Feature Stories by Robert Boatman You Can Read Online, Email to a Friend or Download Anytime

2009-02-21T21:11:00.000-08:00

I N D E X

Ammo: Handguns Are What They Eat
Your Pistol’s Diet Is More Important Than Your Own ... If you eat the wrong kind of food you might make yourself sick, but you’re not likely to die ... On the other hand, if you feed your gun the wrong kind of ammo, it could kill you ...

1911 Saves the World From Vampires and Zombies
We couldn’t make this stuff up ... Research it yourself ... Contrary to the official government line these days, blood-sucking vampires and brain-eating zombies are as lethal a threat to civilization as they’ve always been ...

.22 Hornet: Browning, T/C, Ruger The Small Shot Heard ‘Round The World ... American sporting cartridges tend to be ubiquitous, derivative and dull ...

.300 Win Mag, .450 Rigby, .505 Gibbs, .510/.505
Small, Large and Larger-Than-Large ... There are arguments for and against smallbore cartridges, that is to say 30-caliber and less, in Africa ...

.35 Whelen: Overlooked, Misunderstood, Vastly Underrated
In Search of The Colonel ... In 1922, British archaeologists discovered the entrance to King Tutankhamen’s tomb ...

9.3x62mm Mauser
Most American shooters have never even heard of the best rifle cartridge in the world ... In 1905, divergent global energies mingled and coalesced in curious and far-reaching ways, much like they did about a hundred years later ...

9.3x74Rmm Krieghoff
Not Every African Double Rifle Has Bores Big Enough To Lose Your Rolex In ... The 9.3x74Rmm will take an elephant down as decisively as a .470 Nitro Express with a properly placed shot, and has done so countless times in the past ...

.375 Holland & Holland Magnum, Contemplating Near Perfection
If you had to choose only one rifle ... Ask any dozen hunters ...Taylor to Woslum ...Pondoro to Doctari ...

.375 Holland & Holland Magnum – Factory CZ vs. Fancy CZ
A Promising CZ Goes To Finishing School ... I somehow ended up with twins -- two CZ 550 Magnums chambered in .375 Holland & Holland Magnum ...

.375 Holland & Holland Magnum, Seven Iterations
Sako, Weatherby, pre-64 Winchesters, GMA custom, Mauser 98, CZ ... the smoke had hardly cleared from my first shooting session when half a dozen more rifles had shown up ready for action, each one having something different to say about the personality of the cartridge ...

.404 Jeffery
I wish all such rousing legends were this alive and this well ... I heard the following story from a professional hunter with years of experience in Zimbabwe and South Africa ...

.416 Rigby: Two New Rugers and a Vintage Custom
Factory-fresh Ruger M77 Mark II and No. 1 Tropical plus a vintage Brno ZKK custom ... Bill Ruger deserves considerable credit for his part in the revival of the great .416 Rigby cartridge ...

45-70 in Africa?
Yes, we know it’s a stretch. But will it reach? ... Like the adventures of the .45 ACP in Russia or the exploits of the 6.5x53.5mm Daudeteau in Texas, there are some cartridge-country juxtapositions that jar the solid sense of shooting traditions ...

.450 Rigby: Better Than .458 Win Mag and .458 Lott?
Yeah, better’n the .458 Express, .460 A-Square and .460 Weatherby too ... Conjures up images of head porters in the Congo, 200-pound ivory, gin-and-tonics on the veranda after a hard day’s shooting pesky lions off the lawn ... Well, it shouldn’t ...

.458X2” American and .460 A-Square Short
A Little Beauty and A Little Beast ... Both cartridges are decidedly odd, and so are these custom Remington and Ruger rifles they’re chambered in ... But wait till you get to the Krieghoff 9.3x74R/20-gauge ...

.500 Jeffery
I remember reading once that “The 30-06 is as much recoil as a man can stand” ... In the days when my sole armament was a Marlin 39A and every rabbit was as good as a rhinoceros, I believed almost everything I read ....

.50 BMG 1,000-Yard World Championship Shoot
A Sailor in New Mexico ... Trackers in Africa use bags of ash ... There comes a time, and it comes rather soon, when you have to pull the trigger ... Skip died shortly after this photo was taken ...

.505 Gibbs
Not Recommended for Amateur Use ... There is a class of African rifle whose role in life properly belongs in the specialized sphere of the professional hunter ...

.550 Magnum wildcat
Some people are never satisfied ... Nobody Needs A New Stopping Rifle. But we can’t stop ourselves ...

.585: Big Dog of Bolt Actions
Big Medicine, Big Hole ... Whether Seyfried’s Nyati, the Wells or GMA Express, the word most often associated with .585 is big ...

4-Bore
A rifle so big they named it after a shotgun ... Dancing with the 4-Bore, the .510 Wells Express, .505 Gibbs, .470 Nitro Express, and .416 Taylor ...

Armand Swenson, Lone Gunman
Why do all my friends, living or dead, seem to have those forbidding lone-gunman-type personalities ... Nothing particularly sinister about it. if a guy has no serious interest in guns and shooting, what could you possibly have to be friendly about ...

Blood Brothers:
The Dangerous-Game Rifle Hunter and The Combat Handgunner ... We shooters and hunters have a lot more in common than we think we do. ...

Blood Your Carry Gun
Before you can consider yourself master of the gun you carry every day, you have to kill something with it ... The crucial relationship between a hunter or warrior and his personal weapon is consummated only with the spilling of blood ...

Condition One and Only
Down With Crunchentickers ... Texas Ranger Charlie Miller was minding his own business when a concerned citizen came up to him, noted the hammer cocked back on the big 1911 dangling from the Ranger’s belt, and asked, “Isn’t that dangerous?”

Custom Mausers by GMA
An interview with Mike Roden of Granite Mountain Arms ... The very idea of a custom Mauser rifle built for African hunting ignites fireworks along the spine of any true gunbuilder, rifle aficionado or hunter in the world ...

CZ 550 Magnum Action
Why big-bore custom riflemakers love it more than they love their mothers ... naked truth ...

CZ 550 Magnum Rifle
How the Czechs introduced classic African cartridges to Americans ... We would all be better off if Theodore Roosevelt had been eaten by lions ...

CZ 550 Medium Magnum in 9.3x62mm Mauser
Also available in 7mm Remington Magnum and .300 Winchester Magnum for squirrel hunting ... CZ builds, has always built, the most reasonably priced true Mauser action you can get ...

CZ-USA president Alice Poluchova
She’s Just A Small Town Girl From Nový Jičín ... The headman at CZ has the job of her dreams ...

Elmer Keith Was Dead Right
Long-Range Handgun Accuracy ... I don’t personally know anyone who ever doubted Elmer Keith ... I understand there were some skeptics who thought Elmer exaggerated because he was a small man who always wore a large hat, but I think the skeptics just couldn’t shoot straight ...

Fred Wells’ Old Place: Hallowed Ground
Fred is not with us anymore ... An octogenarian riflemaker who’s got a 10-year backlog of custom orders on the books doesn’t need a neon sign ... Fred Wells is dead ... and so is Jeff Cooper ...

Gary Reeder Does Elmer Keith
It has been said that Elmer Keith almost single-handedly pioneered modern sport handgunning... Elmer Keith’s influence on handgun design was substantial, his influence on handgun cartridge design truly revolutionary ... The big-bore hunting handgun we know today was made possible only after Keith knocked down the doors ...

Guns of Hollywood and TV News
Before You Can Learn The Truth You Have to Unlearn The Lies ... If the creators and communicators of pop culture were as ignorant and careless in their portrayal of the mechanical functions and proper use of automobiles as they are of firearms, we would have people blasting down the freeways at 85 miles an hour in reverse ...

Jeff Cooper’s DVC
Diligentia, Vis, Celeritas ... In case you haven’t kept up with your Latin, the phrase Diligentia, Vis, Celeritas means Accuracy, Power, and Speed ... It is the motto Jeff Cooper came up with to define the essential elements of combat shooting ...

Jeff Cooper's Five Facts Of 1911 Life
These five facts of life are important in any armed confrontation, but one is way more important than the others ... John Browning’s revolutionary semiautomatic pistol was being used like a Colt six-shooter until Jeff Cooper came along ...

Jeff Coopers’ Greatest Lesson
Tell it one more time! ... Your life is threatened. Your gun is in your hands aimed at your attacker’s chest. You have a split second to pull the trigger ... Nothing happens. Your gun does not go bang. You feel no recoil impulse. Your gun is a lump of metal at the end of your arms ...

Jeff Cooper’s Legacy: Gunsite
The colonel’s shooting range in the high desert has traditionally been home to some of the best shooting, most brilliant instruction, and nastiest internal politics in the shooting world ... In 1976, Jeff Cooper founded the American Pistol Institute ... The following is an interview with former VP Bob Young ...

Jeff Cooper’s Mozambique Drill
Mental midgets with severe language problems may call it the “failure-to-stop” or simply “failure” drill, but you and I know it by its real name ... The Mozambique Drill is probably the most influential combat training drill of all time ...

Jeff Cooper’s Scout Rifles
Fooling Around With Them, Cuddling Them and Shooting Them While The Colonel Watches ... Col. Jeff Cooper did not invent the Scout rifle...

Kase Reeder's Black Widow .45
Its bite may be almost as bad as its bark ... The ultimate in CQ gear these days is a “tactical impact block” on your 1911 ...

Life Beyond “The Good Ol’ 30-06”
What’s it like out there ... The mind of the typical American shooter comes to a full stop at 30-caliber rifles ...

Louis Awerbuck: Gunning Through Gunsite
The difference is obvious between students who come to Gunsite to train their minds and bodies in life-saving disciplines and those to whom there is little difference between Gunsite and Disneyland ... Some students approach a shooting exercise as though they were trying to win a giant stuffed mouse to improve their living room decor ...

Louis Awerbuck: Interview With a Madman
Awerbuck is one of the sanest people I know. He does, however, live in a world gone mad just like the rest of us ... Jeff Cooper once told me that he considers Awerbuck one of the top half-dozen firearms instructors in the world ...

Marcel Thys .470 Nitro Express Sidelock: Born to Shoot
The trouble with owning a 200-mile-an-hour Ferrari is that you can never drive it 200 miles an hour ... For less than the price of a handmade Italian sports car (well, a little less), you can own a rifle like this and shoot it till your arms fall off ...

Mauser, Mannlicher and Wells, Your Table is Ready.
Messieurs! Messieurs! ... No names in the entire history of firearms are more imbued with magic and glory than Peter Paul Mauser and Ferdinand Ritter von Mannlicher, and few in more recent history could be considered as deserving to walk in their company as Fred Wells ...

Mauser Model 1896, the Broomhandle
Only a German engineering genius could have designed this three-dimensional steel jigsaw puzzle of a pistol ... The entire gun requires but a single screw ... Who designed the Broomhandle Mauser? ... not Paul Mauser ...

Pretty Pistols
Even the most beautiful guns in the world are made to be shot ... what your concealed carry gun looks like is nobody’s business but your own ... Unless, of course, you have to take it out and use it one day ...

Recoil Is Not Your Enemy
Advice to a friend contemplating the purchase of his first dangerous-game rifle: There’s no reason why you can’t shoot a .505 Gibbs just as accurately and comfortably as you shoot a .22 Long Rifle ...

Rook Rifles Of Our Own
We’ve always had Rook Rifles. We’ve just never called them that ... There’s more than a little romance attached to the British Rook Rif le...

Safety Lever Is In Your Head
You know how to operate the little safety lever inside your head, don’t you? ... Nobody wants to walk around with a deadly weapon in an “unsafe” condition ...

Seecamp Surprise
Is that a pistol in your pocket or are you just not sure you're that happy to see me? ...Even professionals who strap on a couple of full-size .45s every morning always leave room for a little hideout gun ...

Scopes for Dangerous Game
I Spy With My Little Eye ... You don’t need to blow up your view of a buffalo bull that’s standing 20 yards away giving you the look ...

Second Amendment Writings
Selected from several Boatman books and articles ... Collected at IronwordRanch.com ...

Should You Test Your Courage In A Shooting Match?
It’s safe, it’s fun, and you just might learn something ... If you carry a gun, you’re bound to wonder how your gun-handling and shooting skills compare to others ... there's one way to find out ...

Should You Wear Your Gun In The Shower?
Just how clean do you want to get?... Do you remember that scene from the old Hitchcock movie Psycho? ... If Janet Leigh had a .38 with a non-slip grip in her hand instead of a bar of beauty soap she could have demonstrated for the benefit of Tony Perkins and his mother what happens when you bring a knife to a gunfight ...

Sixgun Defense
It’s The Cowboy Way ... “The single-action revolver is a lousy weapon to defend yourself with,” says the Tactical Operational Expert all decked out in his camo outfit that makes him look like he was just spewed up by an overfertilized tree ...

Snubnose .38
Still the definitive Smith & Wesson ... The curvy little revolver that was once state-of-the-art has lost none of its charm ...

Springfield .38 Super and Kimber .45
From 1929 and 2003, extreme variations on a theme ... Yes, Virginia, there is a 1911 for everyone ...

The 10mm Auto Pistol Cartridge is Alive and Well
And Living in the Country ... when you get out beyond the limits of the city, a .38 or 9mm in your holster seems awfully small ...

Three-Gun Carry
full battle dress ... If you live in a high-risk environment, practice a risky business, or just want to be better prepared than any Boy Scout, resign yourself to adding four or five pounds of metal to your daily wardrobe ...

Wild Boar Hunting
Wherein a lost party of Cape buffalo hunters attempts to rescue California despite itself ... Pigs in the Mist ...

Women on Safari
Never underestimate the importance of a girl's first zebra ... A husband and wife rediscover each other in the Kalahari ...

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Feature Stories by Robert Boatman You Can Read Online, Email to a Friend or Download Anytime