By RANGE OFFICER

PLAIN AND FANCY
SHOOTING

EVE ALL AT one time or another come

contact with the individual who has
eard” somewhere of the ammunition sales-
in who tossed anything up in the air from

ash can lid to an aspirin tablet, picking
om off in mid-air with devilish monotony.
t, somehow or another, we never see these
lows. Don’t get mewrong—it can be done.
But it’s always done

munition agent whom
the other fellow saw,
and who’s never around
at the right time. The
number of people who
can put on an exhibi-
tion of this kind is
strictly limited, so it
behooves one not to
take in too much terri

tory in describing

G6 :
w= the—antics of the
—_— twitchy - fingered

snap shooter who
cks off pieces of confetti as they flutter
earth, all in the interests of Whango
mmunition.

One man who can do this, and who can
ways be located is that grand old master
the trick shot, Ed McGivern, who for
ars has lived in the sovereign state of
fontana. McGivern (who bears an aston
hing resemblance to W. C. Fields) has
en practising trick pistol shooting for over
) years—and he hasn’t an equal. In double
tion hip-shooting he can pour six shots
to a playing card at 15 feet in four-fifths
"a second, and he can hit anything thrown
. the air—from a walnut shell to a lard
iil. So fast is his trigger finger that his
cords have to be timed electrically, contact
ires running from the gun to the timer.
racticing with an empty gun he claims to
2 able to pull the trigger 20 times in a
cond! On many occasions five men have
inged themselves out in front of him and
ssed five clay birds in the air in unison.
fac has smashed them all with five shots
1 one and four-fifths of a second. Faster
n the draw than any living man, he can
\row a can in the air, draw from the holster
ith the same hand and hit the object—
lapsed time three-fifths of a second!

Of course everybody is anxious to know

HIRTEENTH EDITION

by this mythical am- °

manne

something of his technique and the reason
for his success.

Well, first of all you must remember that
all this took 30 years of application and,
secondly, he maintains a practical laboratory
equipped with every sort of measuring and
calculating device. He’s one of America’s
experts on hand-loading, and leaves nothing
to chance.

He has sights on his guns and in aerial
shots he uses them. He is partial to a gold
bead foresight, and does all his trick shooting
with a Smith & Wesson for he figures it’s
got a smoother double action and he always
shoots double action.

Draw Picrures WITH RIFLE SHOTS

Another famous trick shot was Ad
Topperwein of Texas. Mr. and Mrs.
Topperwein had few equals with the .22
automatic and, with a .22 repeating rifle,
Ad could make a swell job of outlining an
Indian’s head on a three foot square sheet
of polished tin, even including the feather
head-dress.

The field of trick shooting might almost
include longe range revolver shooting.

Here again McGivern has pretty well

established some sort of a record by putting
four out of six shots on a manvsized silhou-
ette at 600 yards. For this he used a Smith
& Wesson Magnum and his own load.
The demonstration was shot from a sitting
position using a two-hand hold and a knee
rest. Success in this, according to McGivern,
mainly depends on having an assistant with
a super-power “scope to spot the first shot.

A few years ago Sam Cataldo, in the
State of New York, got himself a name for
long distance lead-slinging, and one Sunday
morning a group of State troopers hied
themselves to Cataldo’s farm to get a demon-
stration. Cataldo had a bunch of eight-inch
dishes, which were placed in position 220
yards from the firing point. He fired 50
shots, breaking a dish every second shot.
Needless to say, the policemen were con-
vinced that Sam could “hold ’em and squeeze
em.” Cataldo used a Colt Shooting Master
in .38 Special.

Some of the old-time records are not to
be sneezed at; for instance, at Bisley, Eng-
land, in 1896, Walter Winans put up some
records that would be hard to top today. In
those days 20-yard rapid fire targets had
a four-inch bull and appeared for three
seconds. You had to pick up the gun from
the bench, aim and fire it on each appear-
ance. Winans made 6-shot possibles on
this in "96, as well as possibles on the same
target which travelled at four miles an hour
from 50 to 15 yards, toward the shooter.
There were no nippers in these possibles—
every shot linked into the other and all well
within the ring.

Petty Officer Raven of the Royal Navy
did himself rather proud at Bisley in 1909,
when he put six shots into a two-inch bull
at 50 yards. Both Winans and Raven used
the ever popular .44 Russian model Smith
& Wesson. Full charge ammunition and
a four-pound trigger pull were standard
for all these contests.

In the old-style Duelling Match (16
paces), Ira Paine, many-time gold medallist,
put ten consecutive shots in .39 of an inch
with a .38.

Const. W. A. A. West, Hazelton

Page Fifty-one