By Phil Bourjaily

Now that I have (almost) enough guns for myself, my new excuse for hanging around the used gunrack is to pick up guns for the kids in our high school trap club to shoot. An increasing number come from non-shooting families so I’ve grabbed three older 870s and an 1100 for kids in the last couple years. “It’s for the children,” I tell myself.

Since factory stocks don’t fit everybody, adjustable butt pads like the well-known Jones Pad Adjuster shown here on a Bill Davis synthetic stock, make it possible to suit a variety of shooters. That’s become especially clear to me this year when we have boys and girls ranging in height from not much over 5’ to 6’ 7” in our club.

By Phil Bourjaily

This time every year I get to participate in Aiming for a Cure, a local celebrity preserve hunt/sporting clays shoot that benefits our hospital’s pediatric oncology patients. It’s a great event for a very good cause. I look forward to it every March.

I took a survey of the gun rack at the lodge where we all milled around before hunting or shooting clays. Semiautomatics far outnumbered O/Us and Benellis were the most numerous brand by far. This was mostly a hunting--as opposed to target shooting--crowd, but I was still struck by the number of Benellis, every one of which had a synthetic stock. In my group there were two O/Us and four Benellis: two SBEs, an M1 and a Vinci. Maybe Benellis are only popular in eastern Iowa, but I suspect it’s the case all over.

Among the other semiautos, there was such a scattering I’m not sure I could pick a runner up in popularity. There were a few Berettas, a Browning Maxus, an SX3 and a couple of 11-87s. One of the Berettas belonged to Haley Dunn, Iowa’s best international shooter. Having switched from international skeet to sporting clays and teaching, Haley, who shot skeet with a Beretta DT10 O/U, was shooting her new sporting gun, a Beretta A400.

By Dave Maccar

You guys really got creative for this one. And there was so much animosity toward the idea of a tactical pen, I was a little taken aback.
 
The Chuck Norris ideas were amusing, as usual. Buckhunter’s “Set the pen in front of a TV and see if it can survive 1 hour of 'The Bachelor'" got me going.
 
This one from Big Country was a contender: “You could always put it in a gun case and put it on a plane. If it makes it to point B in writing condition yer good.” but was just a little too realistic.
 
There were plenty of ideas on how to definitely destroy the thing, like Randy Wagner’s “Put it on a track of a D-9 and leave it there for a year,” but remember, this was subject to my sense of humor.
 
Nixstyx definitely took enough shots at this one that something had to hit paper. This had me rolling: “Give the pen to Chad Love and watch as he slams it repeatedly to the ground while shouting that a pen cannot be tactical.” and “One man one pen. I hope it’s stronger than the jar.” but it was this one that won Nixstyx his Tuff Writer:
 

By David E. Petzal

At any given time I’m likely to be shooting loaner rifles, and so I keep eight or so scopes on hand to mount on these guns. Some of the scopes have been around for 15 years or more, and I keep using them because they work. The other day, however, I was shooting with one that had been around a long time, and on the other rifle I was using I had a brand-new Meopta MeoStar. When I switched from the rifle with the Meopta to the one with the old scope it was as though I had suddenly developed glaucoma. Everything went dim and muddy. 

Often, when this happens, it’s because the lenses have acquired a coating of what looks like dried oxtail soup, topped by a layer of dust. You clean them off and they’re fine. But the lenses on this old scope were clean. What was at work? New scopes are so much better than those from only a decade ago that they make them look...disadvantaged. Optical progress, which used to proceed at a measured and stately course, now moves at the same breakneck speed as everything else.