Oh Yeah, I Need a Safe

I got a lot of recommendations for scope-able .22 rifles. If I get one, I think it will be the Savage Mark II F or FSS. These are bolt-action rifles with 10-round magazines and Savage's super-duper, possibly tactical Accutrigger. The F can be had for about a hundred and fifty bucks, which is just plain stupid. The FSS is stainless and costs fifty bucks more.

These both have plastic stocks, which are pretty hard to resist in items like .22s that are more like tools than guns. Savage makes one with a wooden stock, too. Might be nice to have my first wooden-stocked .22 rifle. I don't think I want a bull barrel. Some day I might conceivably want to shoot someplace other than a gun range. If I'm wrong, my mistake can be corrected very cheaply.

I often wonder if the .22 is underrated. It's cheap as hell. It's very accurate at the ranges at which people use it. And it will kill a surprising number of things. Cubans use them to kill wild pigs in Florida. The other day I read about someone wasting a moose with a .22. Probably not the ideal weapon for that job, but still. And the .22 is time-tested as a hog-killer on family farms across the US.

I suppose this is a tasteless thing to point out, but the Zodiac Killer used a .22, and tragically, he had great success with it. Over and over.

Maybe a person living in the woods doesn't need a cabinet full of long guns. Maybe all you need are a .30-06, a .22, and a 12-gauge. I know it's a sin to tell people they need FEWER guns, however.

I saw a show the other day in which a cowboy-action guy shot an oryx on a ranch in Texas, using a lever-action rifle with some obscure old-timey cartridge in it. It was very interesting. An oryx looks like a bit antelope, but I think it's actually related to cows. Anyway, this was a big animal. The guy and his guide wandered around all day, and he finally took a shot at around a hundred yards, hitting the oryx in the shoulder. It fell over and then got up and took off, and it was quite a while before they found it, lying dead on its side.

I formed some impressions while I watched. First of all, it looks like you have to be really careful when you choose a stocked ranch to hunt on. This place was 15,000 acres, and they had to make a little effort to find the animals. But it wasn't like sitting around in a blind all day, praying one measly deer would show up. They didn't find an animal here and there. They found entire herds.

If the ranch had been smaller and the animals closer together, it would have resembled a "canned hunt." This is an event where a fat rich guy drives up to a bunch of animals in a small area, gets out of the car, and shoots one from fifty feet. More or less. Sometimes they hold an animal in a cage or a box and turn it loose when the fat guy arrives, to make it challenging. Sometimes he shoots it while it's still in the box, or chained to a pole. I am very much in favor of hunting, but when a hunt is a sure thing, it's not a hunt. It's slaughter. And animals should be slaughtered humanely. It would obviously be immoral to drive to a cattle ranch and shoot fatted steers in the shoulder and wait for them to expire. That's not what happened on this show, but it leaned in that direction.

Another thing...the crappy cartridge this guy used didn't kill the animal quickly. It seems to me that if you use a weak round, or you use a gun that's hard to aim at long distances, you have an obligation to get very damn close and place your shot perfectly. Otherwise, you might as well be bullfighting. Hunting is supposed to be challenging. I get that. But making it challenging by using ammunition that may not kill the animal quickly is the wrong idea. The challenge shouldn't be to kill an animal badly with a lame round at a hundred yards. The challenge should be to get within a hundred feet, so you can make sure your lame round does the job humanely. Am I wrong? I mean, geez, you could make elephant hunting challenging by making hunters use bows. But it would be hell on the elephants.

Knowing the tiny brains with which human beings are equipped, I am sure many people fail to identify the point of hunting. Unless you do it in order to survive, the point is not to kill animals. It's to kill animals under certain challenging conditions. Take the conditions away and guarantee success, and it's not sport any more. You might as well be in your backyard, wringing chicken necks. You might as well carry an ax handle into a boxing ring. Why...it's just not tactical.

It seems to me that guided hunting would be dull, even if done properly. You drive to the animals, and the guide picks one out, and you shoot at it. Isn't part of the skill finding the animals? The few times I've hunted, most of the effort went into getting to the right place and waiting. Seems kind of weak, having someone else stalk the prey for you. I guess you have no choice, when you're from California and you want to hunt turkeys in Tennessee. But I think it would be a lot more rewarding to take off across your own land and find game for yourself.

I'm not all that interested in hunting. I love to shoot, but that's a different thing. I shoot in the shade, on a nice folding chair, fifty feet from a Coke machine and a clean bathroom (funny how bathrooms used only by conservatives are always clean). I have no problems cutting on pigs that are already scalded and gutted, but cutting up a bloody, hot deer with big long eyelashes might be a different story. I might change my mind some day. If I do, I hope I won't end up shooting things from a car. Or worse, a helicopter.