Apparently, Easter also qualifies for discounts. I glanced through my email and saw a couple of things that appeared to be of interest.
Palmetto is clearing out Crimson Trace Rad Max red dot sight for $89. It is pretty decent RDS and at that price is very worthwhile.
https://alnk.to/3J7YBql
Also at Palmetto, they have subsonic 300Blackout at a pretty decent price. I bought a few boxes last time they had it discounted and it has worked very well for me.
https://alnk.to/9bvt0Km
My home defense gun is a suppressed 300BLK Honey Badger set up for subsonic use. However, practicing with it gets expensive because of the cost of subsonic ammo. This stuff makes occasional practice a little less damaging to my wallet.
Tract has the discounted 4-25x50 with the MRAD Eagleman reticle on pre-order for under $1344. It is a good deal and I like the reticle.
https://tractoptics.com/toric-uhd-4-25x50-34mm-ffp-mrad-eagleman-long-range-hunting-rifle-scope/?dm_i=5GBO,OYQH,3ZZ4CE,2YC8N,1
I saw this scope briefly during SHOT and it looks to be very well calibrated. A little later this summer, I will try to get my hands onto the 2.5-15x44 with the Eagleman reticle to play with. My kids are beginning to hunt and we applied for a few tags for them this year. Depending on what tag either one of them gets, my plan is to outfit whichever rifle they carry into the field with the 2.5-15x44 Tract, and the Eagleman reticle looks to be just the right combination of "enough, but not too much information" to train a teenager.
Primary Arms has a 24 hour sale on AR uppers
https://alnk.to/3cnHF9Z
There is quite a lot of interesting stuff in there. A friend of mine recently started working at Geissele, so I have been paying a little more attention to their stuff beyond the triggers. He is a seriously competent precision shooter, so if what he says about their semi-auto rifles is correct, I should have been paying attention earlier. They have several Geissele uppers on a serious discount. https://alnk.to/2jNUL8L
Anarchy Outdoors, rather than focusing on your eternal soul, hearkens to the baser part of your nature and refers to it as a tax refund sale.
https://www.anarchyoutdoors.com/?ref=fl0iza41
"TAXSALE" code gets you a discount on a bunch of stuff and it is stacked with some pre-existing discounts.
I'll add more as new offers filter into my inbox.
Zeiss makes quite a few binoculars. Aside from an occasional misstep (Terra...), most of them are pretty good.
As with any product line, some models come together better than others.
Zeiss' SFL product line is something I looked at briefly, but never dwelled on it too much. They seemed like nice binoculars, but I never really looked at them carefully.
Imagine my surprise when the folks at Zeiss reached out and asked if I want to take a look at their new 12x50 version of the SFL.
They know I live out west, so they must have heard I have the space to really work out where the limits of a 12x50 binocular are.
Given that sending me a product to look at involves certain risks (until I am pretty much done with the review, I ignore marketing literature and any and all attempts from any company to tell me what to say), I figured that they either decided to live dangerously or that they are pretty damn confident of how good the product is.
I do not know for sure which one it is, but the ...
DNT's 7-35x56 has been here since February and I have managed to have some reasonably significant amount of time with it to date. This video is mostly in the nature of a "first look", although a bit more extensive than that. I will follow up with a careful examination of the reticle and low light performance.
https://amzn.to/4iGPl9w
So far, I am quite impressed with what the scope offers for the money.
Talking to one of the owners, he said he wants to be the undisputed bang for the buck champ under $1k. It is too early to be sure, but he might have a point there.
So far, I am quite impressed with the optic for what it costs and everything I have heard about customer support has been good.
The scope I have did have a minor glitch with the focus cell (I talk about that in the video), but it seems to have worked itself out. Perhaps there was some sort of a minor machining mark somewhere in there that got polished out.
Beyond that, it has been a good scope for me. I tried it on a ...
Here is another scope that has been here entirely too long without a formal review.
Delta Javelin 4.5-30x56, along with Athlon Ares ETR 4.5-30x56, stands at the top of the ladder of Chinese-made precision scopes I have seen to date.
To be fair, there are some new ones that are popping up that I have not tested yet (like the Telson 5-25x56) and some excellent ones that are less expensive (like DNT 7-35x56). Still, of the ones I have had a chance to spend some serious time with, it is Javelin and Ares ETR. Athlon has a Gen2 of the ETR that was announced this year, that I am very curious to test against the Javelin. Compared to the Gen1 ETR, I thought they were extremely close optically, but I slightly preferred the turrets and the reticle in the Javelin. We'll see if Athlon's Gen2 will change that.
I talk about Delta a good bit, but the brand is still not very widespread in the US. Still, there are several people selling them including Don at @AnnexDefense . Since he is a member here, I...
NOVA has a special on testing effectiveness of Revolutionary War weapons. Here is an interesting article on it.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/04/new-nova-doc-puts-revolutionary-war-weapons-to-the-test/
Tonight is the start of the Jewish holiday of Passover.
It is one of the more sacred parts of the Jewish calendar and a very meaningful one.
It is also a nicely misunderstood one. It does pop-up in some very unusual places. A friend of mine sent me this video last night, which is is weirdly appropriate.
I am a right wing, gun-toting and very proud Jew, which gets me in trouble with both the woke Left and the woke Right. A little while back I was accused of being a Nazi by the woke left (for my conservative beliefs) and of being a woke lefty by some internet creature from the woke right (for my Jewish identity). It was immensely entertaining.
I am not going to re-hash the story of Passover, there is plenty of information on it out there.
I'll just point out that there are many themes in the Passover story that are eternal and universal. Different people get different things out of it.
It is a story of liberation from tyranny.
It is a ...
Well, since I was running a little low on AAC Precision 175gr 308 ammo, I ordered another batch. This one came from a different lot than the batch I had before.
I have about 13 months left to be in my 40s, so I figured this is my last opportunity to get cheeky with this project title.
As I mentioned during last week's livestream, I am kicking off a large review encompassing seven different riflescopes that really share only one thing in common: their objectives are in the 42-44mm range.
Here is a comparison table of the specs for the scopes I have on hand. Note that the Swampfox Warhawk 2-10x44 is not going to be in this comparison very much. I'll do a separate video on it. The biggest reason for that is simply that this spec table is becoming too long and comparing so many scopes all at the same time is exponentially more difficult. I was going to take out either the Warhawk or the Blackhound since neither of them have a zero stop, so I flipped a coin and Blackhound got to stay. I will go over it a little bit below the table.
I did not set out to have this particular line-up in mind, but I like this riflescope type, so I ended up with all of these on hand.
Some of these scopes I have lready reviewed quite thoroughly, namely the Blackhound and Tract.
If you look at the specs carefully, you'll see that these range from true ultrashort designs (GPO and March), to "kinda short" designs (Leapers, Delta, Leupold and Blackhound) to a conventionally sized Tract Toric. Some of these lean toward the MPVO category. Some are unabashedly aimed at the Crossover market. Tract stands alone as a relatively conventional hunting scope, except configured very nicely to do everything as necessary. Another scope that would fit this category very well also that is no longer here is Vortex Strike Eagle 3-18x44. I might reference it occasionally.
I have a good amount of mileage with all of these, although I have not yet released a final review on every design. Still, I can offer some initial thoughts in order of ascending price.
Like any self respecting firearm enthusiast I always have some number of projects going on concurrently. One of them is a fast twist 22-250 bolt gun.
Every once in a while Tikka makes a run of 22-250 T3x rifles with 1-8” twist barrel and I happen to have one. That dramatically changes the varminty character of the 22-250. With a modern 80gr bullet, it is a nicely viable hunting rifle for small and medium game (just about perfect for pronghorn). It is also a very capable long range number. At the altitude where I live, it does not go subsonic until you get to about 1400 yards.
1-8” twist will not stabilize the heaviest available 22 bullets, but works well enough for anything up to about 80grains, depending on the bullet construction.
