Hello TFB, and welcome to a new column I’ve devised with the not-so-loyal and sometimes-helpful advice of the TFB Discord entitled “Love, Grampa Fudd” where with input from you readers, the TFB Staff, and members of the Discord, we’ll be tackling some of the [Read More…]
I always love hot takes on gun subjects from big, fancy publications whose contributors really don’t know shit about guns, but they take a hard stance on the issue nonetheless because “By God, we are the [ New York Times / Washington Post / USA Today etc. ] [Read More…]
In yesterday’s article, we took a look at examples of two different methods of design, which I called “preference-driven” and “process-driven”. For these examples, I supposed two engineers from two different cultures – called [Read More…]
If you were designing the next small arms round, how would you do it? What methods would you use to determine its physical characteristics and performance attributes? How would you know what was too large or too small, too powerful or too weak? Perhaps more critically, [Read More…]
Today I want to address something that has come up in small arms ammunition development several times in the past 150 years: The small caliber bullet problem. For the sake of this article, I’ll characterize this problem as a perceived trend recognized on several [Read More…]
Since we know that gunshot wounds follow physical laws – Newtonian mechanics, specifically – we can use physical quantities to describe what happens to a bullet when it enters a fleshy target. In a previous post, we were introduced to three physical [Read More…]
One of the primary focuses of my study of modern small arms has been that of their terminal effectiveness, i.e. their “lethality” or “wounding”, although neither of these latter terms are exactly correct. Over the past several years, I have [Read More…]
I don’t consider myself more than a hobbyist when it comes to ammunition – I reload a little, play around in SolidWorks a bit, and read dry, dusty tomes full of other people’s hard work collating every minute detail about ammunition. I’m, [Read More…]
I received this email from a reader a little less than a week ago: Hi! I’d love to see a series of articles on the advantages and disadvantages of the various pistol calibers from the perspective of the concealed carrier. There’s a lot of conflicting [Read More…]
Home defense is one of the leading reasons for many gun purchases, partly because many people who either do not bother or are not comfortable carrying concealed still want to have a firearm in their home. That’s a discussion for another day, though. Today [Read More…]
One of the great innovations in the past 50 years pertaining to the study of what projectiles do in flight and why is the advent of ultra-high-speed photography – the kind that can keep a rifle bullet in focus. This sort of endeavor is not for the novice [Read More…]
Cowan of Breech Bang Clear wrote a very intriguing article about Stopping Power. It is actually a good article about the anatomy and the importance of knowing how it works with regards to bullet placement. Caliber, it is said, is not as important as round [Read More…]
Caleb over at Gun Nuts posted 5 myths about guns that should just die. 1. Handgun stopping power 2. High bore axis 3. You can upgrade a Mosin in a way that makes it better 4. Competition shooting will get you killed in the street 5. Pistols and shotguns are [Read More…]
There is a lot of speculation about handgun ammunition performance in the gun community. Flame wars break out instantly on the internet by zealots on all sides of the debate any time the words “stopping power” enter the conversation. Everybody has an [Read More…]