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

Having started shooting in the 1950s when no one wore hearing protection and having persisted for half a century, I now have what the doctor describes as “profound” loss of hearing in both ears. What has happened is that some of the hairlike receptors in the middle ear, called cilia, have dropped dead from all the noise. This has had three effects: First, I have to wear hearing aids, but even with those I still have trouble understanding some people. Second, I have constant ringing in my ears, called tinnitus. Third, I have lost my ability to tolerate high-pitched sound that doesn't bother other people, such as fire sirens or Michelle Bachman speeches. This is called “recruitment.”

Of the three, the least known is recruitment. It occurs because your ears essentially re-program themselves when some of your cilia call it quits, and have other cilia doing double duty to compensate for the loss. The result is, that when certain sounds hit your ear, they get very loud very quickly because the way you process sound is all screwed up and some of your cilia are pulling in that sound much harder than they normally would. This is why, when a fire engine passes you with its siren going, you clap your hands over your ears and fall to the ground foaming at the mouth. And people with normal hearing merely stare at you in curiosity.

About hearing aids. The ones they have now are infinitely better than the ones that existed only a decade ago. But they are not a cure-all. If you’re trying to talk to someone who jabbers like a rhesus monkey, or speaks softly, or both, or has Valley Girl Lockjaw,* you will not understand them.

by David E. Petzal

In my post of April 7, wherein I pissed and moaned about my groups breaking up at 300 yards, Amflyer asked a couple of very interesting questions: First, would a bullet that dropped 10 inches below point of aim at 300 yards really cause me to miss any animal that was big enough to justify shooting at it with a .338? And second, would not a range-compensating scope compensate for the fact that some bullets went way low?

To which I reply: there are two things every rifleman should fear:  shifting winds and anomalies of any sort. Since the first is not relevant to this post, we will deal with the second. In the wonderful world of rifles, consistency is king. Just as surely as Congress is comprised of petulant, half-bright children, any gun, or load, that does weird, quirky stuff is not to be trusted, no matter how often or seldom it occurs, because, when it counts most, that anomaly will jump up and bite you right in the ass.

By Philip Bourjaily

My kids are both almost my height and shoot my guns, so as far as I’m concerned the biggest problem with the new Thompson/Center Hot Shot rimfire is that it wasn’t around 10 years ago when I needed it.

Youth guns should be inexpensive because kids outgrow them so fast. But, they should be good guns, too, safe, accurate and shootable. Styled to look just like a little version of Mom or Dad’s T/C Encore, the Hot Shot is a good first rifle for even very young kids.