By David E. Petzal and Philip Bourjaily

It occurred to me the other day that the Remington Model 700 is a better rifle than the Winchester Model 70. I haven’t been so upset since I found out the government gave guns to sailors, but anyway, here’s my reasoning:

Remington designed the 700 (originally, the 721 and 722) after World War II when it became apparent that rifles would have to be made cheaply or their makers would go out of business. (Winchester never quite grasped that point and has pretty much gone out of business.) Because of this, the 700 was always the “cheap” gun while the 70 was the “fine” gun. Sticks and stones were hurled at the 700 for its cheesy-looking safety, pot metal trigger guard and floorplate, tiny, non-rotating extractor, and push-feed operation.

Granted, the safety, which requires a gaping slot in the stock, is horrible, as is the pot metal trigger guard. However, the extractor, in my experience, is as good as that of the Model 70 and maybe better. (I’ve seen Model 70 and Mauser extractors fail, but never a 700). As for push feed as opposed to controlled feed, who cares? It works. The rifle I have shot the most, a .30/06 Model 700, has never failed to feed, despite over 3,000 rounds through it.

As for quality, Model 70s have varied wildly. Some of them are great, but there was a period of years prior to 1964 when they were awful, and the ones made in the years prior to the last gasp of the Model 70 were as bad as anything I’ve seen. Remington, however, has always maintained a pretty even keel.

But the deciding factor is this: If you were to test 1,000 Model 70s of all calibers and the same number of 700s, I think the latter would outshoot the former by an embarrassing margin. The 700 is stiffer, and simpler, and easier to make into an accurate rifle. Gunsmiths who go for accuracy above aesthetics go for Remington actions over Winchester just about every time. And accuracy, when all the sentimental b.s. is done with, is what a rifle is about.

By David E. Petzal and Philip Bourjaily

In my recent post on Elmer Keith I mentioned that the four major gun writers of the 20th century were Keith himself, Townsend Whelen, Jack O’Connor, and Warren Page. So the next logical step would be to see if one of them stood out over the rest. What the heck? Why not? Their spirits will not be perturbed by anything I say.

The rational way to do this is to create a checklist by which a gun writer can be measured, and see how each one stacks up. Theoretically, at the end, a winner may emerge. So here goes:

Writing: You have to go with O’Connor, who was a highly successful writer before he wrote about guns for a living. Not only he was great in his day, but what he wrote has aged well. Whelen was a good writer, but not a great one, and he is now old-fashioned. Keith could tell a story, and is still fun to read, but no match for O’Connor. Page was competent, and no better.

Experience: In terms of hunting experience, Page in a walk, followed by O’Connor. Keith rarely hunted outside the Rockies, and Whelen was quite limited as a hunter, although he probably had more technical knowledge than anyone except Page.

Influence: Page first, followed by Keith. Page was directly responsible for the .243, the 7mm magnum, and was one of the prime movers behind benchrest shooting, which has been a huge influence on guns. Keith was the daddy of the .44 magnum, and a constant experimenter. Whelen was hugely respect by the gun industry, but I don’t recall that he was an advocate for anything in particular, and O’Connor simply reported on what was there. He made the .270, but he wasn’t responsible for it.

And So? Page should get the nod, but the truth is that O’Connor is the most-remembered, most-quoted, and probably the most-read 30 years after his death. And so, with a heavy heart, I have to give it to him.

But as Jim Carmichel says, “There’s nothing deader than a dead gun writer.”

By David E. Petzal and Philip Bourjaily

(Note: A Mr. Sinky O notes in my previous blog that I may be less than inclined to tell the whole truth about guns for fear of losing ad bucks. The fact is that Field & Stream gets no more than a small percentage of its ad revenue from the makers of hunting and fishing equipment, so there is no pressure on me to say only nice things for fear of people pulling ads. Second, we have changed our long-standing policy of not criticizing gear in the magazine and on this website, and have begun hammering what deserves it.
However, kindly remember when reading what follows is that I screwed up, not the Bushnell product.)

A couple of weeks ago I got one of the first laser-ranging, range-compensating-reticle scopes from Bushnell. There are a few similar scopes on the market, but they are either huge, heavy, expensive, horrifically complicated, or all of these. This one is not, so with a high heart, I mounted it on a .30/06 to try it out.

The bottom of this scope forms a rail, and near the front of the rail is a series of grooves. The rear “ring” for this scope clamps onto the rail by screw pressure alone, but the front one has a lug that engages whichever of the grooves you find convenient. It is this lug that takes up the recoil and prevents the scope from sliding. The directions that came with the scope stressed this: the lug has to engage a groove.

The two rings I was sent both looked like rear rings as neither had a lug, but I thought “What the hell, would Bushnell packers screw up that badly?” and mounted the scope anyway. Then I drove 80 miles (one way) to a private range where the friend of a friend had allowed me in for the afternoon to shoot at 500 yards. I couldn’t hit a thing. I mean, I couldn’t have hit a tent if I was inside it. And after maybe 10 rounds, the reason why was apparent. The scope had slipped forward along my rifle’s Picatinny rail by about 6 inches and was barely hanging on. End of shooting session. I drove 80 miles home and sent the scope back to Bushnell with a stern note about packing the correct rings. Quicker than you can say “wailing and gnashing of teeth,” they sent me another with all the right parts.

There are two morals to this story:

First, no matter how experienced you are, or how much you think you know, you are going to do dumb s**t.

Second, if something seems wrong, it probably is. Do not go blindly ahead on trust alone.

Both of these morals come with lifetime guarantees.

By David E. Petzal and Philip Bourjaily

Like many people, I’m hopelessly addicted to the History Channel. Barring the occasional hour on the story of tapioca, or putty, they do lots of interesting stuff, and last night it was ancient Chinese weaponry. Everything was going swimmingly until the program reached the invention of gunpowder. It showed a fellow mixing the stuff in a solid-silver (!) bowl, and we were informed that charcoal is the main ingredient, and there are two others.

 “Huh?”, thinks I. “Why are they being coy about the other two ingredients?” And then it came to me. They are doing it for the same reason that the TSA does most of their  stupid stuff—security. I can think of no other reason for omitting two thirds of the recipe than the fear that a viewer might rush right out, mix up a batch of black powder, and explode something he shouldn’t.

This is absurd for many, many reasons, the most prominent of which is the ease with which you can get this information. Working against a watch, I went on line this morning and got the answer in 11 seconds. As a security measure, the History Channel’s one-ingredient ploy ranks with the airlines refusing to hand out plastic knives so passengers can slice their tiny, rock-hard, airline-issue bagels.

The truth is, anyone can find out just about anything if they want to. Some years ago I had lunch with the president of a knife-sharpener company, and he told me the following story:

“During World War II I was a professor of metallurgy at the University of Chicago, which was one of the centers of development for the atom bomb. One of my jobs was recruiting graduate students to work on the Manhattan Project. I was interviewing a young man and told him what he would be doing, but that I couldn’t tell him why he would be doing it.

“He said, ‘You’re working on an atom bomb.’”

“I nearly passed out. This was one of the most closely guarded secrets in World War II.

“How in God’s name did you know?” I asked him.

“It wasn’t hard,” he said. “We just keep track of who’s disappearing, and what they do, and we put two and two together.”

So much for secrecy.

And if there is no History Channel gunpowder plot I apologize to all the appropriate people.