We Break Down How Rifles Work From The Barrel Up

Transcript

Welcome And What We Teach

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Welcome to Petito Defense. I'm your host, Carl Petito, and I would like to talk about Petito Defense. What is it? There's two aspects of Petito Defense. The first is firearms. Exercises to be done and optimal training to be done for optimal endurance and accuracy with shooting. The other aspect of Petito Defense is karate, martial arts, self-defense type instruction. Today I am pleased to introduce episode one for introduction to firearms part one.

How A Childhood Sparked Marksmanship

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We're going to be talking about rifles. I got interested in guns or firearms when I was a child that was watching Westerns and uh what is that? I I really like the way they looked with a really nice uh walnut with a beautifully blued steel that almost looks wet, but it's not, and it's a very nice deep, rich color. It was just always very fascinating to me. And I saw it as a a tool that was used on the on the frontier for getting food, it was for self-defense, it was for used as a hobby for shooting targets. When I was a kid, my grandfather bought me a BB gun, and I was about eight years old, eight or ten years old, and I remember uh he brought me out back, he put an empty soda can in a spruce tree, and and he said, walk back a little bit. I was about probably 15 or 20 yards, and I remember pumping up air into the chamber. I filled it full of BBs. He taught me, he gave me a really good course on safety, and that really stuck with me from the beginning. And he taught me about the the firearm and how it worked. In this case, it was an air gun. So, and he taught me how to aim. He showed me how to line up the sights. In this case, it was iron sights, and just the basic, you know, V with a with a post, you know, for aiming. He said, Line it up, pull the trigger slowly, and I hit the can the first thing, and he said, You hit it. I said, Well, yeah, grandpa, I you know, I shot it. He said, Wow, good job. And then he said, take a couple steps back some more and do it again. Pump up, put some more air in the chamber, and uh get it ready to go, take off the safety, squeeze the trigger slow. Well, they keep the site lined up. I hit it again, and I hit it every time. And he said, Wow, that's amazing. I said, Well, yeah, you know, I was aiming like you showed me to, and uh, I was excited too, but I guess I wasn't excited as him because I didn't really know the difference. And I guess it was something that always came natural to me. I don't claim to be the best shooter. There's always, no matter how good you are, there's always somebody, someone better. And occasionally I get out of practice and I get back to the range and realize how much fun it

What Makes A Rifle A Rifle

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is again. So let's talk about the basics of rifles. So, firstly, why do they call it a rifle? Well, it starts, it's from the German rifflin. Riflin is means to groove or to cut channels. So inside the barrel where the bullet travels, there's grooves cut in a spiral. So when you throw a football, in order for the football to not lob around and tumble, the football spins. So when you throw the football, it rolls off your fingertips and you get a good spin to it. So there's there's two movements happening at the same time. Linear movement is traveling from point A to point B, and at the same time it's spinning. And for ballistics and for um aerodynamics, it's it's very crucial that it's spinning. So the rifle has rifling inside the barrel. That's what makes it a rifle. Now there's different actions. The actions are the action that loads the cartridge into the chamber so the bullet can travel down through the barrel. I'm gonna explain how that works. So there's this is a bolt action. We I today I'm gonna demonstrate uh a lever action, uh, automatic, semi-automatic action. I'm also going to demonstrate a uh a single shot rifle. Okay, there's also calibers, and we're gonna talk about how what does a caliber mean? What is you know, what are these different calibers, and in future videos, we're going to talk about ammunition, the different cases or or shells of the cartridge and different bullets, different bullet types, and how do we measure the powder? What is the primer? We're gonna touch on that today. And I forgot to mention that this is my grandfather's 22. So after I got done uh shooting with the um the air rifle, as I got a little bit older, he said, Alright, let's get to 22. 22, what's a 22? I just knew that it was a it's a small bullet and not to be underestimated, it's very fast, it hits hard, and this can kill quite easily if put in the right spot on an animal. Um, it's a very powerful round or cartridge. When I started shooting this 22 with my grandfather, and boy do I miss them, um, that really got me hooked into marksmanship. So, for your simplicity, I'm gonna show you a larger bolt action and we're gonna go through the different parts.

Bolt Action Basics Plus Safety Rules

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So, this is a larger bolt action rifle, so you can see it better. It's called a bolt action because this area right here is sort of it's a long bolt, it's a long cylinder, and that the the job of this is to push the cartridge into the chamber and it could be seated down. And by the way, I already showed my camera person that this is fully unloaded, I verified, she verified, and this is safe. The muzzle is always pointed in a safe direction, even when it's fully unloaded. We never aim a firearm toward anything that should not be destroyed, if goodness forbid, a mishap were to happen. We have specific procedures, we go through, we make it habitual, so we minimize, always minimize risk. So the different parts, different actions of the gun. This is a bolt action.

Cartridges Explained Primer Powder Bullet

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Now, let's look at the ammunition. So this is a obviously a larger cartridge that can fit in this gun. This is actually comes out of an A10 aircraft that is built around a very large Gatling gun. This is a 30 millimeter shell, meaning that excuse me, a 30 millimeter bullet. The bullet is 30 millimeters in diameter. So there's the case, the whole thing is a cartridge. The case holds the powder. The gunpowder is ignited by what's called the primer. This right here, there's a firing pin in the end of the bolt here that strikes this. This causes a mini explosion that lights the powder. The powder burns super fast. It takes up space, the gases basically cause the bullet to explode out of the case. So bang, primer, small explosion, it lights the gunpowder. Gunpowder burns very rapidly, it causes gases to make the bullet explode out of the case and through the barrel. Alright. Now, we need a a chamber to put this in so it's lined up with the barrel, and that is called the chamber.

Magazine Vs Clip And Dummy Rounds

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So we have dummy rounds here that I'm going to load into the magazine. Some people will call this a clip, but it's called a magazine. And this will be loaded like so. And this holds this holds several. This is fed into the magazine well. When it's being held in a different angle, you have to find the correct angle to put it in. Okay, now I'm going to confirm. I'm still going to verify that it's a dummy round. And why do we use dummy rounds? We have to protect the firing pin so the mechanism doesn't land on it so it doesn't just strike nothing, so it doesn't go into the air. We want the mechanism to stop and actually hit something so it doesn't over time start to damage the inner workings of the firearm. I'm going to push one of the rounds or the cartridges into the chamber where it'll be held in line with the barrel. So this the job of the bolt is to push that in, and now it's secured down, and the safety would be on, and then to fire the the gun, so you shoot the target,

The Firing Cycle And Ejection

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you fire the gun. If I take the safety off and simply pull the trigger. Once it fires, you have the recoil, now you have a spent cartridge in there, and I'll show you what the spent cartridge looks like looks like for this ammunition. It looks like this. So the the cartridge with the bullet is this. Okay. On this one, I was at the range and the firing pin struck the primer. The primer lit the powder and the bullet left the casing, went down the barrel into the target, I was left with this. So the ejector is part of the mechanism. It ejects the spec casing, and now a new one is going to be pushed in. And that's the mechanism. This is the bolt action.

Rifle Parts Fit And Trigger Discipline

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The parts of the rifle are, of course, we talked about the chamber, we have the barrel, and we have the muzzle. And the muzzle is from old European, it means the nose or the front of the animal's face. So the muzzle is the very end of the barrel, and that should be protected. That's machined specifically so the gases leave with a certain aerodynamic smoothness. And what we want to do is minimize any force that would change the trajectory of the bullet in any way. Okay? Let's talk about the stock. The stock is this part that you put on your shoulder. The fore end or the fore stock is where you would put your hand. So if I'm shooting free hand, I'm here, I got the stock against my shoulder, I have my my forward hand on the forehand or the forestock, and I'm aiming. My cheek is on the cheek piece. Length of pull. What's what is the length of pull? So when I have my I and I never put my finger on the trigger unless I'm going to fire. Okay, so that's another safe habit. We're creatures of habit. If we have procedures that keep us safe, and we do them the same way every time, that minimizes any chance for mistake. So I'm never touching the trigger. But from the trigger to my shoulder, that's called length of pull. So everybody's, you know, the arms are different lengths. So a lot of firearm stocks have adjustments so you can have it longer or shorter to optimally fit you. Whether you're getting a pair of golf clubs or you need skis or any anything in sports, it should be it should fit your body.

Caliber Meaning And Next Actions Preview

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So let's move on to a different action. And remember that action is what moves the cartridge, it ejects the spent shell, in this case, this one, it checks the spent shell, puts a brand new one in, and now that's ready to fire. So let's look at a different mechanism or different action. So we just completed talking about bolt action rifles and how the bolt action works. That rifle that I showed was this 6.5 Creedmoor, but what does that mean, 6.5? It's 6.5 millimeter diameter of the bullet. So if I measure this, that will come out to 6.5 millimeters, also known as the inside bore, the inside diameter of the barrel. Let's move on to leverage rifles.