Quote:
Originally Posted by Jeff Higgins
I think a few of you might have missed the point. This was no novice shooter - like I said he knew his game and knew it well. He was certainly shooting competitive groups for the production rifle benchrest class. Had no trouble discussing the finer points of hand loading, either - one simply cannot compete in that game with factory ammo. He was really "into it", as we say.
If he were in fact a novice or very inexperienced shooter it would not have struck me as being so odd. We all start somewhere at everything we do... but he was well past that.
I wonder if this has anything to do with this modern "tactical" craze. More and more gun magazines cover the "tactical" scene to the exclusion of everything else. The only calibers ever mentioned are the 5.56 and 7.62 NATO, the 7.62x39, the .338 Lapua, and the .50 BMG. Seems until recently that the gun mags were much more broadly based. They included big game rifles, small game rifles, water fowling guns, upland guns, target rifles and handguns, hunting handguns, etc. You couldn't help but pick up on what the "other guys" were up to, even if you weren't interested yourself.
Oh, and he was certainly happy to learn, even if he was just being polite to some crazy old fart with weird guns. I stopped his lesson short of letting him shoot the .375, though - that would have been mean. Maybe next time, if he's still interested...
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I think your rifle is just too old, archaic, obsolete, whatever the term.
How many young guys on a new Ducati know what a Black Shadow was?. How many young guys on modern shaped skis know anything about wood skis and bear trap bindings, or recognize the name Jean-Claude Killy? How many young guys driving new performance cars are familiar with the MG-TD? In my own hobby, how many young guys riding all carbon bikes with electronic shifting would know anything about a 1950 Bianchi, other than recognizing it as some sort of old bicycle?
TL-DR version - you're an old man, and he wasn't.
Plus, of course, many people who are very good at a sport are not gear heads. Perfectly possible to be a very skilled competitive shooter in one particular discipline, while having little interest in other kinds of guns that are irrelevant to your event. I'm imagining that if you talked to the top ten scoring shooters at an Olympic target pistol event, and showed them some old obscure pistol (a Borchardt, Webley, etc), most or all would have no idea what it was and several wouldn't care either.