Previously Gunsite Gossip
Vol. 1, No. 6 2 September 1993
KAL 007 Memorial
The Cold War may be over, though there is
reason to doubt this, but even so, evil has not disappeared from
the world simply because of the demise of the evil empire. In some
ways we live in even darker times than in the forties, for in those
days we could identify the enemy, and during the Cold War he was
pretty obvious even though we were not fighting him in major
battles. Today, however, we are harassed by enemies of so many
forms that it is difficult for us to unite in resistance to them.
For example, a recent letter from the NRA staff to a member who was
asking about the response of the Association to the Waco atrocity
opined that the American people are more afraid of street crime
then they are of rampant and irresponsible governmental
tyranny.
I do not know who can speak for the "American People" -
certainly not I - but street crime I can handle, whereas if I
resist the ninja I will almost certainly perish. No reasonably
competent man need be afraid of crumby little punks in big cities,
but those people in black masks breaking down your doors in the
small hours of the morning and backed up by armored vehicles and
helicopters are too much for the householder, even if they do tend
to be overweight and bad shots.
These are dark times indeed, and we bear up as best we
may.
Among the things that help us bear up are
the traditional delights of late summer - fresh garden
tomatoes and corn only minutes off the stalk. This is indeed a bad
time in the history of the United States of America but, however
that may be, its old-time bounty is there for those who can
appreciate it.
We are back from the NRA Whittington
Center in New Mexico filled with enthusiasm and anticipation for
the First Annual Gunsite Reunion and Theodore Roosevelt
Memorial, now firmly set for the last weekend in October. The
Center can accommodate us for all sorts of shooting exercises
including a miniature version of David Kahn's Keneyathlon,
and in addition we will have the Waco tape, various philosophical
discussion groups, and as a climax, a whole evening of declamations
in honor of our twenty-sixth president, the late, great Theodore
Roosevelt, whose birthday falls on the 27th of the month. While we
want as much action as possible, you need not recite if you do not
so desire - though we wish you would. (Comfortable
accommodations for NRA members are available at $16.00 per person
per night - 2 for $28. You cannot very well beat that.)
Ammunition is available for sale at the Center.
Such of my books as are now in print seem
to be in the process of being discontinued by the new owner. Get
them while they last!
We note with sadness the passing of Jack
Lott, one of the more significant riflemen of the recent past.
American shooters, especially those interested in the pursuit of
big game, owe Jack a considerable debt for his pioneering
engineering in cartridge design.
We can but hope that there are plenty of buffalo, and lion, and
rhino, wherever he has gone.
"Do you know the advantage of a bolt-action rifle? You
do not have to wait for gas to cycle the action."
Ric Wyckoff
Hearty congratulations to Mike Plumb of
the Columbus, Ohio, SWAT Team! You may have seen the excellent
photography that was taken of an action in which Mike shot the
pistol out of the hand of a street goblin with his service rifle.
No one mentioned the range, and I doubt that it was great, but the
action was carried out expertly and we all admire the officer's
performance. The Chief of Police of Columbus attributed this
success to excellent training, but we should note that training
does not make for excellence. Excellence in any activity is a
product of talent and dedication. Training helps, but by itself it
is not enough.
A roadside billboard in Central California
now proclaims,
"Remember Weaver and Waco. You may be
next!"
The ground swell builds up all the time.
This fashionable buzz word "sensitivity"
is beginning to gall. I do not see sensitivity as the necessary
attribute of a considerable man. We may search through history for
manifestations of sensitivity in the great without particular
success. Pericles, Xenophon, Socrates, Caesar, and so on down
through Washington, Napoleon, Roosevelt, and Churchill were not
distinguished for sensitivity. Thinness of the skin seems to be one
of the paramount troubles of the age.
I am pleased to report the presence of a
genuine trophy buck pronghorn residing these days somewhere between
the Sconce and the highway. His horns are "three ears high" which
makes him a genuine prize.
We read now of a new 338 Lapua Magnum.
This very powerful cartridge was designed by the Finns especially
for long-range sniping and puts out a 250-grain bullet at 3,000
feet per second (against about 2,700 for the similar Winchester
Magnum). This is all very impressive, but one wonders if it is any
particular improvement over the 375 Holland. In any case, it is now
available as a hunting cartridge and should land neatly in the same
box with the 375, which we have had around since 1912. These big
medium cartridges are highly regarded by a great many men of deep
experience, but I remain dubious. They are extravagant for ninety
percent of your African shooting and inadequate for the other ten.
That is just my subjective opinion, of course.
I expect to be in Europe during
mid-September, so the next issue of this paper will be a little
late.
In our rifle programs here at Gunsite we
used to emphasize the snapshot to a degree that surprised some of
our students. The question arose as to whether there was any real
need for a rifleman ever to be able to place a single round almost
instantaneously on a small target at short range. Clearly this is
not a common requirement, but any completely qualified rifleman
ought to be able to meet it. Our test here was the flying clay bird
going straight away, with the shooter commencing at standard ready
and abreast the trap. This problem is not likely to be encountered
in field work, but if the shooter can mount that rifle instantly,
tracking with his left eye and shooting with his right, so as to
take the bird exactly at the top of its arc when it is for a split
second effectively stationary, he has mastered a skill which can
upon rare occasions serve him supremely well. I have now seen the
snapshot executed four times in the field, to the immense delight
of the onlookers, and I was much pleased the other day to be able
to bring it off once again on my own. Ground squirrels are
free-fire targets here at the ranch because of their agricultural
destructiveness and their tendency to carry bubonic plague. The
kill zone with a 22 is about the size of a 50 cent piece and in
this instance the beasty scampered across the terrace and flashed
up to the top of the wall where I was able to take him fairly
through the shoulder in a time I would estimate as just over a
second. I do not recount this to boast, but only to point out that
training on the snapshot should not be overlooked. With practice it
becomes quite natural.
We are all profoundly grieved by the
brutal and hate-motivated murder of young Miss Amy Biehl in
Guguletu township outside of Capetown. Here indeed was a classic
"hate crime," since the perpetrators have boasted that she was
killed just because she was white.
There are various sociological implications in this tragedy which I
will not go into here, but I will only point out that if Miss Biehl
had been graduated from Gunsite, she would be alive today. It
should be understood that we taught more than just marksmanship in
our programs here.
California has turned up yet another
subspecies, properly termed the "mugger/hugger." At his trial,
Reginald Denny, the truck driver who was pounded almost to death in
the Los Angeles riots, was seen happily socializing with the
perpetrators' family. This may be an act of truly Christian
forgiveness, but under the circumstances, it seems more than a bit
sickening to some people.
General Shalikashvili, the prospective
head of the US Army, is, as his name denotes, of Georgian
extraction. (Stalin's true name was Dzhugashavili.) Now it turns
out that a group Nazi-hunters has discovered that the general's
father was an SS officer in World War II. (He was described in the
press as a major in the SS, but the SS did not have such rank. He
was probably a sturmbahnfuhrer.) Those who follow such things know
that the Germans gathered together ethnic divisions from all over
Europe in which men of the same linguistic and cultural background
could serve together. The Georgian SS division conducted itself
with distinction in normal military action, but a good many people
seem to think that anybody who was ever a member of the SS was
automatically a war criminal, and they seek to tar the new American
Chief of Staff with the Nazi brush. Apart from the fact that the
general never knew his father, having split with his family for the
United States early on, the notion that the military record of a
father should be held against his son is a little too biblical for
my taste.
Bumper sticker:
"Only criminals, dictators and democrats fear armed
citizens."
Family member Alvin Hammer asks us
if the 7x57 Mauser cartridge will do for general shooting in
Africa. And the answer is, it certainly will. It was the cartridge
of choice for Karamojo Bell, who shot most of his hundreds of
elephants with it. That does not make it an elephant gun, but it
does mean that in the hands of a good man the 7x57 is all that
anyone could wish. For African shooting one should be careful to
select a particularly hard bullet, since a high-velocity
quick-expander may well blow up on the shoulder bones of a
wildebeest or zebra.
Probably we play around too much with cartridge design. This is an
acceptable hobby, but rather meaningless in regard to hunting
efficiency. Americans are in general overgunned for deer, and thus
become used to using extremely flat-shooting, almost explosive
bullets which tend to achieve clean kills - and that is good.
However, if you take pains to ensure bullet integrity, almost any
light or medium caliber will give good service for general shooting
in Africa. This is not, of course, to advocate undergunning for
dangerous game.
Did you catch that Harris Poll which
concluded that one out of ten American young men had fired at a
human target? It has been observed that if that is true some
300,000 shots were fired to achieve about 360 hits. This is a level
of marksmanship which would leave the United States helpless in the
face of a determined invasion by Eskimos. So much for the Harris
Poll.
On our way over to the NRA Whittington
Center we had occasion to cross the northern sector of New Mexico,
from left to right. In doing so we discovered New Mexico Route 64,
which is one of the loveliest highways I have ever seen. The
terrain is mountainous and varied and since there is hardly any
reason for anyone to traverse that part of the country, there are
very few cars on it. We strongly recommend it to those of you who
operate good cars and like to drive.
I have often preached that the proper
antidote to fear is anger, and I see no reason to change my opinion
on this. However, there is another mental condition that serves as
well or possibly better, and that is concentration. I have
discussed this matter at great length with people who are in a
position to know, and I am not without experience of my own, and I
can state positively that when you find yourself facing deadly
danger, your ability to concentrate every mental faculty upon doing
what needs to be done to save yourself leaves no room for fear. If
it happens that return fire is the best solution to your danger,
you are fortunate, because if you have organized yourself properly
your total preoccupation with your front sight and trigger control
will have become automatic; and therefore you cannot fear your
enemy's bullet since you are simply too busy concentrating on
hitting him. I think this truth is incontrovertible, but we
certainly see that large numbers of people who get involved in
street fights, on either side of the law, have never heard of
it.
We read of a bad scene in Assam with an
elephant. As you know, elephants domesticate fairly well, but they
are awfully big and strong, and when they lose their tempers there
is hell to pay. This beasty, possibly because he had been reading
newspapers, completely lost his cool and proceeded to kill seven
people in his own village and then to swim up the river to another
village where he smashed up thirty houses and killed fifteen more.
(And he did not even have an "assault rifle.")
"You only live once, but if you work it right, once is
enough."
Fred Allen, via Mark Moritz
In reading the trade papers I discover
there are still people who do not realize that the effect of
gravity upon bullet trajectory is the same whether the shot is
taken uphill or downhill. When a bullet is fired horizontally the
effect of gravity pulls it straight down toward the center of the
earth as its velocity decreases. If it is fired upward or downward
the time of flight to a given horizontal range is decreased
slightly. Therefore the gravitational effect is decreased and the
bullet prints a little high. The difference, however, is so slight
as to be almost immeasurable until the direction of the shot varies
at least 45 degrees from the horizontal. Such shots are demanded
almost never.
As hunting season approaches, it is well
to remember that it is not necessary to conduct all your rifle
practice on the range. All sorts of things may be simulated at
home, especially including the acquisition of position, bolt work,
and the use of the sling. One particularly good drill is to sit
before the televisor with the rifle across your lap and to use the
commercials for dry practice. Anytime a zero or an o appears on the
screen it is up to you to pick it up in your sights, squeeze off a
perfectly delivered simulation, snap the bolt and hit it again
before it leaves the screen. This is a very effective way to
balance speed against precision, since you must not squeeze off a
miss, but you do not know how long that zero is going to stay on
the screen. I do not watch a lot of television, but I try to get in
a couple of weeks of this every time before I go hunting.
We learn from family member Eric
Ching, who visited the factory at Steyr, that very little progress
has been made on the production Scout. A totally new action is
being designed, and may be ready to test in `94, but no sighting
system has been attempted at Swarovski and the years roll slowly
on. If you want a Scout, best get it made up on your own
action.
To straighten out a certain
misapprehension, these commentaries are the primary property of
"Guns & Ammo" magazine. They are then made available to
Gunsite Press as well as to those few on the "select list." I am
prevented from publishing them commercially myself, but anyone else
is welcome to them - after G&A has had first crack.
I want to put out the word without the interference of
intermediaries.
Please Note. These "Commentaries" are for personal
use only. Not for publication.