Reviews

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome back to TFB’s Silencer Saturday, brought to you by Yankee Hill Machine, manufacturer of the new Victra 20-gauge shotgun suppressor. The ATF released its long-awaited guidance letter regarding changes to the National Firearms Act today. It is a banger. The long and short of it is that the NFA, as we have all known it, is essentially dead. This is breaking news and I scrapped the initially planned article for today to cover this with some initial reaction and thoughts.

NICS stands for National Instant Criminal Background Check System, an FBI database that licensed gun dealers must use to determine whether or not a potential purchaser is legally barred from buying a gun. Obviously, if you know how many NICS checks happen in a month, you have a very rough idea how many guns were sold in that month—but it’s not quite that simple. Private sales between individuals obviously don’t rely on the NICS database, and in some jurisdictions, authorities require NICS queries for a concealed carry permit or other checks. Or a NICS query could cover multiple firearm purchases. Some jurisdictions use other systems instead of NICS. So, using the FBI’s NICS numbers to definitely state how many guns were sold is kind of like playing Whose Line Is It Anyway? … as Drew Carey used to say, “where the points are made up and the rules don’t matter.”

The GIGN's Force Sécurité Protection brought Ukraine to Eurosatory 2026, staging a scenario rooted in hard operational reality. Since February 2022, the FSP has deployed repeatedly into contested territory, evacuating diplomats threatened by active fighting across front lines and missile strikes.

Welcome back to another edition of Fudd Friday. This week, we are looking at a cartridge with a dedicated fan base that many shooters have never heard of. The .35 Whelen uses common components to create an affordable American competitor to legendary safari cartridges like the .375 H&H or 9.3x62 Mauser.

Federal Ammunition, Mossberg, and Palladyne AI have announced the launch of a joint development of SwarmShot a "purpose-built ammunition, an airborne weapon module". The new consortium plans for SwarmShot to first be developed as a modular mission add-on for Palladyne AI’s Gremlin-X Group 1 quadcopter mini-bomber with future plans to develop an integration kit for compatible third-party drones. The consortium's announcement explained:

Back in July Colt CZ Group announced that the Montenegrin Armed Forces had selected CZ small arms, ammunition and accessories. This included the new CZ Bren 3 as well as pistols, precision rifles and CZ Scorpion EVO 3 submachine guns. At the time Colt CZ Group's CEO, Radek Musil, said: "We are pleased to become a partner to another NATO member state in the process of modernization of its armed forces. We are also proud that CZ BREN 3 rifles will be newly adopted into the service of a NATO country."

Welcome back to Front Line Friday. This week is an editorial, and the topic is how agency procurement cycles produce gear that is already behind the curve by the time it hits the field, and why the officers holding that gear are right to be frustrated. Front Line Friday is brought to you by Dead Air Silencers, whose support keeps this column going every week.

I had an opportunity to put a few rounds through an M3M during a recent FN range day and the cyclic rate of 1,100 rounds per minute, twice that of the M2, is something to be experienced. The FN land and sea pintle mount is incredibly stable and the shoulder support helps rapidly traverse and elevate the gun. The recoil dampening mount means the operator feels almost none of the weapon systems recoil and keeps its sight picture through mounted optics stable. It also has an articulated charging handle which makes readying the weapon to fire much easier and (along with the mounts reduction of recoil) reduces operator fatigue.

A lever gun with M-LOK slots, a one-piece Picatinny rail and a suppressor-ready barrel is not what most people picture when they hear "lever action," but that is exactly what Savage Arms has built. The new REVEL Tactical joins the REVEL Classic and REVEL DLX as the third member of the series, and it keeps the smooth cycling of a lever action while adding the accessory-ready features modern shooters ask for.

The M4A1 is one of the most recognizable U.S. military carbines of the modern era. Still, the weapon that entered service in the 1990s is not quite the same M4A1 that soldiers and special operations forces use today. Its development has been driven by a recurring problem: how to keep the M4's compact size while making it withstand the much higher firing schedules of combat and intensive training.

Photo Of The Day: Exercise Crete, held at Waiouru Military Training Area and led by 1st Battalion, Royal New Zealand Infantry Regiment, stood as one of the largest NZ Army exercises in 2025, culminating in a live-fire defensive battle at dawn on the final day. More than 300 personnel participated, including infantry, armour, artillery, engineers, and supporting elements. The exercise served as a tactical milestone following 1RNZIR's December 2025 amalgamation with Queen Alexandra's Mounted Rifles.

Welcome to another edition of Concealed Carry Corner. Last week, we looked at why the Glock 19 became the gold standard in the concealed carry market. If you happened to miss that article, be sure to click the link here to check it out. This week, I want to take a look at some of the biggest mistakes people make when training and how to bridge the gap between the drills you shoot at the range and carrying your concealed handgun every day. Let's take a closer look at how it can be beneficial to build skills at the range.

I never saw this feature coming, but it’s here and it will make sense to a lot of people. SIG Sauer has built a weapon light that talks to an optic. The FOXTROT2R LightFight is a 700-lumen, 20,000-candela white light with one party trick: it is "Connected by LIGHTFIGHT”, a Bluetooth link between the light and SIG Sauer’s new XRAY5 red dot.

Dark matter outweighs everything astronomers can see, and nobody has ever held a piece of it. Daniel Defense is aiming for something similar with Gray Matter, a dealer-exclusive run of the DDM4 V7 SLW finished in gray from end to end. It is available now; it comes only through Daniel Defense dealers, and "Once it's gone, it's gone."

SIG Sauer has made the laser rangefinder smaller than it has ever been. The KILO MICRO 4x18mm monocular weighs just 3.4 ounces (96 g) and measures 2.7 by 1.2 by 1.9 inches. "Built to go anywhere" is the slogan, and whatever fits my pocket is always welcome on the tour. The KILO MICRO uses GEN II Lightwave DSP, which delivers fast, accurate ranging with extreme short-range resolution. It reaches reflective targets out to 1,000 yards, trees out to 800 yards and deer out to 600 yards. The laser divergence is 2.6 by 1.2 MRAD.

This week I'm joined by Jacob Albaugh and Mike Herne of TENET, the Dayton, Ohio company building direct-thread titanium suppressors, around one question: why should a hunter have to choose between a muzzle brake and a can? Jacob got into the industry by way of a hard-kicking .30-06 and a welder, and that path led to a prototype that posted the lowest average sound reading of more than 100 suppressors in Outdoor Life's suppressor and brake test. We get into that test, the HORIZON brake system, and the production version of that prototype, the new VESPER series.

A routine family visit turned into the kind of firearm discovery most shooters will never experience. When my buddy ducked into the guest room to check on his kids, he certainly wasn’t looking for anything exciting.

We’ve told you - Germany's army is swapping rifles, one unit and one shooting range at a time. This is TFB's Photo of the Day and here we have soldiers of the 1st Company, Panzerpionierbataillon 701, based in Gera (Germany) that are getting acquainted with their future service rifle well ahead of their own unit's scheduled fielding date.

Finely embellished handguns are a thing of the past, right? Nobody goes in for engraving and other fancy-pants finishes anymore, right? Wrong. Uh, sort of. The Korth Dreadnought is an example of an old idea reborn for the 2020s, although it is a far cry from the work that F.W. Martin used to do at Smith & Wesson.

The basic idea of the Uxbridge Arms G6 is simple: Sometimes, people want a shotgun accessory to add to their rifle, typically for the purpose of door breaching (which is why they call them masterkeys). See Nick’s review of one such setup here, and there are plenty of others if you look around.

3D printing has now reached production handguns, and up to 30% less muzzle rise is the headline promise behind the P365-MACH3D. This is a micro-compact 9mm that SIG Sauer pitches with the line "Peak Performance. Everyday Carry."

TFB reached out to the Irish Department of Defence for comment on the new procurement and a spokesperson for the department responded:

NASA-supported human-factors research is not the usual starting point for a pistol grip, but it is where CZ's DiFEND methodology comes from, and it shaped the way the new CZ DUTY fits the hand. The rest of the pistol is just as deliberate. A serialized modular chassis holds everything together, a refined striker-fired trigger sits inside it, and the controls work for left- and right-handed shooters alike. The slide takes a red dot directly, with no adapter plates needed for four popular footprints. The CZ DUTY 4.0 lineup comes in four versions, with 15 or 17 rounds and with or without a manual safety.

Barrel-life specifications are a familiar sight in government solicitations, technical documents, and manufacturer literature, but what do they actually mean? A barrel rated for a certain number of rounds is not necessarily guaranteed to perform identically throughout that entire service life, and the terminology can be easy to misunderstand. With different definitions, testing methods, and performance standards involved, “barrel life” is often more nuanced than a single round count might suggest. I’ve seen plenty of confusion surrounding the subject, so this quick overview will break down what barrel-life figures represent, how they are established, and what they do, and don’t, tell you about a barrel’s expected service life.

Weapons familiarization exists for exactly this moment: handing a soldier an unfamiliar rifle and letting muscle memory catch up. At Bemowo Piskie Training Area, Poland, a U.S. Army staff sergeant with 2nd Battalion, 3rd Field Artillery Regiment, part of NATO's Forward Land Forces Battle Group-Poland, fired a karabinek szturmowy wzor 96 "Beryl," Poland's standard-issue rifle since the late 1990s and a modernized descendant of the Kalashnikov pattern, built to run on the same 5.56x45mm NATO round as the M4.

Galco has rolled out the Combat Master 2.0, an updated take on its long-running Combat Master pancake belt holster, and the lineup now includes a fit for the Glock 17.

The CZ 600+ Carbine is now available in the United States. It expands the next generation of CZ bolt-action rifles with a compact, lightweight rifle chambered in .300 Blackout for the U.S. market. The Carbine pairs the proven engineering of the CZ 600+ platform with a lightweight beechwood stock and an 18.5-inch threaded barrel.

TFB first showed the SIG HYP rifle from the SIG NEXT Range Day in July 2025, when very few details were known. SIG Sauer's product page now fills in the picture, where the SIG HYP 6.8X51 goes under the tagline "Unlock the Potential of Hybrid Ammunition." Let’s take a closer look and see what the HYPe is all about.

Beretta isn’t running out of ideas for celebrating the year of their 500th anniversary. Like with the SO10 EELL History, again we’re looking at an art piece in the shape of a shotgun. This time we don’t have one masterpiece, but a pair of identical twins.

SIG Sauer is putting a factory-installed optic on the P226 platform in two sizes. The P226X ROMEO-X SIG-LOC PRO is the full-size model, and the P226-XCARRY ROMEO-X SIG-LOC PRO is the shorter carry version. Both models are new and sit under the tagline "The P226. Evolved."