#Gen3

Welcome back to TFB’s Wheelgun Wednesday! In this installment, we’ll take a look at the just-released third generation of the Standard Manufacturing S333 Thunderstruck revolver. This 8-round .22 WMR revolver has two barrels and fires two rounds per trigger pull. Simultaneous firing of multiple barrels is known as volley fire and when this revolver was first introduced at the beginning of 2019, it was called S333 Volleyfire. Later that same year, they renamed it S333 Thunderstruck. In 2021, Standard Manufacturing released the second generation of this wheelgun that had slightly longer barrels and improved trigger pull. The new  S333 Thunderstruck Gen 3 has several design changes and improvements over the Gen 2. Let’s take a closer look.

The latest iteration of the GrovTec Sabre sling is here. The new Gen 3 Sabre Tactical sling maintains a lightweight, minimalist profile, with the ability to quickly and easily change attachment methods. This can be useful for those who like to run one sling for most of their guns and are accustomed to multiple types of mounting solutions across all of their long arms. The new sling is available for order now directly from the GrovTec website. Full details and the press release are below.

Another new product from Strike Industries! And this time it is a Glock 19 Gen 3 slide called ARK Slide. This is a lightweight slide that also offers a lot of other useful features such as the optics cut, front serrations and angled surfaces designed to improve the performance and make the slide manipulations easier and faster.

Glock isn’t done yet: Despite being passed over by the Army and having their protest of the MHS contract rejected by the GAO, Glock is still hoping for a chance. In a recent interview with Matthew Cox of Military.com, Glock Vice President Josh Dorsey spoke out against the Army’s decision to adopt the SIG Sauer P320 as the new M17 Modular Handgun System. Dorsey’s comments, excerpted below, express dissatisfaction with the Army’s selection process:

We all know that Magpul PMAG s are one of the best options for AR-15 mags, but sadly it took literally forever for the US Military to figure out just that. Not terribly long ago the United States Marine Corps selected the new Medium Coyote Tan PMAGs in the Gen 3 flavor for their general issue magazines. The new MCT colored mags were developed specifically for the US Army in response to their weapons natural signature program and carry over all of the features found on existing Gen 3 PMAGs.

Four US Senators sent a letter to US Army Chief of Staff Mark Milley on Friday, requesting to know why the US Army does not authorize polymer magazines “for use in training or combat”, given that the USMC recently picked the Magpul PMag Gen M3 as their combat magazine. The odd thing about this request is that the US Army does not, exactly, ban the use of PMags in training or combat. I’ll explain later in the post, but first, the Senators’ request:

Released to collective “Huh?”, Magpul’s Sand colored magazines have been an odd duck. The “Sand” coloration scheme has been slow to grow on the market. In fact, I have never seen one on the range for the thousands of AR’s I have been around. My theory is that the color is too light to strike the attention of the tactical and tacticool crowd. It’s closer to white than it is brown.