WOW

I asked for folks preferences on articles...I was delighted with the overwhelming response on sixgunner.com and on my E-Mail, just shy of 100 of them....so I am going to try and answer them all...it will take time and a number of articles, but I will get to yours....

Response #1 to Doc Hudson....Doc asked that I write a piece on the best shots I have made and then to tone down my ego with the worst shots also.....Doc I can't write about all of them because the statute of limitations hasn't run out on some....but there are a few.....on both lists, that we can talk about.

In the early 1970s while I was the State Director (Commissoner) of Drug Enforcement for a southeastern state...we had a fugitive that was outrunning the State Police....He was getting around the road blocks because in those days the idea was under no circumstances do you damage your police cars...because the thinking went, that the criminal would eventually get caught, without expensive damage. I never ascribed to that reasoning because I knew if you didn't take him when and how ever you could....he would hurt a lot more good folks till he did get caught. You also didn’t shoot at speeding cars because you couldn’t predict the results....again afraid of collateral damage....But apparently my line of common sense, stop them when ever and how ever, didn't go very far in most police management circles...budgets did. Since I was the head of my agency...I made the rules for us. My only boss was the Governor and he thought like I did.

Our hot shot went around his last police barricade...on a cleared strip of I-64...because I was waiting for him. I had a cut down Marlin 45-70SS loaded with 500 grain slugs at around 1500 fps...my was a guide gun before anyone thought of Guide Guns...my first shot went right thru the on coming radiator, water jacket and pump of his car out at 70 plus yards...the next shot was the lucky one...it went thru his windshield, struck the steering wheel and went out the side window missing his nasty head by mear centimeters....he stood on his brakes and came to a screaming halt, suddenly realizing I’m sure that someone wasn’t playing games with him anymore. Where upon he was ungraciously but deservedly dragged from the ruined car and hauled away by the State Police.

When they pulled him from the car stunned, he still had a piece of the steering wheel in his left hand and screaming about police brutality. Why was the shot so lucky? Lucky for him...I was aiming for his head!!!!

The very finest shooting I have done or probably will ever do again with accuracy on demand, was over thirty years ago. Myself and a few officers were leaving the Hanover Gun Club range...when we saw several young men on the rifle range....they had driven two stakes into the ground about 6 or 7 feet apart, sticking up about four feet high. They had run a very heavy string across the top from poll to poll. And had tied six strings to the cross string and tied beer cans to those strings so they would dangle down to shot at them....out about 20 to 25 yards. It appeared that they had drank the beer first and weren't doing too well hitting the cans with their 22RF pistols.

We went to them and explained that they were not supposed to shoot handguns on the rifle range, certainly not after drinking, and not when they were not members in the first place. They were good youngsters in their late teens....and really weren't hurting anything...and we were really friendly about the whole situation.

One thing lead to another and somehow money started changing hands about my ability and accuracy with a very special S&W mod.10 that I used in center-fire target shooting. It had only one load...hollow base wadcutters over Bullseye with measured powder amounts in all the same manufactured cases, the wadcutters were weighed all to the same weight....the gun's slim barrel was five inches...set back so there was very little gap, target hammer and trigger...just a few ounces of pull...fixed sights cut to that load....it was the gun’s only load. When I did my part they would all go into one oblong hole at 25 yards...

The sun was behind me and those strings holding the beer cans, stood out bright and easy to see. I cut all six strings that day with six shots...and I've tried a number of times to do it again...but never have...younger eyes and steadier hands back then..

I remember Jim shooting that 45 Linebaugh/Ruger he wrote about, back that day in the 1980s, and putting them all into a 4 inch group...he says it was 150 yards...but I remember pacing it off and still think it was closer to two hundred...what he didn't tell you was the last shot opened the group, it was running 2 ½ inches, the last shot made it four inches. Now saying all this about these two fabulous shooting experiences Jim and I had....because it can also go the other way at times. I don't know if Jim remembers, but he called to me one day while we were woods loffin'and shooting in the hills of Oracle, AZ. He had shot at a rabbit a number of times and the rabbit held but Jim kept missing! So he called me to come and shoot the #$%&^X@ thing! Where upon I also missed it a goodly number of times. The rabbit is still laughing at us today...because it was only about 10 feet away from the both of us!!!!!

Got into a social disagreement with two characters in an underground parking garage in New York City many years ago. My partner and I made the mistake of saying please or something when trying to arrest them, ticked them off. Suddenly there was a number of 32 caliber bullets, 45 acp military ball ammo and 38s bouncing off the walls and ceiling. And going thru pretty Cadillacs, BMWs, and such....One gave up because he ran out of ammo...the other...well that's the strange thing about the whole story. Seems he got his ankle blown out from under him. Lost his gun and had to give up. The bosses were so impressed with our not killing them we both got an award. And I got one for outstanding accuracy and good judgement shooting him in the ankle and bringing him down. Ballistics stated it was my 45 ball that did the deed....But I didn't tell'em it was a ricochet, because I never shot at his ankle, my partner and I at the time thought he had shot himself by accident!

We were hunting rabbits. Spooked a bunch of deer from some brush in a place called Robards Corners..it was outside of San Antonio Texas back in the very early 1960s...a friend was watching while I fired at the running deer with a 22 Hornet...he said it was to light for deer...but we needed the meat...he was watching thru binoculars...when he let a warhoop out..."Dang it..(something like that) you got the doe right thru the head...must be 120 yards!!! What a shot!!!" We didn't have scopes in those days, open sights....never did tell him I was aiming at the buck running in front of her....

The first clone 45 Colt Italian single action, I ever had was in 1970 and it was imported by Iver Johnson. I bought it in a little gun shop in Richmond Va. We lived in the wilderness of the western part of the state. The store owner had given me a handful of commercial ammo so I could try the gun on the way home. I had no idea where it was sighted...

Along the way, in the middle of nowhere I spied a big turkey buzzard on a oak branch. I got out of the car and aimed the new 45SA for the middle of him and touched it off. He immediately jumped off the branch and into the brush below him. Then he flew back up on the branch....so I tried it again holding a little higher this time...he jumped off again. Finally nothing moved. I went to the brush under the tree..about 50 yards. Surprise TWO dead buzzards and the rabbit they were eating...if you believe that nonsense about buzzards waiting for something to die before they eat it....I have some property for sale in Sarajevo you might want...get all the shooting you’d ever want to do....

I had a youngster out hunting one day...he was a nice kid and new to guns. I was starting him out right. We were walking the back hills to the mountains around Tucson. He knew nothing of handguns, being newly moved to the southwest with his family from some northeastern city that hated guns. Anyway a jack rabbit jumped up and ran hard, about 80 yards out....I drew my 45 Colt single action explaining how you run the front sight slightly past the running rabbit and then fire.....son of a gun! I hit that rabbit right in the spine...it leaped in the air came down dead. Don’t know who was more surprised...me...the kid..or the rabbit. 15 years later the kid is a grown man, and he still tells the story of Paco and the rabbit...and what a fantastic shot I am...hope he doesn’t read this...hate to kill a legend.

Elmer Keith once (maybe more than once) said that a person who practices a whole lot, has luck favoring him in shooting. Well I practice a lot...I have one handgun, a Freedom Arms single action that has over 70,000 rounds thru it....and that is one handgun out of many. Numbers add up quickly...if you shot say only 50 rounds average a day for a year, that’s over 18000 rounds....When we lived in the wilderness, every morning on my home range I would start the day off...everyday...with up to 50 rounds just to keep my edge. I did that for 5 years straight. And that was just my morning eye openers. That comes to 90,000 rounds over 5 years alone. I was on two pistol teams at the time with tremendous amounts of practice....plus hunting all the time...and a whole lot more.

But when it comes to numbers in shooting I can’t even get close to John Taffin’s coattails. He shot silhouette for more than a decade....in that time period alone he must have gone thru multi hundreds of thousands of rounds. And Jim Taylor has put so much lead into the hills of southwestern Missouri, that end of the state is probably dipping into northern Oklahoma by now. So as Elmer says...luck follows practice.....

So Doc that’s just a few of the Good...the Bad....and the Ugly. If I think of more....and there are many more I’ll do this again, thanks for the request...it was fun reliving some of it.

Shawn45 said it best in his request for an article on feral dogs..."how about lassie?" There were several requests to write about the wild dogs I have run into. And because of my writing about shooting dogs in the past, I have been accused of hating dogs. Nothing could be more false. Love Dogs! But I dislike those that kill, maim and destroy, for blood lust. I wrote about them several times in my book. I was attacked and so was my daughter....we lost 40 animals on our little wilderness farm over 5 years to dogs. And as Jim T said in his very fine article on wild dogs...we are not talking about our well behaved pets. We are talking about killers...animals out of control...dangerous creatures.

It was 1972...my daughter at the time was six. We lived in the back country of Virginia...very wild. There was only 1500 people in our entire county at the time. The state forest officials figured the population of wild dogs in the state topped 250,000 animals. Seven people had lost their lives to dog packs in five years...including 18 month old twin boys in a heart wrenching episode in the northern part of the state. The loss of live stock state wide was outrageous. The Governor of Virginia...Holton...signed an order telling law enforcement officers of the state to shoot on sight any dog without a collar in the open areas and woods of the state. State insurance would cover any pets that owners might lose, even though warnings were sent out everywhere that a purge was taking place to get control of the situation, and that home and farm owners should keep there dogs contained. In the middle of this, a petting zoo in the city of Richmond was attacked by a dog pack, and a number of helpless small tame animals were ripped apart. This was the setting for what started my actively hunting feral dogs.

My daughter was waiting for a school bus at the end of our long lumber road early one morning in January of 72. A very large dirty whitish shepard mix feral dog attacked her...our school bus driver at that moment thank God, was coming down the road and saw the attack. She laid on the horn and the gas heading right for them. It scared the dog, who ran into an adjoining field. I went after the dog in a four wheel jeep. I shot him in the top of the shoulder with a little .380 PPK Walther at point blank range from the jeep, as he was running along a road.. He went under a barb wire fence and got away.

The snow suit my child was wearing saved her from any physical damage...but it was along time before she got over the abject fear of the attack. I was unhappy with the performance of the .380...so I traded it in for a Python .357 magnum. And went on a personal vendetta against wild dogs in our area. Killing 99 in three years...that I keep records on. Of all sizes and shapes from small, to one bruiser that was just under a hundred pounds. They averaged in weight around 35 to 50 pounds.

A few weeks after the attack on Jennifer...I spotted the dog that had attacked her, he was on a gravel state road...in front of a side road that led into friend’s farm...he was eating something. He was so busy I was able to get close enough, 50 yards, to put a 357 from my new Python into his headlights....lights out. It turned out he was eating my friend’s wife’s little pet lap dog. I went and told my friend and he said he would get rid of the body of the dog....

Later that evening he came to visit me. He had taken a bullet out of the shoulder knuckle of the shepard. It was my little 88 grain hollow point. It hadn’t gone in more than 3/8 ths of an inch. I have never carried a .380 since. Though the ammo made today for them is certainly a lot more effective then it was back then.

And speaking of effective...I learned how effective a 22 magRF cartridge out of a handgun is...the hard way. I was watching a friends farm while he was away for a day trip. Five dogs came in to get to his chickens. I talk about the incident in my Leverguns book. And will also in my new book I’m working on...but the bare facts are using a mod. 48 S&W with an 8 plus inch barrel...five shots with Winchester hollow pointed 22 Magnum RimFire ammo and five dogs down for the count. All within 10 to 15 feet....there is a picture of three of them hanging from a tree. The 22 magRF from a handgun is a lot more then the paper ballistics it’s critics like to quote.

I was deer hunting not far from my home in the wilderness when I heard something coming like a freight train thru the brush....you know that feeling you get that....you know that you know that...etc...the hair on the back of your neck goes up and...then blamb a sixty pound feral dog broke from the brush and I hit him with a 35 Remington 200 grain slug...but then he hit me right in the chest like a full back and we both went down...him on top sinking his teeth into my collar bone thru my winter coat. My rifle went helter-skelter, but I had a single action 44 special holstered...I pulled it and put two shots up thru his chest and out his back, before I could roll him off. I sustained a damaged collar bone and a ruined coat. This particular dog fit the description of one that had been raiding a local school yard and chasing kids...lucky none of the kids got bit...I figure it had to have been him..because the school ground raids ceased right after that. I got to dislike feral dogs even more, for every moment I had to wear that brace till my collar bone healed.

We, my neighbors and friends, in the area lost many animals.....mostly chickens and ducks...but also sheep...calves and my daughter lost a young horse. People were attacked...garbage cans, storage areas, and much more were always getting torn apart, animals being killed and maimed, they were a dangerous nuisance. We noticed...as we started thinning out their numbers a good deal, the small game began to return to excellent numbers. And the dog like any animal as you hunt his species, he gets very wary and increasingly more difficult to catch, and gets increasingly more nasty when discovered. But feral dogs have a fatal flaw...they always come to bait traps....they would check around a hanging hunk of meat for 50 to 75 yards or so...but never 200 yards...out where we would be with a rifle. The old 30-30 and 35 Remington Marlin leveractions, were deadly on these tough old dogs. The problem we faced as hunters of them...they were highly aggressive and hunted in packs. When you’d shoot one, unlike coyotes, the rest of the pack sometimes wouldn’t turn tail and run....they would often turn on the shooter. It could and did get lively sometimes.

My brother-in-law and I were out one day walking along a stream. It was unusual for me that I had a little .410 double barrel shotgun with me loaded with Brenneke (sp) slugs...not a handgun. Four nasty dogs came for us...I hit two in a wink of an eyelash...the other two didn’t run away..they kept coming! Reloading...luckily it had autoejectors...I shot the third at a few feet and the fourth at my brother’s feet! That was the very last time I went anywhere out there without a heavy handgun.

I shot them off of me, off of downed animals like calves, in chicken pens, out of sheep fields, in the heavy forest and treed areas, in open farm land, and on roads...I’ve caught them running deer, killing wild turkeys, killing other dogs...farm animals and each other. If this country ever experiences a real disaster and society and it’s rules break down...it’s not the gangs of thugs we will have to fear....it’s our own pets....they can be ruthless, violent, cruel, and deadly to people. It was an interesting time...score Paco/99....dogs/one.