Trego's Mountain Ear

"Serving North Lincoln County"

Tag: Firearms

  • My Ruger is Changing Duties

    Folks look at my old Ruger pistol, and see it as a Mark I. It isn’t. Made back in 1958, the markings show that it left the factory as a Ruger Standard Pistol, then fell into the hands of Jim Clark at Shreveport, Louisiana.

    I never met the man – but Jim Clark was a national champion in Bullseye, and built fantastic guns. This photo of Clark’s Ruger comes from the NRA program ‘I have this old gun’:

    Mine looks about the same – and has always been a lot more accurate than I am – or ever was. At 76, I’m not so steady as I once was – but I have just found (and ordered) New Old Stock Pachmayr grips for the old pistol – I’ll stash the old Herrett target grips, set the pistol in a holster (the match grips make it uncomfortable for belt carry), and I will see how it works for carrying around the place. Age makes hitting well a bit harder, but we shall see. The sights are still visible, the trigger is good, and while the muzzle brake on a 22 seems a bit of an overreach, I’ve had it for years.

    Some might warn me that a 22 isn’t enough gun for bear. Frankly, having encountered a couple of Grizzlies up close and personal, I don’t believe anything you can hang on your hip is enough gun. Second, my walks are usually on the place – my pistol is more for protection of my little dogs – and they have threats that are less formidable than Grizzlies. Third, as a teenager and a young man, I took 10 black bears with my 22 single shot, and three with my High Standard revolver. So I don’t believe I’m particularly undergunned with my 67 year old Ruger.

    Some folks tell me that Rugers dominated Bullseye back when my pistol was converted from a Ruger Standard pistol to a Clark converted match gun. In Clark’s hand, that was so. My memory tells me that High Standards, Colts and Brownings led the scoring more often. Anyway, as I age, and presbyopia makes it harder to keep a sight picture, and weakness makes me less steady, it’s good to give a different job to a tool that I have trusted for years.

  • Glock Switches Change Faster Than Glocks

    Glock had some problems with anti-gun groups and the California legislature (I may be repeating myself there) because of a device known as the ‘Glock Switch.’ What it amounts to is a device that makes the Glock pistol go full auto – basically changing a semiautomatic pistol to a machine gun. Put simply, the device is illegal as all hell. It’s a combination of old gunsmithing skills and computer use to build interchangeable parts with a 3D printer. There is nothing particularly new about the idea – one of Dillinger’s guns, built by Hyman Lebman was a model 1911 converted to full auto – as this photo shows:

    I don’t believe I would enjoy shooting this – but at the time Lebman was building them (and converting Winchester 1907 rifles to machine guns) the National Firearms Act was still a gleam in some politician’s eye. Unlike Lebman’s San Antonio operation (1933), Glock switches are sold on the internet – my personal recommendation is don’t even think about buying one. Ethics aside, the fines and prison sentences are too large. Even if the switch is advertised at only $13.

    Anyway, with Everytown for Gun Bans and the California legislature closing in, Glock decided to redesign all of it’s handguns, and come out with a Glock V that wouldn’t take the switch. Intriguing enough, by the time the Glock V was moving in the supply chain, the new switch for the Glock was on the market.

    Like I said before – I’ve never fired a Glock. I’ve never converted a semiauto to full auto. I have repaired a few semiautomatics that, because of one worn or broken part or another had problems with multiple discharges. The problem is that it looks technically easy to convert many semiautomatics to full auto. I can’t say for sure – the only work I ever did was to make sure semiautomatics didn’t go full auto. But it looks easy enough to me. I suppose, if you gave me the task of building a semiautomatic that couldn’t be converted to a machinegun, I’d start by making it hammer fired and double action only. That way, you still might make it go full auto, but you’d have to spend big dollars changing a whole lot of parts.

  • I’ve Never Fired A Glock

    It isn’t that I’m some sort of a bigot – or perhaps it is. With a long double action trigger, I tend to shoot low and left. Not a big deal – with the SCCY, I took the sight pusher – a tool that uses a bolt thread to move the rear sight – and put the rear sight in a spot that corrects for my weakness. The SCCY is different from a Glock – a plastic frame and a stainless slide – and double action only – but what do I know? I’ve never fired a Glock. When Glocks first came out, I was learning the ins and outs of the 1911 – and it didn’t seem that good habits for the 1911 transfer seamlessly to the Glock.

    As a kid, it was pretty much revolvers. Dad packed a Smith Victory model that he had salvaged from a sunken plane, and he started me with a High Standard Sentinel. Dad liked 4-inch barrels and double action revolvers. And I learned to use them single action. When I started teaching at Trinidad State, in the mid-eighties, they taught me that God carries a model 1911A1. I learned to hone the sear so I could have a 3 pound trigger pull (the other important changes were a fitted national match bushing in the front, and a tight link at the back. When the trigger doesn’t move far, and doesn’t take much pressure, it’s a lot easier to hit. And the model 1911 (like the 1873) is single action only.

    I guess my first match quality pistol was Thompson Center’s Contender – I used it with a heavy 22 barrel when I hung out with a bunch that shot metallic silhouette. Renata medaled. I never did. In most of my competitive shooting I’ve been treated respectfully, but never had the ability to regularly finish at the top.

    Glocks call their striker fired action ‘safe actions’. They may well be – but the early striker models (around WW1) depended on some cheesy safeties. So, as Glock was coming on, I was learning the 1911. I’m not bigoted against the Glock – it’s just that it came out in the mid-eighties, and it’s probably a bit too modern for me.

  • John Buhmiller’s Rifle

    Last month, Rock Island Auction sold John Buhmiller’s African rifle (along with a lot of memorabilia). It’s on a large commercial Mauser action – and, frankly, not one of the Buhmiller rifles that interest me the most. I’d prefer to see the rifle he used at the end of his African hunting – either 470 or 500 magnum, built on a model 1917 Enfield action.

    The Mauser failed him once – he was running dry, dropped a cartridge in the magazine, and the controlled feed in the Mauser action jammed the rifle as the old man was running from an angry elephant. I admit, the Mauser makes a prettier custom rifle – but I heard the story forty years ago from Leonard Bull – who once hunted large game (and men) on the African continent. Leonard described the stock as ‘fence post ugly’ – so I suspect it might not sell for as much as the rifle that was sold in October.

    My own Buhmiller barrelled rifle is in 257 Roberts – built on a Springfield 1903 action. When Laird Byers was dying (the iron crab) he had his attendant call me – offering to sell the rifle for what he had in it. When Leonard Bull looked down the bore, he agreed that I did have a Buhmiller, and pointed out what he termed the ‘square cut’ rifling. Leonard was a Kenyan – Buhmiller’s hunting was in Tanganyika. Little things like national boundaries didn’t keep Africa’s big game hunters from meeting each other in the mid-1950’s.

    So what’s the relevance? John Buhmiller started making rifle barrels in Eureka, where he spent his working days in the rail road office, as a telegraph operator. My small caliber Springfield probably comes from those Eureka days – though the barrel may have been made in the early fifties before he moved operations to Kalispell. I’m guessing it was Eureka – by the Kalispell days he was stamping his name onto the barrels. Come to think of it, I don’t know if he was stamping the name onto barrels that wound up installed in P-17 Enfield actions.

    Buhmiller, as an old man, managed to make friends with Tanganyika’s equivalent of Fish and Game, and served that bunch, unpaid, hunting problem elephants that damaged crops and fields. He had a farmer who provided meals and housing, Tanganyika’s game department took all of the ivory, and life was good.

    Before Africa, Buhmiller was a competitive service rifle shooter, competing at places like Camp Perry. Even then, he was producing some of the world’s finest gunbarrels – though Leonard (who knew him only in his African days did look at my 257 Roberts and comment, “I didn’t know he made barrels in such small calibers.”

  • SCCY Is Gone

    Years ago, I used my Cabelas card points to buy a SCCY pistol that was on deal.  Half of the reason I bought it was the impressive warranty.  Then the doggone thing worked so well that I never used the guarantee.  The only problems I ever encountered were some ancient Egyptian ammunition that had been captured by Israel in the Six Days War (back in 1967) and stored poorly until they auctioned it off as military surplus.  When ammunition is over a half-century old, and has been stored poorly, it probably isn’t the pistol’s fault when it doesn’t fire.

    It isn’t a bad little pistol – but SCCY (which produced 987,075 pistols between 2017 and 2023 according to BATF) found itself sued by Rochester and Buffalo (New York) in 2022.  In 2024, SCCY learned that the company’s insurer didn’t cover this sort of liability.  (Another comment was that there were over 50,000 SCCY pistols recovered from crime scenes – I’m not sure what the time length was for this statistic).  Anyway SCCY went under the auctioneer’s hammer – and mine still hasn’t malfed.  I’m pretty sure I don’t have a warranty anymore.

    Mine looks like this:

    Other colors are (or maybe were) available – like this:

     The bright colors and the pastels never were my thing.  Neither was the newest model – the SCCY cpx-3 versions.  I’m old fashioned.  I like hammers, and the new versions solved the problem of a heavy trigger pull by replacing the hammer with a striker mechanism.  On my cpx-2, I can’t cock the hammer (double action only) but I can see it through a slot in the back of the slide.  And a long, hard trigger pull is the only safety on the pistol.  To be fair, the hammer isn’t cocked until the trigger makes it all the way back – so it’s really just as safe as the old double action revolver.  Safety aside – baby blue, bright orange, and pink just aren’t colors that belong on my sidearm.  If you feel differently, that’s fine.  

    Back to the striker versus hammer argument – my only striker fired pistol is a 1914 Mauser design.  It cocks every time the slide goes back, and the only protection is the safety.  One safety.  The old 1911 design (Colt, by John Moses Browning) with a hammer has a bunch of safeties.  Mauser had only one.  There have been a lot of changes to strikers over the past century – but I didn’t get my first semi-automatic until Browning’s design was almost 75 years old.  Since I’m now 75, I don’t expect to ever be comfortable with a striker fired semi-auto pistol.  Heck, I’m not comfortable with a concealed hammer single action.

    Anyway, SCCY is no more – and without that outstanding warranty, the prices on both new and used SCCY pistols seem to have dropped.  My own experience is simple – I have taken my magazines apart, and smoothed the rough edges.  They worked before, and I’m not certain they needed the smoothing – it’s something I learned at TSJC, and I do it more based on faith than science. 

  • Use Enough Gun

    I think it was Robert Ruark who coined that phrase. Most occasions where I needed to follow that advice, I’ve had a 22 – which the experts do not classify as enough gun. Whether it’s defense against bears, or against human predators, the experts generally start with a recommendation of using a caliber that starts with 4.

    There are few really good studies that provide data that gives a conclusive answer. Weingarten’s data (https://www.ammoland.com/2024/05/bear-defense-with-handguns-update-20-more-cases-98-effective/) includes “162 handgun-only incidents, not counting the three indeterminate cases. Over a dozen incidents are under investigation. Four failures out of the 161 incidents calculate to a 98% success rate. ” One of the failures was a 44 magnum, and another was a 22 pistol on a polar bear. While there were a lot of 44 magnums in Weingarten’s data set, the biggest takeaway I had from his numbers was that carrying a pistol is more important than the caliber.

    To me that makes sense – I know that a 357 didn’t seem adequate when two of us were less than10 feet from a large Grizzly – fortunately the bear felt the same about being outnumbered 2:1. And there’s always the Bella Twin story from 1953 – she not only took the year’s largest bear with a single shot 22, she used 22 long cartridges instead of 22 long rifle.

    Greg Ellifritz did his own data collection on handgun stopping power (https://www.activeresponsetraining.net/handgun-stopping-power-science-vs-40-years-of-experience ) He begins his article with a simple statement: “Most gunwriters are idiots.” He explains why, then shares a link to his own study (https://www.activeresponsetraining.net/an-alternate-look-at-handgun-stopping-power) That study begins with this graph:

    It’s no surprise to me that the 22 scores higher than the 25ACP – heck, 25 ACP is the only caliber he displays that I’ve never owned. Still, look at how close the 22 is to the 60% line – and realize only the 32 surpasses it. Still, Weingarten has a data set with less than 200 incidents, and Ellfritz’ data set is slightly over 1500 incidents covering ten different calibers. Both data sets suggest that the caliber is of less importance than just having the pistol. Ellefritz says “I also believe the data for the .25, .32 and .44 magnum should be viewed with suspicion. I simply don’t have enough data (in comparison to the other calibers) to draw an accurate comparison. I reported the data I have, but I really don’t believe that a .32 ACP incapacitates people at a higher rate than the .45 ACP!”

    I don’t have a recommended caliber for bears. As a kid, I took 10 black bears with either my single shot 22 or my 22 revolver. Never really knew that I wasn’t using enough gun – and bullet placement is a lot easier when you get in close. My most important rule about a gun in bear country is to have a gun. It’s amazing how much better a 22 has made me feel when the alternative was praying.

    I’m no longer young. I’d like to believe in bear spray – but it’s a new tool, and requires practice to develop the skills needed to use it effectively. I may be slowed down – I am slowed down. But the years have included a lot of practice with revolvers and Browning designed pistols.