It's unfortunate the challenge, satisfaction and just plain fun of squeezing a gun's trigger isn't more widely reported, or known. This thought occurred to me on recent days while shooting at Oakdale Gun Club in the east metro, joined there on given outings by a few score or more of other shooters, each sighting in a rifle, targeting clays with a shotgun, or otherwise plinking away, sometimes with handguns.
Anyone who does it will want to do it again.
On Wednesday, for instance, at Oakdale, I had my .270 with me, and like shooters benched on either side of me, I was profoundly interested in hitting a bull's-eye 25, 50, 100 and 220 yards out, a feat not as easy as Hollywood movies suggest. Ultimately, a steady hand and Zen-like coolness are required. Also a good gun helps. And good ammunition.
It's the latter and its relative scarcity that might surprise a lot of deer hunters in coming weeks.
Example: The other night at Cabela's in Rogers, the ammo supply in some calibers, .270 not least, resembled that of a mom-and-pop convenience store somewhere in west Texas. OK, that's a stretch. But you get the idea: Ask for a premium Federal or Winchester or Remington brand of center-fire ammunition and in response you might get the same shoulder shrug I did.
"It goes out,'' a clerk said. "As fast as it comes in.''
Of course anyone who's been awake the past year or so has heard, if only generally, about the fast clip at which guns have been selling, particularly ARs, the so-called "assault-style'' rifles.
A lot of these are chambered .223, and that ammunition has been flying off the shelves. But so have .22LR ("long rifle'') rimfire cartridges, in part, as Guns & Ammo magazine has reported, because this ammunition is relatively cheap. Also, more ARs chambered .22LR have come on the market in recent years, and target shooters can push a lot of ammunition through these babies fairly cheaply, and minus the recoil and noise that accompany capping bigger cartridges.
