Cellar Shooters

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by Bullitt

What do you personally prefer shooting UG? Gun, caliber, etc.

Oh, my. About every sort of shooting has its points, and I appreciate most of 'em, though I can't claim a great depth of experience in any.

Of late, it's mainly been semiauto hand guns, as the one revolver I possess is incipient -- a blackpowder Remington .44 Army 1858 replica. It's a kit to finish and blue yourself. I'm considering having at least the chambers, and likely the bore, hard chromed as an anticorrosion measure, then go for a nice oldfashioned bluing job -- a rather civilian sort of revolver.

What I take to the range (all too few times these days) is my .22 Ruger Mk II to burn up a box at least, preferably two, on fundamentals -- front sight, press; trigger control; stance -- the wherewithal of the Zen-archery kind of shooting that is NRA bullseye. Then some .45 for dessert. I'm a Jeff Cooper fan and favor 1911s, owning two. These are also the fighting guns for the house.

I'm interested in IDPA shooting, not being ready to afford Steel Challenge raceguns. Yet. But the basicness of International Defensive Pistol -- combat shooting competitions with iron-sighted pistols that look like real guns and not ray guns -- appeals very strongly, not least because it's easy to budget.

Well, those are the ergonomic, highly efficient kind of bang-bang. Something much slower paced and genteel like smoking a pipe instead of cigarettes is my blackpowder .54 cal. Italian Hawken, whose only two unsatisfactory points are its exceedingly coarse set trigger (I don't mind it heavy, it's supposed to be, but gritty won't do) and, in common with any Hawken, way too tall a front sight as issued (this was an issue even back in the Plains buffalo hunter days; the antique Hawkens generally had their front sights filed down) which causes the piece to shoot low if you take a six o'clock hold or a center hold. I have to park the sight on the 12 o'clock of the bull. If you're not trying to do 3-a-minute military musket volleys, it's an easy-paced, rather meditative sort of shooting, concentrating a good deal upon your shot, because you only have one. It replicates the internal combustion engine's Otto cycle: intake as you load, compression as you ram the load home with the ramrod, combustion after you've set the percussion cap upon the nipple and brought the hammer (not the cock; that's flintlocks, which do not have hammers) to full-cock, and exhaust, blowing the smoke out of the barrel -- suck-squeeze-bang-blow -- and not so incidentally burning out any possible lingering embers from the black powder. This can happen, and you only need it to happen once! Which is a darn good reason to make sure the bore is NEVER EVER EVER pointed at your face during loading and shooting, but is always off to one side a bit. Guys used to blow themselves up all the time getting fire around the powder keg, and getting blasted by sixty to a hundred grains of Pyrodex or regular black powder is not much nicer or much better for the complexion.