By David E. Petzal and Philip Bourjaily

This past Sunday, I watched the Jets’ 47-3 disembowelment of the Rams, and one play stuck in my mind. Bret Favre (who is a hunter, by the way) rolled out to the right and, ignoring the four 315-pound life forms who wanted his blood, waited for what seemed an incredible length of time before he zinged the ball right between a St. Louis defensive back’s hands and into the hands of his own receiver.

A less experienced quarterback would have panicked and thrown an interception, or eaten the ball, or tried to run and got nailed, but Favre, who has done this a lot, knew how much time he had down to the hundredth of a second.

So it is with big game hunting. There are situations when you have to shoot right now and situations when you can take can take your sweet time. Beginners never seem to get it right. They will panic, throw the rifle to their shoulder, and fill the air with lead. Or they will fuss and fidget and aim, and aim, and aim, and in the meanwhile, the critter will get bored and leave.

A veteran hunter will know from years of watching animals and studying their body... [ Read Full Post ]

By David E. Petzal and Philip Bourjaily

This past Friday I was coaching a young hunter in the finer points of riflery when he got careless with the .30/06 he was shooting and received a medium-good scope cut in his forehead. He asked me not to mention it to anyone and I said, Pish tush, you should be proud of it; it’s the mark of the rifleman. I then pointed out three or four of my choicer scars.

Eventually, if you shoot enough, you are going to get a scope cut. Actually, you’re going to get a collection unless you spend all your time shooting .22s or centerfires with IER scopes. (Given the choice between an IER scope on a rifle and a good, bloody scope cut, I will take the latter.)

The two best I’ve ever seen came from a .30/06 with a cheap scope that had no eye relief to speak of, and a .300 Weatherby, whose owner contorted himself into a weird prone position, shooting downhill at a caribou. The ocular lens bell caught him on the bridge of the nose and opened it up like an ax. My own best scope cut came from a .30/378 with a muzzle brake. I was curious how hard it... [ Read Full Post ]

By David E. Petzal and Philip Bourjaily

“And I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, ‘Come and see,’ and I looked and beheld a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”—from The Book of Revelation

“It is already dark in Moscow, and soon it will be dark here. I wonder: shall we see the light again in our lifetimes?”—Freidrich Wilhelm Kritzinger, in the movie Conspiracy

*It could have been worse. We could have gotten Hillary, and with her the same politics as Obama plus that voice braying at us for four years. On the other hand, I will miss the excellent antics of Bubba turned loose in the White House with no one in charge of him.

*Obama says he respects the Second Amendment.  And I am Ferdinand, King of Romania.

*We are probably not going to see any gun legislation for a while. Obama and Biden will have their hands full with the coming depression and our two wars, plus energy, plus who knows what else. Also, it will take Congress a while to figure out who is who in the pecking order, who gets to steal what and how much, etc.

*Eventually, however, they will get brave and propose something... [ Read Full Post ]

By Philip Bourjaily

Here’s the bad news: the sky is falling.

Here’s the good news: so is the price of lead.

One of my local stores has lead shot at $37 a bag, down from $43 a month ago. Rumor has it the price will keep dropping. Like a lot of folks, I’ve been shooting lighter reloads to stretch my money, but even if lead gets to $15 a bag, I’m having so much fun shooting recoilless target loads that I won’t go back to the heavier stuff.

The Hodgdon website   http://www.hodgdon.com/  has the recipes I use. I’ve settled on 3/ 4 ounce of 8s at 1200 fps. I can hardly feel them go off in an 8 1/ 2 pound 12 gauge, but they crush skeet and sporting targets. It is true that there aren’t many pellets in the fringes of a 3/ 4 ounce pattern, but I’m willing to trade a little margin for error for a complete lack of recoil.

DEP has written that good shooting begins with the acceptance of pain and great shooting begins with the love of pain (do I have that right, Dave?), but I’m enjoying the absence of pain. Has anybody else out there lightened up and liked it?

 ... [ Read Full Post ]

By David E. Petzal and Philip Bourjaily

More goodies from Remington.

This is not a new knife (or a knew nife) but I gave it short shrift last year when it came out and I regret that, because it’s a very good one. It’s designation is Tango Series I Fixed (which is odd, because in milspeak, Tango refers to a terrorist). It’s what gun writer Ken Warner refers to as a “sharpened pry bar,” which means the thing is just about indestructible. There are military, civilian, and law enforcement models with a choice of drop point (shown here), sabre point, or tanto point in either 440C or N690 stainless. The handle scales are G-10, which is glass-filled epoxy that is harder than Hillary’s heart.

Blade length is 5-1/3 inches and overall is 10-1/2 inches. Sheaths are Cordura nylon, tactical, and high-speed, low drag. The blades are very heavy—just over 1/4-inch thick, as nearly as I can tell, which is pretty rare these days. I don’t see how you could damage the Tango I even with unreasonable use. In the times to come, this would seem an ideal tool for cutting into wheels of government cheese, butchering... [ Read Full Post ]

By David E. Petzal and Philip Bourjaily

At one time every American gun maker with any pretensions to class had a custom shop as part of its factory. These shops offered all sorts of optional engraving, fancy wood, elaborate checkering, barrel lengths—you name it. Remington was no different, but during the middle of the 20th century its Custom Shop in Ilion, NY, was noted not for turning out fancy guns, but for super-accurate rifles. If you showed up at a benchrest shoot with a Remington 40XB-BR, people wet themselves. I owned a 40XB in .222 for a while in the late 1960s, and it made the woodchucks dance for fair.

But over the 70s the trend was to pretty guns, and a typical Remington Custom Shop rifle was likely to be very good looking but otherwise not much different from a production-line gun. Now the pendulum has swung back the other way. The Remington Custom Shop has a new manager, Carlos Martinez, and is getting a major infusion of new CNC machinery with which to build working hunting rifles that are as good as those built by anyone.

The new line of rifles (there are 4) look like run-of-the-mill 700s, but that’s as far as it goes: