The Gun Blogs

I deer hunt in South Carolina where you can see up to about a 300 yard shot. I hunt with a Winchester Model 70 7mm Rem Mag. Does anybody think that is to much gun?

In comments here I take David U. to task for this:

I am a member of NRA, I pay only the annual membership fee because I believe in the Proper interpretation of the 2nd Amendment. I own Guns, including personal Handguns and I have a concealed carry lic. in Tex. That said, I have complained to Mr. Lapierre (no reasponse) re: the stand on the Assault Rifle
...
Assault weapons are for Combat, I don’t see the need or the use for them in any other venue. If it is for Gun Collections and/or plinking, well, there are ways to enjoy that activity without owning full auto weapons.
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I just have a problem with weapons designed specifically for combat ( i.e. FULL automatic weapons and those that can be changed to full auto. ) being in the hands of the general public, that is not personal protection, that is something else.

It's like he never heard of Zumbo. Or Jackson.

UPDATE Oh, great, my comment hasn't shown up yet. I'll keep an eye on it.

UPDATE the Second: It's up! Here's some of it:

I’m in the NRA too (Life Member), and what you have to understand is this: Once the gun-grabbing politicians get my “assault weapon”, how long will it be before they come for your “high-powered sniper rifle” aka Grandpa’s 30-06 with the 4x scope? Add to this the fact that urban sprawl and environmental groups are taking hunting lands away at an alarming rate, do you really want to alienate a large portion of the gun owning community by throwing them under the bus, just to save your part of the hobby?

You’re more than welcome to come to my blog and discuss this. Making arguments like yours helps no one.

Related material from Sebastian.

Ya know, at first I didn't realize that was Greta Van Susternenenen's blog. =)

This is what I think.

I just bought a Remington 770 .308. And the bolt handle is a bit hard to tap down when i push it to the reciever. I am new to bolt action rifles, so i would like to know if all bolt action rifles are like that or if i just have a defected one.

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Well, another shooting at a school. When are people going to learn? Now, everybody's going to be yelling more gun controll and we need better gun laws. ever woundered how a single person can walk into a room and blow away 30 people? What do you think would have happened if he walked into class and shot the teacher and then turned and looked at the class only to see most of the class was pointing a gun at him just before they blew him away. IF YOU WANT MORE GUN CONTROLL, HAVE EVERYONE BUY A GUN AND KEEP IT ON THEM AT ALL.I think the good people who go by the law far out numbers the bad people. Then it would be just a matter of time before all the bad guys are done in. I do know this, You would never hear of anyone killing 30 + people. I know that after they shot one person, SOMEBODY is going to shoot them. Think about it? Woodzman

By woodzman

This is pretty much what you'd expect from PETA.

Installing more metal detectors and locking school doors is all well and good, but it’s not enough. Unless our leaders also examine the hunting culture in rural America—where most mass school shootings take place—and its role in these disturbing incidents, little will change.

Oh, it gets worse:

Not everyone who stalks and kills animals will stalk and kill a human. But every person who picks up a gun, aims it at another living being and fires must deaden a piece of his heart. It’s bad enough when adults are the ones pulling the trigger, but we are turning our children into killers as well.

Yep, hunters are heartless murderers. And by teaching our kids to hunt, we are making them the same. Though I'm thinking that the just as many of the school shooting were perpetrated by people who never had contact with hunting. Not that PETA's article gives any stats, but why offer any facts beyond a couple of examples where there contention works.

Couldn't be that the killers were broken in some other way. Just happens a couple of them had participated in hunting. This contention is as weak as blaming violent TV shows or violent video games. Not that they have any real evidence, but they think that the the government should look into the connections.

Nothing like moving your agenda ahead on the deaths of the unfortunate few.

This morning marked the end of the Coon Wars. The last casualty was a grown male who was suckered into the Hav-A-Hart by marshmallows. I had to walk over to the neighbors to borrow a firearm since I had left my ancient Mark 1 at home. The neighbor had a .22 Ruger Single Six. The body is in the clean-up zone for the Black Vultures.
I had caught the opossum three times- enough so that he was getting used to me dumping him out of the trap and putting him on the same log. He's going to get a name if he shows up again.
I reset the trap with marshmallows. Tomorrow I will check and see what's around. The deer can handle two or three coons under a feeder, but six or eight seems to keep them away. Three down. Might go to four, but basically, the raccoon war is over.

The lake today was very calm and quiet under rumbling skies. The light is really laying over early and late and taking on that summer slant. Very nice.

I walked down to the feeder and the same oppossum was inside...playing dead. He rolled over on his back and hung his tongue out the side.

I dumped him on the forest debris. He lay still a moment, then started cutting his eyes around checking out the situation. I rolled him over with a toe and booted him toward the nearest tree. He climbed it, hand over hand. Possums have opposable thumbs...why aren't they smarter?

When he got eye level on the sassafrass sapling he stopped and I told him: "You can't step twice in the same river." He had a full red-blue tick on his ear. Zen thought is spare even for a marsupial.

Opossum in the trap. They are fools for cat food so I guess he ignored the coon gore and waltzed in. Probably not a linen table cloth kind of diner anyway...
Possums only live about 2 1/2 years and look pretty ragged by the end of the second year. This one was young and fresh. Probably born a few months ago. He gave me the gaping teeth look but I just shook him out of the trap and re-set it. Possums are all bluff until they start playing dead. I picked him up by the tail and put him on a treetrunk. He finally wandered off.

I think marsupials are just a little embarrassed about being left behind in the evolutionary wars.

A few years ago I caught the same two foxes repeatedly. They never seemed to catch on. Both of them developed big scabs on the top of their noses from trying to escape through a one-inch square in the wire.

Or maybe catfood is worse than crack for foxes. At any rate:"Smart as a Fox" isn't saying much.

Black Vultures and Turkey vultures are busy over the remains of coon number two. If I get number three the war may be over, or I may push for four.

No photos on the camera. It just sits there like an idiot until I walk up. The latest smart tech...and it's about possum level.

Posting a photo of the redheads knees with chigger bites..pardon..I mean bugs of color bites. She's really sensitive to them.

Seems like more evidence that God drinks.

Two velvet bucks were in the pasture across from the lake so I pulled over and watched them with binocs for a bit. The biggest one was a deer that's been on cam a lot. I don't have a name for him but I'm sure he's in last years file. He's out past his G-1s with thick bases. The other was out about three inches and very thin. Side by side you could see that the bigger buck was about 1/3 larger in body mass. They still looked skinny in red summer coats. They casually jumped two fences and ambled into the woods close to one of the camera sites.

Maybe a 2 1/2 and 3 1/2 old deer. I'm not sure I am shooting any at the lake this year.

The corner of the pasture had ten Black Vultures, all looking like gangly first years, picking at the remains of the coon carcass. I drove through slowly and they watched from about 15 yards away, but nobody flew.

The coon trap was empty and silent and strangely: still set. Lots of corn on the ground and corn and catfood in the trap. Are coons THIS smart that they would abandon a site after one catch? I figured at least an idiot squirrel.

Nothing on the camera. It's the useless Moultrie 100.

I stirred the coals of the burn pile and got it flaming again. I'm still carting in logs from all over the lot and rolling pine sections cut by the illegal alien tree crews that TXU hired to clear the powerline right-of-ways in the spring. They cut several trees for me while they were in the area. Believe me, they weren't working THAT hard. Several times I drove in to find them sitting around on my yard admiring the view. I always walked down to try out my Spanish.

The redhead is covered with chigger bites she got out here. I'm untouched. She must have brushed a egg-case worth somewhere and they all spread out and dug in. She had a hard time sleeping last night with the itching. Pretty miserable. Good reason to burn the lot off once a year.

I'm hitting all the poison ivy with Round-up. Very satisfying. Seems to be handling it.

You really get to know a yard when you are in charge of keeping it. I'm trying to keep this one in line with just a couple of hours every two days. My step father kept it to golf-course standards. I'll be lucky to maintain a clearing in the forest. It RAINS twigs. When it gets bored with that it drops a treetop. In between it lays on a coat of leaves. I'm finding big chunks of concrete, barrell hoops, bits of dead appliances. They are all going to a dumpster in town.

Two shiney black pine beetles came out of the end of a rotten log I laid across the fire. I'm sure they had never been out in the light and open before. I flicked them out with a rake tine and tossed them into the duff away from the heat. Not everyone gets second chances, but they did.

Yesterdays raccoon is an empty shell in the corner of the pasture. The heat and the Turkey Vultures did their work. Not much left except skin and bones. No smell.

The trap is empty today. And sprung. They refused to go inside and dug the catfood out from underneath it.

Raccoons can LEARN...and in this they seem much smarter than Republican Congressmen.

I rebaited and set it with LOTS of corn and catfood. I moved it where it's not sitting on easily diggable duff. My first reaction will be to move it to the other feeder site. Then I will try leg-hold traps. I'm going to learn too.

Cut fallen treetops and picked up the unending rain of twigs in the yard. I fired up the burn pile and fed it for a couple of hours. Fed the geese. The yard and lot is full of holes where armadillos have dug out turtle eggs. There was even a big divot on the sandy beach next to the boathouse with turtle eggshells floating in the waters edge. I don't know if those hatched and fled or if I am looking at the remains of more coon-work.

I'm enduring a environmental change of some sort. Pine trees that are 40-50 years old are dying and falling. They are about 80 feet tall, so its a mess as they come down one or two a year. I bet when the indians lived on this ridge they had it picked clean of every twig while keeping the village fires going. Now it's just me and my loppers and saw.

One camera runs well and the other one is basically a waste of battery time. They are both Moultries. The good one- with 195 photos, shows a young buck just growing horns. Looks like a really bad rack and late to be growing. His face shows such definition that I think he is over the 2 1/2 year mark. Haven't seen the big one in velvet on the cams the last week.

It wasn't just the six to eight raccoons that were showing up eating deer corn on the gamecams, it was the fact that some of them, while they weren't eating corn, were DOING it, to make MORE coons. I finally decided I was going cut the numbers. On camera, I could see that the coons and the deer didn't get along. It wasn't a problem for nearly the first two years of deercam/feeder operation but eight coons a night are suppressing the deer. For a year I had no crows, no squirrels, and few coons on the memory cards. I still have zero oppossums or skunks, though I have seen bobcats, fox, and coyote.

The cams are in a large creekbottom area that is a corridor between a beaver-flooded creek and the lakehouses. It's brushy and quiet, a natural game corridor.

Some of these raccoons are big enough to saddle and ride. I thought about using multiple leg-hold traps and shooting the prisoners in the head with my .22 Mk I Ruger, but being a sensitive renaissance type, so I bought a large hav-a-hart cage to catch them in, (Gander Mountain), and THEN shoot them in the head with my Ruger Mk I .22.

I set it at the closest cam. I baited it with dry catfood.

The coons are coming late, around midnight. This morning I walked out to reload the feeder and a young yearling coon was in the trap. She had dug up the duff around the hav-a-hart, so she had been in there for a few hours at least.

I put the barrel through the bars and let her bite it so the shot wouldn't damage the trap. Maybe that's what those long Ruger barrels are for. My girlfriend was with me so I warned her to turn her head.

Afterwards I cut the coon open so the Turkey Vultures would have an easier time and tossed her in the corner of a pasture near the drive. She will be a greasy patch and a piece of fur by tomorrow noon.

More data in the morning. I killed a young coon. Does this mean the older ones were trap-savvy? Will the group learn from the fate of the first? Will it take new tactics, new bait, switching trap locations, changing to leg-hold traps?

I'm going to achieve my goals in the Raccoon War. It will be interesting to watch. I set the trap away from the feeder by a few feet at first, but now its in camera range so I can watch the reaction of the others.

I figure I need to cull five to six of the eight or make them wary around deer corn.

I've been having fun the last two years running a couple of game cameras behind my lakehouse. I own a five acre share on a private lake. The land fronts the lake on one end and a large beaver-flooded swamp bottom on the back. It bisects a natural corridor for game crossing my property.
I had older film game cameras, but they were tasked with elaborate timing schemes to allocate the 36 photos on a roll of film over a several day or weeks time span. The new digital cams don't have that limitation. Instead of 36 frames I have 500 frames so 60 photos of raccoons eating corn just isn't an issue. There is no film processing and I use rechargeable batteries so the cost and convieniance are low.
The history of hunting is basically an information processes: Where are the animals? My lakehouse sits on a sandy ridge that is covered with pre and post-colombian Amerind home sites. Men have hunted off this land from the start of human occupation of the New World. For the first time in the history of that hunting I can collect the data.
I check the cameras every two days. It takes 12 minutes to walk to the cams, pull the memory cards, service the feeders and check sign. One cam is an older moultrie that works very well- averages over 100 photos in two days, the other is a disaster that may have 0-50 photos. It's a later version Moultrie 100 sold through Wal-Mart for 100.00. It's been exchanged at Wal-Mart and sent back to Moultrie. It's better, and Moultrie sent me some free rechargeable batteries for my trouble, but basically its still a piece of trash. I'm going to update it, but with a cam that uses the same batteries and card.
I keep a notebook of photos of the local deer. I've got names for all the bucks and most of the does. When we see an animal now, generally it can be identified specifically and has a history over a couple of seasons. Last year there were eight shootable bucks and a couple of little spikes that looked like they ought to be taken. I rattled up one nice buck and shot him before he got in the blind with me.
I've shot deer with my Ruger #1, a Garand, and an Argentine Cav Mauser.
The land next to me is owned by a rancher who doesn't hunt but has a keen eye for game and land conditions. I gave him a duplicate notebook of deer/coyote photos and update it by putting new pages in his mailbox. Across the swamp the land is owned by a large extended family and so I do the same for them. Both guys are absolutely blown away by the information, but its cheap-printed on plain paper and inserted in plastic sheet protectors and I get better neighbors and good information flow back from them, plus they own most of the land these deer circulate across. The guy across the swamp had to give up hunting due to glaucoma but can see the large printed images.
This week, the deer are not moving much. There's an older resident buck that is in velvet about eight inches out. He's hanging out with a doe, which is a little rare. The does are beginning to get ready to fawn, so they all look very pregnant. Range conditions are very good. The coyotes have rotated out of this part of their range for a bit. The hogs are up the creek but not here. I'm going to have to cull some raccoons, probably with a live trap and .22 pistol.

I noticed that Jeff Cooper was recently extolling the Savage Model 99. (You'll have to scroll for it). Here's a picture I found on the internet, it isn't the exact variation I'm talking about but it gives you a good idea. (I don't have it on hand to photograph).

My dad grew up in a family where there wasn't much "big" game hunting. They had a .22 or two, and feasted frequently on rabbits and squirrels, but as far as I know they never moved up to deer and the like. When he did first begin deer hunting, he did so with a borrowed 8mm Mauser.

When he finally scraped enough money together to purchase his own deer gun, he chose a Savage Model 99 in .243 Winchester. Although he bought a Remington 7mm Magnum many years later, the Savage has always remained his favorite deer gun, and he has taken many whitetails with it through the decades. It has also proven to be the fatal hammer for a number of coyotes. I have taken a few whitetails with it, myself. Once, nearing the end of what had been, for me, a fruitless deer season, I even barked a squirrel with it.

An excellently accurate and very handy rifle. Unfortunately, I have just read that Savage stopped making them in 1999 (I didn't know they had been discontinued). If you run into a used one and it appeals to you, I don't think you can go wrong with adding it to your collection. A number of calibers were chambered for it, but in my experience the most commonly found are .243 and .308.

Some newer models were made with a removable magazine, but the older models (such as my dad's) have a built-in magazine. You open the action and push them in from the top. The .243 version holds 5 rounds in the magazine, if I remember correctly. It does not have an external hammer like the classic lever gun, but does have a safety which both prevents firing and locks the lever closed.

I also spent one very enjoyable day at our private, homemade rifle range putting about 30 rounds through the barrel, first to sight in a new scope, and then just to punch a ragged hole in the target 100 yards away. Just for fun, not because it was necessary or anything. This rifle probably holds its high place in my heart because it was the first centerfire rifle I ever shot.

Crossposted from Blogonomicon, with some minor editing. I just registered and wanted to post something. I hope I got all the formatting right.