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.

by David E. Petzal

When I showed up at the Kittery Trading Post to buy a used Anschutz .22, I was saddened to see that this peerless piece of Teutonic precision (one with a $1,000 price tag, new) was saddled with a piece-of-junk scope that you might use to hold a window open, or throw at an armadillo if one particularly annoyed you.

There is no abundance of good rimfire scopes—in fact, there are damned few—despite the fact that that the .22 is the foundation of any serious shooter’s gun collection. I guess most people feel that when they've bought the gun they've shot their wad (as it were) and look for something cheap and rotten to use as a sight.

This brings us to the new Nikon Pro-Staff BDC 150 3X-9X-40. It is a very, very good scope, and it comes with Nikon’s BDC reticle, which will enable you to shoot out to 150 yards. This particular reticle is calibrated to work only at 9 power, and only with hyper-velocity (1,600 fps) ammo, but with a little experimental shooting, you can adapt it to just about anything.

By David E. Petzal

Now that hunting season is here, many of us are tempted to grab our trusted smokepoles and head for the fields and forests. But what your trusted smokepole may hand you, rather than a dead animal, is a sharp rap in the nuts, metaphorically speaking, of course. You never, ever, assume that a rifle/scope will work.

This was brought home yet again by a friend of mine whom I met at the range a few days before he was to head for Canada. The trigger of the rifle he had planned to bring had gone weird; the sear would not hold, and he had to send it back to the maker for repairs. So this morning he had brought his backup gun, a veteran of 25 years’ flawless service. Lo and behold, the first shot was not even on the paper. We boresighted the gun and the crosshairs were 8 feet off to the left. Unbeknownst to my friend, someone had dropped the rifle or otherwise screwed with it.

By David E. Petzal

Oh well, back to guns. As Pogo said, politics is the kiss of death for swampland critters.

Some time ago I reported on Minox’s binoculars, and stated that, dollar for dollar, they were the best I knew of. (Or if I didn’t, I should have.) The optics were wonderful and the glasses themselves were simple, straightforward, and direct. They would not double as an astrolabe or tell you where there was an open parking space, but they would show you where the game was.

Now, I’m pleased to report, the company is offering a line of 9 scopes, designated as the ZA3 and ZA5 models, depending on power, that range from a 1.5X-8X shotgun/dangerous game scope to a monster 6X-30X with a 56mm objective. I have been using a ZA5 2X-10X (Yes, a great many of these scopes offer 5X magnification) for a number of weeks now and have not been so impressed since Redfield came back from the dead.