Can’t find

[madmax]

By golly I think I'll get that.
Thank you once again.
Tony

[Alan R McDaniel Jr]

I do admit to taking two shells to the woods in my youth if I could scrounge them up. I never practiced. Ever. I never spent one day shooting at anything that didn't move until I was an adult. I didn't know what practice was and I don't think I ever heard the term. That is the truth. Dad served in the war and never picked another weapon when he got out so I was on my own when it came to hunting and I was on my own when it came to buying ammo.

My male role models were very much into guns and hunting. There was never anything in my upbringing that constituted what some refer to as "range time". They were rifle builders and reloaders. They built their own hunting rifles from Mauser 98s and Springfield 03s and 03A3s. Then they worked up loads. After the initial load development that rifle might fire four rounds per year. Two fouling shots and two shots on deer.

This past weekend the neighbors down the road must have fired 2000 rounds. Probably 223 from an AR. I'd count to 20 and then they'd do it again. It really got kinda tiresome. We never did that.

My youngest son asked me to be his Best Man. I asked him what he wanted to do for his bachelor party. He said he wanted to shoot with me and his brothers. I loaded up around 500 rounds of each 45 ACP, 45 Colt, 38 spl, and 357 Mag. I also took along a couple of bricks of 22 lr. That was the only time we ever did anything like that.

Back in the day ammo, even reloaded ammo, cost money, and money was tight. The cost of building a hunting rifle and loading ammo was weighed agains #s of deer meat (and javelina meat too) to justify the build. My dad was a craftsman and built some beautiful rifles and stocks. He often told me about doing a full checkering job for a fellow for $25 and that was the full extent of "Christmas Money" for that year.

When I came into shooting age (5), I got to practice shooting ... on rabbits. My grandmother and mother would fry what we'd eat and we'd take the excess to the folks who worked for my grandfather. The idea was to take a fine bead and hit the rabbit in the eye wasting as little meat as possible. Those folks wh ogot the rabbits didn't throw any edible part of those rabbits away. Their dogs were lucky if the skin had a bit of flesh on it.

I like to shoot, and I like to reload. I don't hunt much any more. After the boys left home our meat consumption dropped considerably and a deer would be way more than #1 wife and I would eat in a year.

I do know that as a kid, when I started having to buy my own ammo, my aim got a lot better.

Alan