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A moldy oldie review: The Singlepoint sight

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"I don't know just what it is, but I'll let you have it cheap." So said the fellow at the gun show, and that is how I came to have this thing in my collection. The Singlepoint is an ancestor of today's red dot sights. It created a stir back in the seventies. It was discussed in the English  Parliament . Its moment of fame came on the Son Tay  raid in the Vietnam war. It even got writeups in  Popular Mechanics  and  Popular Science , honors reserved for things that were maximally cool. By modern standards, though, it's a pathetic gunsight. It was a good try for its time, no doubt. It is an occluded eye gunsight (OEG), meaning you can't see through it. When you look in the end you see a black field with a red dot floating in it. You look at the target with your other eye and your brain merges the two images into one. Thus, you see the red dot superimposed upon the target. Well, sort of. It doesn't work perfectly. The effects of  pho...
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Riot gun part 2: Pattern size

Personally, I like a wide open pattern.The whole reason for preferring a shotgun over a rifle is its hit probability and I don't intend to compromise that. Is it better if your gun throws a broad, open pattern of shot or a small tight one? It isn't a simple question. The shotgun's hit probability, which is superior to any other small arm's at close range, owes to the spread of the shot. If you reduce the spread, you reduce the shotgun's advantage. Things get more complicated, though, when you consider that a pattern that is too wide increases the number of pellets sailing past the target, doing you no good. Since pattern size increases with distance, a loose pattern loses effectiveness rapidly with range as the pattern's density degrades. What to do, what to do? As a sort of baseline to the discussion, the riot gun for its first hundred years or so was almost always cylinder bored or Improved Cylinder choked, and threw open patterns, firing shells concoc...
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A noisy trend: .357 compacts

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I notice that since November I have reported on three new .357 Magnum revolvers with SA/DA lockwork, three-inch barrels and compact frames.  Kimber was first, with a thumb-cockable version of their K-6, previously produced as double action only. Then came Colt's King Cobra, the up-gunned magnumized version of the new model Cobra .38. Ruger just introduced an LCRx in three-inch .357 form. It is a trend I approve. A gun in this general format is a very good balance of power and portability, range, and practical accuracy. It's a town-and-country gun useful for personal protection or for woods tramping. Each of these newly introduced guns has smooth lockwork that produces lighter double-action trigger pulls than older types, another development I heartily approve. I can shoot the old school Smiths and Colts and Rugers and so on, with their heavier triggers, but less pull weight doesn't hurt anyone's shooting ability. Not everyone will like the recoi...
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