Archive for September 30th, 2010

Gun safes to suit your needs and not take up room

I have a few generations of the gun vault gun safes and I have to admit that it may be time to toss a few of them.   Technology in the gun industry has been greatly advancing and gun safes are no different.  I believe that there is a 99.9% probability that you do not ever have to leave an unlocked fiearms in  your  home for defensive reasons.   Most reasons to lock up your firearms is to prevent theft so get that in your head if you aren’t locking up even your hunting rifles.   With many of us carrying firearms daily, you have to realize that the way gun safes are being designed today, that the older styles wear out batteries faster and in my experiences have some reliability issues.

I have good experiences with all of the gun vault gun safes that I have purchased in the last 3 yrs.  There was apparently and issue with some of the first biometric safes, but the issue has been resolved.  If you have kids in the house or live in a home where there is a lot of traffic, these safes can be bolted to areas that are not easy to find and most criminals aren’t going to take their time during a robbery.   My advice is to not put them in the obvious areas, but make sure you can still easily open and close the safe.   The gun vault microvault can easily fit into your car and be used for travelling or be used in an even more stealthy manor in your closet or near your bed.

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Preferences and applications of reticles

There are now so many choices for hunting and target shooting optics, more so than just a decade ago.   I’m still waiting for an optics company to come out with combat rifle scopes that have interchangeable reticles, but we’re not there yet.    There are some really good bullet drop compensators for hunting optics, but the only drawback is that they are setup for specific bullet weights and deviating from that will make the calibrations incorrect.    IOR Valdada had some good fast European reticles, but the eye relief was notoriously bad.    I really don’t like the idea of having to get my eye that close to a combat rifle scope due to the higher risk of bonking yourself  in the eye.

Trijicon rifle scopes have a better eye relief and I really like the triangle chevron configuration.  You gotta do your research on how the Trijicon reticles are calibrated because once again,  deviating from the bullet weight will causes misses at certain distances.   It would be nice if they could get some of these reticles setup so you can switch from long range calibration to CQB, but like I said, we’re not there yet.   I’m not a big fan of putting to many  lines on a piece of glass because it can become messy when using them for observation.   I’d also have to state that the vast majority of people I know that have ACOGs aren’t using them for long range shooting and mostly just for hitting the X at 100yds.

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