The OUTDOOR CHANNEL, Wednesday night, all about guns.

[mjp28]

The OUTDOOR CHANNEL, Wednesday night, all about guns.

This is one of my "must see TV" nights, anyone else watch it?

Tonight on Gun Stories was about photographer Ronnie Barrett and how he developed something very different, a .50 cal. rifle, just before the Gulf War hit. The rest is history.

Barrett was born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee in 1954, and graduated from Murfreesboro Central High School. He started his career in 1972 as a professional photographer. In 1982, while he owned a photography studio, he got his initial inspiration to create what would become the Barrett signature product. On January 1, 1982, when Barrett was photographing a river patrol gunboat on the Stones River near Nashville, Tennessee, he created an award-winning picture that made him start thinking about the .50 caliber cartridge because of two Browning machineguns mounted prominently on that boat.

Since no commercially available .50 caliber rifle existed at that time, he decided to make a semi-automatic weapon. With no background in manufacturing or engineering, Barrett sketched a cross-sectioned, full-size rifle, adding different components to it. Once he decided on the concept, he approached some machine shops with his drawings. They told him that if his idea was any good, someone smarter would have already designed it


Barrett Firearms Manufacturing was founded by Ronnie Barrett for the sole purpose of building semi-automatic rifles chambered for the powerful 12.7×99mm NATO (.50 BMG) ammunition, originally developed for and used in M2 Browning machine guns. Barrett began his work in the early 1980s and the first working rifles were available in 1982, hence the designation M82. Barrett designed every single part of the weapon personally and then went on to market the weapon and mass produce it out of his own pocket. He continued to develop his rifle through the 1980s, and developed the improved M82A1 rifle by 1986.

[mjp28]

When I saw the Barrett story I was thinking along with him....putting a big .50 cal. shell in a rifle?

People laughed and joked about the whole idea, maybe funnier yet the first test fire, is the thing going to blow up?

Well he staked it down and tied a long rope to actually fire it while catching it all on VHS.

Hard to believe too he was actually at one time about $1.5 million in debt, now this gun and others are in over 60 countries.

A man and a dream and the guts to do it.

[mjp28]

This past Wednesday on Gun Stories they profiled the legendary Remington 870 shotgun, introduced in 1950 and 10,000,000+ later what a gun.

The Remington 870 was the fourth major design in a series of Remington pump shotguns. John Pedersen designed the fragile Remington Model 10 (and later the improved Remington Model 29). Working with John Browning, Pedersen also helped design the Model 17 which was adopted by Ithaca as the Ithaca 37 and also served as the basis for the Remington 31. The Model 31 was well liked, but struggled for sales in the shadow of the Winchester Model 12. Remington sought to correct that in 1950 by introducing a modern, streamlined, rugged, reliable, and relatively inexpensive shotgun - the 870 Wingmaster.

Sales of the 870 have been steady. They reached 2 million guns by 1973 (ten times the number of Model 31 shotguns it replaced). By 1996, spurred by the basic "Express" model, sales topped seven million guns. On April 13, 2009 the ten millionth Model 870 was produced, and the 870 holds the record for best-selling shotgun in the history of the world.

One other thing on the 870, they said there are so many of them and they were relatively inexpensive so they really aren't collected as wide as other guns but that may change as time goes by.

[mjp28]

After Gun Stories among other things they were talking about the Centennial of one of the best sidearms ever created, the 1911.

Often copied but the original basic design is still solid.

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They are running reruns of some shows like tonight's Gun Stories on the arrival of the Glock.

I thought they were the ugliest thing out there -but- they work....and invented by a guy who knew plastics and nothing about guns!

I remember the "scare stories" of the "plastic guns" that could evade xrays and al that, well......

The Glock pistol, sometimes referred to by the manufacturer as Glock "Safe Action" Pistol, is a series of semi-automatic pistols designed and produced by Glock Ges.m.b.H., located in Deutsch-Wagram, Austria. The company's founder, engineer Gaston Glock, had no experience with firearm design or manufacture at the time their first pistol, the Glock 17, was being prototyped. Glock did, however, have extensive experience in advanced synthetic polymers, knowledge of which was instrumental in the company's design of the first successful line of pistols with a polymer frame. Glock introduced ferritic nitrocarburizing into the firearms industry as an anti-corrosion surface treatment for metal gun parts.

Despite initial resistance from the market to accept a "plastic gun" due to durability and reliability concerns, Glock pistols have become the company's most profitable line of products, commanding 65% of the market share of handguns for United States law enforcement agencies as well as supplying numerous national armed forces and security agencies worldwide.....and the rest is history!