LOUSY GUN WRITING
You've all seen it... guys who want to say something they think is clever. Probably started with sports writers. You know, the group that labeled left handed as "southpaw." What if the left hander was facing east? Would he then be a north paw? Is a right hander a north paw? I suppose so. Never hear about them. Sounds like profiling to me. Maybe even discrimination. Seems like there is always some kind of fuss being made over the southpaw. I'm right handed, and I think writers ought to say something a little extra about me! Maybe along the lines of, "For a north paw, he sure doesn't sweat much!"
I was reading one of the gun magazines earlier today, and on those pages a rifle barrel was referred to as a "tube" by one author, and a "pipe" by another. Hucksters. Knee slappers. Lacking in mental sophistication, I say. It's a barrel! Their efforts at being cute fail miserably, and do nothing toward encouraging the next generation of shooters in the direction of responsible behavior. What are the tires on their cars? Rubber roundies? Say what it is, or do the industry a favor by dropping out and finding a job you can handle. I can't name names. People who write like that are probably liberal whiners, and they're the type that would likely claim damage and conjure up a lawsuit.
And then there are the 'testers." They take a rifle, say things that are already obvious in the photographs ("It has a dark gray laminated stock with four-panel checkering"), and then go on to express their opinion with the full expectation that the reader will agree. (I seldom agree.) When it comes to testing, which is almost always at a not-to-useful 100 yards, there are all too often accompanying excuses that describe how the groups might have or would have been better if the weather conditions had been favorable, or if they didn't have to be fired out of the moon-shaped window of an outhouse door with loose hinges. I think, mostly, that a whole mess of the gun writer wannabe gun experts simply aren't good shots, and that very few of them understand how to wring top performance out of a conventional rifle. So, the reader gets a virtually useless report. Most of the readers beyond the age of 60 could do better, and so could a sizable portion of the younger folks who grew up with the proper rifles and knowledgable teachers.
Being a good shot doesn't just happen. For my age group it typically started with a BB gun, followed by a quality single-shot 22 by Winchester or Remington. There's no way to go back and recapture those days, or cultivate the skills that so many of our older generation possess. The current generation has, for the most part, skipped the BB gun, started right off with a semi-auto 22 by some manufacturer (all too often of thrown-together low-cost materials), and then moved into some crappy AR-type "rifle" that they're convinced is the modern way to go. It's not the fault of today's shooter. It is a problem exacerbated by manufacturers who answer to stockholders and blindly follow the dollars. Thanks to that, today's truly good shots have dwindled to precious few in number.
A recent magazine test of a potentially fine rifle by a manufacturer that has been around for about 200 years produced only mediocre results. So I ordered one, identical in model and chamber, and promptly began shooting groups in the 9/16ths- to 7/8ths-inch range. Yes, I used my old standby "never fails" handload for the cartridge, tweaked away a problem with the forend bedding, and adjusted the trigger down from over five pounds to two and a quarter. I also used a top quality front rest with the proper bag, and a leather rear rabbit-ear bag filled with dry silica sand. In essence, I tried to do a decent job of testing the rifle. There's the difference. The same thing could have been done by a competent writer, taking the reader through the steps that got the rifle to shoot nickel-sized groups, thereby helping to teach a new generation some useable fundamentals.
JDC