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.

No, not the TSA this time. Chuck E. Cheese pizza.

The wife, kid, and myself went there this past weekend for a birthday party. Upon arrival they stamp your hand with an ink that can only be seen with a black light. Mom, dad, and baby all got stamped with the same integer value.

When we went to leave they checked our hands. Wife’s stamp was fine, mine was half gone from shoving it in my pocket to grab tokens, and the baby’s ink was gone. Surprise!

Basically there are two kinds of people that’ll leave a Chuck E. Cheese with a kid that has no stamp on their hand:

1) An actual kid snatcher
or
2) Parents that wash their kid’s hands before and after eating

Now, given that I’ve got an IQ north of 80 I wasn’t the least bit surprised that their system failed to differentiate between the two groups. What I was surprised at was the checkout person, for lack of a better term, actually having to pause for 5 seconds and think about it. That tells me it’s somewhat uncommon for her to find a child lacking their original stamp which means a fairly significant number of people don’t wipe their kid’s hands down during the 1-3 hours you’ll spend in there.

*facepalm*

Kel-Tec has released a video showing some of the modifications they’ve made after getting feedback from the 2011 SHOT Show:

Summary: Removed the 47th chromosome from the old trigger design (which we knew about), added cuts in the magazine to inspect rounds left, and modified the action release so users wouldn’t be making a trigger pulling movement in front of the trigger guard.

One thing I hadn’t picked up on until this video is that the OAL is only 26.1 inches. That makes it a handgun under Michigan law. No, I’m not going to get one and use it as a carry piece.

Word on Facebook from Oleg Volk is that the Kel-Tec KSG (the 14 round bullpup shotgun) isn’t going to have the trigger problems that were reported on after the SHOT Show.

Caleb over at GunNuts confirms. Sorta.

What I heard from Oleg is they never planned on shipping with that trigger setup. It was just a “printed” part done for the SHOT Show. At SHOT Caleb was told that the Law Enforcement (LE) version wouldn’t have the silly trigger problem with civilian models would.

I have no idea which is correct. They’re both saying things that they got directly from Kel-Tec, but either way that particular issue is no longer in play.

Looking forward to seeing this thing hit the market!