pronematch.com

by Hap Rocketto

In an earlier era sovereigns ruled with absolute power through a principle known as the Divine Right of Kings. Essentially this meant that the power of the king was derived directly from the throne of God, no mean claim in a time when religion was a most powerful influence. Because of the believed source of the king’s power the general populace also came to believe that royalty had certain supernatural powers, among them was one known as the Royal Touch. In particular it was believed that scrofula, known as The King’s Evil, was particularly susceptible to this cure.

The Royal Touch was a miraculous gift of healing that some royalty took seriously while others, such as England’s William III, who once told a petitioner as he touched him, “May God give you better health and more sense.” were more casual. There are many documented cases of the Royal Touch healing the common man. In hind sight it may well be that the first step in an era of dubious hygiene, washing the supplicants before they were brought into the royal presence, was really the reason for the cure rather than the laying on of royal hands.

I am not particularly superstitious, although I have been known to not wash my shooting sweatshirt during a particularly good run of scores or change my socks if the Red Sox are having a winning streak. Never the less I have come to believe that some members of the shooting royalty have a touch of the touch about them. For example Lones Wigger, the shooting king of kings. His ability to inevitably have a vacant parking place for his car directly behind his firing point at Camp Perry, year in and year out, beggars the mind. There is no other reason for this regular occurrence that I can divine other than something divine.

Another member of the shooting aristocracy with the touch is Art Jackson. I was fortunate to be the amanuensis to this Olympian and world and national champion when he produced his autobiography. As we worked on the project, which eventually amounted to over 60,000 words, he related numerous incidents where he escaped either bodily or competitive disaster by no other means that I could determine other than intervention by a higher power.

One of his more recent encounters with the touch involved me. I once mentioned to him that I was getting on in years and tired of being pounded about by the .308 I shoot in the local slow fire rifle league. He suggested that a smaller caliber centerfire rifle might do the trick and he would keep his eye out for me. Soon my telephone jingled and Art’s voice filled the earpiece with the good news that he had run across a Remington 700 in .222. It came with loading dies, brass, primers, and two stocks and he had purchased it in anticipation of me taking it off of his hands. When he told me the ridiculously low price paid for the rifle I had to ask him if he was wearing a mask and holding a gun in his hand when he acquired it.

My next question was obvious, “How does it shoot?” Three days later an envelope arrived with Art’s return address in the upper left hand corner. Enclosed I found a note and a torn and weathered piece of target with some holes punched in it. Art’s note told me that he had slapped a scope on the rifle and taken the seven rounds of loaded ammunition that came with the rifle down to the range for a test. Art related that there were some old men who were sighting in a rifle. They had no spotting scope so they would fire a round, hobble down range to check it out, and return to repeat the cycle again. I would note that age is all a state of mind because Art is 84. Having little time to wait out these old codgers Art bore sighted the rifle, sighted in on a knothole in the plywood target frame, took one sighter shot, corrected from it, and then fired a five shot group of 1.75 inches at 200 yards. He saved the last round so he could dissect it and determine the load.

As he ambled down range to measure the group he realized that he had no way to prove to me the group size. His eye caught a used target caught up in the brambles, much like the ram in the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, stooping he picked it up, tore off a corner, and, good citizen that he is, put the remainder in the trash barrel. When he got to the butts he placed the shred of paper over the group and punched through the bullet holes with a pencil.

It is apparent that Art has the touch because; in the first place he got a very good rifle for a price that came close to grand larceny. The second proof is the fact that when I went to the range it took me some 20 rounds to sight the rifle in with iron sights as opposed to Art’s one. Finally he boldly shot an unknown load from an unknown source without having it blow up on him.

As a shooting peasant I don’t have the touch. Had it been me engaged in this little episode, instead of Art, I would be out an unseemly large amount of cash. I was lucky to get by with just 20 sighting shots while Art needed just one. Had I shot handloads from an unknown source I would still be recovering from numerous contusions, bruises, and cuts caused by the flying metal fragments and wood splinters of the exploding rifle. As Mel Brooks said in his movie The History of the World Part I, “It is good to be the king.”

by Hap Rocketto

The first cold snap of autumn had come, and with it a new television season. As is our practice I stoked up the woodstove, the bride popped a bowl of popcorn, and we cuddled up on the couch to watch the season premier of Crime Scene Investigator, the Las Vegas one-not one of the spin-offs. The series is little more than a prime time soap opera with engaging characters and intertwining story lines that plays a bit fast and loose with the nuts and bolts of forensic criminal investigation. It is our weekly guilty pleasure.

It is easy to suspend belief for, in my case, I am easily distracted by Marg Helgenberger playing Catherine Willows. The methodology of evidence collection and evaluation intrigues me and, even though I know they are not all that accurate, is fun to watch. I must admit I am always on the lookout for firearms stuff and try to beat them to the punch.

On this seemingly quiet night two of the characters, Nick Stokes and Greg Sanders, flipped a coin to see who was going search a rather ripe, rancid, and raunchy dumpster for evidence. I empathized with them for recently I had been a participant, a distant one thank goodness, of a similar incident.

While Dumpster Diving is not an Olympic sport, shooting is. How they became intertwined and played a big part in the National Rifle Association’s 2008 New England Smallbore Rifle Position Regional is a story worth the telling. It all began when a local gadfly filed suit against Blue Trail Range for, in my opinion, alleged and trumped up safety issues. In the aftermath the range shut down for a short period and the summer shooting schedule was knocked into a cocked hat. The state association, caught short, scurried about the state for alternate venues and the matches were rescheduled.

The positional regional ended up at my home club, Quaker Hill, putting me in the position of club representative. Happy to be of assistance since I wasn’t shooting position last summer; I set up and broke down the range, acted as range officer and target boy, and was Chairman of the Jury. It was one of the first of the new one day conventional three position regionals to be held but that fact, and its ramifications, simply slipped my mind during the hectic preparations.

Things went well, except for a fierce thunderstorm that broke during the standing stage. While the shooters were under cover the same could not be said of the Range Officer, the target boy, and the Chairman of the Jury, not to mention the targets which were reduced to the basic ingredient for paper mache. After the challenge period had ended, the awards distributed, and the competitors left, I tossed the soggy targets into the dumpster, locked the gate, and headed home.

I had barely gotten out of my wet clothes when a phone call arrived from Lisette Grunwell. As a competitor she had stayed undercover and remained dry at the match and, not having to change clothing, went directly to her computer and looked up the National Records for the new course of fire. Finding that a number of participants in the match, herself included, had established National Records she felt compelled, for reasons unknown, to call me. I then called the Match Director who, not being a club member and living further away, asked if I would file the paperwork as I was Chairman of the Jury. I was happy to do so. I then remembered that I needed to submit the targets for verification. I called Lisette back, as she lives close to the club, and asked her to retrieve the targets. She agreed but, being no fool, immediately dispatched her fiancé Kent Lacey with instructions to recover the targets at all cost. Kent, being no fool, climbed into his truck, dove into the Dumpster, and returned to spread the targets out on the garage floor to dry.

Eventually the rescued mildewing mass of paper pulp got to me and was sent off to NRA Headquarters with the appropriate forms. Soon after, record certificates began falling all over Connecticut as do the leaves in autumn. But, alas, no good deed goes unpunished. Word quickly got back that I had overlooked one of the records and needed to make things right. I got on the phone to the NRA, informed them of the situation, and asked that they adjust the records accordingly. They would be only happy to do so, all I had to do was send in the targets.

The targets! In a panic I shot down the basement stairs relived to find the buff colored pile of putrefying pulp more or less safe and sound. What started as the official score cards of a rifle match had now turned into an interesting, if unintentional, mycology project. After brushing away an interesting assortment of fungi it only took some scraping to remove a minor coating of mold hiding the competitor and match numbers I sought. Quickly they were folded, stuffed into an envelope, and mailed off to the unsuspecting, and I hoped understanding and allergy free, NRA Competitions Division.

For the next few weeks I nervously scanned the newspaper hoping not to read of some postal facility in the Washington, DC area being evacuated when an envelope with a strange growth escaping from underneath the packaging set off the biological alarm system as it passed through a security screening. Much to my relief, within a week or two, the correct record was posted and the newspaper had remained mute. Once the record was posted online I wasted no time in bagging up the moldering mound of targets and, with fingers crossed, hoping no other record would be found missing, reinterred them in the local landfill’s white paper recycling dumpster.