Guns

A few years ago I experienced a moment that is now seared into my memory. The moment began inconspicuously. I and some of my Rocky Mountain Vintagers pals were ambling from station to station at Jerry William’s superb Quail Run Sporting Clays Club in Kiowa, Colorado.

Fate! Mark Reynolds saw the gun’s potential immediately, an impulse founded on years of experience as much as upon carefully reasoned thought. Ambling about at the 2009 Shooting Hunting Outdoor Trade (SHOT) Show, Mr. Reynolds met Iñigo Lopez, director of the prestigious Spanish sporting arms maker, Aguirre y Aranzabal (AyA), at its exhibition booth.

Locked in international tournament combat with Krieghoff and Perazzi, the Beretta DT10 has taken more medals in competitions than any other shotgun. In fact, since 1956 Beretta shotguns have dominated the Olympics.

It’s Las Vegas, January 17- 20, and the sprawling Shot Show once again served as a venue for new shotgun introductions in our universe of wing and clays shooting. While Benelli’s Franchi and Stoeger units took the cake for the most number of new model roll outs at the Sands Convention Center, all eyes were on FABARM’s forthcoming semi-auto as it pointed the way for what we can expect from the company’s merger last year with Caesar Guerini of Cambridge, Maryland.

The Baserri Chronicles Part V: New shotgun companies are a rarity these days, and so when one comes along we’re eager to track its progress. That’s the idea behind our series, the Baserri Chronicles. In this fifth installment, we write about the advent of Baserri’s new dealer program called Premier Shooting & Retail Centers, where you can try before you buy.

Krieghoff International is ready to introduce a sub-gauge, high-rib sporter that combines the emerging principles and technology of upright shooting for pursuits such as sporting clays with the liveliness of a premium upland shotgun.

How about firing over 25,000 12-gauge shotgun shells as the testing grounds for two new shotguns? I have heard about gun companies that fire huge piles of shells as the introductory testing of new shotgun models, but I’m pretty sure such testing takes place in a figurative laboratory, i.e. the company’s testing facilities. But I was part of a five-shooter party that fired all those thousands of shells in a genuine hunting situation.

Long before Blaser started importing their groundbreaking F3 shotgun into the U.S. in 2004, the German manufacturer founded in 1957 by Horst Blaser was renown for its dangerous-game rifles. The Blaser S-2 Express Double Rifle in either .470 or .500 Nitro Express was a go-to gun for traditionalists looking to bring down a Cape Buffalo or Elephant in Africa. Likewise, a big-bore Blaser R-93 was engineered with a silky smooth bolt action if you needed to squeeze off that critical second shot at a charging rhino. Then in 2010, when Blaser introduced its next-generation bolt-action rifle, the R8, its revolutionary design immediately made it the darling of the big-game set.