Ok, you guys know Ian is a close friend of mine. So if his new offering of Inrange.tv were a total failure, I’d just sort of go silent. Obviously I hope he does well, but first he’s obligated to do good. Ol’ hermit Joel has a satellite connection with a maximum 750 megabytes per month, so at 5-point-something gigabytes per download I was not in a position to experience the joy or sadness. So I plugged the show and stated my expectations because I know Ian and Forgotten Weapons, but at the time I had never actually seen the thing.
Now that I’ve seen the first iteration of Inrange, I can honestly say this is something I think you’ll find worth your time and $2.99.
There are four major segments. The first, on the Lage conversion to the Mac-11 submachine gun, at first left me a little cold I must admit. Karl is a serious competitive 3-gun shooter and knows a great more about modern machine guns than I do, and he went off in directions I didn’t think the average (ie, me) shooter would find all that riveting. But he and Ian tied it together nicely at the end, showing reasons why a person who’s interested in maybe getting into full-auto might find this a good entry rather than choosing a historical subgun or a beltfed.
The second segment is the one where I perked up my ears, because I was involved in this one. Most of us have heard of the Allied propaganda from WWI about evil Huns and their vile, inhumane sawtoothed bayonets. Actually it turns out the saw teeth were simply provided as an expedient method of building fighting positions. Would they work? Segment Two showed that they would, though a standard bucksaw would certainly be a better choice. Full disclosure: that sawbuck he’s working on is mine, as is the off-camera voice.
Segment three is an interview with a fellow named Jim Fuller of Rifle Dynamics, an AK specialist. Being an AK shooter myself, I was interested to watch this. Fuller did appear to be on meth at the time, so despite his undoubted expertise it was a little hard to follow what the hell he was talking about. AKs don’t have the reputation for modification that ARs do, but still there is quite a bit of tweaking (heh) that can be done and this segment gets into that in some detail. I’ve been examining the combination of folding stock vs. front-mounted optic on an AK myself, so I found this segment more informative than at first I thought I might.
The final segment is a series of interviews with people participating in a full-auto shoot associated with the Defcon Hacker Conference in Las Vegas last month. I really wouldn’t have thought there would be a lot of connection between gun nerds and computer nerds, but it turns out that isn’t the case at all and their stated reasons for that were quite well articulated.
There have been some criticisms of the sound quality in the connecting studio segments with Ian and Karl, and having now watched the show I’d have to concede those criticisms are justified. There are definitely improvements to be made, and I have no doubt they will be made.
Having said that, there have also been criticisms concerning the $2.99 subscription cost, since anybody can go to Youtube and watch all sorts of gun videos for free. As to these criticisms, I must say the words “whining bullshit” come to mind. It’s perfectly true that the Forgotten Weapons videos are free, and the InRange videos are not. That’s because FW videos don’t involve travel and production expenses, while InRange definitely does. If you want to watch some guy shooting guns he already has handy on a range that’s right there for using, you’ll always be able to watch that for free and god bless. Think of InRange as the Top Gear of gun videos: There’s a qualitative difference between a Ford Pinto and a Bugatti Veyron, and this is it right here.
In conclusion, in the opinion of this hermitish gun nut you’ll find InRange.tv well worth your time and $2.99 investment*. Enjoy!
—
*And no, I didn’t get paid to say that.
