Everett's strange encounter

After I posted the blog entitled “Telling on myself,” I received a response, in the form of a private email, and it's a doozie.

Everett Bosch wrote to me to relate the story of a strange encounter he had recently while airgunning. Everett is a Presbyterian Minister in the Town of Tracy, California. Tracy, Everett tells me, is situated about 60 miles east of San Francisco and about 60 miles south of Sacramento. It used to be a small farming town, but with the growth of the Bay area, has increasingly become a bedroom community for folks who commute to the Bay area.

But folks still farm in Tracy, and ground squirrels are definitely a problem for the farmers. Everett is an airgunner, proud owner of a scope .22 Discovery, and he likes to help people out by doing “pest control favors” while at the same time keeping his eye sharp.

On a recent Friday afternoon, he decided to indulge one of his country boy pastimes by getting out his Discovery and going out west of the new Catholic Church site to help out a local farmer by reducing the severe ground squirrel-caused crop predation in that area. He walked about a quarter into the fields from where he parked his car and began to search for ground squirrels. As he searched, from time to time he would look toward the road.

After a while, Everett looked and saw two highway patrols cars some distance up the road from him. He figured they were doing “some sort of highway patrol stuff” and gave it no further thought. A while later, he looked again, and there were now four highway patrol cars at the same location. “Boy, something must be going on,” he thought.

He was about to find out that he was what was going on.

Having hunted for about an hour, Everett decided to call it quits.

As he walked back to his car, from the quarter-mile distant road, with its four Highway Patrol and now one Sheriff's patrol cars, came the loudspeaker command: “You in the field with the rifle... put the rifle down! Put your hands up! Start walking toward the road!”

Everett thought, “Oooh boy, I've done it now! I can see the paper now: ‘Local pastor arrested on terrorism charges!’ As I walked the very long distance, my hands slowly drifted downward a bit: ‘Get your hands away from your body! Lift them HIGH! When you get to the pole, a unit will meet you.’ The CHP car came to me, stopping about 15 yards away and the officers inside took over. One got out, standing behind his car door with pistol drawn and aimed carefully at me. The other said, ‘Turn around; keep your hands very high! Get down on one knee; now onto the other one; cross your legs over your ankles!’ At my age and with my extra-long feet, do you know how hard that is? I'm sure I detected the end of a laugh when I heard, ‘Don't fall over.’ The officer at my back proceeded to give a very thorough pat down, over, under, and around. He asked, ‘Is that a cell phone in the belt holster under the shirt?’”

Soon it became very apparent that the Everett wasn’t doing anything illegal. He was merely trying to help a local farmer with a pest problem. The responding officers even commented on his “impressive” air rifle.

Everett now has a written statement of release from custody by the investigating officer (though he said Everett was never in custody... whatever Everett was in, he was now released from it!). Apparently the local authorities had received three phone calls, not from the local residents, but from motorists on the highway, reporting “a man with a rifle.” The Deputy Sheriff said that it was just “Suspicious Circumstances” to which they had responded. Everett thinks maybe he'll have his statement of release framed.


He concludes: “You see, this is no longer the little country town called Tracy, occupied by farmer-types and mostly blue collar workers accustomed to 'gopher patrols'. It is now the city of Tracy owned by Bay Area people who call 911 out of fear of guys with rifles.”

Til next time, aim true and shoot straight.

- Jock Elliott

Telling on myself

I collect stories. I particularly like true stories of things that I have actually happened to people. The incidents might be funny or strange or just mildly unusual, but I like them because they underscore how whacky real-life can be. I hope you will share some of your stories, but to get the pump started, here are a few things that have happened to me while airgunning.

A close encounter of the curious kind. Not long after I first began testing and writing about airguns, I was sitting in the front yard, shooting an HW97 with a huge scope mounted on it. I was concentrating on trying to complete a few shots in the fading light when my wife stuck here head out the front door to see how I was doing.

Suddenly she began laughing.

“What?” I said.

“You have an audience,” she replied.

“What do you mean ‘an audience’?”

“Very carefully, look to your right,” she said.

Slowly I turned my head and looked across the lane that divides our property. There, standing on a small ridge not 80 feet away, three deer were peering through the trees, intently watching me with all the curiosity of young children.

I wondered what they were thinking. We’re they talking in muffled deer whispers about me? “Jeez, Marge, do ya think he’s a good shot?” “I dunno. If he is, we better get oughta here.”



The buck stops here. One spring I was in the side yard, shooting at a bout 20 yards with a PCP air rifle with a high magnification scope mounted. As I peered down range for my first shot, all I saw was a blur. I tried twisting the focus ring on the scope all the way out. No improvement. So then I tried turning the focus all the way in the other direction. Still all I saw was a blur.

I lifted my head, looked over the scope, and found a beautiful 4-point buck standing between me and the target. He stood there looking at me. “Get out of here!” I yelled. No response. “Git! Shoo!” Nothing. Finally, I turned my back on the deer, whistled Dixie for a few seconds, and when I turned back, he was gone.

The awful truth about the common denominator. I usually shoot “Ok” most of the time, but every shooter will occasionally have an off day. One day, I learned that lesson Big Time.

I was testing a spring-piston air rifle that is known for its accuracy, but no matter what pellet I tried, I couldn’t get to group better than 1.5 inches at 30 yards for a 5-shot group. I came storming into the house using several of the more colorful short words to peel the paint off the walls: “Those blinkety-blink springers are more trouble than they are worth! Why, you’d be lucky to hit the broadside of a barn from the inside. It’s a wonder that anybody shoots them. You must have to be some sort of savant to get them to behave . . .” and so forth.

Teed-off to a fare-the-well, I grabbed my .22 caliber Career precharged rifle which was a known tackdriver. I charged back out to my range, put up a fresh target, and fired five shots for a group with the best pellet for that gun. I walked up to the target and found I had gotten the same result as with the springer.

“What, have all my airguns gone to blazes?” I asked the empty range. Then I realized that the one common denominator in this experiment was the nut behind the trigger: me. Some days, it’s just plain your fault that the shooting is not going well. Along those line, Brian Johnson, a very gifted shooter, once said to me, “When I miss, I assume it’s my fault, not the guns.” That’s excellent advice.

If you feel like telling on yourself, I’d love to hear your interesting airgunning story.

Til next time, aim true and shoot straight.

- Jock Elliott

How I got started in airgunning

My very first airgun was a Daisy, but not the vaunted, legendary Red Ryder. Instead my first airgun was a Daisy Model 25.

It was Christmas. I was ten, sitting in the living room with my Dad. The opening of presents was over, and I was disappointed. I hadn’t gotten my BB gun. But, just like in the movie “A Christmas Story,” my Dad said, “Wait a minute, there’s another present over here.”

And he pulled a long, slim box from behind the couch. In it was my Model 25. It was beginning of many happy hours for me and my Dad.

For those who aren’t familiar with the Model 25, it is a pump action BB gun. Pump once for each shot. To load the Model 25, you unscrew the shot tube from the muzzle, push a slide down and lock it, and then carefully (very carefully) pour BBs into the tiny hole until the shot tube is full to the top. Then you have to screw the shot tube back into the muzzle, and the fun can begin. The Model 25 had a rear sight that could be flipped from a peep sight to a notch sight.

I don’t know how many thousands of BBs went down the smooth bore of my Model 25, but I can remember there were summers when it seemed I was at the corner store every other day buying another tube of BBs. I do know that eventually I became a pretty good instinctive shooter. I didn’t use the sights anymore; I simply looked over the top of the barrel and pretty much hit what I intended. I think, though, that if I could pop back in time, I would be astounded at how short the distances were that we normally shot at. I think that many of our shots were taken at 15-20 feet. No matter; we had lots of fun.

Eventually trigger seer became so worn that the gun was now on “full auto” – as soon as you returned the cocking pump to its original position, it would go off, whether you pulled the trigger or not. Nevertheless, I still have that Model 25. I can’t bear to throw it away.

I drifted away from shooting after that, concerned with the things that young men chase after. It wasn’t until four decades later that I got back into airguns again. A fellow writer was visiting from Scotland. On a whim one day we purchased a Marksman Biathlon Trainer, a rudimentary low-power break barrel springer with plastic match sights and .177 rifled barrel. Even though it had what a friend called “a seventeen-stage trigger,” I was astounded with how far it could shoot with a fair degree of accuracy. My Scottish friend and I shot up a couple of tins of pellets in a few days.

We knew nothing about trajectories, velocities, pellet selection, scopes, triggers or any of the other considerations that fill my head now when I consider an airgun. All we knew was that we were enjoying the heck out of shooting.

There was another thing that we did not know, although I know it now: that unobtrusive, unremarkable box that housed the Marksman Biathlon Trainer also contained the Seeds of My Doom. That’s right: my fate was written on the wall, if I only had sense enough to realize it. And here’s why: that Marksman box also contained a glorious, full color catalog from Beeman adult precision airguns.

When I looked at the beautiful metal and wood of those finely craft airguns, I was lost. I knew I had to find out more about them. And that was the beginning of the road that eventually led to me writing this blog.

That’s my story. How about posting a comment that tells how you got started in airgunning?

Til next time, aim true and shoot straight.

- Jock Elliott