NAA isn’t marketing The Earl as a hunting gun, of course, or even as a last-ditch defense gun. In the words of Sandy Chisholm, The Earl “might become your favorite plinker,” which to me is a definite possibility. Suggested retail for the convertible model is $324, and the Magnum-only version will set you back $289. For your money, you get not only The Earl but a case, lock and a really neat scaled-down leather flap holster similar to those designed for the original full-size 1858 Remington. (This gives me an idea, one that will almost certainly never comes to pass: offer The Earl in a blackpowder version similar to the NAA Companion.)
So: who will be interested in The Earl? I imagine Cowboy Action shooters will love it, as will anyone whose idea of a good afternoon includes sitting in the sun, shooting at cans. Sandy Chisholm advises that due to NAA’s overwhelming order backlog, The Earl is planned as a limited-production item. If you’re like me, however, it’s certainly worth chasing one down.
Know what your Cimarron firearms are worth with this up-to-date 8-page .PDF download from the 19th edition of Standard Catalog of Firearms.
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This new addendum — also to be cloaked in secrecy — would empower the U.S. Attorney General to deny a person the ability to exercise their Second Amendment rights to purchase a firearm.
While it is not surprising that some members of Congress are again using fear of terrorism to implement a gun-control agenda, the openly unconstitutional legislative language proponents are employing is troubling.
Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) is leading the effort in the Senate, while another well-known gun control advocate — Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) — is directing the House initiative. They have introduced identical bills — the “Denying Firearms and Explosives to Dangerous Terrorists Act of 2009.” This proposal would give the attorney general the power to unilaterally and in secret develop a watch list of persons believed to be unworthy of possessing a firearm or any explosive.
This new “dangerous terrorist” watch list would include names based not on hard evidence of criminal activity, but on nothing more than the subjective conclusion by the attorney general that a person is “appropriately suspected” (whatever that means) of engaging in some manner of assisting or preparing for acts of domestic or international terrorism. The American people would never be privy to what criteria might be employed by the attorney general to determine whether someone is an “appropriate suspect,” and they would have no way of knowing why they might be denied the ability to purchase a firearm.
If a person were to be refused “permission” to purchase a firearm or explosive, and if they subsequently filed a lawsuit in federal court to find out why, the government still could keep such information secret. In other words, the attorney general could deny a U.S. citizen the ability to own a firearm, and never have to give the reason. Read more
Know what your Colt firearms are worth with this up-to-date 76-page .PDF download from the Standard Catalog of Firearms.
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Know what your CZ firearms are worth with this up-to-date 15-page .PDF download from the Standard Catalog of Firearms.
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Know what your Dakota Arms firearms are worth with this up-to-date 5-page .PDF download from the 19th edition of Standard Catalog of Firearms.
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Know what Charles Daly firearms are worth with this up-to-date 10-page .PDF download from the Standard Catalog of Firearms.
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Imagine that. The Senate confirmed this week, by a vote of 62-35, a gun banner who stays up at night thinking of ways to impose more gun control upon American citizens.
Harold Koh is that gun grabber, and he was confirmed yesterday to be the Legal Adviser at the State Department.
On Wednesday, Senate Republicans attempted to kill the Koh nomination with a filibuster — until eight of them crossed the aisle to help Democrats confirm Koh.
The back-stabbing Senators are: Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Susan Collins (R-ME), Judd Gregg (R-NH), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Richard Lugar (R-IN), Mel Martinez (R-FL), Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and George Voinovich (R-OH).
Once the filibuster was thwarted, Koh's nomination passed easily. The vote on final passage can be viewed at: https://tinyurl.com/m4m2f5
Koh is eager to assume his post at the State Department, having lamented that there is only so much that can be done from the outside to push gun control treaties, and that ultimately we need people like him in positions of power. The chief lawyer for the State Department is just the position someone like him needs to push more gun control through international treaties.
GOA will continue watching for any attempt by the Obama administration to foist an international gun control treaty upon the citizens of the U.S.
At Lautenberg’s request, the Government Accountability Office recently studied firearms and explosives purchases among terror watch list members. It found that people on the list tried to buy guns 963 times in the last five years, and nine out of 10 times they were successful because nothing else in their background disqualified them.
That sounds outrageous, but consider this: The FBI refused to divulge details about who was able to buy a gun and what their connection to terrorism might be. That itself makes conclusions rather hard to draw.
Then there’s the watch list itself, which has a number of problems, the first being its size. At last count, the list had more than 1 million names representing 400,000 people, and it’s growing quickly. Just four years ago, the list stood at one-fourth of its current size.
It’s also rife with errors. While much of the criticism can be attributed to cases of mistaken identity – such “false positives” have snared the likes of Sen. Ted Kennedy and members of the Federal Air Marshal Service – the list itself is also suspect.
Just last month, the Justice Department inspector general found that the list included the names of at least 24,000 people who may not have belonged on it. Other names that should have been on the list weren’t.
But the most significant concern is the secrecy surrounding such intelligence tools, which doesn’t necessarily make much room for due process. Read more
A measure sponsored by Senators Sandra Bolden Cunningham and Teresa Ruiz, which would prohibit the sale and purchase of more than one handgun per person, within a 30-day period was approved today by the full Senate by a vote of 21 to 15.
Unless I'm missing a state or two somewhere, that makes New Jersey the fourth to pass this kind of law (or fifth, if you count South Carolina, which repealed its version of the law in 2004, after finding it to be ineffective at reducing violent crime). The others that still have such a law are California (no surprise there, with it's Brady Campaign Number One Tyranny Rating), Maryland (again, no surprise, with Maryland ranking almost as “high” as California), and Virginia. The fact that Virginia is one of only three (soon to be four) states with such a law is probably a surprise to some. Virginia, after all, is blamed for having “lax gun laws” that contribute toward it being part of the so-called “Iron Pipeline” of guns that end up illegally in places like New York City.
The professor, Dr. Howard Andrews, testified that 90 percent of the guns recovered in New York crime investigations from 1996 to 2000 had been bought out of state. A large number came from five states with lax gun laws: Virginia, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina.
The idea of “one gun per month” laws, supposedly, is that they pose a serious obstacle for gun traffickers. The very New York Times editorial cited above, in fact, makes this claim:
Perhaps the most effective tool is a ”one gun per month” law, which bars anyone from buying more than one handgun in a month. These laws stop gunrunners from buying in volume, a limit that reduces their profits substantially.
It's a bit difficult to reconcile that with the fact that one of only three states to have such a law on the books is also considered one of the major source states for gun trafficking.
New Jersey already has extraordinarily draconian gun laws (it's ranked second only to California by the Brady Bunch, even before passage of the rights rationing bill). The purchase of each and every gun must be prefaced by acquisition of a permit from the police (which must be applied for in person, I believe). The permit, if nothing in the applicant's background prevents its issuance, is supposed to be issued within 30 days. No one is surprised, apparently, when it takes half a year or so, though. One would think that if restrictive gun laws worked to keep criminals disarmed, that permit process would do it. Actually, given New Jersey's insistence on blaming Pennsylvania's “lax gun laws” for NJ's violent crime, it seems that New Jersey has thought it already had the laws it needed, and that the problem was other states. Read more
Looking to go armed, but are stuck in the weeds as to what to arm yourself with? Here are 20 excellent concealed carry gun options that will keep you on the defensive.