David E. Petzal - The Gun Nut

A reader was kind enough to suggest a couple of rants ago that I was carrying on the tradition of bloggery established by the late Jeff Cooper. That would be nice, because of all the gun columns in cyberspace, his was by far the most interesting and it is still up there.

There are a lot of people I wish were still around, and right at the top of the list is the South Carolina knifemaker George Herron. George was not only a genius with his hands, he was one of the most generous men I have ever known. I have no idea how many beginning knifemakers he coached, or how many thousands of hours he spent teaching them the art, but it was enough to found a whole school of knifemaking—the South Carolina school. And none of it was for money. He did it because he was glad to do it.

The following comes to us from Hal Herring, who lives in Montana and writes mostly about conservation:

“Last winter, when I drove down to Alabama, I pawned my re-weld M-14 for extra money. After my wife paid off the loan, the pawn shop told her that the rifle had been seized by the Sheriff’s Department because its serial number allegedly matched that of a rifle stolen in Detroit, or Bakersfield, depending on who was telling the story.