The Firearm Blog has a great post with some pictures of the latest prototype of the CAA Alfa. These were taken by Konstantin Lazarev, who’s got some more photos on his Facebook page. It is unclear whether this is a functional prototype, but at least it’s not 3D printed like the last one we saw.

As before, I’m a little skeptical about this gun. “AK in a shell” has been tried by many folks, and none of them have found much success. Couple this with CAA’s lack of gun design history (the RONI doesn’t count) and being late to market compared to the IWI ACE 3X… I suspect LE and US civilian sales are what they’re counting on to make this worthwhile.

The “AK in a shell” concept is rather flawed anyways. The AK receiver and trunions basically MUST be steel due to the way the gun functions. Once you’ve gone down that route, the extra plastic is just extra weight. In my opinion, IWI had the right idea by reducing weight in all the other places, and making strategic ergonomic changes.

According to The Firearm Blog, the Hartman MH1 reflex sight is now shipping in the USA. As you’ll recall from our previous coverage, the MH1 is the Israeli-made successor to the tepidly-received MSE-AQC. I am still skeptical that it will sell well at its specified price point ($650), especially in light of the competition from the popular Mepro Tru-Dot RDS, but perhaps street prices will surprise me.

I just saw that The Truth About Guns has reviewed the Magnum Research Baby Desert Eagle III (polymer frame) in .40S&W. You’ll recall that the polymer BDEIII is essentially the third-gen Cherokee, and the steel BDEIII is basically a second-gen Storm.

This is the first “trustworthy” review I’ve seen of the BDEIII in either form, so I felt it worth mentioning. Robert gives the gun a pretty good rating, but hates the slide-mounted safety/decocker – hardly a surprise, given the preferences in the US market.

There have been some posts on ARFCOM alleging that the X95 has some accuracy issues out of the box, and is not measuring up to the 1-2MOA that people have been getting out of the original Tavor SAR. Groups with even high quality match ammo seem to be more like 3-4 MOA.

Accuracy testing on bullpups is notoriously tricky due to the problems of getting them properly bench-rested, but there’s enough data in the thread (including some from AUGs and Tavor SARs) that buyers should at least be concerned about the problem. Anyone know if the X95 barrels are from the US or Israel? One of the nice points about the Tavor SAR was that delightful Israeli-made barrel – you knew you were getting what the IDF was getting.