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1 week ago | 
athlonoutdoors.com | Frank Melloni
Picking up a firearm and being reminded of simpler days or the joy of your first harvest is irreplaceable and fraught with emotion. However, if we allow this emotion to interfere with facts, it becomes a hindrance. Like many others, I’ve always been told that you need a super-long barrel to get the full velocity out of a shotshell, and anything less than 26 inches is unethical. I’ve also been warned about using anything less than a 12-gauge.
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1 week ago | 
nrafamily.org | Frank Melloni
Nothing can ruin a camping trip or hike faster than unplanned visitors—and no, I’m not talking about that annoying guy you met on the trail a few miles back. Chance encounters with wild animals could end in catastrophe, particularly during springtime. This time of year is the unofficial “baby season,” and there are few more dangerous situations than getting between a mother and her kin.
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2 weeks ago | 
americanhunter.org | Frank Melloni
One of the greatest costs associated with creating a firearm is the engineering that goes behind the design. Therefore, if you can clone a winner, it becomes effortless to drop your price point without having to resort to cutting corners that might hurt the product’s overall quality. For decades, the Benelli M2 has been viewed as the gold standard of inertia-driven semi-automatic shotguns.
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3 weeks ago | 
americanrifleman.org | Frank Melloni
Regardless of your style of shooting, most of us understand that stationary targets seldom represent real life. When harvesting game, you typically only have a sliver of time to pick a shooting lane and thread a shot through it as the animal passes, and in life-or-death self-defense engagements, emergent threats will most likely be moving rapidly, making it more of a time trial to get to your gun and get a shot downrange.
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3 weeks ago | 
athlonoutdoors.com | Frank Melloni
During the COVID-19 pandemic, we watched millions of Americans purchase their first firearm. Of the three basic types, a disproportionate amount of shotguns made the journey from the gun counter to the home. Many were under the guise that shotguns are simple to use. However, they are more complicated than most think, and courses like the Gunsite Team Tactics Defensive Shotgun course demonstrate that. There are few concepts that irritate me as much as the notion that shotguns are simple to use.
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1 month ago | 
americas1stfreedom.org | Frank Melloni
By now, you’ve probably settled on reloading tools and an inaugural set of components and have likely been to the range to test your very first handloads. If you’ve followed sound advice, your rounds probably went pop and hit the paper, which is an excellent place to start. Still, handloading gives the shooter full control over the rounds they send downrange, so if you’re not 100% satisfied with the accuracy or the function of those cartridges, there are plenty of avenues for improvement.
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1 month ago | 
nrafamily.org | Frank Melloni
While many instructors gravitate toward teaching ultra-operator tactics and high-speed, low-drag types of shooting, for me, nothing is more satisfying than working with somebody brand new. I’ll never get to relive my “ah-ha” moments, but watching another experience theirs is pretty darn close. Of them all, nothing warms my heart like watching a newbie begin to understand the relationship between firearms and recoil, which admittedly isn’t at all what it appears.
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1 month ago | 
americanrifleman.org | Frank Melloni
There may be no better firearm proving ground than a fast-paced prairie dog hunt. Engaging an army of tiny critters at exaggerated distances allows us to test a rifle’s accuracy, reliability and follow-up speed, all while evaluating a given projectile's trajectory and terminal performance. Low-recoil, high-velocity cartridges have always been popular for this task, as they generate enough push to rupture thin-jacketed varmint bullets without bumping your impact out of view.
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1 month ago | 
americanrifleman.org | Frank Melloni
With suppressor wait times at a historic low, subsonic rifle cartridges are more popular than ever. Here is a recipe for low-cost, semi-automatic-friendly .300 Blackout range fodder that runs cleanly and is affordable. This recipe centers around a 220-grain Spire Point from The Blue Bullets. These projectiles feature a high-temp polymer coating in lieu of a conventional copper jacket.
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2 months ago | 
athlonoutdoors.com | Frank Melloni
In the world of ammunition, it’s hard to ignore the roll that Hornady has been on, particularly regarding cartridges built explicitly to function in AR-15s. Most shooters remember the release of the 6mm ARC, but what if I told you that it wasn’t truly the first of the series? That gives us the interesting backstory of the Hornady .338 AAC. Back around 2017, a client approached the Grand Island manufacturer with the idea of a harder-hitting cartridge for the famed black rifle.
