The Gun Shots

Why The Second Amendment Matters (Or, Yes, It Can Happen To You)

This incident happened a few days ago and has been talked about on several blogs and newsgroups since. I was a bit reluctant to post anything about the shooting where Leon Rozio defended himself against four armed attackers, and killed one on the process, because Leon happens to be the brother of one of my best friends.

Leon is a traveling jewelry salesman down in Florida and has been targeted before but this time the attackers were armed and when they tried to kill him (by running him over with a vehicle) he fought back.

Non-gun owners often ask me why I “feel the need” to carry for personal protection. They argue that the chances are remote that I would ever have to use a gun in self-defense. I answer back that I hope the chances are zero that I’ll ever need to defend myself that way; that I carry a gun for the same reason I wear a seatbelt; and that not only am I safer when I carry a gun, but so is everyone else around me, including them and their loved ones.

But as the incident with Leon shows, it can happen. And, sadly, does.

I’m very thankful that Leon survived this attack. His brother told me he is still very shaken up by the whole thing but that he’s doing okay.

As an interesting side note the Rozios know what it is like to live in a country where the right to defend your self isn’t guaranteed. They fled from Cuba during the takeover of the country by Castro, settling in Florida and Southern California. The father and uncles were successful businessmen who had their livelihoods taken from them at gunpoint by Castro and his thugs.

—John Snow

Gun News Flash

I’m too busy getting ready to travel to Louisville for the NRA annual meeting (with a quick detour today to go shoot sporting clays down in Maryland) to do any real work, so I’ll point out the good stuff other gunny folks are posting.

Caleb over at Call Me Ahab has some good analysis on Bloomberg’s latest idiocy and coyote attacks. Keep scrolling.

More than 490,000 Florida residents are in Marion Hammer’s debt.

Say Uncle makes the obvious point on how gun laws work (or don’t).

—John Snow

Democrats and the Second Amendment

In an article by the title of We're All Gun Nuts Now, John McCormack looks at the Democrats uneasy relationship with the Second Amendment:

Democrats have run away from gun control because they think it's a major reason they lost swing states in the last two presidential elections. As Democratic congressman Barney Frank said in 2001, "Unlike gay rights, environment, and choice  .  .  .   Democrats were disappointed when a pro-gun control bloc did not appear."

The article also talks about McCain's anti-gun voting record on certain issues.

Like Obama and Clinton, McCain favors closing the "gun show loophole," which allows private individuals, unlike licensed gun dealers, to sell their guns without performing background checks. This has a decent chance of becoming law in the next couple of years.

Definitely worth a read.

—John Snow

(hat tip: Glenn)

Alberta Bear Hunt: And The Winners Are…

At the beginning of bear camp my host, Linda Powell from Remington, suggested we get a friendly betting pool going. She came up with the following categories: first bear, largest bear, first color-phase bear and smallest bear and all of us agreed to the wager.

Here are the final results:

First Bear: Linda Powell

Biggest Bear: Linda Powell

First Color-Phase Bear: Linda Powell

Smallest Bear: Linda Powell

A word to the wise: Never bet against Linda Powell.

—John Snow

Alberta Bear Hunt: Coda

My hunt ended as they sometimes do, with an unfilled tag in my pocket. It is always a risk to pass over good animals early in a hunt hoping for a better one to come along and in this case the hunting gods didn’t reward me.

Last night the woods were cold, silent and seemingly empty with the exception of a single raven that spent a couple minutes running through its repertoire of calls before moving on, leaving me alone. This stand was a new one for me, the most remote stand in camp, one the guides call the “bitch bait” owing to the difficulty of getting there.

But the bears are there, as this trail cam photo shows. I was hoping this guy would stroll into sight to feast on the rotting beaver carcass we had strung up and as I’m writing these words in camp there’s an excellent chance he’s doing that right now.

It has been an amazing week up here and I can’t wait to get back to hunt with Wally Mack and his crew at W&L Guide Services. They run a top-notch operation. They have excellent accommodations, the guides all worked very hard and the food was incredible. They guarantee that their hunters will gain weight during the trip and that was certainly the case with our group. Plus, with bears like this, how could I stay away?

—John Snow

Alberta Moose

Guide Randy Erasmus pulled out this moose rack for me. As if Alberta’s bears aren’t reason enough to come hunting here, there is some outrageous moose action as well. This rack is a bit on the small side, Randy said, around 40 inches or so.

Plenty of hunters take 50-inch trophies (or larger) when they hunt these areas. The key is to get away from the crowds, said Wally Mack, the outfitter we’ve been bear hunting with. His moose camp is a long 23-kilometer haul on ATVs from the trailhead.

“All the locals hunt here, but they’re hunting for meat,” Mack said. “If you can get away from them and get way back in the woods you can find some real fine trophies.”

Hopefully I'll see that for myself. I’ve made plans to come back to Alberta in the fall (though not with Mack who is booked solid until 2010) and hunt the Swan Hills area.

—John Snow

Alberta Bear Hunt: The Good, The Bad and The Beautiful

I passed a quiet evening on stand without seeing a single bear. Not so my hunting partners. All of them had filled their tags before I even climbed into my tree.

The Good: Tim Herald who arrowed a great bear the other day struck gold again. He had a large boar right underneath him from the moment he got dropped off. Instead of shooting it from the stand he decided to climb down and stalk it on foot. He got within 16 yards and made a perfect double-lung shot. If he knew what our friend Mark Nelson was going through at the same time he might not have been so quick to take on the bear on foot.

The Bad: Mark learned an important lesson on this hunt. Most of the time you choose the bear you’re going to shoot but sometimes the bear chooses you. Right after getting to his stand this large, aggressive sow came in. The moment she saw Mark she was wolfing at him and stamping on her front legs. She charged his stand twice, running from the bait to the base of the tree. To make matters more interesting, the stand Mark was in is not very high off the ground.

The bear’s behavior was a bit unnerving but Mark thought everything was going to be okay when the bear moved away, climbing up a low hill. At the crest of the hill she suddenly wheeled around and charged. She covered the distance to Mark’s tree in a flash.

“At that point I had had enough,” Mark said. “I wasn’t about to cope with this bear for the next four hours.”

When she got to the base of the stand, Mark shot, hitting her in the neck. She ran off and fell. Mark thought it was over when she started to get back up. He reloaded his single shot H&R Ultra Slug Hunter and hit her again. Again, she fell. And again she got up. He shot her twice more before she finally died.

The Beautiful: Linda Powell is closing in on her goal to take one each of the different color phase bears. Some years back, she shot a chocolate-colored black bear and last night she took this gorgeous cinnamon. As happy as she is about this bear, don’t bring up the blonde color phase she shot at, and missed, last year. It’s a bit of a sore subject.

—John Snow

.221 Fireball Field Report: Beware of Flying Squirrels!

Just got this report in from my friend Pat. He was out shooting some ground squirrels yesterday with a .221 Fireball and had this to say:

I hit a couple that popped up at close range with the Fireball, and the top half of them went probably 12 feet in the air. Higher than a basketball hoop.  It was incredible.  If the wind had been wrong on those, the torsos would have landed on me.

Wow. His rig:

Remington 700 Classic, .221 Fireball topped with a Leupold 4.5-14x40mm AO Vari X-III, fine duplex. 

His ammo:

40-grain Sierra Blitzking, 20.0 grains of AA-1680 gunpowder and a Federal 205 Match primer.  MV=3,450 fps. 

The results?

Very messy.  Lots of shots were 50-75 yards, with a lot more from about 100 to 150 and a few at 200 yards plus.  The baby squirrels were out, which are about the size of one of those little cans of V-8.  Hard to hit at long range, that’s for certain!

Good shooting, Pat. Next time bring a raincoat.

—John Snow

Alberta Bear Hunt: Bow Trophy

One of my hunting partners, Tim Herald, and I decided to switch stands the other night. He is bow hunting up here and hadn’t tagged a bear yet and really liked the looks of the bear I had seen a couple nights ago but had passed on. At the stand he had been hunting a large bear had been lurking around the edges but hadn’t approached within bow range but was certainly within range of my slug if I wanted to take him.

So we swapped hunting locations and it worked out perfectly. He arrowed this beautiful boar and caught the whole thing on video. His big bear never showed, but at least I saved my magazine.

—John Snow

Alberta’s Literary Bears

It was an improbable sequence of events that I suspect has never happened before and I seriously doubt would ever happen again.

As I usually do, I took some reading material into the stand with me last night. I’ve gone through all the books in camp so I had a couple of magazines that I picked up during the last trip to High Level—specifically the latest issues of Harpers and the Atlantic Monthly.

It’s a fact of life that when hunting from stands stuff falls and I hadn’t been up there long before my copy of the Atlantic sailed off the perch. (The night before my knife fell and the night before that my headlamp made the leap.)

Toward the end of legal shooting light a medium-sized bear approached the stand. He looked an awful lot like the bear that had visited me earlier that afternoon but I wasn’t certain whether it was the same animal.

He didn’t show any interest in the bait and instead walked underneath my stand and sniffed at the magazine. He lay down next to it and started rubbing his head on it, flipping through some pages in the process. Really.

I was amused by this spectacle up to the point he grabbed the magazine in his mouth. I hadn’t had a chance to get through much of the issue and it was the last copy in the store and I experience a certain level of panic when I don’t have anything to read.

I was tempted to throw my binocular at him, the Swarovski 7x50 I mentioned earlier, but rejected this thought almost immediately because (a) the Swarovski’s are very, very expensive, (b) they are really heavy and I didn’t want to break them or hurt the bear, and (c) they aren’t mine.

Instead I grabbed the small tree next to the stand, which the bear was resting against, and pushed. It was a dead white poplar and it broke with a loud crack and fell over on the startled bear. The boar jumped like a scalded cat and scooted about 30 feet away. He stopped and gazed back over his shoulder at me with a reproachful look.

It just so happened that right under his nose was a subscription card from the magazine. He took one sniff, sat down again and ate it.

Less than a minute later my guide came to pick me up on his ATV and I climbed down to recover my magazine.

—John Snow