Massad Ayoob's Blog

Here’s an article I wrote twenty years ago for this blog’s host, Backwoods Home magazine. It’s still relevant today, although the mentioned prices have gone up significantly. There’s one exception to that, though. With the trend toward 9mm pistols pre-cut to mount optical sights, there are a lot of 9mm, .45, and particularly .40 S&W […]

…with a cool book on the topic. The half-century anniversary is upon one of my favorite pistols, the 9mm Beretta 92.  It’s author Chris Orr’s very favorite pistol, and that’s clear from the enthusiastic way he writes about it in “Five Decades of a Fabulous Firearm: Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Beretta 92 Pistol […]

In 2022 in Indiana, a courageous young armed citizen named Eli Dicken stopped a mass murder in a shopping mall. Opening fire on the crazed rifleman from a distance of forty or more yards initially, he fired ten rounds from his Glock 19 pistol, hitting the would-be mass murderer eight times and killing him where […]

Back in the day, Marlin produced an economy line of rifles under the Glenfield brand. These plain-jane guns ran from single shot bolt action .22s to a perfectly functional version of Marlin’s excellent Model 336 lever action .30-30. Marlin was acquired by Ruger some time ago, and in conjunction with introducing a Mark II version […]

This coming year the .30-06 Springfield cartridge will be 120 years old. Here’s a piece I wrote about it in 2006 for Backwoods Home magazine.

For many years  I’ve enjoyed the YouTube gun evaluations of a friend of mine whose internet name is Justin Opinion. He’s a very sharp guy, and a helluva good shot to boot. He’s also a graduate and has  hosted me to teach.  A dozen years ago, he did this interview with me about how to […]

The semiautomatic pistol is the most popular handgun today, and the National Shooting Sports Foundation tells us that some 26 million new gun owners have joined our ranks since 2020.  Many of them are a bit short on hand/upper body strength and have trouble racking the slides on autoloading pistols. Fortunately, we have a new […]

…not because I have articles and columns in them, but because these will be the collectible last print issues. Both are planned to continue as online publications, at www.gunsmagazine.com and www.americanhandgunner.com.  Guns debuted in 1955 as America’s first dedicated newsstand gun magazine. American Handgunner hit the stands in 1976 as the first gun magazine devoted […]

Are you right-handed with left master eye, or vice-versa? Lots of people are. Shooting a handgun that way is easier than you might think. I recently wrote and illustrated how in this article. For long guns, it makes more sense to simply shoot from the shoulder on the dominant eye side, whether rifle or shotgun. […]

Last month I taught a MAG-40 class in the San Diego area with one of my 9mm Glock 26 subcompact pistols. This month Governor Newsom signed into law a bill banning the sale of any new Glock pistols since they can be converted to fully automatic fire with the infamous Glock Switch. It’s a new […]