Sam has been encouraging me to write book reports on the stories of my youth – and particularly the stories that I shared with her as she moved into the Sci-Fi that I passed on, then into her own. So I’m going to write about L. Sprague de Camp’s novelette – A Gun for Dinosaur. The story was first published in 1956 – I was a new reader when I read it a year or two later – and the description was moved from the magazine pages to the chalkboard of my young mind: “Here you are: my own private gun for that work, a Continental .600. Does look like a shotgun, doesn’t it? But it’s rifled, as you can see by looking through the barrels. Shoots a pair of .600 Nitro Express cartridges the size of bananas; weighs nearly seven kilos and has a muzzle energy of over twenty-two hundred KGMs.”
I was, at the most, eight years old when I read those words – and had to go to the dictionary to find out what kilo and KGM meant. It meant that the gun was way too big for me. Later, in my thirties, and teaching at Trinidad State Junior College (America’s oldest gunsmithing school) I got the chance to handle a .600 Nitro Express double gun. It was well balanced, but heavy. And, remembering Sprague de Camp’s science fiction, I turned down the chance to shoot it. I explained that I wasn’t willing to spend $20 per shot of anybody’s money just to say I had shot a .600 Nitro. And that’s partially true. But it delivers something like 8,400 foot pounds at the muzzle – and I just didn’t have the nerve to face that sort of recoil from the other end of the gun.
In de Camp’s time, the 600 Nitro double gun was the powerhouse. In my era, the 50 BMG (Browning Machine Gun) produces over 1,200 foot pounds of muzzle energy, and can go into a semi-automatic action (think Barrett) that where the action absorbs part of the recoil, and spreads it out over more time.
It was a good story in 1957. Seventy years later, technology has changed, and the old recoil intensive side by side would no longer be the chosen action for dinosaur.
A Gun for Dinosaur is a great read – but even if time travel remains only in science fiction, firearms technology has moved past the 600 Nitro.
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