Lightfield has a 12 gauge 3.5″ 600 grain load that produces 1890fps for 4759 ft/lbs. of energy at the muzzle.

I’m honestly not sure I’d even try that. It’d have to be an awfully heavy 12 gauge for me to even think about it.

Here’s a high speed video of a 20 gauge #4 Buck load hitting a block of ballistic gel.

That’ll leave a mark.

The other day the belt buckle on my Blackhawk CQC gun belt broke. The metal bar on the buckle that goes through the belt just snapped off.

I’ve never seen that happen before. I sorta figured the metal bits on a belt would be the last to wear out. I guess not.

This evening my daughter yelled out “POOPIE!” while in the bath tub. Yep, she made a turd in there and realized she wanted no part of it anymore.

I don’t want to be all “my baby’s a genius” or anything but identifying a pile of crap puts her ahead of about 85% of Congress.

If the Brady Campaign wants to pretend they’re all about gun safety and not outright banning gun ownership, or at the very least severely restricting it, perhaps they should offer up some actual gun safety advise.

Or, perhaps, some product reviews.

I hit their site today, taking a “quiz” and when that frustrated me I wondered if they had any advise on safes, child safety, things like that.

Nope. Bupkis. Go figure.

Oh, and if you’re wondering what frustrated me is I made it to question #2 on their gun law quiz before I could call bullshit on it. They asked how many states require a background check before you could buy a handgun at a gun show. They didn’t list Michigan. Sorry, Michigan requires we get a permission slip from the local police before we can buy a handgun. You would think they would applaud that, but no,they ignore it.

It’s almost like they’re totally divorced from reality. Go figure.

The Firearm Blog brought to my attention some new pink hulled shotgun shells from Federal.

Awesome.

Here’s the product page at Federal’s website. There we see the load: 1 1/8oz at 1145fps.

Not so awesome. Why the fricking frick are these not 1oz loads? I mean, really. How easy would that be? You got a newbie to the shotgun sports, they’re worried about recoil, so you just tell them to buy the pink box. That’s a whole lot easier to understand than “Winchester AA, low recoil, #8 shot, 1oz load.”

The New Orleans, LA police department is proposing a “gun offender” registry.

The ACLU has said they’ll lobby against it. Good job, guys.

This has got to be the strangest looking shotgun I’ve seen in a while.

You take a typical over/under design, lop off the top barrel, and then build the rib up so it’s back where it’d naturally have to be. You could pretty much use that rib for a freaking carry handle.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it, just saying that it looks weird. I’d imagine it shoots great and if anybody at Blaser wants to send me one to try out I’m game.

Elsewhere on the web I ran across a lady shooter with some questions on shotguns for home defense. An experienced shooter, but little experience with shotguns. One of her concerns was recoil when firing rounds suitable for dealing with two legged intruders in the home.

My personal choice for such a task is Federal Low Recoil 8 pellet 00 buck, catalog number “LE133″. You might see it advertised as “tactical” or “law enforcement only” ammunition in some places. For me, shooting it from an 870 with a 20″ barrel I find recoil to be rather mild but that’s subjective.

So, what are the numbers?

Well, here’s the product catalog for Federal LE shotshell ammunition (PDF). In there you’ll find that the LE133 round generates 1145fps at the muzzle. My boxes weren’t marked with muzzle velocity so I had to go looking.

Next, hop on over to Wikipedia’s article on lead shot sizes and we see that a 00 buck pellet weighs 53.8 grains. There’s 8 pellets in the round which gets us a total weight of 430.4 grains. Divide that number by 7000 (the number of grains in a pound) and then multiple by 16 and we have the weight in ounces: 0.98.

So, 1oz of shot at 1145fps. Do those numbers look familiar? Yep, they’re right about what most trap, skeet, and sporting clays guys reload to when they’re looking for reduced recoil loads.

So, basically, if you can handle your 12 gauge just fine with econo birdshot shells from the local WallyWorld you’ll be just fine with something like the Federal LE shotshells. The 9 pellet version will recoil much like an 1 1/8oz load box of econo shells would and the 8 pellet even less.

Now, if you’re wondering how the shells perform there’s gel tests up in that PDF link above. The 9 pellet loads achieved 23.25″ of penetration in gel and the 8 pellet loads ran out to 19.75″. Plenty, basically. And here’s an independent test of the 9 pellet loads in gel if you don’t trust the manufacturer.

Mosin Nagant kaBOOM report.

Like Steve says in the beginning of his post… never thought I’d see that.