Next Edition of Firearms Guide Packs Even More Info Than Before
After a few hiccups with the release date, the long-awaited 3rd Edition of the Firearms Guide is finally available. I spoke with Chris from Impressum Media, creators of the Multimedia Firearms Guide, at the 2012 SHOT Show earlier this year where he told me of the coming updates. During the show, Chris had anticipated the release within a few weeks, which turned into early March, which turned into late March and then early May. The wait is over and users now have access to detailed information on ammunition and firearms from over 250 manufacturers spanning 38 countries totaling over 55,000 entries. The creators tout the Firearms Guide 3rd Edition as “the most extensive firearms, ammo and air guns reference guide and schematics library.”
The Firearms Guide isn’t just a list of guns, either. The entries include a great deal of detail including price, manufacturer info, barrel length, sight radius, caliber, features list and more. This volume of information could easily overwhelm you if it were not so easy to navigate. Entries can be searched for by name or narrowed down by selecting from 14 different criteria – including caliber, country of origin, price, action and more.
For users who believe that a picture is worth a thousand words, get ready for a lot of words! The Firearms Guide includes more than 36,000 high-res (up to 6636 x 1492) color photos. If that wasn’t enough, also included are over 3,000 high-res firearm schematics and corresponding parts lists from 268 manufacturers. Whether you are a professional armorer or a WECSOG graduate tinkerer trying to find out where that “extra” pin or spring goes, this is sure to come in handy.
See a gun in the guide that strikes your fancy? Thinking about buying a gun that needs shipped to a local Federal Firearms Licensed dealer? Just looking for a gun store in your area? The Firearms Guide also includes a database of over 62,000 gun dealers in the USA along with their phone numbers and addresses. Dealers are searchable by type of license, by state or by ZIP code.
Done learning about firearms and ready to hit the shooting range? 500 printable targets, including game animals, silhouettes, standard targets, sight-ins, fun-to-shoot objects and more are also included with the guide. Print out a stack of these black and white or color targets and take them to the range with you.
To top it all off, the Firearms Guide even comes with some extra bonuses, including a precision sniper rifle video, US-EU caliber conversion chart and more.
The third edition of this valuable resource may not have been released right on time, but it is obvious that Chris and Impressum Media have put in a lot of work and it really paid off in the final product. A good portion of the information in the Firearms Guide is probably available elsewhere online or included with your firearms manual so if you’re trying to pinch pennies, buying this might not need to be at the top of your list. However, if you want to save time searching the internet or digging through stacks of manuals and want to have a mountain of firearms information readily available at your fingertips, this can be a useful tool.
One aspect of the Firearms Guide that I have found to be a minor annoyance is on the technical side of things and it carries over from the second edition to the new third edition. The guide is a computer program that comes on a DVD along with all of the pictures, descriptions, schematics, information, etc. There is no installation of the guide; the program runs right from the DVD and access all of the information right from the DVD. This means that a big limiting factor for the speed of the program (for example, when searching for a particular firearm) is the speed that your DVD-ROM drive can read the information from the disk, load it into your computer’s memory and display it to you. In almost all cases, doing this type of thing from a DVD drive is slower than doing it from the hard drive. A workaround that seems to speed up the Firearms Guide for me is to copy everything to the hard drive and run it from there, rather than the DVD. It isn’t difficult to do and the increase in speed was well worth it for our testers; it would be nice if Impressum Media would include an installer to put the guide onto your computer.
Available as a DVD for use on PC and (coming soon) Mac computers, the Firearms Guide retails for $39.95, a price that even includes world-wide shipping. Learn more at the Firearms Guide website.
