I had mentioned, a few posts back, that I impulse picked up a Poverty Pony lower that had been registered as an SBR by the Iron Mountain guys out in Potomac. Since I had a ‘wrist braced’ JAKL ‘pistol’, and the the JAKL uses a 95% (have to use a slightly modified bolt release paddle) standard AR lower, this seemed like a good opportunity to turn the wrist-braced-pistol into what nature and man intended it to be – a stubby carbine with a real stock. And thus, this happened:

Pretty cunning, innit?

The JAKL (and the AR-180) [and by extension the Sig MCX] are interesting guns from a survivalists perspective because the have almost all of the AR’s ergonomic benefits and modularity, while removing one of the AR’s (questionable) liabilities – the buffer tube making folding stocks impractical.*

Unless youre driving around in a GMC van with three of your war buddies, dodging the military police for a crime you didnt commit, the utility of being able to fire your carbine with the stock folded is something that doesn’t seem like a frequent need. Not saying it won’t happen…hallways and stairwells exist, but as a general sort of thing…not a frequent need. However, being able to reduce your carbine to a compact, easily storable, portable package…well thats a different story. This particular package will just barely fit, assembled and ready to shoot, in my Bag O’ Tricks ™ (admittedly not leaving me room for much else).

I'[ve become rather fond of SBR/SBS’s in the last year or two. Their compactness and handling of a short barrel, combined with the steadiness and rigidity of a ‘real’ stock (as opposed to wrist brace), just feels quite good in the hands. Obviously there’s a tradeoff with a shorter barrel, but for the distances at which such an arm could reasonably be expected to be employed the differences in exterior and terminal ballistics will be niggling.

First choice for running out the door when Der Tag kicks off? Nope. But when that time does come its a nice choice for keeping in the truck when quick handling goes from ‘nice to have’ to ‘best practices’.

And, as you can see form the picture, I’m starting to drop red dots on pretty much everything, although iron sights for backup are a non-negotiable.

*= Keywords here: impractical and practical.

I was thiiiiiiiiiis close. And someone snaked it out from under me about a half hour before I called the gun shop to say “Hey, do you still have this?”. What was it? Why, a 4″ Ruger GP-100 .357.

What is so special about that, you might ask? After all, aren’t there scads of 4″ GP-100s out there? Well, yes but…

I have long thought that an ideal ‘combat’ revolver, if a revolver can be said to be ideal for the rough and tumble of irregular warfare, would be a sturdy fixed-sight, full-underlug, stainless .357 Magnum. It would have no adjustable sights to get damaged, have a full lug to protect the ejector rod and give some weight at the front, be in everything-resistant stainless steel, be built on a large enough frame to handle a steady diet of .357 but not too heavy to inhibit fast handling,  be in the powerful and versatile .357 and still have the option to be fed with .38’s if thats all that was available. The only major manufacturer who made something like that was Smith and Wesson with their 681 series of revolvers built on their L-frame*. An excellent gun it has been out of manufacturer since the 90’s. Ruger, though, once in a while, drops a fixed-sight variant of their GP-100 and thats what your buddy Zero is looking for. The 3″ variants are easy enough to find, and there are some 4″ DAO re-imports that century brought in a while back, but the full-lug versions are scarce.

One of my ‘Grail guns’. Still looking.

I came across an auction last week for a half-lug version and I’d take that over nothing. But…I missed the auction deadline and the store that had it for auction sold it shortly before I called. Dang it.

I would much rather run through the apocalypse with a Glock or HiPower, but if I were to carry a revolver, and I were expecting trouble from things that had language skills, this guy would be a top contender.

*= Yes, Smith ran of some oddball, very-limited-run .357’s with fixed sights on their N frame. (Most notably, the 520.) But the numbers are small enough that they may as well be non-existent. Also, the 520 was blued. There was, I think, a fixed sight variant of the 627 out there but N-frame is bigger than the handier L-frame and I don’t believe it had the full underlug.

The weather warmed up a bit, and the snow has turned into a a slushy mess so…lets go shooting!

First off, I got to shoot the Ruger RXM Glock-clone. It shot just fine and, I thought, was pretty accurate. I also swapped a threaded G19 barrel into it and shot it suppressed. The SIG suppressor I picked up has  been giving me some issues on the RXM and my G17… I think the spring in the booster needs to be changed out for a different one. Need to investigate that. Other than that, the RXM was very nice. I think Ruger may have finally created a centerfire autopistol that the public will want.

After that, it was time to try out the stubby 11.5″ S&W AR. As predicted, it was a little noisy. Threaded the Griffin Abyss suppressor on the end and that tamed it down quite a bit. An interesting gun, and certainly a niche piece, but I have to say the short barrel with the suppressor on it brings the gun to the same size as an unsuppressed AR, but with the advantages of a suppressor…pretty nice.

Last gun to play with was the Angstadt Arms 9mm AR which was a lot of fun to shoot. 9mm carbines are just plain fun. I had a three-lug adapter on the end of it so my Obsidian9 just snapped right on. Then it just sounded like a nailgun. And, again, a lot of fun.

I also helped a friend sight in their new Ruger AR556 MPR. This is a gun I very much like. I don’t think you can get anything better in it’s price range. It has Ruger’s cleaned up 452 trigger, a rifle length gas system, and 18″ 1:8 barrel, and a nice brake on the end. A pleasure to shoot. Strong recommend.

Any day at the range where you don’t come back with more holes in your body than what you started with is a good one. Wet feet aside, I had a good time and it really has been too long since I’ve gotten out to the range.

So, overall pleased with my purchases although I’d like to shot the RXM some more to see how it performs after I adjust the sights a bit.

Dang it…almost made it two full weeks.

The year is 3.84~% done and…well….It had been __0__ days since I bought a gun.

Quitting purchasing guns isn’t hard…I’ve done it a dozen times.

The Ruger RXM I ordered last week arrived on Christmas Eve…like some sort of anti-Hallmark Christmas moment.

First impressions are that, other than lacking finger groves, this thing is about as Glock as you can get without an IP lawsuit. First thing I did was swap out barrels, slides, etc, off of my genuine Glock Gen3 guns and everything fit just fine.

Other than the removable fire control unit (FCU) this thing is a G19 that had a few tiny mods. The texturing is very nice…aggressive enough without feeling like youre grabbing sandpaper. The lack of finger grooves on the grip is really a personal pref thing…I don’t care either way, although I kinda prefer the grooves but don’t care if theyre not present. The magazine release seems a little more pronounced making for more economic motions when releasing the mag. Slide release was about as Glock as you could get. Sights, from the the factory, are metal, tall, and with a tritium front and serrated back…thats a big upgrade over what your basic Glock comes with. The slide is serrated fore and aft, which I like. The frame is a blue-grey color that, in my opinion, seems a bit weird…it addresses no need except perhaps to help Magpul use up all the Grey #2209 polymer pellets. The trigger….uhhhh….it’s the oddest trigger I’ve ever felt on a semiauto pistol. It feels like a long double-action on a tuned revolver. It seems to stack all the way to the break with the last bit of travel very reminiscent, to me, of a DA revolver. The only complaint that I can see immediately about this gun will be the trigger. For guys who shoot a lot, you can make it work…but you’ll be conscious and deliberate about your pull and followthrough in a way i don’t think you would with a regular Glock trigger. The slide is cut for an optic and, from what I’ve read, the Ruger is better than the Glock in terms of ability to mount an optic. Can’t speak to that since I havent tried it yet.

Does it fit Glock holsters? Fit all of mine, including leather ones, just fine. And of course it takes Glock mags.

So, lets say that it is, for the sake of argument, in all respects a Glock 19. What, if any, is the advantage to getting one over a G19 from a survivalists point of view? Well, let’s look at a few things starting with price.

To keep this an apples-vs-apples discussion I’m going to use my dealer pricing since that’ll  be pretty close to what most dealers will buy them at. Final retail prices can vary wildly depending on region and market. The Gen3 Glock is not available with an optics cut, so right off the bat, if you’re a red dot guy you are getting an advantage with the Ruger. My dealer shows a Gen3 G19 at $440 and the RMX at $340.

• Ruger: Optics cut – Glock: No optic cut
• Ruger: One Pmag – Glock: Two Glock factory mags
• Ruger: Metal night sight – Glock: Three dot plastic sight

From a cost perspective, you get one extra mag with the Glock (a $20 value) for your $100. With the Ruger, you’re short one mag, but you gain an optic cut and a night sight made of metal for $100 less.

So why would someone choose the Ruger over the Glock. I think the answer to that is going to boil back down to the removable FCU.

Like the Sig 320, the shotgun-shell-sized metal FCU is the serial numbered part…its the ‘firearm’. This means that all the other parts…the barrel. slide, and frame, are completely unregulated. This means you can order those parts through the mail straight to your shipping address. Why is this significant?

Let’s say that, being a smart survivalist, you know that one size does not fit all. You like the Gen3 Glock platform for its reliability but you want your gun to have different sights..maybe even a red dot. And you’d like a more tactical color. And you might want a G17 size frame but with a G19 sized slide. Or you may want competition sights. Or a threaded barrel. To get all that on a G19 you would have to send your slide out for milling a red dot cut, throw away the plastic sights and replace with the sights you want, etc, etc.

Or, you buy an RXM FCU and then start shopping third-party. You order a stripped slide, your sights, a threaded barrel, a frame in the size and color you want, and you slap it all together. On the one hand, you now have your semi-bespoke RMX and no leftover parts, and on the other hand you have your semi-bespoke G19 with a few extra parts that you paid for and didnt use, and a bill for slide machining.

That modularity is about the only real advantage I see at this point.I am hoping that Ruger will bring out a full-size G17 version of the RXM soon, as well as MagPul offering up some different colors.

If you already have a rack full of G19’s or G17’s, is there a reason to get this gun? Probably not unless you want the satisfaction of just buying an FCU and ‘building’ exactly what you want from the ground up. If you don’t have any Glocks but have wanted to get into them, this might be a better choice. The price difference between the two is not insignificant.

What about mixing them both into your logistics? For the most part, it probably wont hurt anything. The FCU and a couple of its related parts are obviously proprietary to Ruger, but just about everything else is interchangeable with the Glock, so if you have a shoebox full of Glock spare parts you’re probably going to be well supplied for the RXM as well.

I think that for the survivalist, the biggest attraction of this gun will be the ability to just buy an FCU and then customize it from the ground up to be exactly what you want. This is a feature that is not unique to the Ruger (see the Sig P320) but the advantage to the Ruger is that once you put together your ideal gun you can then support it with dirt-common Glock parts. Also, I suspect the third-party market is already gearing up quickly for things like Flux Raider chasis, different color frames, different size frames, etc, etc.

When Ruger finally does make the FCU available by itself, I’ll probably get one just to play around in the aftermarket parts arena and put together something that fit my ideals.

Of course, all bets are off if I take this thing to the range and it doesn’t shoot well…but so far, I like what I see.

My curiosity got the better of me.

It’ll be here next week. Really looking forward to comparing this thing against one of the several Gen3 17’s I just picked up. Will let ya’ know!