SHOT 2013: A Strange and Ominous Calm

Despite the fact that residents of New York state have just had a loathsome wad of gun restrictions shoved down their collective throat by their satanic governor Andrew Cuomo, and that President Obama is cooking up something equally as wonderful, the SHOT Show seems to have taken little notice that I can detect as I lurch around the floor. The one comment I have heard a good bit is that “Obama thinks he’s emperor, and we’re gonna have to show him what’s what.”

Well, I have news. He is emperor, thanks to a Congress that long ago degenerated into a food fight, one that’s peopled by the most ineffectual group ever assembled on the North American continent. Say “power vacuum.”

Say “magazine clip,” which seems to be the current catch phrase used by news nitwits and the Pres to describe where cartridges feed from.

But I digress. The place is jammed, as usual, and everyone who doesn’t have the flu will get the flu. It sounds like the seal tank at the San Diego Zoo. Yesterday, I saw a heavily bearded man cough up something the color of a swamp that scuttled across the floor and attacked a bomb-sniffing golden retriever. I can’t tell you how it came out because I ran away.

Oh yes, guns. The most interesting one I’ve seen is the Remington Model 783, which looks like the result of sex between a Ruger American Rifle and a Marlin Model 2000. It’s a mid-price rifle that sells for around $451, and is Remington’s first modern rifle. John Fink, the Remington designer whose baby it is, says unapologetically that he and his colleagues adopted the best ideas from other companies, plus what they came up with themselves. It’s a synthetic-stocked bolt-action with a detachable magazine, two-stage trigger, Super Cell recoil pad, and a massive, enclosed receiver. John says that the accuracy they’ve gotten from the rifle is astounding, and I believe it. The 783 is built so that it can only shoot accurately.

It comes in standard and magnum calibers, and all barrels, whether standard or magnum, are magnum contoured, which is a very smart thing to do. The barrels are button rifled, not hammered, which is a very good thing as well.

The 783 is a clean break from the past, and a gun that the company needed very badly. The Model 700 (which will stay in the line) is over 60 years old. It was, in its time, the state-of-the-art way to build a bolt gun, but not any more. Now, the 783 holds that title.