I did, however, take the rifle to the range to see if the rifle was zeroed in. I placed one round in the chamber, and after settling the crosshairs of the scope on a 200-yard spinner target that was painted orange, I squeezed the trigger.
Clang! The bullet hit the orange part of the target, and I could see the target swinging back and forth in its cradle. So much for that, I thought, and I ejected the empty cartridge casing.
I placed the empty casing back into the box and put the ammunition and the rifle back in the truck. I saw no reason to expend any more ammunition. I had found out what I wanted to know.
* * *
I and a friend had an interesting last week looking for a few things related to firearms. My friend was looking for bullets for his handgun, and I was looking for bullets for the .243 and a fairly good soft case to transport either my .270 or the .243 to and from the field.
We started from Danville and went all the way to a gun store in Paris with no luck. Their guns were ridiculously expensive. They had about five M1 Garands that had $1,800 price tags on them.
Being as the M1 was the rifle that I went through almost all of my military service time with, I was interested in just what these rifles looked like inside and out.
The outsides weren't too bad, although they were lacking in the bluing department. At least one of them had had some rear sight alterations. The stocks weren't really too bad. I know that I could have done a fairly good job in redoing them with a little patience and a good deal of linseed oil along with a piece of leather to rub the oil into the stock with.
However, the bores in these weapons were pitiful. One of them had something in it that almost plugged the bore. I couldn't tell what it was, but it certainly wasn't something that was supposed to be there.
I just put them back in the rack and walked off shaking my head thinking that anyone would have to be stupid to pay $1,800 to buy one of those pieces of junk.
Since that store didn't have anything, we traveled back into Lexington to another sporting goods store that carried quite an assortment of guns and reloading equipment, again with no luck. We then went to Frankfort and checked two gun stores there with no luck.
After Frankfort we came back through Lawrenceburg and checked a store there with no luck. Our final stop was in Harrodsburg, and we still didn't find anything worthy of plunking any hard-earned cash down on the counter for.
At the end of our journey we had burned some gas, drank some coffee and I had downed a soft drink. I had a package of Nabs, my friend had an apple and we didn't buy a thing in the gun line.
Most of the shelves that we looked at seemed as if they had been victims of a three-day garage sale. Even the reloading equipment shelves that usually are stocked with all of the dies, presses, cartridge case polishers and such were really picked over.
If you were looking for a specific type of primer other than a plain large rifle primer you could forget it, and there wasn't an abundance of the regular primers.
Our conclusion was that the gun dealers were trying to cash in on the panic buying and had marked up to a ridiculous level everything they had in stock.
So if you want to buy a new firearm, you might want to look into taking out a second mortgage. That is, if your first mortgage isn't in trouble with the economy the way it is now.
It seems that everything that has to do with firearms has risen price-wise into the stratosphere. As I said last week, we'll just have to wait and see how long this trend lasts. Hopefully it will be short-lived.
