Good thread, great stories, but I still stick with the simple pump shotgun.
Grizzly Adam wrote:One of my favorite pastimes is interviewing elderly people concerning their lives before "modern times" changed everything ... most of my contacts have been and are pre-WWII generation folks. Because of my occupation, I've had close access to many more older folks than lots of men do, and I have had and do have lots of older friends.bugs wrote: I was thinking more about the olden days if people needed a gun but had the convenience of what is on the market today and I just couldnt decide if it would be a shotgun or a rifle.
I have had the privilege of personally knowing many an older man who really did depend on a gun to feed the family when they were younger ... mostly during the great depression era. It's a subject I've often talked with them about, at great length, because it's of particular interest to me. Almost every one of them did their hunting to feed the family with a .22 rifle. One of the younger among these men, an Appalachian mountaineer who is a great friend of mine, reports killing 72 deer in the early fifties with a hardware-store lever action, over salt-blocks ... by shooting them in the "earhole", as he puts it.
When I've asked these men about why they didn't use large-caliber rifles and shotguns for hunting, their answers have all been similar: "Didn't need 'em, couldn't afford to shoot 'em, didn't want to tote 'em around, and didn't care to draw undue attention to myself."
Words from the wise, my friends.
When hard times come, more gun than you need, more gun than you can afford, more gun than you care to have with you all the time, and more gun than the least noisy one that will get the job done becomes dead-weight.
So, all things considered, I'd still say, "A rugged .22 rimfire for me."