EmptorMaven

X-ring rubber bullets have been around for more than a generation. Currently they are manufactured by the Meister Bullet & Ammunition Company. Boxes of 50 retail for around $12.

These should not be confused with “less lethal” or riot-control projectiles. Rather, these are reusable primer-powered training bullets. I tested both .38 and .44 caliber versions.
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In 2007 Kel-Tec announced they would produce a clever new .308 Rifle, Forward-ejecting, Bullpup style (RFB). It immediately hit the wish lists of gun enthusiasts across the country. Mine is shown here with a 3-15x50mm Nitrex scope and AAC Cyclone suppressor.

This gun has a number of commendable features:

• It weighs just over 8 pounds, yet fires the medium-size .308 cartridge
• It has an 18″ barrel yet measures just 26″ overall (the shortest allowed for an unregistered rifle)
• It has a crisp 6.5-pound trigger, proving that bullpups don’t have to have terrible triggers
• It uses standard FAL magazines, which are widely and cheaply available
• It ejects spent cases forward, making it a truly ambidextrous bullpup

The RFB does have a few shortcomings that I will touch on in the course of this review, most critically in its gas system design.

The Biggest Challenge: Getting one

As of 2011 Q1 Kel-Tec has produced only 1500 of these rifles. The MSRP of $1880 hasn’t changed since it was first announced. Kel-Tec is irritatingly detached from the market for its products: The company increases neither production rates nor prices in response to ongoing high demand. Furthermore, the company only sells its firearms through an inscrutable network of distributors. To this day none of my dealers have been able to get their hands on an RFB. Meanwhile, people who do acquire them have always been able to scalp them on GunBroker.com for hundreds of extra dollars. Kel-Tec, obliviously, sells these to its distributors for under $1200.

I finally obtained one by learning through their fan forum that a batch was shipping to a particular distributor who was willing to make a direct sale to me (transferring, of course, through an FFL). My final cost was just $1350 which is considered closer to the “fair” street price than the MSRP.

The Bullpup Advantage

I have been a longtime fan of the bullpup firearm design, which places the action and magazine behind the trigger. The benefits are pretty clear in the following picture showing the RFB (18″ bbl) next to a comparable conventional semi-auto rifle (the FNAR, 20″ bbl) and a traditional bolt-action sniper rifle (the Savage 10FP, 26″ bbl).

The reduced length alone makes a bullpup much more practical for enclosed or close-quarters use. What you may not realize until you handle one is that the center of mass is moved so far to the rear that it is easy to shoulder and shoot, if necessary, with just one hand.
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The AUG has a notoriously bad trigger. Not only is the trigger pull about 10 pounds, but it is also very “sticky.” Some people just shrug and say, “bullpups have bad triggers.” That’s not necessarily so. For example, Kel-Tec’s RFB has a crisp 6.5-pound trigger right out of the box. I will explain the origin of the AUG’s bad trigger as well as steps that can be taken to improve it.

The original AUG was an infantry rifle with a clever select-fire mechanism: Pull the trigger partly to the rear for a single shot. Squeeze it all the way to the rear and the gun fires a fully-automatic burst. For this feature to be reliable in the field the AUG was designed with a long and heavy trigger to avoid unintentional full-auto discharges. Perhaps compounding this design decision is the fact that militaries have not historically made “trigger feel” a high priority for infantry rifles; if anything a heavy trigger is considered a safety feature that reduces the possibility of unintentional discharges.

Steyr did not consider it worthwhile to create a smoother or lighter trigger for their semi-automatic-only trigger packs.

MSAR, which specifically built its rifle for the U.S. civilian market, doesn’t have a good excuse for copying the heavy AUG trigger spring.

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With the iPad 2, as with the original iPad, Apple is continuing to charge an absurd $130 premium for models equipped to access 3G cellular networks. Even worse: You have to pick between Verizon and AT&T when you buy your iPad, since their wireless data networks are incompatible. It’s pretty sad to spend over $600 for a tablet computer that is then locked into a single data provider on an aging 3G standard.

Smart consumers are foregoing the 3G option on iPads and instead investing in portable internet access points, which can then serve not only their iPad but also other Wi-Fi enabled phones and computers in the vicinity. This preserves freedom to upgrade to faster 4G networks in the future and to switch service providers without having to buy another iPad.

For example, you can buy a MiFi mobile hotspot for the same price as the iPad 3G option and then get unlimited data access from Virgin Mobile, without a contract, for $50/month — for up to 5 Wi-Fi devices.

Interesting suggestion here that the NATO-standard 5.56x45mm infantry cartridge was selected based on short-range engagements that prevailed prior to the proliferation of rugged magnified optics. I.e., since it was hard to see and hit an enemy more than a couple hundred yards far away, the 5.56mm cartridge was considered adequate.

Ever since its adoption field reports have complained about its marginal stopping power. In recent years our military has spent a lot more time in wide battlefields with optics good enough to reach out to and beyond the nominal 400-yard “effective range” of the 5.56mm. It may weigh twice as much, but nobody questions the ability of 7.62 NATO to stop human targets out to 800 yards. (Beyond that is the realm of trained snipers, who may step up to .300 Win Mag or .338 Lapua Mag cartridges with effective ranges beyond a mile.) There has also been a lot of recent work on other cartridges that fit within the 5.56x45mm profile but provide better ballistics and stopping power, 6.8SPC being the most widely adopted of that family.