#Data

How many Americans own guns? What kind of guns do they own? How many guns do they own? The 2021 National Firearm Survey by William English, Ph.D. at Georgetown University, sought to answer these questions and more. So let’s take a look at what the survey found.

ELEY Ammunition, known for their fantastic rimfire loadings, is on the march to make more loadings and those that exist even better. ELEY has announced the release of their “Standard” 22 ammunition and their Lot Analyzer tool.

89% of statistics are made-up, or so the often repeated joke goes. Unfortunately, the tongue-in-cheek remark is all too often true, with various sources making statistics up, changing their meaning, or cherry-picking the data for a personal or political bent. A classic example of this is various “definitions” of “school shootings” that distort perception on a critical issue.

Today on Modern PDW Calibers we’re going to look at what might seem like a humdrum round, but which represents an important performance band for the modern personal defense weapon. That round is the 5.56x30mm MARS, a purpose built “micro assault rifle” cartridge from Colt designed to fill a similar niche to the WWII-era .30 M1 Carbine.

My friend John C. shared this photo. He is a photo journalist in South East LA. He made this map and plotted shootings that he has published.

Let’s get the big news out of the way first: in an effort to reinvest in the entire NFA community, Silencer Shop has purchased NFA Tracker – a website dedicated to crowdsourcing ATF data to predict wait times based solely on user input. At least, that’s what  NFA Tracker used to do. After over a year of redesigns, feature additions and upgrades, the new website relaunched last month with one promise – to provide users with more accurate NFA approval predictions as well as provide discussion forums, user reviews and expert opinions without bias towards (or away from) any industry member.

Up to this point we’ve looked at calibers ranging from 5.56mm to 7.62mm, but today we’re going to look at something smaller… A lot smaller. The smallest caliber size that is feasible for a given current barrelmaking and projectile manufacture technology is .173″/4.32mm, and a natural centerfire platform for that caliber is the common 5.56mm case. This has led to a large number of cartridge types developed  – including the privately designed .17 Remington, and the German 4.3x45mm DAG – that are essentially similar, and so we will cover them under one umbrella here. Representative of this type in a military context is the Frankford Arsenal’s 4.32x45mm, which was loaded with a relatively low drag 27 grain full metal jacket projectile which – like the 5.56x38mm FABRL covered recently – possessed approximately the same ballistic coefficient as the 5.56mm 55gr M193 projectile. This means the 4.32x45mm Frankford represents essentially an alternate approach to duplicating the M193 round in a lighter package, by reducing the caliber instead of making the projectile lighter and longer.

One of the most criminally ignored elements of military small arms ammunition in the casual discourse is weight. Despite being one of the most important elements from a logistical and human factors perspective, the subject of weight rarely comes up in discussions about ammunition, with those conversations tending towards sexier topics like muzzle energy, caliber, and “flash figures” like bullet weight and muzzle velocity.

In Part I and Part II of the TFB Weight Omnibus, we published the weights of 58 rifles and submachine guns, and their magazines. Now, we’re going to take a look at that data, and do a little analysis to them to see what we can learn. First, my methodology when doing the weighings was somewhat flawed, and so we’ll have to compensate for that. Chiefly, I was inconsistent in whether I weighed rifles with or without their slings. In some cases, the slings of some of the rifles were old and delicate, and I did not want to remove them, but time constraints and a certain absentmindedness on my part were the larger reason behind this. To compensate, I’ve created four categories of slings which, while they won’t exactly match the weights of the slings actually mounted to the rifles, will be a close enough approximation. They are:

(This is Part 2 of the TFB Rifle Weight Omnibus. You can read Part 1 here.)

Recently the inimitable Field Sports Channel conducted a global hunting survey, which turned up some very interesting statistics. A video overview is embedded below: