The odds are that your hunting rifle is not perfectly sighted-in, no matter what you remember from the most recent firing. Rifles can change, for many possible reasons.

How often have I said, in bitter debates against anti-gun fanatics on radio, TV and before live audiences during the past 30 years, that “a gun is just a tool, an inanimate object like a monkey wrench, having no independent will of its own for either good or evil?”

Sooner or later, most shooters get around to trying a muzzleloading rifle. When that urge came over me, back in the ’50s, there was no such thing as a replica hunting rifle. I dug up an original caplock rifle in a hock shop in Richmond, Texas. To say it had seen better days is a serious understatement, but all the parts were there and the bore still showed signs of having been rifled at one time.

The hunter gripped his rifle in sweaty hands, facing the crouching lion only 30 yards away. Suddenly the animal launched his charge in deadly silence. The man with the gun knew he had only four or five seconds to stop that yellow ball of fangs and claws ... (no, wait! an African lion in full charge covers 30 yards in only half that much time. Maybe it was a grizzly ... yeah, they’re not quite as fast as a lion) ... to stop that half-ton of silvertip fury.

Whitetail bucks are remembered for many different reasons. Some represent a "First" or a personal best in a hunter's life. Others are memorable because of some physical characteristic, or for their legendary elusiveness.

Perhaps the single most common question I'm asked, by mail and in person, is "Which is your favorite cartridge for deer?" The answer is that I don't have one. Sometimes it's phrased differently; for example, a reader may say "What do you use for deer, most of the time?" The answer to that one is most likely to be "Whatever happens to be handy."

Preaching, owning a cat, joining a nudist colony, and teaching your wife to shoot are all activities requiring a durable and deep-bottomed ego. I don't know much about the first three, but I am a brass-bound, pluperfect expert at the last-mentioned!

In order to secure these revealing recoil studies, flashlight bulbs were taped to the muzzles of the guns and, for the rifles, to the scopes and the temple of the author's shooting glasses. The strobelight exposure was made a split-second prior to firing, and the traces made on the film by the bulbs records the movement of gun and shooter while the camera's shutter is open.

Gun experts, big-game hunters, writers, and others have theorized on killing or stopping power for over 100 years - and the debate still goes on. But the experts don't know any more about stopping power than you do. If your present rifle works for you, on your game, in your hunting conditions, stick with it.

Recoil is not something for which every human being has some inborn, specific tolerance limits. It is something that every shooter must live with, and which can be dealt with and adjusted to by virtually anyone.