Silhouettes

                      (.22 LR handgun, above, airgun targets, below.)

I’m not a serious rifle shooter. I’m okay at it. 

Some years ago, I shot in club-competitions in a discipline called smallbore metallic silhouette, using a handgun.

The short version: There were forty targets, set ten each at various ranges. These were vaguely-shaped animal outlines: chickens, pigs, turkeys, and rams. The chickens, about the area of a teacup, were at twenty-five yards; pigs, maybe a saucer-size, at fifty yards; turkeys, a vague bird-like shape a bit larger than the pigs, seventy-five yards; rams, a pie-plate size, at a hundred yards.

The competition was simple. Forty targets, forty shots. Final score was how many of the targets you knocked over on the railroad ties upon which they were set. If you hit it, but it didn't fall over? It was a miss.

You were limited to a pistol or revolver in .22 LR caliber, with iron sights — no scopes — and you had to shoot them in order, left to right.

I was a AAA-rated shooter. Pretty good, but not as adept as the International Masters. What that meant was, I scored 37-39 at an unlimited match. The really good shooters consistently shot 39-40.

One was allowed to lie down and prop the gun against a leg or knee, and to have a spotter with a scope report where the target was hit. There was also a standing event, which was harder.

If I had misses, these were almost always a turkey, which were narrower and more iffy if there was any wind blowing.

I hit ten of ten rams most of the time using a Browning semi-auto pistol with a bull-barrel, notch-and-post sights.

A maybe easier visualization, put a pie plate on the goal line of a football field. Walk to the other goal line, lie down on your back, rest the gun against your leg or knee in what is called Creedmore, or a Perry Post, position, shoot and hit that plate. 

Then do it nine more times.

That’s a handgun. With a scoped .22 rifle? Even a dot scope? I could shoot all day and not miss a target. I practiced once a week, a hundred rounds. 

The big bore version of this had larger targets, but set at twice the range. If you can make a 200-yard shot on a ram target with a handgun and iron sights? A scoped rifle is a gimme if you dial it in right.

Three-Eighty or Thiry-Eight?

L., S&W Model 60 Chief; R., SIG P238

 .38 Special versus .380 ACP.

Out of a full-sized sidearm, the .38 Special is the more effective round. The bullets are generally heavier than those of a .380 ACP, they are a little slower, but hit harder. 

It depends on the ammunition, of course. A hot .380 ACP round will keep up with a so-so .38 Special loading, but out of a service firearm, the .38 Special is, all things being equal, a more effective bullet. Recoil is not heavy in either round.

Overall, the average foot-pounds delivered are higher for the .38 Special than the .380 ACP, about forty to fifty f/p more per bullet.

When the guns used are short-barreled hideaways? The differences in punch and accuracy are not as great. The velocities drop in both calibers with snub-nose revolvers and pistols, they tend to be subsonic, and expansion of hollow-point ammo is iffy in both. They penetrate to about the same distances in ballistic gel. Neither is a rhino-stopper.

However, there are other factors to consider. Generally, pocket .380 ACP pistols have longer barrels than J-frame revolvers. Better sights on many of them, which offer a bit better accuracy. 

J-frames typically hold five rounds, and .380 ACP pocket pistols hold seven or eight cartridges. So a .38 Special might throw a total of 1250 f/p downrange with a cylinder’s worth; a .380 with one in the pipe and seven in the magazine will total 1520 f/p.

There is something to be said for eight instead of five.

Revolvers are mechanically easier to operate and less likely to malfunction than semi-automatic pistols, though with the proper load, that might not be a factor.

Concealability? The pistols have the edge. They tend to be shorter overall, and the cylinder of a revolver is thicker than any of the smaller pistols. Reloads are faster, though, again, most gunfights are over before either runs out of ammo.

I have carried both kinds. I am comfortable with either, though the revolver is harder to hide. My choice will usually depend on clothing I’d be wearing. A jacket, any belt-holster handgun is fine. T-shirt and shorts? The small pistol (or mousegun revolver -- the .22 Magnum Pug, say) -- is all that can be easily hidden.

I do like having those extra three shots as an option.

The Lani People

The summer I was fourteen, I made the transition from borrowing library books to buying paperbacks. We had in our neighborhood a bookmobile that would come round on Saturday mornings, and I was a regular, but there were things you couldn't get there, and this book, pictured above, was one of them.

In 1962, it was possible to go through the paperback rack at the local Rexall Drugstore, on the corner of Evangeline and McClelland streets in Baton Rouge, and find no more than one or two science fiction titles. 

The cover of this particular one guaranteed that I, as a fourteen-year-old boy so full of testosterone that I sloshed when I walked, would buy it.

Attend: The cover illo featured a bunch of naked women, albeit artfully arranged with arms and angles so that you didn't actually see anything that would have been considered obscene back in the day. I couldn't pass it up. Plunked down my forty cents -- this was in the time when I got a buck and a quarter for mowing a lawn -- and was away to spend the afternoon reading.

The writer, J.F. "Jesse" Bone, was a professor at the veterinary school in Corvallis, Oregon, and the book is an action/adventure story about a vet who goes to a planet to take care of the livestock -- which in this case happens to be a humanoid species called the Lani, who are not human -- they have tails, and can't interbreed with humans. Thus it was okay to sell them.

Since you probably can't find copies of it, I'll give the plot away: The Lani are human and in the end, our hero manages to free them. Along the way, the writer makes some excellent points about slavery, and what constitutes humanity. Not the deepest book ever written, but it was fun, and it holds up pretty well. There is a fight scene between the vet and a male Lani that stirred my interest in martial arts greatly. The Lani is bigger, stronger, meaner, but he doesn't have a chance against the vet, who is martially-trained ...

Fast-forward sixteen years:

I went to my second World Science Fiction Convention, aka the WorldCon, in Phoenix, Arizona.

I said this before, but anything worth saying is worth saying at least three times: The Guest of Honor was Harlan Ellison. Since Arizona had refused to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, Harlan attended, but refused to spend any money in such a state. He stayed in a borrowed RV, and ate and drank what he brought with him, and kudos to him for it. Harlan sometimes got flak, but he didn't just talk the talk, he also walked the walk. I liked Harlan, but even people who hated him sometimes grudgingly admitted to admiring him. 

As part of the gig, Harlan sat in a little A-frame made of two-by-fours and visquine in the middle of the lobby and wrote a short story. This was a reprise of his writer-in-a-bookstore-window routine, meant to demonstrate that a writer could craft a professional-quality tale in front of God and everybody and could concentrate well enough to pull it off, no sweat.

Impressed, I went to watch him work for while. Sitting at a table nearby was an old guy. I introduced myself, and so did he, and it was Jesse Bone.

Holy shit! The man had been a seminal influence on me. Actually, more of semenal influence, given that cover ...

I made a joke about that as we chatted. Later in the day, I went to the dealer's room and had a button made: "Jesse Bone is a Semenal Influence" and I wore it the rest of the week.

While Jesse and I were talking, a short, portly, shave-headed guy came over, carrying a huge battery-powered tape recorder. He sat, clicked on the recorder, and said, as nearly as I can recall:

"Hey, I'm Gene Gold. I know Jesse is too busy, but you're a writer, right?"

I allowed as how I was. Amazing that he could tell just by looking. 

"Well, I'd doing a new magazine, and I need a story. I want it to be about the last martial arts instructor on Earth. I don't want it to be downbeat, no pathos, it needs to be two thousand words, and I need it by next Monday. Can you do it?"

I cannot tell you how flabbergasted I was at this. To this day, the idea still boggles my mind. Of all the five thousand people at the con, nobody was better qualified to write that story than I, and how on Earth had this guy happened to find me?

"Sure," I said. "No problem."

"Great. Here's my card, send it to me when you are done."

And with that, he clicked off the recorder, stood, and left.

Son-of-a-bitch!

I wrote the first four graphs of the story later, in the bar, while having a beer with -- I think, Hank Stine and Jesse Bone -- though that part is a bit hazy. Got home, did that story, plus the one Stine commissioned, and thought I was a rising star in the SF field ...

Later, I moved to Oregon, and Jesse and I would now and then run into each other, have a beer, and a fine ole time. He passed away a few years afterward, having published a bunch of short stories and a few novels, one of which was Confederation Matador -- both words I have used in my own work with some frequency. (In fact, if you Google them, you will a link to a Wikipedia piece referencing my Matador series.)

Thanks, Jesse -- in memory yet green.