Lighter fluid is one of the handier things a gun nut can have on hand. It’s a great degreaser, and because of the bottles in which it comes you can dispense tiny amounts, which makes it economical. My last 12-ounce bottle of Ronson lighter fuel lasted me more than a decade, and when it ran out I went into the local hardware store to ask for a new one.
“Aisle three, on the left,” said the clerk, but when I went there all I saw was charcoal igniter and bottles of butane.
“More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”—Woody Allen
Election day is nearly upon us and as someone to whom America looks for guidance, I feel obliged to give you my thoughts on what to do come November 2.
*First, you can’t not vote. Too many people have paid too high a price for you to shrug off that privilege and duty.
In my post of October 8, I introduced you to C.J. Chivers, a senior correspondent for The New York Times, former Marine officer, and the only Times staffer who knows which end of a gun the bullet comes out of, which makes him as rare as a coelacanth. Due to an arrangement far above my pay grade, Chris has agreed to field questions from you on his book, AKs, the military, The New York Times, or anything else he could reasonably be expected to know about. To prime the pump, here are my two along with his answers. When this post appears, chime in with your own questions and Chris will answer them shortly.
Petzal: In your book, our small arms procurement system, and in particular the Army Ordnance Department, come off very badly, and over a long period of time. Based on what you’ve seen in the past ten years, are things better now?
Chivers: How could they not be better? The introduction of the M-16 into American military service (to which The Gun devotes considerable space) was so badly executed that it’s hard to imagine worse.
But let’s do a fuller answer about the present day, and channel some of what I hear from the field or have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The whitetail rut is deer hunting’s answer to the Super Bowl. No time of year can generate such enthusiasm and excitement among whitetail hunters; our seasons may last several months, but if any of us could only hunt one period, we’d focus on the weeks surrounding peak breeding.
Despite our anticipation, the rut is a dynamic, ever-changing event influenced by many variables, and keeping up with buck behavior and breeding activity a huge challenge. To help our readers, Field & Stream is launching an exciting new tool designed to keep whitetail fanatics plugged in to the latest news—in your region and around the country—regarding the whitetail rut.
This week I went to Winchester’s Nilo Farms in Alton, Illinois, to learn about and shoot a new steel load they are calling “Blind Side”* which will be available next year. As you can see in the picture, Blind Side pellets are not round but hexahedronal – that is, rounded, but with six flat sides, like dice. The advantage to the shape is two-fold: the pellets pack more compactly into a hull, allowing higher payloads (1 3/8 ounces in a 3-inch hull, 1 5/8 in a 3 1/2-inch), and the shape increases shock trauma on tissue when it hits.
I’ve been shooting home defense ammunition at paper and water jugs lately as I work on an upcoming column. One of the concerns about home defense ammunition is wall penetration, as a stray round may pass through several walls and strike a family member or neighbor. My wife won’t let me pattern guns in the house even if I promise to spackle the holes, so to get an idea of what it looks like when shot meets a wall, I watched this video. Although I’m not surprised by the results, this is still a vivid demonstration of the power of a shotgun.
This is from William Doughty, CPT US Army. I loved it. Those of you who were or are in the Service will grasp its profound wisdom.
You know you’re in trouble when you hear:
a Lieutenant say, “In my experience…”
a Captain say, “You know, I’ve been thinking…”
a Sergeant say, “Trust me, sir…”
and a Warrant Officer say, “Hey sir, watch this…”
“The Gun Nuts” TV show completed its first run last week and is now in repeats. With season one done, we’re thinking about ways to make next year better.
To get the bad news out of the way: Elisha Cuthbert’s agent won’t return our calls. Therefore it is extremely doubtful that she will be hosting Gun Nuts, Season Two. You are stuck with me, Dave and Eddie.
Because of space limitations, I couldn’t get into the details of the Work Sharp Knife Sharpener in my last post regarding this gadget. Here are some of the more cogent questions you’ve asked about it, answered by the company’s Director of Marketing, Matt Bernard.– DP
Q: What angle does it sharpen/how does it hold the angle.
A: The Work Sharp Knife Sharpener comes with two precision angle guides, one set at 40° (20° per bevel) and one at 50° (25° per bevel). To achieve the proper angle, simply set the knife in the guide, and hold it against the guide while drawing the knife through. The guides are set to hold the proper angle along the entire edge of the knife so no guesswork is required.
Up until our excellent adventure in the Sandbox, sniping has been one of the orphan children of the services. But things have changed big-time. M-14s, which a few years ago were referred to as “rifles that were obsolete on the day they were issued,” are being dug out of storage and given new, retrofitted lives as dedicated sniper rifles such as the M24, M25, and the snazziest of all, the Marine Corps’ M39 EMR (Enhanced Marksman Rifle, see photo), a $3,000-plus weapon that is almost completely unrecognizable as an M-14. It seems that having one guy who can really shoot send a single bullet downrange is more efficient than expending 25,000 rounds per casualty, which is what we did in Korea and Vietnam.
This story from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is about a group of inner city kids who went on a mentored pheasant hunt as part of the Wisconsin DNR’s Learn to Hunt program. It’s a great feel-good story: a bunch of kids who otherwise might never have had a chance to go hunting got to experience the outdoors, gun dogs, and the rush of a pheasant flushing in their faces.
Probably the least-mastered skill in all of hunting is knife sharpening. I make it a practice to grope every knife I see in the field (which gets me some strange looks, but who cares) and I doubt if one knife in 50 will actually shave hair. Sharpening a knife by hand, on a stone, required both considerable time and skill, and the many weird devices designed to make the job easy either give you mediocre results, or wreck your edge, or both.
New Rule Number 1: Don’t Set Your Backpack on Fire
F&S Deputy Editor Slaton White sent me this picture snapped at writer’s seminar at the Blackwater training facility in Mt. Carroll, Illinois. I have pixilated out the face of the shooter to protect his identity.
The inherent weakness in just about all mil-dot scopes and range-calculating systems is that in the moments before you shoot you have to either remember something or figure something out, and in those moments, the brains of most hunters turn into salt water taffy. When the metal is about to meet the meat, only the most cold-blooded and experienced of us can calculate and then squeeze the trigger.
But not if you have a Burris Eliminator.
The Smith & Wesson factory in Springfield, Mass., lies right on the way from the Hartford, CT, airport to Amherst College where my older son is a senior. Gordon and I stopped over to tour the factory in August as I was taking him back to school. I only wish I had thought of this three years ago when he was a freshman.
This picture (which, as far as I know, has not been Photoshopped) was supposedly taken at Buffalo Bill Dam near Cody, Wyoming, and shows a flock of wild sheep out for a leisurely stroll across the dam face. This is actually a dam in Italy, but all the same, traversing its face, freehoof, as it were, would make Spiderman’s guts churn in terror.
Back in the 1970s, Grits Gresham transcended the outdoor-writing biz by appearing in a series of Miller Lite beer commercials, such as the one below, with celebrities from other sports. He became recognizable literally around the world.
In October, 1978, I went hunting with him in Botswana, and Grits acquired all sorts of souvenirs which, because many of them were long and sharp, he could not pack. So when we boarded our flight home at Jan Smuts Airport in Johannsesburg, he was carrying two spears, a couple of real, headbusting clubs, and a set of Bushman bows and arrows.
Video: More Bowhunters Than Ever Hit the Wisconsin Deer Woods
Video: Minnesota Deer Hunter Face Increasing Competition From Wolves
Ohio Eyes Another Record Deer Season
Connecticut Motorist Pulls Knife on PA Police Over Injured Deer
Oregon Man Uses Friend’s Dead Mother’s Name to Apply for Deer Tags
Go to Hurteau: Whitetail Headlines
Coronation, Alberta – This morning I got the chance to shoot the new Remington Hypersonic shotshells. These loads are very fast – reaching 1700 fps and maybe a wee bit more, as Mr. Scott would say on board the Enterprise. They achieve high velocity by means of a unique wad. A hollow post in the wad runs down the middle to the primer. It contains a sort of “booster” charge that pushes the wad down the barrel. Then the main charge ignites. It’s kind of like a little two stage rocket, the idea being that the shell can achieve higher velocities at lower pressures once the first charge has given the second more room in the chamber to ignite.
Here are a couple of hypotheticals for you: You sneak up to a grizzly bear and poke it with a stick. Do you have the right to shoot it when it pokes you back? You dive into the shark exhibit at the aquarium. Do you have the right to harpoon the predator when it starts nosing you? And now, for a real-life example:
Go to Hurteau: Indiana Camper Slashes Throat of Petting-Zoo Buck
The MK II BTVS is a radical-looking .22LR bolt-action that’s one of the most accurate factory .22s* I’ve ever used. Its stock is laminated, thumbhole, with six ventilation ports and two sling swivel studs in the fore-end. All the metal is stainless steel. The barrel is 21 inches long, 1-16 twist, and medium-heavy (.800 at the muzzle). Weight is 7. 5 pounds and the Accu-Trigger on my rifle breaks at 2 pounds 8 ounces. It feeds from a five-shot magazine and fit and finish are excellent.
Granted, a gas operated pump action falls under the heading of “solution in search of a problem” but still, how cool is an 870 trap gun coupled with an 1100-style gas system to reduce recoil? That was the idea behind the 870 Competition, a gas-operated single shot (!) trap gun Remington made from 1981-1986.
Tomorrow is the opening day for archery seasons in the two states where I do most of my deer hunting; Minnesota and Wisconsin. I’m well into my third decade as a bowhunter, and I guess this should be “old hat” for a guy with faded camo and grey in his sideburns, but it’s not. I’ve been a certified mess this week; lousy concentration at work, easily distracted in conversation, restless while falling asleep…
Here’s the brilliant concept behind the hit Iraqi reality TV series “Put Him in Bucca:” take a celebrity, slip a bomb into his car, then trick him into driving through a…
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The Pennsylvania lifecaster, viral video comedienne, actress, graphic designer, trapezist, professional tie-dyeing T-shirt artist, cheeseburger lover, and deer stand-in wants to know. And who better to judge? Check it out:
Go to Hurteau: Does iJustine Look Like a Deer?
This ambiguous phrase, “see the fur part,” is used by intensely rural prairie dog hunters to describe the ability to see the actual impact of a bullet on a critter. It’s considered desirable to be able to do so, because even if you don’t hit the furry little plague host, you can see the bullet splash and make corrections.
I crossed e-mail swords with another writer on this when he claimed he could see an actual hit from his 7mm Remington Magnum. I said I doubted that unless said rifle weighed 20 pounds and had a hell of a muzzle brake, neither of which it did. Seeing the fur part requires steady nerves on your part so you don’t blink in the instant the rifle goes off, a very low level of recoil so you don’t lose the sight picture, and, in some cases, considerable distance between you and the target so you can re-acquire the sight picture before the bullet strikes.
You can bemoan the trend. You can call it regrettable and pine for the days when a rump roast and a holiday card got you on to the farm of your choice. I do. But I don’t see how any capitalism-loving American can find blame in the fact that deer leases—at increasingly astronomical prices—are becoming more common. You can’t blame the farmers, obviously. And as I see it, you can’t really blame deer hunters who lease either—although some seem happy to point the finger at their fellow sports. To the finger-pointers, I ask: “What are you some kind of commies?” 
In any assemblage of working rifles, the most important one is not a .30/06 or .223 or .460 Thunderf***er, it is the .22 rimfire. That is what teaches you to shoot and, once you’ve learned, keeps you from backsliding. If you tell me how many rounds of .22 ammo you go through in a year, I can tell you how good a rifle shot you are. 
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