By David E. Petzal

After a week’s silence on the shooting at Sandy Hook School, the NRA’s Executive Vice President Wayne La Pierre called a press conference and laid out the NRA’s position on what could be done to prevent another such tragedy. The speech was not a success. It was marred by the appearance of two sign-carrying, slogan-screaming yahoos who were seated in the front row. If you’re going to give a speech about how to achieve security, it helps to have some of your own. I trust that the person(s) responsible for letting the yahoos into the conference are now working for the State Department, where their lack of competence will pass unnoticed.

One of the things that’s become evident after Sandy Hook is not that some people detest guns and the people who own them, but how much they detest us. I’ve been reading The New York Times since 1958, and I’ve never seen it use language such as it employed to describe La Pierre. I believe that if the Almighty had come down and said the same things He would have been denounced with equal savagery. It is also quite clear that any possible solutions proposed by the NRA or any other... [ Read Full Post ]

By Phil Bourjaily

Many of us have guns passed down from our fathers. My friend Peter hunts pheasants with his father’s SKB 500. It’s a 12 gauge quite similar to the one I used to have. The SKBs were an excellent value—strong, well made guns—from a Japanese factory which unfortunately now makes, I believe, golf clubs. [ Read Full Post ]

By Phil Bourjaily

I should have been easy to spot sitting at the water’s edge on a marsh stool, black shotgun in my lap. And, if I had only been wearing regular camo (right) I would have been easily recognizable as a duck hunter. In an Avery Killer Ghillie suit (left) I looked like a harmless clump of weeds.

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By Phil Bourjaily

Response to the caption contest of me biting down on a Federal Prairie Storm round was outstanding.

At first, I thought I could pick a winner myself. Of course I preferred the ones that made me seem awesome and mythological, such as Duke123’s entry: [ Read Full Post ]

By David E. Petzal

I spent the past week in Kansas, a place of very little culture but very many whitetail deer, which is a better reason to go someplace than culture. I was hunting out of elevated blinds with a friend who is a highly experienced hunter and a very good spotter of cloven-hoofed ungulates. Each of us had a laser rangefinder. Mine was in my binocular; his was separate.

What we noticed pretty quickly was that neither rangefinder ever agreed…ever. Sometimes the difference was only a few yards, but sometimes it was 50 yards or more. In addition, my rangefinder also gave Weird Readings. It would say that a deer was 152 yards away when it was perfectly obvious the beast was way over 300. This may have been caused by fog, which we had, or by the beam bouncing off weeds and brush that I couldn’t see but which the laser could. It was, as Richard Pryor used to say, a nerve-shattering experience.

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By Phil Bourjaily

A while ago I received a press release from some flashlight manufacturer billing their 1,000 lumen flashlight as “the world’s brightest.” Now, my own brightest flashlight is a mere 100 lumen Surefire which already seems incredibly, unnecessarily bright to me, so I had a hard time imagining a 1,000 lumen light. My skepticism kicked in anyway “This is America,” I thought. “No way is a 1,000 lumen flashlight the most powerful we can buy.”

A quick Google search turned up the 4,100 lumen “Torch”  which, as you can see in this video, lives up to its name. [ Read Full Post ]