Neanderpundit

Not long after I got my 22, and before I got very good with it, I took it to a Boy Scout shoot, a dozen or so of us shooting at paper targets stapled to the back of an empty barn.

I wasn’t good enough to be “good” but I was ok. I put ’em on the paper.

Next to me, Randy, one of the endless stream of toadies for the main bullies, sat and bitched how his MArlin 22 auto kept jamming- switched to his lever action, and then to a boltie. He was supposed to be shooting single shot, but he kept loading from magazines- and he had no idea how to load a magazine, so he’d jam.

I sat there, patiently loading my rifle one shot at a time, and put all my stuff on the paper. Standing I wasn’t so good yet, seated I wasn’t bad,. prone I was keeping all my shots in a ragged hole. OK, the hole was an incha nad a half around, and the targets were less than twenty yards away, but I was impressed.

Meanwhile, randy, next to me, had pretty much kept his target safe from being pierced by a single projectile.

He later claimed my target was his, and he was shooting at it and not at his, but I saw and knew better.

So the lesson for today is: No matter how many weapons you have, no matter how fine your collection is: The man with one gun he can shoot will kick the ass of a man with a dozen guns he can’t shoot. or, as jeff Cooper was known to say (though I don’t know if the saying originated with him) “Beware of the man with one gun. He probably can use it”

When I did finally get that rifle I had been longing for, I bought it myself. It was a single shot Western Field (mossberg made ’em for Monkey Wards) and it shot like crazy- I regularly shot it at 100 yards right down to 2001. Had a pretty heavy barrel, not out of any desire to make it more accurate, I think, but out of cheapness. Wards basically took a piece of bar stock, drilled it, reamed it, and machined the receiver directly into the same stock. The trigger was quite good, for a gun I bought at a flea market for $20, and I had a good time. I was nearly seventeen when I got it, and i had quite a good time shooting it. At the time, the hot round was a CCI stinger. I used to stop on my way home from work, buy two boxes of them and a pack of smokes, and go shoot the crows off of old man Mose’s barbed wire fence, where they sat waiting for the raccoons to tear down ears of corn.

I would make little deals with myself, I’d light another smoke when I hit twelve crows, or I’d drop five crows before I finished this smoke I had on the go. Sitting under the edge of the porch with a gallon of iced tea, old jeans and stained teeshirt, hundreds of crows dropped between the buckhorns of that back sight. I barely made a dent, and there were often as many as nine of us trying to keep the crows out of mose’s corn, and we still barely made a dent.

Those were my evenings for nearly a summer. Partner’s dad had a nice levergun, and he would occasionally let me shoot that, and I fell in love- but I did my best shooting with my own gun, because I shot it the most.

That fall as we went back to the farm for the family reunion, I took the rifle along- we were allowed to have 22’s and shotguns because there were always vermin that needed dealing with. We were sitting in the backyard when we heard commotion in the coop, so (anxious to show off my carefully acquired skills), I grabbed the 22 and sprinted to the coop (I could sprint in those days. Really!) just in time to see the fox ducking under the wire where he’d dug under. His head popped up the other side of the chicken wire, and quick as a wink, I popped him.

Pop was flabbergasted. Gramma was happy none of her chickens were harmed. I glowed with unabashed pride for the rest of the weekend. I don’t think anyone thought i had it in me. SO today’s lesson is simple: Shoot a lot. It pays off when it counts

When I was eight or nine, Dad took me to a friend’s farm and threw clays for me until I got the hang of leading, until I began to shoot as if I meant it. I had a Sears 12 gauge, full choke, that think Dad paid $12 for, with a box of shells and a gun case thrown in to sweeten the deal. The shotgun worked fine, but it was so damned cheap the receiver was investment cast and painted black instead of blued. It was in perfect condition, which is to say, like new, in that even the new shotguns of this model tended to lose their forearm after a couple shots. Then you had to take a pair of pliers and flatten the little spring back out so it would work again. it had a little thumb catch instead of a beavertail, and all in all, it was a good working gun.

For a couple years I used that shotgun, wanting a rifle so bad I could taste it. When I hunted rabbits, I had to flush them, acquire them, follow them until the old full choke was going to spread them far enough that I wouldn’t just turn them to rabbit burgers, and shoot. Or shoot far enough above them so they’d take two pellets and not 400.

When I finally did get the rifle, it wasn’t at all what I wanted. being the ass that I was as a kid, I made no effort to conceal my disapointment. I wanted a 22!! Instead, I got a Sheridan Blue Streak.

You could get 22 velocity and muzzle energy (almost) out of this thing, but you sure had to work at it. It took eight pumps, and sometimes a little kid had trouble doing six. Anyway, while all the other kids were whacking away with their Red Ryders, I was confined to the not-so-tender ministrations of the Pump Action Pneumatic Air Rifle.

If yesterday’s lesson was Target Acquisition, todays is “make each shot count”. I learned that first summer as I took shot after shot at squirls that there was just too damned much work in pumping that rifle up to miss a shot. For weeks, I came home empty handed and worn out from pumping that rifle,until it slowly dawned on me i needed to make each shot count, or I was going to be worn out before bird season began.

Dad could have bought me that 22 for less than the cost of the air rifle, but he knew what he was doing,. Because I had to sacrifice for each shot, pumping until my arms were sore, I made a point of making the shots count. I didn’t waste ammo, I still don’t. I developed a habit, out of necessity, of making sure i was going to hit what i shot at. Only two generations previous, my grandfather as a kid used to (or so he said) only shoot when he could get a tree behind his target, so he could recover his lead. I got off pretty easy by comparison.