Well, there I was sitting at the old Mac, trying to work instead of listening to bluegrass, when I got a press release announcing that Redfield now has a scope out called the “Revenge.” I thought this was a pretty odd name to give an optical sight, but then I remembered that last year, Winchester came out with an all-copper bullet called Power Core, which has no core, so I guess the rules about product names have been relaxed.
But then, just a moment ago, I received word of a new crossbow called the Barnett Vengeance. Vengeance on what? The last time a crossbow was used in an act of vengeance was on March 25, 1199 when Richard the Lionheart, King of England, was killed by crossbow bolt to the neck that was fired by a French boy who claimed that Richard had killed his father and brothers.
Here’s me, on the set of the Gun Nuts TV show, holding my pick for the ideal youth turkey gun: a 20 gauge 870 Express Jr. with a red dot sight.
It is short, light, doesn’t kick much with the right loads, and it’s easy to hit with. My younger son shot his one and only turkey with it, and I have since taken it from him and killed turkeys with it, too. While you don’t have to put a $500 Zeiss Z-point on a kid’s gun, I think some form of red dot sight (and a lot of target practice before the season) is the best way to be sure a kid doesn’t miss.
As I mentioned previously, raising the comb of a field gun with moleskin or a slip-on comb pad makes it work better for clay target shooting--especially trap. The question arose in the comments to that post: Why should guns have different stock dimensions for clays or birds, seeing as how both are flying targets? Good question.
The gun in the picture is a Remington 1100 trap gun. I bought it (for $250. Score!) from a friend who used it as his duck gun for many years. It’s the gun I give to any kid who is having trouble hitting trap targets, especially kids who are struggling to hit trap targets with a field gun.
I have posted this picture before but it gets a repost for good reason. It’s spring, and for many of you summer trap league is right around the corner. A lot of hunters shoot league trap with their field guns purely for fun and to hit more birds in the fall, and that’s great. However, you will shoot much higher scores (and get even better practice, as high scores beget confidence, and confidence makes good shooters) if you raise the comb of your stock a quarter-inch or so. A slightly elevated comb raises the gun’s point of impact, allowing you to see the target instead of having to cover it up with the barrel of your gun to hit it.
As we come up upon VE day (May 8) we should reflect that even the youngest WWII veterans are in their mid-eighties by now, a fact I’m well aware of, since my dad died in 2010.*
I was reminded of the “Greatest Generation” a couple of times last week. An Honor Flight was landing at the Quad Cities airport when I picked up my son the other night, and a few days before that I squeezed into my old tuxedo and attended a black tie event for my wife’s department.
Since I knew almost no one there and we were seated at a table with a wealthy donor and assorted VIPs, I feared a long evening. Wrong. The VIPs were all interesting and the donor – an attorney who sponsors an ethics essay award my wife administers – was a very lively 87-year-old who loves to fish and often travels to Brazil for peacock bass. He doesn’t hunt, though, having had enough of guns as an infantryman in Europe during WWII.
There is a small percentage of the U.S. population that hunts, and a small percentage that hates hunting. While many of us believe the general public looks on at hunters with disapproval, the truth is, most of them rarely think about hunting at all.
When they do think about it, the non-hunters I encounter believe two things:
- We are crazy for keeping the hours we do and going out in the cold.
I have written a lot of how-to turkey stories over the years, but I generally ignore my own advice. Instead my personal approach to hunting boils down to: sleep late, get lucky. This morning I actually woke up at 4:30 a.m., thought about getting out of bed, then decided against it. It’s not that I don’t like getting up in the early morning, it’s that I hate feeling wiped out later in the day when I do.
So I left the house at the crack of 6:30 a.m. As an afterthought, on my way out the door, I grabbed a new mouth call from the box where I store the calls sent to me by manufacturers to try. I had noticed yesterday the ones in my vest were starting to fall apart and thought I should add a new one.
Talk to good shotgun shooters, and they will tell you they get “in the Zone” where targets look as big as trashcan lids and birds seem to fly in slow motion. I get in the Zone sometimes, but the difference between ordinary pretty good shots like me and really good shooters is that the champions can find the Zone regularly and stay in it. For me, being in the Zone is a fragile state.
We are filming my parts of Gun Nuts, Season III, even now. One of the segments we’ll be doing again this year is reader questions. I asked for them a while ago and have picked some to answer on the show.
Here’s one that unfortunately didn’t make the cut for the camera, but I thought it would make a great discussion starter. I’m taking the liberty of posting it here. Thanks to frequent contributor Tom-Tom: “Phil, in your opinion, what characteristics does it take to make a shotgun “A Classic”? Many of today’s models seem to be the “New and improved” version while others are still made virtually the same as they were many years ago. Is there a common denominator across pumps, side by sides, over/unders, autos and single shots?”
I have given a lot of shooting advice to a lot of high school kids on our trap team in the past four years. If you threw out 99.9 percent of what I’ve told them, trap can be boiled down to two things: “Keep your head on the stock” and “focus on the bottom edge of the target.”
The former is obvious, since we have all been told forever that your eye is the rear sight of a shotgun. The latter, however, works wonders, and it surprises me every time it does. Looking at the bottom of the target should be wrong because trap targets are rising. But from what I have seen, far more targets are missed over the top than underneath. For whatever reason, people who don’t lock their eyes onto targets usually miss over the top.