By David E. Petzal and Philip Bourjaily

I would like to be able to say that I am pleased to introduce Bill Heavey, but that is a crock. I’m writing this because I was told that if I didn’t, I would be fired. I would like to be able to say that Bill and I are really great good friends despite our jabbing at each other in print, but that’s not true either. We regard each other with suspicion, much like two dogs circling a fire hydrant. 

But give Bill his due. He is making an excellent living writing about his life as the Dysfunctional Outdoorsman, and that is not an act. A friend of mine who was on a caribou hunt with him describes it this way: “Bill really is worthless in the wilderness. I know someone who wanted to beat him up on general principles, but I have to admit, he’s pretty funny to have around.”

So let’s leave it at that. Here are Bill’s columns, presented for your entertainment. Or you can watch police-car crashes on Spike TV.—DP [ Read Full Post ]

By David E. Petzal and Philip Bourjaily

I got a question the other day from a shooter who wants to build his own rifle on a Turkish Mauser action and a barrel made by one of our major gun producers. He was interested in the best way to bed the barrel, and asked if the various methods really made that much difference.

You bet they do, said I, but let’s back up a minute. Since you’re going to all that trouble, why not start with a good barrel instead of one that will probably shoot OK, and might shoot badly? The barrel is 90 percent of the equation. If you have a good one there’s not much you can do to make a rifle shoot poorly. If you don’t have a good one there’s nothing you can do to make it shoot well.

A little while back I was talking with Chad Dixon, the gunsmith who builds Scimitar tactical rifles for Dakota Arms. Scimitars have to shoot 5 consecutive 10-shot groups that measure 1/2-inch or less before they leave the shop, so you could assume that Chad knows something about accuracy, and he said the following:

“If someone wanted me to build him an accurate rifle, I would ask how much... [ Read Full Post ]

By David E. Petzal and Philip Bourjaily

The well-known liberal newspaper from which I get my news carried a story last week on the end of Dan Rather’s 44-year career at CBS News. You may recall that Rather broadcast a bogus story on President Bush’s service in the Air National Guard, and shortly in March 2005 gave up his spot as the network’s evening news anchor.

Dan, it seems, is damaged goods. But it’s not the first time he has lent his voice to something that was less than true. In September, 1975, CBS broadcast a “documentary” called “The Guns of Autumn,” which was purportedly an expose of hunting, but was so biased, so clumsy, and so blatantly rigged that it was panned by even the Columbia Journalism Review, which is the official organ of the Columbia School of Journalism and no friend to either hunters or gun owners. The narrator of this electronic excressence was Dan Rather.

So great was the howl from hunters that CBS felt compelled to do a sequel called “Echoes of the Guns of Autumn,” which attempted to justify the first show. Since... [ Read Full Post ]

By David E. Petzal and Philip Bourjaily

Whenever I go to the SHOT Show, I try to sneak by the Dakota Arms booth without looking at the guns or making eye contact, because I know I have as much self control around Dakota rifles as the average Senator does around a lobbyist with an open checkbook. I mean, you see some stuff ...

Anyway, about 5 years ago, there was a rifle there that had been built for a customer who could not pay for it, and so it was up for grabs. It was a Model 76 African, which is the standard Dakota Model 76 in a heavy caliber and with all the bells and whistles. It was a .450 Dakota, which is ballistically identical to the .458 Lott--500 grains of bullet at 2,400 fps out of a 23-inch barrel.

This particular rifle had one of the most spectacular stocks I’d ever seen--fiddleback Bastogne walnut with figure running from butt to muzzle. (Bastogne walnut is a hybrid--claro walnut crossed with English, and it produces some very showy blanks.) The rifle had a dropped magazine, giving it a... [ Read Full Post ]

By David E. Petzal and Philip Bourjaily

None of this is to say that the WHA is the worst idea that anyone has ever had, or even the worst to come out of hunting—that whole bison-slaughter thing would rank above this.  But it is a very, very bad idea in so many ways.  Where to begin?

In the first place, tranquilizing a large ungulate is not like playing Whack-a-Mole.  Whatever secret potion the WHA’s competitors use, they will still have to get precisely the right amount of highly toxic serum into a deer’s system to knock him out, and afterward be able to revive him.  Needless-to-say, there are any number of ways in which a scenario like that can go horrendously wrong; and doing it for sport is like putting someone under general anesthesia as an April Fool’s joke.  One part of the world where WHA tournaments won’t be held is South Africa, because recreational hunting for big game with tranquilizing darts, for all of the above reasons, has been outlawed there.

The WHA would like to point to the assorted fishing tours as models for its competitions.  Yet hardly any fishing tournament is held on private stocked waters, while the WHA will involve privately owned deer on high-fenced properties. ... [ Read Full Post ]

By David E. Petzal and Philip Bourjaily

I recently returned from a spring bear hunt in northern British Columbia. The drive from our hunting camp to Prince George was about 7 hours, so I got a chance to swap war stories with our driver, who was big-game guide and a calf roper. The conversation was pretty good. I learned that he had broken each ankle three times, which made wading unpleasant, but most interesting was his story about the client who shot a retreating bull moose in the butt with a 7mm magnum and a Barnes X-bullet.

According to the guide, the bull showed absolutely no signs of being hit, but ran like hell and vanished. At the client’s insistence, they followed the trail and found the animal dead a couple of hundred yards away.

The conclusion the guide drew was that the 7mm mag (he didn’t say which one) is a lousy cartridge and the X-bullet is a lousy bullet because “…an animal should show some sign of being hit.” When I heard that I suffered a small seizure. If the statement had come from someone who had little or no experience I wouldn’t have flinched, but this guy had hunted a lot.

I’ve seen game of all sizes absorb... [ Read Full Post ]