I trained the forces of military and police in countries receiving arms from the U.S. The Mau-Mau uprisings, and terrorist movements, were under way in Africa. The U.S. under the Secretary of State Dean Acheson and the Secretary of the Armed Forces secretly had arms shipped to those countries fighting Communist infiltration. I helped train those forces receiving them...I’m saying all this, to explain why someone stationed in North Africa got to go all over the eastern regions of the Continent. And hunt a great deal over two plus years.... That brought me to the use of both the 44 special barrel set up, and the original 45 Colt chambering on lots of game.

My grandfather used to tell us a story about shooting a horse that back in 1928, was stomping it’s rider....he shot it with a 45 Colt single action...and the 255 grain load of the day. As he told it, neither the rider or the horse survived...but for different reasons.

In Africa I decided I wanted to prove or dis-prove that this was possible. Remember very few people in the 1950s shot any animals with a handgun...even fewer wrote about it doing it...and even fewer still, read about it. And handguns in Africa outside of armed forces were largely unknown. But to the wondering eyes of the natives on that particular hunt, I plastered myself into the sides of a muddy water hole hill and waited. When the sun began to fall the very wary zebras came to drink. At about twelve yards I shot an old and grizzled male zebra in the chest, with a commercial 45 Colt load (Remington I think). It broke the spine, he rolled over practically on his back, trying to turn and run...but he never got up. I’m not sure who was more surprised... him, me, my ProHunter (in those days of pre-political correctness, they were called white hunters). Thus began my love for the mighty 45 Colt.

In February of 1972, I was the Commissioner of a state law enforcement agency in the south east. I walked into a bank, on my day off...I had a Ruger 45 Colt loaded with 260 gr. Keith cast slugs, over 22 grains of 2400 powder. I fired three shots that day, fatally wounding one of three bank robbers...and destroying the carburetor of the get-away car...and the surrender-instantly-of the other two....anybody want to ask me if I feel undergunned with a single action in an enforcement situation? There are better handguns, but under gunned...not hardly. Anybody want to know why I never carried a nine millimeter anything?

 I’m not against a nine, if someone else wants to carry it. All my enforcement life, for some reason I was one of those people that relied on heavy calibers...heavy loaded...and always seemed to get involved in outlandish and dangerous situations. I survived, in great part to heavy loaded, large caliber handguns...the confidence they gave me, and my absolute knowledge that I could place my shots within a few inches out to fifty yards or more. Out to 100 yards I could and still can do what most in law enforcement need a scoped rifle for....

Then in the early 1980s, at about the same time Freedom Arms was getting it’s 454 off the ground it was my privilege to talk often to a young man named John Linebaugh...he was in Wyoming and he was to start one of his own revolutions....Gun writer Ross Seifried took one of Linebaugh’s super strong 45 single actions to Africa...and had the audacity to kill a Cape Buff with it...and then write about it. All hell broke out in the gun world...and the race was on.

Freedom Arms...when everyone was telling Dick Casull he was crazy...the Baker family believed in him...built his guns and the 454 Casull was born. I will say it once...no need to say it more...anything...ANYTHING...on four legs that walks this earth can be brought down cleanly with a 454 Casull and the right bullet. In 1983/84 Holt Bodinson and I had over $10,000 worth of Freedom Arms handguns to test...in those days that was 14 guns. I got to buy the most accurate of the lot....Holt thinks he got the best one, but I lied to him about the accuracy of mine and his..he got number two...

I purchased 100 brand new 45 Colt cases..(Freedom Arms doesn’t recommend you use 45 Colt cases for 454 loads) I loaded them 14 times each...with NEI’s 290 grain Keith bullet over 30 grains of 2400....I have no idea what the pressure is or was but the velocity was near 1700 fps from a 4 and 3/4 inch barreled handgun...I lost one case...I crushed it in the reloading press...so much for those that say 45 Colt brass is weak. All of those guns shot with accuracy I had never seen in handguns before, especially with such heavy loads. Holt and I got so used to the superb accuracy that when one gun kept stringing it’s groups just 1 and 3/4ths of an inch..we sent it back with the targets...Dick Casull himself took the gun off the line as SUBSTANDARD in accuracy.

The gun I purchased (with a then a bank loan of $620) put five rounds into ½ inch groups..the other twelve guns were all close in accuracy..Holt’s gun shot easily into 3/4ths inch groups....these were open sighted guns at 25 yards...

 Holt did all the testing with the scoped guns he would have to tell you about those. But I didn’t stop there...in ten years plus, not quite 11 yrs, I put over 70,000 rounds thru my gun. 95% were cast loads...I have had the throat insert in the barrel, replaced twice. And the ejector rod kept coming off after all those rounds...so two years ago Bob Baker, Freedom’s President, and a handgun hunter in his own right, took my gun back to the factory with him from the gathering of the Shootists. When I got it back several days (not weeks) later I tried to shoot the rod off again...with 340 grain SSK bullets at over 1600 fps...after two hundred rounds in two days and no problems...I figured they got it right. Now you tell me in all honesty what handgun in America today will take 6 to 7 thousand rounds of heavy loads a year...and have only the ejector rod come off after ten years?!. Sure barrels will wear out...but the special insert that Freedom puts in their Primer Grade guns is changeable...And 95% of the loads were cast bullets, with non-ball powder.

By the way that’s over 3000 lbs of lead and 290 lbs of powder over a ten plus year period....that’s about five hundred plus rounds a month for near 11 years. Some years more...some years less..Today I fire about 2500 rounds of handgun ammo a year, in all kinds of calibers....the hands and the eyes are getting old.

At one point in our thirty-three years of marriage...my wife and I live in pretty wild wilderness country in the south east. In those five years I shot scores of deer a year for us and farm families around us that couldn’t hunt and needed meat...several black bear a year...turkeys (with handguns or leveraction rifles)...and wild dogs. We had a epidemic of wild dogs in the 1970s in the southeast. In one three year period I killed 99 of them..from small to well over 60 lbs. (one giant at about 100 lbs) I was attacked and so was my young daughter at the time on two different occasions. The electric company tree cutting crews carried shotguns, the state law officers were REQUIRED to shoot any dog without a collar in a outlying area...state insurance paid if it was a person’s pet caught wandering. Notifications were everywhere, warning people not to allow their dogs to run free in the woods.

The only time the dogs were safe was during deer season, because many used dogs in the state to run deer for hunting. I really think that practice was one of the big contributors to wild dogs...some of the hunting dogs wouldn’t return and they would breed in the wild...plenty to eat...winters weren’t that bad most years...it was excellent habitat for them. And in the mid 1970s the coyotes began to spread into the southeast...and guess what began to breed together...you got it. And we had a superbreed of coyote going for awhile. I left there in the late 1970s, and came to the southwest to live...I’m not sure what the situation is today in the southeast with feral dogs...but I know the problem has spread to the cities. Trying to keep control of them just in New York City alone is a multi-million dollar job.

Destruction of small game, damage even death to humans, feral dogs are dangerous. Of course I get a lot of E-Mail from Tree Huggers about my writing about killing dogs. The Hollywood political district in California just had a referendum...the tree huggers want tags on all fur coats stating how the animal was killed, and if it was a human death. No Kidding! It was all over CNN News. We are getting more then ridiculous, it’s getting insane...but the insane is politically correct..."and none dare call it treason..." Anyway I have never hit a feral dog with a forty caliber and lost it.