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Night Vision and the PVS-14: How Does It Work?
As technology has advanced, many items formerly relegated to “Buck Rogers” are now not only available, but common. It wasn’t too many years ago that a GPS or handheld laser rangefinder would have been looked upon as something straight out of a science fiction movie. Today, they can be found in most gear bags. As technology steadfastly marches forward, modern electronics continually become smaller, more effective and less expensive. The same is also true of Night Vision Devices (NVDs). Like GPS and laser rangefinders, NVDs were originally designed with the military in mind. Today though, commercial NVDs are widely available. A highly useful tool in its own right, a quality NVD is something more and more outdoorsmen are interested in adding to their gear bag.
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‘Let George Do It’: A Marine’s Medal from Guadalcanal
The George Medal may not be regulation, but for those that received it, it is as real and as earned as any decoration Uncle Sam ever struck in bronze. The horrors of Guadalcanal defied easy explanation. Marines tried anyway. They called it the “green hell,” though even that fell short. So, one miserable night on that crocodile-infested island, a few officers decided the division deserved a medal—not for heroism in the traditional sense, but simply for surviving that dreadful place.
What they came up with was an irreverent decoration absolutely unfit for a general’s podium: a wide-eyed Marine frantically catching a hot potato on one side, and the rear end of a cow primed to unload into a spinning electric fan on the other. Crude? Perhaps. But the so-called “George Medal” was more than a gag. It is emblematic of something deeper.
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By any measure, the adoption and use of LLMs (large language models) is astounding, Lee Rainie, director of Elon's Imagining the Digital Future Center, said in a university news release. "I am especially struck by the ways these tools are being woven into people's social lives." While these tools can be useful when it comes to, say, helping you write an email or brainstorm questions for a doctor's appointment, it's wise to be cautious about how much information you share with them.
A recent study from the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI helps explain why. Researchers analyzed the privacy policies of six of the top U.S. AI chat system developers (OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, Amazon's Nova, Meta's MetaAI and Microsoft's Copilot) and found that all of them appear to use customer conversations to "train and improve their models by default" and "some retain this data indefinitely."
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The recent reduction of the $200 tax stamp fee to $0 makes it more compelling for users to buy or convert their existing ARs into short-barreled rifles (SBRs). That puts users at a crossroads: what caliber to pick? In a short-barreled configuration, the two most likely options are 300 Blackout and 5.56 NATO. I’ve shot thousands of rounds of both out of short-barreled ARs, and both have their place, with positives and negatives across the board.
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The 7.62mm M14 Rifle: What You Didn't Know
The U.S. Army's M14 rifle occupies a unique place in American military history. Officially adopted in 1957, it was intended to be the one rifle that could do everything. It would replace the M1 Garand rifle, M1 and M2 carbines, Browning Automatic Rifle, and even the M3A1 submachine gun. Chambered in the new 7.62×51mm NATO cartridge and fed from a detachable 20-round box magazine, the M14 appeared to be the perfect Cold War battle rifle.
I was assigned to the 3rd Infantry Regiment in 1975 and they used the M14 as their primary rifle (still do I believe). I trained and qualified with the M14 and fell in love with the rifle. Hitting man-sized silhouettes at 460 meters with iron sights was no problem at all. In 1976 I spent a over a month’s pay on a Springfield Armory National Match M1A and it remains my favorite rifle.
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Primer Types Explained: Small vs. Large, Standard vs. Magnum
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Auto-Ordnance M1 Carbine Short Barreled Rifle
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The Best .22 Trainer Pistols: 11 Current Models Tested
The “true trainers” are .22 pistols that attempt to mimic the look and feel of a specific centerfire model. The more common category is “pseudo-trainers.” These have the general look and feel of centerfire defense pistols, but they’re not based on any specific model. Most shooters tend to use them less for serious training and more as general plinking and range guns.
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Jeff Cooper's Commentaries: Vol. 4, No. 9; August, 1996
In this matter of ammunition, I personally like to keep a large supply on hand, not for any specific purpose, but simply because it makes me feel good. To have a large supply - several thousand rounds - of 45 ACP or 30-06 or 308 is comforting in and of itself, and by no means necessarily because one has some conspiratorial notion about expending it. As you know, there are people such as Democratic Senator [fill in the name] who feel that the subtle way to disarm the people is to cut off the supply of ammunition. We hope that such people do not prevail, but it does not hurt to be prepared for unpleasant eventualities - thus we have seat belts, crash helmets, life jackets, and pistols.
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