Silvio Calabi - The Gun Book for Boys

Copyright 2012 by Silvio Calabi, Steve Helsley, and Roger Sanger

ISBN 978-1-60893-199-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request

Printed in the USA

5 4 3 2 1

Books

Distributed to the trade by National Book Network

Designed by Rich Eastman

A ll sorts of books have been written for boys. Maybe youve gotten some of them already. They tell us how to make paper airplanes and build treehouses and who won famous battles in history. Its all good, but when we were boys we wanted to know about guns and shooting, snipers and rogue elephants and man-eating tigers and blowing up stuff. How far will a bullet go, anyway? Were those $15 war-surplus guns in the magazine ads any good? Is my .22 enough for hunting deer? What about an old army rifle? Can I get ammo for that relic pistol Granddad gave me? Isnt shooting birds with clusters of pellets cheating? Does a bulletproof vest stop all types of bullets? Why is it dangerous to shoot at the water? Will firing a machine gun for a long time melt the barrel? Why is my mother so freaked out about BB guns?

In order, the answers are: It depends. Some of them. It can be. Sure. Probably not. No way. No way. Because its like skipping a stone. Yes, sort of. Because shes your mother (and loves you).

Weve been working on the answers to these questionsand a whole lot moreever since we were kids ourselves. Then finally it seemed like a good idea to share them with you. No shooter knows everything, and all shooters have questions. Thanks to the Internet, answers are easy to find, but they arent always complete answers or even the right answers. Were here to help you sort out the right answers from the junk.

You dont have to read this book from the beginning. Its set up like a box of chocolates: You can dip into it anywhere and find something interesting. However, you probably should read (or at least look at) the section called Talking the Talk first. It explains a lot of the language of guns and shooting. You may think you know this already, but even a lot of adults whove owned guns for years get some of the lingo wrong. Then later on, if you find a word you dont know while youre reading, flip back to that section and look for it. If the word isnt there, its probably explained somewhere else. For example, if you dont know what a percussion cap is, its not in the alphabetic listing; its in Making It Go Boom. Naturally.

S ome adults wont like this book. As you probably already know, to some people guns have become symbols of crime and violence, and a few people believe no one should own guns anymore.

However, from the days of the Pilgrims up until about when your parents were born, most of us regarded guns as everyday items. We seemed to get a lot more uptight about them after the Vietnam War, which ended in 1975. Also, at the same time, the population of our country was growing quickly and more and more people were living in cities, where they learned nothing about hunting or self-reliance, which is what guns were for during most of Americas history. (History is everything. In Japan there are almost no shootings. Japan has a culture of blademaking, though, that goes back more than a thousand years. When criminal violence occurs in Japan, its usually with knives or swords.)

A Russian SVD, the Snayperskaya Vintovka Dragunova, or Dragunov sniper rifle. Some people would call this a scary gun. Guns arent scary, but what is scary are some people with guns. This book can make you a safe shooter who really knows his or her way around firearms.

As a result, too many people are now afraid of guns. But guns are just tools, and every tool has a purpose. Use any tool, from a hammer to a lawn mower, the wrong way and it can become dangerous. No one has a problem with chain saws, but no one would use a chain saw to carve the Thanksgiving turkey, either. The same thing is true for guns. They dont belong in school. Theyre not toys. You dont use them to settle arguments.

Guns arent scary, but what is scary are some people with gunspeople who have bad intentions or who are just ignorant or careless. This book probably cant do much about your intentions, but it can make you a safe shooter who really knows his or her way around firearms.

uick: Whats the single most important man-made item in history?

You probably thought, Oh, easy: the automobile. Or maybe the computer.

Wrong. The most important manmade item in history, so far anyway, has been the gun. Some of the biggest breakthroughs in technology came about because someone wanted a better gun or ammunition, and then these breakthroughs were applied to making other things. You probably learned in history class that Henry Ford invented the assembly line, where mass-produced parts were put together in a standard way to produce the Model T car quickly and inexpensively. Ford may have been the first to build automobiles this way, but gunmakers like Eli Whitney and John Hall beat him to the basic idea a century earlier.

(In fact, an 1882 report to the US Census Bureau on The Manufacture of Firearms and Ammunition declared that this interchangeable system of manufacturing has been one of the chief influences in the rapid increase in the national wealth in the previous 50 years.)

Heres another absolutely key advancement that came courtesy of the gun business: The most basic concept in precision manufacturing is the ability to shape things consistently to within a few thousandths of an inch. (A motor, for example, wont run if its parts dont fit together this closely.) The first person to work to such tight dimensionshe invented the thousandth of an inchwas Joseph Whitworth, an English engineer who was designing a more accurate rifle for the British army in the 1850s. Queen Victoria knighted him for his work.

The Bessemer process of smelting iron ore efficiently came about in part because the gun industry needed better steel. And so on and so forth.

It wasnt just manufacturing, either. The importance of guns in all of history is impossible to ignore.

The first Europeans known to have reached North America were Vikings who arrived in Newfoundland a thousand years ago. Their settlement failed. Some historians think the Norsemen were driven away because their swords, axes and bows were no better than the native Indians weapons. Six hundred years later the Pilgrims landed on what is now Cape Cod. They had guns, thougha lot of guns. (By 1630 the Massachusetts Bay Colony required that all men, including servants, be furnished with good & sufficient arms and would provide guns to those who couldnt afford them.) The English settlers were able to hold off the Indians, and they stayed and prospered. The rest, as they say, is historyAmericas history.