16ga.com ~ View topic - For Sale: Citori Lightening shot once LNIB.....

....28" with several choke tubes (2 IC, FULL, CYL, 2 SKT, etc etc), the box and all the papers, 99.99% minty, I shot it once, blued engraved receiver, it just ain't me......$1500, PM with your questions, etc.... thanks, will make the right guy a happy camper.... I need side by sides, but don't say I didn't try something different....

brit

Guest

How much does this gun weigh?

Thanks,

Jim S.

Have you tried tilting your head so your eyes line up vertically? Very Happy

Joined: 28 Oct 2005 Posts: 126 Location: penna

I think it was Elmer Keith that said " man was designed to shoot a sxs with one eye beside the other. Every time i shoot an o/u that is where I hit one shot over one shot under!"

Elmer was hardly shy and known to say a lot of things. Some of them were even valid. Some of them were also true. He was known to be a tad reckless with the truth, but he was always entertaining. He also used to drive Jack O'Conner up the wall with his penchant for exageration. Aside from that, he really was a superb rifle and hangun shot. Rumor has it he was less so of a wingshot.

O' Conner on the other hand was a skilled shotgunner. He also favored SxS guns. However, I doubt he had a real problem with stackbarrels. I do not recall him ever saying anything bad about the Browning Superposed or the Remington 32. Few folks in those days would have. The O/U guns were the wave of the future and have come to dominate shotgunning games.

This is not to say the O/U is better or worse than the SxS. It still comes down to the shooter and not the gun. It will always be the indian and not the arrow no matter how barrels come to be arranged. Even if some cleavor fellow manages to invent a shotgun with barrels arranged in a 45 degree angle, some other dude will pick it up and learn to shoot it well. and so it goes.

Why not? Elmer knew better than anyone that he liked telling windies. It was part of his heritage. He grew up on the pulp fiction 5 cent wild west novels and stories so popular at the close of the wild west. He was a man with an active imagination and a creative bent. He made his claims in the same flat, matter of fact manner any good western yarn spinner would.

Like most folks of his ilk, it was probably not so much that but how you called him on it. I'm certain that if you knew him, and did it humorously and not in a mean spirited way, he'd probably just wink and let it go, or bluster a bit like a puff adder. Elmer was not known as a mean spirited man. He did like yanking O'Conner's chain though.

O'Conner was a professor of English lit who could not abide with some of the more outlandish opinions Elmer laid forth. However, the "discussions" the two of them would have about some of Elmer's claims and opinions were both interesting and entertaining to their readers. They were often done in a humorous way.

Elmer was a big bore fan and thought anything smaller than a 45-70 was a pop gun. O'Conner was a high velocity .270 fan for smaller big game like deer. Elmer based much of his claims on sheer opinion based on nothing more than what he saw. However, he did have a good working knowledge of what he was saying about rifles and handguns, especially about big bore black powder rifles. However, I really doubt he ever put up a pattern sheet and tested shot shells. Wingshooting was not his forte, but that little detail would never stop him from offering his opinions on the matter. To him, one ounce of #7.5 shot was good for anything that flew. I'd hate to have to shag all the cripples he probably winged, or digest the amount of shot he probably swallowed.

O'Conner, on the other hand, was more of a truth and fact seeker and would do the research and testing. He was more like today's modern, more technical gun writer. Except that he also had a keen and sometimes biting wit that could convulse the reader with laughter. Few writers today have that gift. He was also a very accomplished wing shot and understood the need for bigger shot and more of it on bigger birds. By the way, the 16 gauge was one of his favorites. He knew how versitile it really is.

Most anyone with any experience with a .45 Long Colt, or a .44 Special single action model P would realize that regardless of how hot you could load either, killing a deer at a 700 or 800 yards with either of these caliber guns was simple matter of sheer luck if possible at all. Elmer claimed he did. He did so in his usual flat, matter of fact way. No one ever saw it done. Some claimed they did, probably to preserve the myth and legend such claims from folks like Elmer create.

Who can ever say for sure where myth starts and fact departs? Elmer did know that such writing helped sell his stuff in his day. He was more a force of nature than one of today's technojargon slingers. It was more by force of will and the strength of his own popularity that he convinced Remington and Smith and Wesson to build the .44 Magnum.

Today, Elmer would probably not be published in the gun press. It was a different time, and our culture has changed. I miss both him and O'Conner. we will not see the like of them again.

"I miss both him and O'Conner. we will not see the like of them again."

Au contraire, mon frere, we got you, 16gg!!! Very Happy

Happy New Year, by the way, I got a lot of stripers and blues on the fly this past August off Cape Cod (Chatham and Wood's Hole areas both, also right off Craigville Beach in the surf..... they called all the folks out of the water due to fears of "pirranha of the Atlantic", and I proceeded to wade in with my Sage 10 weight and beached 2), you were right, they were thick!!

Duncan

Joined: 17 Dec 2005 Posts: 47

In a 1930's American Rifleman I read a story by Elmer Keith about him shooting bald and golden eagles with a 30-06. He claimed it was to save the baby lambs from these winged predators.

I doubt the magazine will reprint that article today.

JERRY