July 1958 is a particularly good issue.
Ads for Enfields, including the "first time ever offered, the Jungle Carbine..." Heh! It looks like a sporterized Enfield. I wonder how many of them were faked...
There is a great article on modern (1950s) cowboy guns. What real cowboys preferred to carry. Everything from the traditional single action and .30-30 levergun to a M1 Carbine, to one guy that preferred a furren gun that was an over under shotgun/rifle that he used to get ducks for the pot one winter day and later the same outing a fleeing coyote. Found it handy, he did.
There is an article on the importance of marksmanship training for police officers.
A neat article about Switzerland and how it is a nation of riflemen.
1950s Bullpup rifles, included converted Winchester bolt actions and even a bullpup BAR.
And, most importantly, a review of the brand new army rifle... the M-14. Ha! How convenient, since that may well be my next purchase. To get a product review from 50 years ago seems nice. The author's buddy was well trained with automatic fire and quickly figured out how to hold the rifle while shooting full auto. It was a different grip and stance than semi-auto fire. The Author didn't have as much luck with accurate fire.
They mentioned that some Commands were contemplating setting the rifles to semi-auto only, or full auto and 3 round burst, or semi and full auto, but easily converted back out if desired. They weren't sure, even then, of the effectiveness of full auto fire but figured the individual soldier would quickly figure out how to make the change themselves is full auto spray and pray was denied them in possible gunfight situation. Plus they noticed that even wave tactics by the communists in Korea tended to burn through their sub machine gun ammo fast, and the Garand's semi-auto methodical pick-offs after the enemy mag-dumped were actually an advantage. He also suspected the DCM Civilian Marksmanship Program would need to issue M14s to civilians like me and it would need to be a non machine-gun rifle to comply with the 1934 National Firearms Act. Such a shame this vision wasn't realized.
I like the semi-auto doctrine. You can fire and maneuver with half a squad laying down volume semi-auto rifle fire out of 20 round box magazines. A squad can also have 2 belt fed actual MACHINE GUNS for the purpose machine guns have. The machine guns can even be quite effective with the light .223 round, the better to carry lots. But a rifle is not a machine gun. A carbine is not a rifle. (A carbine is not a pistol, either, and a carbine has less of a role when you have a rifle about.) But what do I know?
The author admired the Garand, and was pleased the M14 was similar, sure anyone trained to fire a Garand would be able to be as good with an M14 with 5 minutes familiarization training, but the M14 was a pound lighter and centered the weight back a bit toward the shooter and between the hands. A marked improvement over the Garand. He was also pretty confident that the next war "will see an actual invasion of the Continental USA" and we'd need to issue lots of M14s to the civilian militias who got their training in the past 20 years on the Garand so the learning curve adopting the new rifle would be shallow.
People thought like this once. Just assumed that that sort of duty was in the offing and of course the government would find it desirable to quickly issue battle rifles to ordinary civilians and of course we'd need to train young men and teenager before they entered the service how to shoot in order to make thier basic training more productive when they do go into the Army. It was a different time, indeed.
One other thing I learned. In the assumption that the civilian militia issued these new rifles to fend off the invading pinko Jacobin hordes, he said that ammo would be widely available through sporting sources. I was not aware that the .308 was wide available as a hunting round at this time. I thought it was developed as a cut down .30-06 round, and new with the M-14, so it would likely to be not widely available. Like the 6.8mm Grendel round is contemplated for military use but isn't too widely available at places like Wal Mart just yet. Interesting historical point. .308 Winchester was only around since 1954, 4 years prior to this article. And yet the author insinuates wide distribution of it, commercially.
He liked the flash suppressor except for fact it has a lot hanging off it and started to wobble loose even during their test. Good thing for me to consider... There are aftermarket flash suppressors that may or may not address this, and if not, something to check on with routine maintenance to be sure I don't get surprised with an equipment failure.
Check out this extensive online documentation on the M14.
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