By David E. Petzal and Philip Bourjaily

If you’ve never been to the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming, you should drop whatever you’re doing and go there right this minute. Among its many wonders is the Cody Firearms Museum, which was founded in 1976. In the early 1980s, the Museum received a Maynard carbine (used by the Confederacy in the Civil War) from a Nebraskan, who claimed that a Native-American ancestor of his had used it at the Little Big Horn.

Half the old guns in the West were allegedly used at Little Big Horn, so the curators put the Maynard aside and more or less forgot about it. Then, in 1983  a range fire burned the Little Bighorn battlefield right down to the dirt, and for the first time, a team of forensic archaeologists was able to explore the battlefield and, in the process, dug up thousands of expended cartridge cases, including Maynard shells, and other artifacts.

The cases went to the Cody Firearms Museum, and then to the FBI lab for examination. Then someone remembered the Maynard carbine, and sent it along for testing. And sure enough, some of the shells found on the battlefield came from the old gun. One of them might even have... [ 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 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 David E. Petzal and Philip Bourjaily

This blog is supposed to be about sporting firearms, but the responses to my ravings of March 9 were so interesting that I am compelled to follow up.

On the Trapdoor Springfield: As one reader quite correctly pointed out, our soldiers did well with the Model 1873 at the Wagon Box fight. They did well with it on many other occasions as well, including Little Bighorn, where we tend to forget that troopers under the command of Frederick Benteen won their part of the battle.  The truth is that you could have armed Custer’s men with AK-47s and they still would have lost. Two hundred and fifteen against 2,500 (or many more) is bad odds. But still and all, the single-shot rifle was an outmoded tool even during the Civil War.

On the M-14.  During my 6 years in a green suit I was both an armorer and a cadreman, and got to see a lot of trainees shoot the M-14. By and large, they didn’t do very well. Most of them had never shot a rifle before, and it was simply too much gun. But the M-14 is a very good rifle, and tuned up, it can really shoot. That’s why... [ Read Full Post ]

By David E. Petzal and Philip Bourjaily

After writing about my impressions of the Bushnell Yardage Pro that I groped at the SHOT Show, I was savagely set upon in this blog by several of you who thought I should have tested the thing and written about it with more authority. Friends, let me assure you that you are ignorant and live in Outer Darkness. SHOT Shows don’t work this way.

They work this way: With almost no exceptions ever, gun and optics manufacturers come to the show with toolroom samples that either don’t work at all, or sort of work. The object of these samples is to get gun writers excited so they will write about this stuff and set the gun-using public to jumping up and down and barking like baboons. Actual working production-line guns, scopes, etc., do not appear until months or years later.

My job at the SHOT show is to run around like a wolverine on meth, find this stuff, get back to the office as fast as our dying airlines can take me, and write about it. But as for using? That will take a while.

On top of that, some gunmakers never come through with guns they have promised. Prominent among these is... [ Read Full Post ]

By David E. Petzal and Philip Bourjaily

More on “The Father of Ten Million Rifles.” It’s been a long, long time (maybe 70 years) since Field & Stream had any kind of article on military small arms. In the years before World War II, and during the war, we covered the subject regularly, courtesy of our two gun columnists, Captain Paul Curtis and Colonel Townsend Whelen. Curtis wrote about shotguns and Whelen about rifle, but military guns were a subject close to their hearts.

Our readers at the time felt the same way. Everyone knew the war was coming, and that it was going to be a doozer, and millions of men were either veterans of World War I or getting ready for World War II, so military stuff was of major interest to them.

Why we stopped is a mystery to me. All guns are interesting, as are the stories behind them, and I was glad to see General Kalashnikov and his rifle get their due in print.

Kalashnikov is a gun-design genius. If you go back and read the old issues from the 1930s and early 1940s, you can read about another genius named John Garand,  whose M-1 rifle was called (by no less an authority... [ Read Full Post ]