Field & Stream — The World's Leading Outdoor Website

By Dave Hurteau & Chad Love

By infecting stem cell cultures from fetal mouse brains with the prions that cause wasting diseases, including CWD, scientists at the McLaughlin Research Center have discovered a method for diagnosing the infection much more quickly and studying genetic susceptibility to the disease. The finding could lead to a better understanding of what causes certain wasting diseases, and could eventually lead to successful treatments.
http://www.billingsgazette.net/articles/2006/03/20/news/state/50-prions.txt [ Read Full Post ]

By David E. Petzal and Philip Bourjaily

Here’s one for you to ponder: Compared to most other machines, rifles are very simple mechanism—very few parts, and those are uncomplicated. Then why is it that two consecutive rifles off an assembly line will shoot so differently? Or to take it a step further, why is it that two custom barrels, made with the most exacting precision, will shoot differently? I mean, I know one barrel maker who does his own spectrographic analysis of each load of barrel blanks he gets, just to make sure the steel mill that produced them isn’t slipping something by him, and even his  barrels don’t shoot alike.

Kenny Jarrett, the South Carolina gunmaker who specializes in sub-minute (and usually sub-half-minute) rifles of all sorts, from prairie dog rifles to buffalo rifles, once told me that when he was using factory actions as the basis for his creations, he would get two or so a year that simply would not shoot. I mean, whatever they did to the rifle, and they did everything, it simply would not shoot well. All they could do was cut the receiver in half, throw it on the scrap heap, and start again.

Kenny had no idea why this should be, and... [ Read Full Post ]

By Dave Hurteau & Chad Love

The recent popularity of filming one’s own deer hunts has been a boon to video-camera manufacturers as well as game wardens, but it hasn’t worked out so well for poachers dumb enough to record their illegal activities. In January, a father-and-son poaching team was caught red-handed on their own video tape, and now the home-videos of five young Oregon game thieves may ensure convictions on multiple felony charges.
http://www.mailtribune.com/archive/2006/0318/local/stories/01local.htm  [ Read Full Post ]

By David E. Petzal and Philip Bourjaily

During the 1980s and 1990s, Field & Stream was owned by a corporation based in Los Angeles. Its management, from my lowly vantage point, was comprised of dimwits, lickspittles, blunderers, Harvard MBAs, toadies, and no-hopers. One of the ideas this bunch had was to hand out Lucite plaques with the company logo on one side and the company motto on the other (“Bend over. Here it comes again”) to all its employees. I believe this was done in lieu of bonuses.

Anyway, no one wanted these things but me. I thought they would make terrific targets, and when I let this be known, I shortly had more plaques than I could carry. And they did blow apart in a wonderful fashion. But when I shot them with a .220 Swift, a curious thing happened: The tiny, 4,000 fps bullets simply bored holes through the Lucite.

When you push bullets above 4,000 fps, strange things happen. I’ve seen paper targets sprayed with molten lead from a bullet’s core as it passed through. Apparently the heat and stress of the trip up a rifle barrel at that speed melted the lead cores. I’ve seen highly frangible .22 varmint bullets go through mild steel plate that... [ Read Full Post ]

By Dave Hurteau & Chad Love

To make your yard or flower garden the envy of the neighborhood, we recommend supplementing the soil generously with heaping shovelfuls of dead deer. That, apparently,  is what some Montanans will be doing this spring, as the state’s Department of Transportation in Ravalli Country has solved the problem of 700-or-so roadkilled deer by dumping them in a giant compost heap. The move has been so successful, other counties plan to follow suit. Says one DOT worker: “I thought when we started this, oh man, this is gonna be ugly. But it hasn't been that bad.”

http://www.ravallirepublic.com/articles/2006/03/15/news/news01.txt [ Read Full Post ]

By David E. Petzal and Philip Bourjaily

Blogger's note: The following has nothing to do with guns, but so what? A good letter deserves an answer

This is in response to a gentleman named O. Garcia, who commented on March 5th on my blog regarding gunwriters, specifically, the scarcity of good new ones. Mr. Garcia pointed out that younger gunwriters don’t write like old gunwriters because American English, both spoken and written, has changed an astonishing amount in a very few years.

Amen to that, brother. There’s nothing wrong with change in a language (else I would have to write in the manner of Wm. Shakespeare if I wanted to make a living), but the quality has declined. If you’d like proof of this, listen to our President’s daily losing battle to get a coherent sentence out of his mouth. (And he a Yale graduate, no less). Then compare it with Franklin Roosevelt or John F. Kennedy or Harry Truman (who didn’t even go to college). Bubba Clinton might have been OK if he could have grasped the concept that you have to shut up once in a while. [ Read Full Post ]

By Dave Hurteau & Chad Love

Marking the first time ever in the United States that defendants have been convicted of the felony theft of wildlife, father and son commercial perch fishermen Orville and Richard Stinson have pled guilty to fish theft and racketeering and will pay $160,000 in sanctions. They will also donate 250 pounds of perch fillets to a food kitchen and help in the prosecution of future fish-poaching cases. In his defense, Orville Stinson told to the judge: "They say we took tons [of illegal yellow perch]. But we sold that to someone. It's good food, it's not drugs."

http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/cuyahoga/1142415749292330.xml&coll=2 [ Read Full Post ]

By David E. Petzal and Philip Bourjaily

In my travels throughout this great, wide, and wonderful land, people always ask me “What about Hillary?” as though I have some kind of inside information which they don’t. Shooters, it seems, are more worried about Hillary than they are about avian flu, global warming, and the end of oil combined.

So what do I think? I think she will get the Democratic Party nomination. She has far more money  and far more determination than anyone else, and will steamroll the opposition. If the election were held today, I think she would stand a good chance of winning. A lot of people really don’t like her, but then a lot of people really didn’t like W, and he got re-elected handily.

If she is elected, she will make gun owners wish her husband was back in the Oval Office. She does not like firearms and she does not like us and she is much meaner and more vindictive than Bubba. She will sign every gun law that comes along, and scream at Congress for more.

She will also unleash the BATF, which, being a Federal agency, is naturally sensitive to political pressure. Under President Bubba, it revoked thousands of FFLs and... [ Read Full Post ]

By Dave Hurteau & Chad Love

Using her now recognized scientific talent, 18-year-old Shannon Babb of Highland Utah discovered that the carp in nearby Spanish Fork River were struggling to survive due to pollution, and she is now working with local officials to help the fish. And the carp, it turns out, have paid her back handsomely, as Babb's work won her the $100,000 first prize in last night's Intel Science Talent Search.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/15/education/15intel.html?ex=1143090000&en=47dbaa9da4501bbd&ei=5070&emc=eta1 [ Read Full Post ]

By David E. Petzal and Philip Bourjaily

A couple of days, ago, a colleague was quizzing me on the difference between factory rifles and the semi-custom guns that cost a lot more. “What sets the high-priced machinery apart?” he asked.

Two things, I told him. First, you don’t see the flaws in a $4,000 rifle that you do in a factory rifle. As an example, take the .325 WSM Browning A-Bolt I bought a few weeks ago. It’s certainly not a bad gun, but the barrel is too long for the fore-end, there are gaps between the stock and the barreled action that a reasonably gaunt weasel could dive into, and the trigger was not adjustable, which meant that the rifle would be limited to a decent, but not good, trigger pull. Also, some of the parts, notably the trigger, are pot metal. I don’t mean to pick on Browning, but this is pretty typical of what comes out of the factories.

If you want to spend a whole lot more money and get a rifle from Charlie Sisk or Ed Brown Precision or New Ultra Light Arms or Mark Bansner, you don’t see things like this. There are no gaps, no pot metal, no triggers needing adjustment or replacement,... [ Read Full Post ]

By Dave Hurteau & Chad Love

Last year the House of Representatives passed a bill that would drastically change the Endangered Species Act and has opponents worried that critical habitat will be opened to development and that crucial science will be shut out of the decision-making process. Now, as the legislation moves to the Senate, some 5,738 scientists have sent the lawmakers letters expressing their opposition to the House's proposed changes.

http://www.democratandchronicle.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060313/NEWS01/603130325/1002/NEWS [ Read Full Post ]

By Dave Hurteau & Chad Love

Just in case you've been eating fish caught outside of chemical plants--whether they be in Minnesota or not--here is perhaps a reason for you to stop doing that.

http://www.kare11.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=119550  [ Read Full Post ]