Ballistic December/January 2023

Before turning the calendar page to 2023, let’s raise a glass to the 100-plus firearm, ammo, optic and accessory makers featured in our fifth annual Ballistic’s Best Guns Of The Year Awards. This year’s handgun categories include compacts, full-size, revolvers, rimfires and 1911s. Our long-gun categories include hunting rifles, PRS rifles, AR-15s and a mixed bag of tactical 12 gauges. The Ballistic’s Best project is a beastly undertaking that has its ups and downs—getting the teams, guns, ammo, optics together to pull this off is a goat-roping exercise—but a real fun one! As you’ll see from the main cover blurb, we state “100+ Guns Tested & Ranked.” At the start of the process, we’re actually closer to 160 firearms, but there were wash-outs and no-shows. We editors truly want to thank our…

Variety is, as they say, the spice of life. That’s especially true with this year’s list of contenders for Ballistic’s Best Full-Size pistol category. We had a little bit of everything to work with this year including standard striker-fired pistols, several competition guns and even a couple of 10mm offerings to throw into the mix. Hammer-fired pistols were represented as well, and there was something on the table to fit just about any budget. To assist with the evaluations, I had several local guys join me at the range over a two-day period under the hot August sun. These guys all have some sort of expertise with firearms from the very specific to a broad understanding of the market. Skill sets ranged from military and law enforcement to gunsmithing to retail…

In the year 2022, the term “compact pistol” has been massaged and redefined to encompass a wide variety of new offerings available from manufacturers. Sure, there are those pistols that meet the typical definition of a compact, but there are also a few that push the boundaries and might just downright surprise you. With the help of several local, savvy shooting enthusiasts, it was my job to sort out, evaluate and score a disparate mix of compacts, sub-compacts and micro-compacts that somehow fall under the same umbrella. That particular task was what had me and the fellows gathered together one August morning staring at a table full of 11 of the latest and greatest from some of the best manufacturers in the business. As we sipped our coffee and psyched ourselves up…

One has to wonder in 1911 when John M. Browning’s pistol was adopted by the U.S. military if he foresaw his gun being used more than 100 years later by our military’s most elite war fighters. Could he have guessed that our nation civilians would embrace his gun just as warmly as the military did? Would he even have dared to think that a retired Marine would become the pistol’s biggest proponent of its use for self-defense and build the country’s largest privately owned training academy devoted to teaching responsible armed citizens? Or that shooting sports would be so dominated by 1911 platform guns and, while they may look very different from the 1911s doughboys carried into action 106 years ago, the mechanics and function remain very much the same? It’s…

For the first time in several years, 2022 felt like the world was getting back to something close to normal. Ammunition returned to the shelves, prices are coming down and there is more inventory in the cases. What’s more, manufacturers are introducing new models at a record pace. This year’s roundup is, in many ways, a redux from the last several years. In 2019, we evaluated the Taurus 856 Ultra Lite and the Korth Super Sport. In 2020, we covered the new Colt Python, the Chiappa Rhino and the Korth Silver Mongoose. Last year, we looked at the Colt Anaconda and the Korth NXS. When we went looking for new models for 2022, we found that many of the manufacturers did not have new models available for review. So, for 2022,…

Over the years, Ballistic’s Best has looked at some of the best guns in the world. Each category has been designed to give companies a chance to go head-to-head in order to find which gun wins the prestigious Ballistic’s Best award for that year. While the categories have always been solid, the editors are always working on ways to include more divisions and ultimately help readers get a closer look at their options. With that in mind, this year we are happy to include a “Best .22 Rimfire” category. With the large surge of new .22s on the market, it seemed fitting to add this new category. Like all the other testing that goes on in Ballistic’s Best, this proved to be a major undertaking. Between the shipping of guns,…