Issue 44

Way back last century when I moved to the U.S., the prevailing wisdom among firearms aficionados was that you never wanted to invite “The Man” into your life. According to popular lore, owning NFA items virtually guaranteed the midnight knock, followed by a request for papieren, bitte. The reality is, of course, worlds apart from the tinfoil-hatted fantasies of yore, and if you’re really worried about government intrusion into your private life, then ditching your cellphone would be a better place to start.

While the National Firearms Act was, and remains, an unjust imposition on the rights of firearms’ owners, complying with its requirements has become less onerous in recent years. Originally conceived as a means to price naughty guns and accessories out of the range of the common man, inflation has rendered the $200 tax stamp annoying, rather than prohibitive. And the advent of the e-file system means the process of making and registering a short-barreled rifle or shotgun, or indeed a suppressor, is now completed in days, rather than months.

So with no further ado, the RECOIL team brings you the “SBR All the Things” issue. Each one of the shorties within these pages was legally assembled for fun and to show that just because the most common AR-15 might be a 16-incher, you don’t have to settle for common. Why order vanilla when you can have cookie dough? In addition to the abbreviated long-guns (short guns?), we take a retrospective look at one of the greatest battle rifles ever fielded, kick the tires on a couple of high-end Hummer H1s, and get some first-hand intelligence from the front lines of the campaign against ISIS.

You might also have noticed a change to our usual cover style. We’ll resume our regularly scheduled programming shortly, but the chance to sit down with one of the most influential and notorious names in the Global War on Terrorism was hard to pass up, and we hope it’ll provide you with another data point. In all, we think this is one of our most comprehensive issues to date, and hope you’ll enjoy reading it as much as we did putting it together.

Check out RECOIL Issue 44

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