LONG GUNS WITH SCOPES
Though I’ve never held a high-powered modern rifle, I have held a Hawken, a frontier buffalo gun meant to shoot long distances with a calibrated Venier sight. It’s a heavy gun, well-balanced, made by a single family. The one I held was made by S. Hawken. It was not a reproduction.
“The Hawken rifle is a muzzle-loading rifle built by the Hawken brothers that was used on the prairies and in the Rocky Mountains of the United States during the early frontier days. It has become synonymous with the “plains rifle”, the buffalo gun, and the fur trapper’s gun. Mass: approximately 10 to 15 pounds; Feed system muzzle loaded; In service: 1823–1870; Round shot averaging 54 caliber.” (Wikipedia)
Though I left Browning before Scriver bought an entire gun collection, there were always long guns around. I was never a shooter, only the loader. Except that I killed gophers with a .22 to feed the eagle who had to have roughage and preferred warm prey. Both Scriver brothers were excelling members of gun clubs in their youth and Harold served under Patton in WWII. Both brothers were large game hunters.
So I knew that the east slope of the Rockies was not a place that turned away from gun culture. In the evening we often went out to the lumberyard of Hubert Bartlett’s where the men talked right-wing stuff about guns being seized and the necessity of the John Birch Society. This is not new to me. It was the Sixties.
In the Seventies when I took the Civil Service job of specialized county deputy, commonly called a “dog-catcher,” it was necessary to qualify on the rifle range. I did better than others except for a male former Vietnam sniper. Here in Valier our female librarian routinely shoots the coyotes that invade her yard on the other side of the lake.
And yet a retired military man — now become a policeman and moved to Valier — had the idea he was going to teach women to shoot. He quite liked the idea of being in charge of other people again. I’m sure he was also pleased by the Valier shooting range in a building just outside the town.
These days I do not have a gun. I support gun control.
For a while enough enemies from my past lingered that I grandiosly and narcissistically thought someone might shoot me through my computer window. In Portland, which I had just left, there was always neighborhood gunfire. It never happened here. My most likely shooters died of old age.
Twenty years later I thought I needed a text and settled on the Netflix movie called “Sniper: Ghost Shooter.” I was trying to find a scene from a movie I saw years ago in which a sniper is paired with a spotter who is also a stabilizer, lying alongside the gun-man, even overlapping legs, because the slightest tremor can spoil the trajectory of the bullet. I couldn’t find the scene. “Sniper: Ghost Shooter” is too recent to be on the list I link below. The only clue I could remember was that the spotter was a big cheerful local they called “Fruity,” because he wasn’t afraid to be up against another guy.
https://screenrant.com/movies-like-american-sniper/
“Sniper: GS” was much more “modern”. The top boss was black, the team included women who were shot though they talked tough, as was the one enemy woman who asked for help. Much of the plot was about technology including drones, GPS, the internet, and so on. The scenery was spectacular. The hero is torn between being human and being an effective shooter, and between being obedient to commanders or his own understanding of what was happening.
He is reluctant to shoot women and children. This situation is much closer to the classic cowboy TV series that followed the Korean War than to the deconstruction social criticism of many more recent war movies. But it still glamorizes justified shooting while under fire or even covert bushwhacking.
This series is the 6th straight-to-vid “sniper” film. The first one in 1993 stars — surprise surprise — Tom Berenger in Rambo mode. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sniper_(film_series) Reviews are a little harsh but the films are meant for fans anyway. Part of the potency of this sort of “guns” sequence is the predictability and use of familiar elements.
None of the stories take place in the US but exploit access to places like the former USSR, keeping alive memories of adversaries. (I have not forgotten the assassin snipers of the Sixties who killed JFK and MLKJr.)
The more serious war movies don’t concentrate on the technology of stabilizing and analyzing weapons, but rather on the difficulty of re-stabilizing the human gunners. This is what worries some of us and ought to worry people who sell shooting. The goal with guns is not to take them away from everyone, but to keep them away from the deranged and vindictive. How do we do that if rules are disregarded and technology keeps inventing work-arounds like ghost guns or 3-D printing? It has to be a shift in the thinking of the culture as a whole. This is best done through stories, but not movies about the potency of handsome snipers.
Keep in mind that last summer while neighbors stood in their yards visiting. a streaking car with burst tires came showering sparks down our street, pursued by an assortment of law officers from tribe, county, border, drug task force, etc. At the airport three blocks away the driver stopped and bailed. One of the officers shot him. There was no more news, no explanation. He was said to be carrying a knife, not a gun. We never got an accounting of what really happened.
That former Vietnam vet sniper who was a sure shot on the sheriff’s rifle range? He had to be fired when the boss caught the guy killing dogs that aggravated him.
If you want specifics about “Warhorse Development”, here you go.
