Rifles and Pistols and Guns, Oh My!

In Good Guns, Stephen Bodio writes, “At its best every good gun is a kind of time machine.” And he might have added that every custom gun maker is a link in a chain of time machines that stretches back to the Clovis spear point or beyond, a line of men obsessed with the pursuit of perfection.

No one becomes an artist – any kind of artist – with a view to getting rich. Painters paint and writers write and gun makers make guns because they can’t help themselves. They may find their avocation early (Mozart was composing at five) or late (Grandma Moses only started painting in her late seventies when her arthritis got so bad she could no longer embroider) but they are driven.

Joe Smithson found his avocation early. He was raised on the Navajo reservation in northern Arizona. His family had a large ranch and his father owned the local trading post.

“I think that’s where my fascination with firearms started, because [his father] was always taking in a lot of guns for pawn.”

After high school, Joe went to Trinidad State Junior College, renowned for the gunsmithing program started in 1947 by P.O. Ackley of Ackley Improved cartridges fame. He was able to study under some of the best gunsmiths in America, and went right from college to an apprenticeship with the legendary Jerry Fisher. Then he opened his own shop in Farmington, NM.

“I started a shop with Jim Mosley (the dean of the gunsmithing department at Trinidad) and we were in business for three or four years before I opened my own place. But then I ended up moving to Provo, UT as a single dad with three kids.”

Joe opened his own shop in Provo, but as he says, “Gunsmithing is a hard way to make a living if you don’t have an outside income. I was lucky enough to have one customer [Mario Zanotti] who kept me afloat ordering guns every year. Without him and the support of Mosley and Fisher, I couldn’t have made it go.”

Fortunately, he did make it go, and today he builds six to eight guns a year, depending on how involved the projects are. Eighty percent of his business is bolt actions, but he can make anything from double rifle or shotgun to lever action or single shot. (The rifle that got him accepted into the American Custom Gunmaker’s Guild was a Fraser falling-block single shot he made himself completely from scratch, action, screws, springs, everything, by hand. It was not, he learned, a productive way to do things.)

The rifle Joe sent me to play with was chambered in .275 Rigby (his favorite caliber for light game is the 7X57mm, the virtually identical precursor and inspiration for the .275), and built with the traditional looks of a British ‘best:’ a breathtaking walnut stock with a crisply defined cheek-piece; ebony fore-end; smooth metal butt plate; square bridge action made by Granite Mountain; flawless – and I really mean flawless – wood-to-metal fit; folding leaf sights; an extra front sight and dust covers for the scope mount slots (!) tucked away in the pistol-grip trapdoor; detachable scope mounts…. Stop right there. Detachable scope mounts unlike any I have ever seen before.

When Joe started using Granite Mountain’s double square bridge action, he wanted a flawless and failsafe detachable mount to go with it, one that would go back to zero every time. He started experimenting with traditional lever systems, but eventually abandoned them in favor of his own unique design.

Each mount has a button on the side. When the button is pressed to remove the scope, an internal ball bearing rises up into a hole in the cam, allowing the mount to slide free from the base. Putting the scope back on, the mounts slide forward into the corresponding grooves in the bases and, when the button is released, the ball bearing drops down into a hole, the button cams over the ball bearing and the whole thing is locked into place. It is simple, easy to use, and absolutely failsafe. If it feels as precise and solid as a Tomahawk cruise missile, it’s because the mechanism is made by the machine shop that manufactures parts for Tomahawk missiles. Of course Joe, being Joe Smithson, then hand polishes and laps the mounts before installing them on bases he makes himself. He has also modified the system to work on other actions or even on double rifles. It’s the relentless pursuit of perfection, and it’s so successful that he makes them for both Westley Richards and Purdey.

I admit to being a sentimental fool – just ask my wife – and I get swept away by romance when I should probably stick to practicality. Certain words and names conjure up irresistible images of adventure and excitement. Winchester, Parker, Holland & Holland, 416 Rigby, 30-30, .375 H&H, .30-06, and of course, .275 Rigby. 275 Rigby? It may be relatively unknown in America, but it is a distinguished and popular round in England. It is the round we associate with tiger hunter Jim Corbett and elephant hunter WMD “Karamojo” Bell, and it doesn’t get more adventurous and exciting than that.

The .275 was originally developed by Mauser in 1892 as a military round, designated the 7X57mm or 7X57 Mauser, or even sometimes the 7X57 Spanish Mauser, since the Spanish army was the first to adopt it. In case you were busy passing notes to the cheerleader seated next to you in history class, I will remind you the 7X57 is the round that caused such enormous losses for Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War. It is also the round that enabled 88,000 Boer guerillas and commandos to fight the might of the British Empire and 500,000 of their soldiers to a humiliating standstill. The British eventually prevailed, but only after instigating a series of scorched-earth tactics whose brutality would today result in Queen Victoria, her Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, and Lord Kitchener all being tried for war crimes in The Hague. (During the last 18 months of the war alone, over 20,000 – some reports put the number at over 26,000 – Boer women and children died in concentration camps.)

John Rigby & Co., originally an Irish firm founded in 1735, moved to London in 1897, and even before the end of the Boer War they already recognized the superiority of both the Mauser bolt action and the 7X57. However, knowing their British market, they offered the gun under the designation .275 Rigby, but by either name the round earned a reputation for accuracy and low recoil. And effectiveness: no less an authority than the late Finn Aagaard, who touted the 7X57 as a superior deer rifle and excellent all-round big game cartridge, reported that he once fired 173-grain solids from a 7X57 at plywood boards and achieved more penetration than he did with a 400-grain from a .416.

Ballistically, it is a little less powerful than the .270 Winchester, but an excellent choice for deer, antelope, wild boar, even much of African plains game. It is not a long-distance cartridge, but at moderate distances (out to 300 yards) it is extraordinarily effective.

The .275 Rigby is virtually identical to the 7X57, with the same case dimensions, the primary difference being that the 7mm is commercially available in more bullet weights than the .275.

The .275 Rigby Joe Smithson sent me was built on a Granite Mountain square bridge action. Granite Mountain Arms is a Phoenix, AZ based company that produces (in their own words) “the highest quality precision Mauser 98 style action ever produced… …the world’s finest double square bridge magnum action…” Based on Joe Smithson’s rifle, I tend to agree with their claims.

The Mauser action makes a great hunting rifle, especially for dangerous game, for the same reason (among others) that it made a great military rifle: that loose, sloppy action is very forgiving. If you fall on your face in the sand with a buttery-smooth action with close tolerances, like some of the old Mannlicher-Schoenauers or Colt-Sauers, you may have to take the gun apart before you can work the action again. I went bottom over teakettle down an embankment with a Colt Sauer many years ago, and it took about five minutes for me to get enough grit and dirt out to be able to extract the bolt. Five minutes in the sunshine on fine, cold day in southern Utah doesn’t seem like much. Five minutes in Alaska in the company of a grizzly who has lost his sense of humor might seem like an eternity. Fall on your face with the Mauser and its loose tolerances allow you to force the action. (The original Mauser 1898 had a bolt handle that jutted out at 90-degrees so that clumsy soldiers could use their boots to kick the action open or shut.)

Granite Mountain actions are CNC machined out of 8620 steel and case hardened. The receiver has an integral ‘C’ ring and a drop-bottom box with a hinged floor plate. The bolt has dual opposed locking lugs and a third safety lug, a recessed bolt face, a modified bolt handle to accommodate scopes, and the traditional three position wing safety. It comes with adjustable sporting trigger, and everything is hand lapped and hand polished. Of course Joe Smithson, being a perfectionist, does his own lapping and polishing on top of that, and the result is an action as slick and smooth as a politician chasing votes, but with Mauser’s loose and forgiving tolerances.

I have been privileged to shoot a good number of custom rifles built on Mauser actions and whatever hand polishing has been done by the maker has been superseded by that looseness. Not so with Joe Smithson’s work. It is still has that Mauser looseness, but it was without a doubt the smoothest Mauser I have ever handled.

I fired four five-shot groups, and with the exception of one stray (doubtless caused by a combination of global warming and the tilting of the earth on its axis) all four groups were under one inch. In one group that rifle put two bullets so perfectly into one hole that it took me a while to realize I hadn’t missed the target altogether. In another group three bullets created a single modified clover leaf under half an inch. Oh, yeah!

Perfection does not come cheap, but whenever a tool transcends mere function to become a work of art, price is no longer the issue. If you can afford to consider buying a custom firearm of this quality, what you are paying for is much more than just a hunting rifle. You are paying for the pursuit of perfection, a pursuit that takes you all the way back to the Clovis spear point.

The recent Navy Yard shooting has prompted entirely predictable calls for even more draconian gun regulation, with the bulk of both politicians and private citizens calling for a ban (I use that term loosely to encompass the wide range of restrictions being called for) of AR15 semi-automatic rifles.

I was a little perplexed as to why the focus seemed to be so strongly on AR15s, when the shooter at the Navy Yard used a shotgun, but the fact is that the initial outcry was raised against America’s most popular rifle by both news agencies and politicians. (CNN distinguished itself by reporting the news both more correctly and less correctly in a single sentence by claiming the shooter used an AR15 shotgun; there is no such animal.)

The Navy Yard shooting has even prompted a call from an English newspaper (The Observer) for international intervention into America’s “gun problem,” citing international law and equating America’s “gun problem” to a “civil war.” Leaving aside the fact that tens of thousands of private gun-owning American citizens voluntarily sent tens of thousands of their privately owned firearms to England during World War Two so that that unarmed populace might defend itself in the event of German invasion; and leaving aside the fact that if it hadn’t been for American military intervention in World War Two, the journalist in question would be writing his column in German; and leaving aside the fact that Great Britain’s Parliament recently voted against joining America in intervention against a Syrian dictator who has violated international law by using chemical weapons of mass destruction on his own people; leaving all of that aside, I was perplexed by the shrill focus on a firearm that wasn’t used, and in the course of doing some research, I came up with some interesting figures from the most unbiased and objective source I could think of, the FBI.

According to the FBI 2011 crime statistics:

—Homicide rates have gone down, for all categories of weapons, including firearms, over the last five years for which records are available, with the sole exception of explosives, where the rate increased. (In fact, all violent crime—murder, rape, assault, robbery—rates in the US have declined steadily since 1993.) There was a very slight (1.3%) rise in the total number of homicides in 2012, but it is too early yet to know if that indicates a trend or is simply an anomaly.

—In all states over the last five years, for all categories of weapons, handguns predominate in all homicides, being used far more often than rifles of any kind. Rifles account for roughly 3% of all homicides committed by firearms nationwide. The sole exception in the last year was Connecticut, that state’s records being skewed by the tragedy at Newtown.

—The number of felons killed during the commission of a felony by a private citizen with a firearm over the same five year period increased by about 8%. Handguns accounted for most uses, but the number of justifiable homicides by a private citizen with a rifle also increased, by approximately 6%.

So if the number of private citizens defending themselves with firearms is rising as the number of homicides committed with firearms is declining, why is anyone calling for more laws to take firearms out of the hands of law-abiding private citizens? And if the percentage of rifles used by private citizens for self-defense is roughly double the percentage of rifles used in homicides, why is there a problem with AR15s, that being one of the most widely owned rifles in America?

Finally, referring to all firearms of every stripe, if firearm ownership had any correlation to homicide, logic would dictate that places (be it nations, states, counties, or cities) with higher rates of firearms ownership would have higher per capita rates of homicide. Since the opposite is true, it is hard to make a case that disarming law-abiding citizens results in a safer, gentler society. America has, by an incredible margin, the world’s highest per capita rate of gun ownership, but her per capita rate of homicide by any and all means isn’t even close to that of Mexico, where private gun ownership isn’t possible, and Mexico makes South Africa and most of the rest of Africa, as well as Brazil and almost every other South or Latin American country, look safe and gentle. In fact, if you look at all types of violent crime generally (murder, assault, rape, robbery) Great Britain makes America’s most dangerous cities look safer than Disneyland, Great Britain having a higher violent crime rate than any other nation in the European Union or even South Africa.

But their journalists should lecture us?

And now Barack Obama has called for more gun-control measures.

“As long as there as those who fight to make it as easy as possible for dangerous people to get their hands on guns, then we’ve got to work as hard as we can for the sake of our children… to do more work to make it harder… The fact that we do not have a firm enough background-check system is something that makes us more vulnerable to these kinds of mass shootings…”

Other than the drug cartels, who have little voice so far in American politics (I hope), I know of no individual or group or organization that wants to make it easier for dangerous people to get their hands on guns. But leaving that aside, when it comes to calling for firm background-checks, Mr. Obama is on shaky ground. The Federal government’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) proudly boasts that it has made over one hundred million checks in the last decade, resulting in over seven hundred thousand denials. That’s admirable, certainly something to boast about. Unfortunately, it qualifies as selective boasting. According to that rabidly pro-gun conservative newspaper, The Washington Post, their own fact-checker found that in 2010, out of seventy-three thousand total denials, forty-eight thousand were felons or fugitives who were prevented from purchasing a firearm. That’s good. (The difference between the two numbers represents mistakes of one kind or another: misidentification, similarity of names, numbers transposed, various other clerical errors.) What is not good, or even comprehensible, is that of the forty-eight thousand felons and fugitives who committed perjury and violated federal law by attempting to purchase a firearm, only forty-four (44) people were prosecuted. Forty-four prosecutions out of forty-eight thousand felony violations. That’s 0.06%, down from a whopping high of 0.20% back in 2005. Uh, excuse me, but if you’re not going to bother enforcing the laws you make, why make them?

You will forgive me if I am as unimpressed by Mr. Obama’s call for expanded background checks as I am by the lectures of English journalists.

I received a comment in response to “Thank God Our Elected Officials Are Looking Out for Us!” It came from a man with impeccable credentials in various fields, a man who is nobody’s fool, but he said one thing I take exception to:

“I personally do not find anything aesthetic about [firearms] (though I know others do rever [sic] them as works of art).”

If you’ve ever read this blog, you know I love firearms and make a portion of my living writing about them. I suspect this love of firearms is a result of my father patiently and consistently taking me to the arms and armor galleries of countless museums when I was a child. This almost certainly had less to do with his own interest in firearms (which was less than zero) and more to do with his understanding of how to get a small boy drugged on art and culture in general. My father was an extraordinary man; take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.

In addition to a love of firearms (and knives, swords, armor, the whole nine yards), one of the consequences of this early exposure was a fascination with any tool that is also a functional work of art. A quick list off the top of my head would include firearms, knives, saddles, bits, spurs, certain silver items, equine tools such as headstalls and mecates out of braided rawhide or horsehair (a process called hitching), certain antique cars, and I’m sure there are others that haven’t swum across my ken.

I could make an argument that an AR15 is as aesthetically pleasing as a hammer or wrench or any other tool that is perfectly distilled down to its functional essence to make it as efficient as possible, but let’s go for the more obvious examples.

Consider the lines of a fine side-by-side shotgun, a tool that has also been distilled down over the last one hundred and fifty years to its functional essence. Forget any fancy metal work or wood work; just look at the spare elegance of an Abbiatico & Salvinelli round-action shotgun,

or the classic lines of  Lebeau-Courally bolt action rifle Hemingway would have been proud to carry.

Both of these display the same kind of elegant and functional simplicity you might find on a Clovis arrowhead; all three, shotgun, rifle, and arrowhead, are made aesthetically pleasing by being perfectly designed for their purpose, with nothing extraneous or distracting. Still not convinced? Let’s take it a step further and look at some engraving.

Ken Hunt’s magic on a Purdey action.

McKay Brown’s adaptation of the classic Celtic knot.

A Civil War battle scene on a Piotti.

A Westley-Richards sidelock.

A mule deer by Tommy Kaye on a pistol grip cap.

Charles Lee’s engraving on a Dale Tate shotgun.

You may not wish to own such things—or any kind of firearm, for that matter—but no one can deny the artistic merit of these most basic tools.

Take a moment to check out the workmanship of some of the greatest artists living today at the Traditional Cowboy Arts Association http://tcowboyarts.org/ the American Custom Gunmakers Guild http://www.acgg.org/ and the American Bladesmith Society http://www.americanbladesmith.com/

The tool as art is one of the greatest accomplishments of the foolish human animal.

I live in California. There was a time when saying that would have made me the envy of practically everyone in America who didn’t live in California. After all, what’s not to like: lovely, temperate climate; beautiful and varied terrain, with something for everything; almost a thousand miles of breathtaking coastline; vineyards galore; world-class restaurants in practically every city; some of the greatest universities and colleges in the world; some of the most spectacular natural wonders the world has to offer, from Yosemite to giant sequoias to the redwood forests to… The list goes on.

Unfortunately, all of those positive delights are outweighed by the negatives, which can be summed up in one word: politicians.

Pretty much of all of them stink, but one of our state senators, Dianne Feinstein, has raised the bar for egregious hypocrisy and stupidity. Let’s take a quick look at the hypocrisy first.

Senator Feinstein has gone on record as stating that, if she could, she would confiscate every firearm in private hands in America: “If I could have gotten one more vote in the senate, it would been, ‘Mr. and Mrs. American, turn them all in.’” And yet, while she was still a supervisor in San Francisco, she herself had a coveted concealed carry permit and carried a handgun.

No hypocrisy in that. I’m responsible and trustworthy, but you, little insignificant you, are not.

“As a supervisor, I had no protection, so I got a gun permit and learned to shoot at the Police Academy. When I became mayor, I succeeded in passing a measure banning handguns in San Francisco…”

And certainly no hypocrisy in that statement, by golly.

Of course, one could argue that whatever training she received at the Police Academy was just enough to make her almost as much of a menace to society as getting elected, because she clearly didn’t learn the fundamental rules of gun safety, such as never, ever putting your finger on the trigger of a firearm until you are ready to shoot. Look at the photograph above. It does make you tremble to think about those law enforcement officers in the city by the bay.

Now let’s take a look at the stupidity.

Senator Feinstein’s “Assault Weapons Ban,” (and I won’t waste your time enumerating the fallacies and inaccuracies of her bill) was delayed when Senator John Coryn (R-Texas) tried to include a provision that would allow military veterans to purchase “assault weapons” the same way that retired law enforcement officers are allowed to. Here is Senator Feinstein’s verbatim response to the proposal:

“The problem with expanding this is that, you know, with the advent of PTSD, which I think is a new phenomenon as a product of the Iraq War, it’s not clear how the seller or transfer of a firearm covered by this bill would verify that an individual was a member or veteran and there was no impairment of that individual with respect to having a weapon like this.”

Try parsing that sentence. English we speak here very much. But let’s examine the content of her garblings. If you’ve read my memoir, An Accidental Cowboy, you know that I spent ten years dealing with the effects, both direct and corollary, of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, so this is something I feel qualified to comment on. PTSD is not merely the product of war. It can be caused by rape (which might have been prevented, had the victim been allowed to carry a firearm), by a non-fatal assault, a natural disaster, a car accident, virtually any traumatic experience which causes the victim to feel helpless. It can even be caused indirectly by, for example, the sudden death of a loved one, or witnessing a traumatic event. So while PTSD is certainly most commonly associated with war, it is not the exclusive provenance of man’s inhumanity to man.

But what really caught my eye and made my blood pressure go up into quadruple digits was the phrase, “…with the advent of PTSD, which I think is a new phenomenon as a product of the Iraq War…” I mean, how ignorant do you have to be to get elected as a public servant? It just so happens I am currently reading Son of the Morning Star, Evan S. Connell’s coruscating portrait of George Armstrong Custer and the battle of The Little Bighorn, and the evening before I stumbled across Senator Feinstein’s eloquent and graceful and oh so insightful thumbnail of PTSD, I read about Captain Thomas Weir, one of the very few survivors of that horrific day. This is Connell: “Less than six months after the battle he died. He was thirty-eight. His physician told Elizabeth” (Custer) “that when Weir arrived in New York he was depressed and nervous. He spent most of his time in one room, avoiding everybody. Toward the end he became so nervous that he was unable to swallow.”

“The advent of PTSD?” “A new phenomenon?” “A product of the Iraq War?” I think we can safely say that PTSD has been with us as long as war has.

Senator Feinstein continued: “I think we have to—if you’re going to do this, find a way that veterans who are incapacitated for one reason or another mentally, don’t have access to this kind of weapon.” Incapacitated?

Well, well, well. Ms. Feinstein, my dear Ms. Feinstein, wouldn’t it be nice to have at least some rudimentary grasp of issues before you pontificate on them? First of all, your implication is that PTSD is the exclusive provenance of veterans. Do you really think that police work is such a stress-free walk in the park that retired law enforcement officers, who are allowed to own what you inaccurately refer to as “assault weapons,” are invariably free from any of the residual effects of shooting and killing people, or being shot at, or just by seeing some of the unimaginable horrors that make up their daily work? And what makes you think PTSD is universally and invariably “incapacitating?” Was William Manchester, who suffered from PTSD and its corollary depression (a result of his service in World War Two, before PTSD existed, according to you) “incapacitated?” (You might want to read his brilliant account of his “incapacitation,” Goodbye Darkness.) Is your colleague, John McCain, “incapacitated?” How about British comedian-actor-writer Spike Milligan? He managed to accomplish quite a lot in spite of being “incapacitated.” My wife claims I am incapacitated every time I try to balance the checkbook, but leaving that overrated activity aside, I’ve managed to hang on without perpetrating any grotesque crimes. How about the countless thousands upon thousand of veterans who have come back from Iraq and Afghanistan with PTSD who live quiet and productive lives and are at least as responsible as any idiot who poses in the senate with her finger on the trigger of a gun.

January 19^th, 2013, has been designated as “Gun Appreciation Day.” Uh, no, not by the federal government; by a coalition of groups that all support the second amendment of the U. S. Constitution. Some of these groups I belong to or support; some I have only heard of; some I’ve never heard of; some I have heard of, but they seem a little too far over the top—or to the right—for my taste. But what’s interesting about this is that it appears to be the first ever (that I’m aware of) attempt to show legitimate, quasi-mainstream (to the extent the internet can be considered mainstream) support for gun ownership. Which brings us to the crux of the issue.

Chris Dorsey, CEO and President of Orion Entertainment, an outdoor television production company, once told me that when he was in high school in Wisconsin he and his best friend used to ride their bikes to school during hunting season with their shotguns on the handlebars. At school, they would give the guns to the principal, who would lean them up in the corner of his office, and after school Chris and his friend would pheasant hunt their way home. That was only about thirty years ago, but it seems now like such an old-fashioned, long ago and far away thing for boys to do, Huck Finn drifting down the Mississippi on his raft. And yet it was in most of the country, until recently, just as much a normal, quintessential American activity as playing baseball, the kind of scene Norman Rockwell might have painted.

How did the gun, any kind of gun, become demonized? Why have so many Americans, primarily white, liberal, affluent, urban and suburban Americans, become so virulently afraid of guns?

Gun control of any kind is, by definition, racist. The vast majority of violent crime occurs in impoverished, inner-city areas. The vast majority of residents of impoverished inner-city neighborhoods are minorities, primarily black and Hispanic. Should those residents not be allowed to protect themselves? Are so many white, liberal, affluent, urban and suburban Americans really so racist that they consider minority lives snuffed out in ghettoes a small price to pay for their own safety?

Gun control is, by definition, sexist. Women are usually smaller and less able to defend themselves than men. Rape and sexual assault are becoming “more common throughout the world” (Source: Wikipedia, quoting a United Nations survey), with approximately one out of every six (or seven, depending on your source) American college women reporting a rape, yet nine out of ten rape victims never tell anyone what was done to them. Those are college women. I have no reason to believe the situation is better for poorer women unable to afford a college education. Do white, liberal, affluent, urban and suburban Americans care so little about their wives and daughters that they would put their own safety first?

And the ugliest truth of all is that gun control is, by definition, elitist. Most victims of every type of crime, violent or non-violent, are those people who are least able to protect themselves, physically or financially. Politicians and celebrities and the wealthy or well-connected can afford armed bodyguards; they and the affluent can afford to live in neighborhoods with low rates of crime; they can afford to live in homes with alarm systems. Are white, liberal, affluent, urban and suburban Americans so arrogant and callous as to believe they are the only ones who deserve to be protected?

Ever since the first ape whacked another ape over the head with a bone and got more of the berries to eat, man the tool-using animal, has always been armed. It was only toward the end of the industrial revolution, when lifestyles and living patterns throughout most of the world were changed by industry, and more people became more affluent, that for the first time in history a man would or could go out without an armed retinue to protect him, or, if he were less wealthy, with a sword or a pistol on his belt to do the protecting himself. Is there any white, liberal, affluent, urban or suburban person out there so naïve as to believe that countless hundreds of thousands of years of evolution can be undone in a handful of generations? Or, more ridiculously, by the scribbling of a presidential pen? Focusing on the gun as a casual agent is completely inexplicable. If you follow that logic, the next time you go to a concert, wait until Yo Yo Ma leaves the stage and then applaud his cello.

Now, according to columnist Philip Rucker, writing for the Washington Post, “…the White House is working with its allies on a well-financed campaign in Washington and around the country to shift public opinion toward stricter gun laws and provide political cover to lawmakers who end up voting for an assault-weapons ban or other restrictions on firearms.” Is the current administration so elitist as to believe they are the only ones who deserve to be able to protect themselves? Are they so naïve that they really believe they can pass more laws to make crime more illegal? Are their own careers more important to them than reality?

I posted a blog a while back in response to someone’s criticism of me for making my living, in part, by testing firearms. In retrospect, that was only a half-honest response, because in the same batch of emails was one from a person who expressed interest in reading some of my gun writing. At the time, I sort of dismissed the writer of that second email as just another loosely hinged right-wing extremist loony in a tinfoil hat, just like me, but then I got another request to read what I had to say about guns. So, with that in mind…

Astute and observant visitors to this web site will already have noticed that the “Short Stories” tab has been changed to the “Other Writings” tab. Since profiles of my erstwhile co-star Gerald McRaney or bullfighter Rob Smets, or—for that matter—a profile of a firearm, hardly qualify as short stories, I felt it better to expand the meaning and possibilities of the title.

I’ll start with something out of the ordinary.

Cowboss

In cattle country you learn that it is not unusual for a cowboy to drive—or ride a horse—many miles out of his way to talk to you face-to-face rather than use the telephone, so I wasn’t surprised to see a beat-up truck with an even more dilapidated stock trailer drive up the lane toward my house. It was late evening, all coral and turquoise, the last day of quail season. Normally, I would still have been out somewhere with my goofy Pudelpointer, but I had just had my shoulder rebuilt and couldn’t lift a shotgun, and my old dog was so arthritic that he was almost as useless as his owner, so I was at my desk, trying to make the best of a bad situation.

I didn’t recognize the truck or trailer. When they stopped in front of the house I could see two horses silhouetted, one still saddled, both drooping with exhaustion. When the driver got out all I could really identify was a mountain of man, but that only narrowed it down to half a dozen possibilities. He had a gun case in one hand.

What happened next is absolutely true, but I have changed all names, all identifying characteristics, numbers, provenances, everything that might give away the cowboy’s identity. This is at his request, and I don’t question his motives.

I shall call him Joe. I’ve known him for several years and I once almost bought a horse from him. He has a reputation in our neck of the woods as being one of the best all-round cowboys there is: good horseman, good cattleman, good ranch manager, good steward of the land he is responsible for, honest, and bull-tough. You wouldn’t want to be rude to his wife or daughter.

He limped into the house. Like all cowboys, he has had his share of wrecks, but he looked even more crippled up than usual. He refused anything to drink, and chatted with my wife for a moment, and when I commented on his looking especially tired and busted-up he grinned.

“Yeah, we were gathering out on _________’s place and I knew it wouldn’t take too long so I brought my shotgun along, got a last limit of quail. I’m getting a little old and fat to be hauling my carcass up and down these hills without a horse under me. But that’s what I wanted to see you about. __________ said I should show you this gun, said you know a lot about guns.”

“Joe, I don’t know a lot about anything and the older I get the less I know about everything, but I’m happy to do whatever I can for you.”

We went into my office and he laid the case across the arms of a chair and sat in another.

He said, “Let me tell you first how I got this. Back when I was riding for the…” he named a ranch about two hours away “…there was this old boy owned a small piece of land that bordered the ranch. He was a retired college professor, no cowboy or anything like that, so when some cows busted through the fence one Sunday, I went over and got them out of his tomatoes, fixed the fence and all, and this old boy and I got to talking. Make a long story short, we kind of got to be pretty good friends. I did a couple favors for him over the years, went along and held his hand once or twice when he had to get his grandson out of jail, a few other things. And that’s how I come to have this. See, the professor’s son died a while back and the only kin the old boy had was the grandson and he’s about as worthless as man can be and still be breathing. Drugs and stealing and all like that. Well, the professor come down with some lung trouble and he knew he was on his way out, so he called me last year, said the damned grandson was going to get everything, but the professor didn’t want him to have this shotgun. Wanted me to have it, on account of our being friends and all. Said it had been made special for his daddy a long time back and was pretty valuable. And now _________ says he thinks it’s valuable, told me to come see you, find out what it’s worth.”

I have been down this road many times. Everyone who has ever found an old firearm in Grandma’s attic is convinced he has a priceless treasure. It may happen, but not to me or anyone I know. The owner of the local tire shop in my town went to a garage sale where an elderly gent was selling two rifles and a shotgun. The tire dealer only wanted one of the rifles, but the old boy wouldn’t sell them separately; it was all or nothing. I happened to drop by to get my tires rotated a week or so later and it turned out the shotgun was a Parker VH, not in the best condition, but probably worth about twice what the tire dealer had paid for all three guns. That’s the closest I’ve ever personally come to treasure in the attic, and I had no reason to believe this would be any different.

But the human animal is by nature an optimist. PBS has done very well capitalizing on that fact with their Antiques Roadshow. Joe heaved himself up and unzipped the canvas case.

The value of a thing is dependent on many factors, but the quality of a thing is much easier to recognize and quantify. It has nothing to do with personal choices. You may not wish to hang a Rembrandt in your living room, but unless your IQ is smaller than your hat size you’ll recognize the quality of one regardless of whether it’s in pristine condition or in need of major restoration.

What I saw lying in that old-fashioned canvas slip-case was pure unadulterated quality. It was a sidelock over-and-under with double triggers, and I’m not a particular fan of over-and-unders, preferring side-by-sides, but it made no difference. The lines, the proportions, the elegance of the thing were overwhelming. The damn gun had charisma.

I moved the case to my desk and turned on the table lamp. Somehow, unlikely as it may seem, I had a pretty good idea what I was going to see. The top barrel was engraved, “Boss & Co., 13 Dover Street, Piccadilly, London, England.”

In case there is anyone unfamiliar with Boss shotguns, let me say that most of the truly knowledgeable and wealthy gun collectors I have ever met consider Boss to be the ne plus ultra of shotguns. Throughout its long career (dating back to 1773 or 1812, depending on how you look at it) the company has never built anything other than a ‘best’ gun, and never compromised their quality. Or their prices: the company itself proudly quotes no less a gun enthusiast than King George VI, who wasn’t exactly strapped for cash, but when asked if he had ever thought about ordering a Boss, he replied, “A Boss gun! A Boss gun! Bloody beautiful, but too bloody expensive!”

On my desk lay a gun too good for a king.

In four decades of mooning over high-end guns I couldn’t possibly afford, it was one of only two or three Boss shotguns I have ever laid eyes upon, and the first over-and-under. It was also the first time I have ever held one, and I began to appreciate the mystic that makes them so desired.

In addition to their reputation for the ultimate in quality and high price, Boss are famous for their over-and-under design, which is slimmer and shallower than any other. They achieve this by machining bites into the barrel face, allowing the bolts in the breech to enter the bites, eliminating any need for underlumps. The result is a low profile that allows the gun to be fitted with a straight grip and splinter fore-end that aligns the shooter’s hands as perfectly as a side-by-side. That design was created by John Robertson, who became a partner in Boss in 1891 and who eventually became sole owner. Robertson also created a unique ejector, and a single trigger design that became the subject of a lawsuit between Boss and Purdey.

This particular gun had twenty-eight inch barrels, delicate rose-and-scroll engraving, two Robertson patent numbers (for the fastening bolt and the ejector; if it had had a single trigger there would, presumably, have been a third Robertson patent number), multiple proofing numbers, and a gold oval with the initials of the man for whom it was originally made. The serial number placed the date of manufacture after World War One and before the Great Depression. (It actually placed the gun to a specific year, but I’m not eager to have Joe appear on my doorstep in a bad mood.) The gun showed the kind and degree of wear consistent with hard use and good care.

And that was it. I did some research for Joe, gave him what information I could, and then he drove off with his tired horses and his piece of perfection. I’ve asked him to consider adopting me, but I don’t think that plan is working so well.