This is via an IM from David M. at my work.

Someone wasn’t following all the gun safety rules:

Sheriff Steve Kozisek said Richard L. Fipps, 46, of Sheridan had driven to Murphy Gulch Road with two employees to move a vehicle that had become stuck. Fipps was standing beside his truck as chains were being removed from the front of it when he was shot.

Kozisek said Fipps told a dog in the front seat of the truck to get into the back seat. Among other personal items laying on the back seat was a .300 Winchester Magnum with the safety apparently turned off. The dog managed to discharge the weapon, which fired through the cab of the truck.

The gun wasn’t in use. It should have been unloaded and in a case. Now he may lose his arm. He and others could have been killed by this single shot.

I recently had an email conversation with John G. at the Lewiston Idaho pistol club. I haven’t attended a match there in probably two years but he said they still tell stories about me.

Really?

So he claimed. Then he gave me the following examples (link added about the magazine shooting incident):

A shooter dropped a mag while reloading on the run and somehow booted it into the target area, prompting the story about Joe Huffman, who once shot one of his own mags clean through…  Better to be infamous than forgotten, I suppose.  Strangely, I’m reasonably certain that the person telling the story wasn’t shooting with us when it happened, suggesting you’ve become part of the oral history of our matches.

We also still use you as a unit of measure for heights (e.g., “Joe Huffman could shoot over it but nobody else can, so it’s high enough”).

Wow! I’m thinking maybe I should go back and shoot a match with them again sometime over the holidays.

I was wondering. Does this make me a legend in my own time? Or just in my own mind?

Years ago I read about a fascinating pistol target device described by Jeff Cooper as an Apitir. I searched for it at the time and found nothing. I later forgot the name, which I knew only as an odd name starting with an A. After rediscovering Cooper’s description and searching for it just now, I still find nothing. If anyone is building them, or has build even one, they haven’t posted it on line by the name Apitir, and almost no one has been talking about it.

Cooper describes it in the sixth item on this page. It’s a great idea, Cooper wanted it to be widely embraced, and since no one else is talking bout it, at least under that name, well, there it is for you to ponder.

It shouldn’t be difficult to build, but I don’t quite understand what he meant by “actuated by the shooter…with the shooting hand.” Maybe he intended that your pistol be holstered as you pull a cord or some such, and then as the disks begin to roll you draw, aim and fire. My (apparently incorrect) memory of it was that you’d shoot a central target, which would release the two rolling disks. He did not indicate the angle, or pitch, of the sloped runners. A variable slope would allow you to experiment, or change the difficulty, as desired. Some experimentation would be in order, to find a rail design that reliably keeps the disks on track, and lets them fall off when hit.

I remember thinking that a magazine full of the disks, and a feeding mechanism, would allow for several actuations, or tries, before having to reset the thing. That would make it more complicated and expensive, but far more useful.

If I had any trust that it would remain unmolested by rifle fire for a number of years, I’d have one built and keep it at the Peterson range. Something like that would make a pretty sweet rifle target though, too.

One compromise design, or variation, would replace the steel disks with clay “jackrabbits” or similar targets.

Via TFB, we see The Dominator, a 308 Winchester upper for the 1911. OK then. As Cooper was fond of saying; I suppose we should refrain from asking “why?” I don’t know what it’s for, but it is interesting from a gadgetry liker’s point of view. If it were a choice between the two I think I’d take the Thompson Center Contender. Hmm; how about a 300 Win Mag upper for your LCP, then, for, you know, uh…practice, or something, so when you’re out shooting for defense with your .380 it would serve as low recoil practice for big game hunting.

OK, so I’ve been ignorant. Laugh and make fun of me and get it out of the way. Tam posted about a “Kit Gun” recently. I’d seen that term many times, and it’s always been used as though everyone understood what it meant and there was therefore no point in trying to explain it. Kind of like the high school meetings I missed because, well, “We told everyone” they said (meaning they told a few people and assumed everyone else would hear it from them. I was always out of the loop because I only attended half days my senior year. It was a good excuse to avoid pep rallies anyway.

I searched “kit gun” some time ago and came up with nothing helpful, but doing it just now I found it! A kit gun means it goes with you on hiking and camping trips, and the term comes from the “kit bag” that a hiker or camper might carry. Well I’ve hiked and camped all my life and never heard of a “kit bag”, so the term “kit gun” has been not at all obvious to me. I somehow missed that memo. I suppose everyone knew about all this but me.

That makes just about every gun I own a “kit gun”, technically, since I would take most any of them along on a camping trip or a hike, and have done so in most cases, but I guess the term refers to one that’s generally more handy (smaller and/or lighter) than some other similar gun in a similar caliber, kind of how a “carbine” is a relatively shorter and lighter version of a particular rifle. As far as I can determine through observation of usage though is that a “kit gun” refers to a handgun only, not a long gun, even though I do have what might be called a “kit bag” that holds a long gun. So a relatively light and handy rifle equals “carbine”, while a relatively light and handy handgun equals kit gun. Is that about right?

Does this mean that ANY service pistol is a “kit gun” simply because soldiers tend to hike about and are known to camp?

Just learned this today, so it may be flawed. I’ve ordered “gun kits” before but apparently those do not necessarily qualify as “kit guns”, though there may be such a thing as a “kit gun kit” from which you build your own kit gun.

OK, so there MUST be a term for a light or small and handy shotgun that I’ve never heard. “Coach gun” maybe, but that’s a side by side with exposed hammers, in my mind anyway, which would exclude many other light and handy shotguns.