We have 12 more knives to give away (see them here…), so if you haven’t entered yet, get to it!

The difference between a standard and low profile hammer

The USFA Rodeo® and USFA Rodeo® II with a low profile hammer will be sold exclusively through Long Hunter Shooting Supply. These models also come with the standard Premium Action Job included in the price. The “From Box to Holster” features are:

• Rear sights are widened from .108 inch to .140 inch
• Forcing cone is cut to 11 degrees
• A crisp, no creep trigger pull
• Factory flat “hand” spring is replaced. The frame is drilled and a Ruger style coil spring is installed for reliability.
• Factory main spring is replaced with a Lee’s Gunslinger flat spring for a smooth, reliable cocking motion while maintaining a quick hammer drop
• Factory flat “trigger/bolt” spring is replaced with a wire spring for added strength.
• Hammer is relieved .007″ on each side to eliminate drag marks. The hammer can be machine jeweled or plain polished per customer request.

***********
Long Hunter Shooting Supply is owned and operated by Jim Finch aka Long Hunter.  For more information, call 806-365-0093 or visit www.longhunt.com

On Sunday, Bryson, who goes under the moniker “Young Gun,” was practicing his sport during a match at the shooting range south of town. Dressed in the requisite Western garb with a gun-belt heavy with ammo resting on his narrow hips, he was the youngest participant by probably decades.

More on durangoherald.com….

“She Never Spoke Spanish to Me”

First, a story …
We’re sitting around a cool autumn campfire under the spectacular bowl of Montana big sky country, cowboy coffee with just a shot of rotgut mescal burning our hands through the blue tin cups. The man on my left, arguably one of the most recognizable figures in the world, quietly chords his guitar, then launches into a melody. The woman on my right leans over and whispers in my ear. “Do you know the words?” asks Dale Evans, Queen of the West.

“Everyone knows the words,” I whisper back, and I try to figure how profoundly unlikely it is to be under Montana skies, singing Happy Trails with Roy and Dale. Even more unlikely, we’d been on horseback for over a week, pushing a small herd of longhorns to a pasture just outside Yellowstone. The ride had started as a publicity stunt for a made-for-TV movie featuring my friend Randy Travis—get a bunch of city slickers, this being before the movie City Slickers, and have them ride for more than a week to get to the location. In a few days, as expected, most everyone had retreated to hot baths, motel beds, and air-conditioned vans … everyone except me and the real cowboys, the wranglers, who drove the little herd from dusk until dawn, ate late, slept on the ground, and did it again the next day.

“You’re media,” one of the cowgirls said after we all gagged down dust for 10 hours. “You don’t have to be here.”

“Too stupid to leave,” I said. “Dumber than the horse.”

“Horse ain’t dumb,” she said.

The “… till we meet again” refrain lingers in the cool air with a tinge of regret … we know the reality that Roy and Dale are past most of their campfires, and perhaps if we do meet again, it won’t be in Montana. One by one the city folks slip away, until it’s just us cowboys, telling lies, swapping stories about guns and horses and bars and mistakes we’d all managed to live through, laughing until there was nothing left but glowing red coals. On the way back to the bedrolls, Randy Travis and I are quiet. “We are lucky men,” he said finally, and I couldn’t help but agree.

I never wanted to be a cowboy. I didn’t grow up trying to shoot it out with Marshal Dillon or ride with Josh Randall or Paladin or hope my own dum…diddle diddle diddle…dum diddle dum…Bonanza! Ponderosa was just around the corner. For me it was always the guns. My heroes were Elmer Keith, Bill Jordan, Skeeter Skelton, Charlie Askins, and that firebrand, Col. Jeff Cooper, hunters and gunmen of the first order, and I resolved early on to follow in their footsteps. I suppose I’m as surprised as anyone that such a half-fast plan actually worked.

For me, it’s still all about the guns. I came to Cowboy Action Shooting™ as a veteran of several other shooting sports—some of which I helped to birth—drawn not by the hats or the boots or the aliases or the history, but by the blue steel and polished wood visions of Colt Single Action Armies, of Winchester ‘73s, of fat, hammered stagecoach guns. Of course, the history was in the guns themselves. The first gun I ever fired was a Ruger Bearcat; the second a Flattop Blackhawk … any sport that would give me the opportunity to shoot those guns a lot was muy bueno in my book!

I may have come because of the guns, but I stayed because of the people.

In an increasingly grey world, it’s good to know the Cowboy Way, a better way, is still alive and well. My television series COWBOYS, only on OUTDOOR CHANNEL, has been a labor of love, not just from me but from every single person participating in the show. Both our Producer, John Carter (“Pick E. Une” … for those of you poor pathetic non-Southerners, “picayune,” originally a small coin, is Southern for “trivial”) and our Director of Videography, Gene “Grizz” Moffett, are now regular Cowboy Action Shooters and doing great. Our host, Tupelo Flash, is … well … Tupelo With An Emphasis On Flash, but, darn, doesn’t he grow on you? Next year we’ll be adding frequent visitor, Evil Roy, to COWBOYS,as well as the coolest gunfight reenactments you’ve ever seen.

I’m also very excited about the explosive growth of Wild Bunch style shooting, and we’ll be talking about that a whole bunch in the next THE HOWLING. I shot the Wild Bunch match at END of TRAIL this year, and you would think the co-author of one of the landmark books on the 1911 (THE COMBAT .45 AUTO, with Bill Wilson) and a veteran USPSA and IDPA shooter could get a 1911 to run all the time. Trust me, at Winter Range next year, Wolf Bane will have this magazine thing sorted out!

Wild Bunch shooting is the doorway for many new accidental cowboys and cowgirls into our sport. It’s something new under the sun, a mix of the old and new (or more properly, a mix of the old and not quite as old) that meshes perfectly with traditional SASS competition. I’ve been privileged to handle a couple of the proto-1911 guns from the 1907 military trials—guns John Moses Browning personally tuned—and they resonate with the same strange energy of an old Peacemaker or a worn-out cowboy 1892 Winchester. I’d like to add that the big bore rifle requirement in the Wild Bunch rules really adds something special to the competition … it’s harder to run the big boys than the .38s many of us use in regular competition. I think that’s appealing to the crossover shooters coming into the sport, and, hey, it gives me an excuse to run my Nate Kiowa Jones-tuned .44 Magnum Legacy ‘92 clone, which is just too much fun!

So what else can you expect from THE HOWLING? Well, if you follow my blog or the DownRange.tv Forums, you know I’m not short of opinions.

We’ll be talking about guns, training, and events, plus being on the road with COWBOYS, my flagship series SHOOTNG GALLERY and our awardwinning personal defense show, THE BEST DEFENSE. Plus some surprises … always surprises!

So, as we like to say in television, stay tuned … ‘till we meet again!

*****************************

Wolf Bane, SASS #13557, is the alias for Michael Bane, veteran shooter, gunwriter, and producer of the OUTDOOR CHANNEL series, COWBOYS,SHOOTING GALLERY, and THE BEST DEFENSE. You can find an excerpt of his most recent book, TRAIL SAFE, at: http://www.flyingdragonltd.us/trail-safe.htm.

This column was published in the October 2009 edition of Cowboy Chronicle, a 104 pages monthly magazine for members of the Single Action Shooting Society. The magazine is part of their $55.00 annual membership package.

Chuck’s knives have appeared in dozens of movies such as “Quigley Down Under”, “Switchback”, “No Mercy”, and “Little Nikita”; in hundreds of commercials; and in countless television shows such as “Wildside”, “Magnificent Seven”, “Thunder In Paradise”, “Walker: Texas Ranger”, “Knightrider”, “Jason and the Argonauts”, and “Magnum P.I.”

His knives are prized as works of art, and collector’s items, and are displayed at many museums, such as the Roy Rogers Museum, and Gene Autry Western Museum, and in the private collection’s all over the world, including such celebrities as Robert Stack, Tom Selleck, Roy “Dusty” Rogers, Jr., Chuck Norris, the Mandrell Sisters, Kenny Rogers, Dolly Parton, and John Milius.

Click to play the slide show below and see the 13 knives we are giving away to the lucky winners.  Below each photo is the date for the drawing of the particular knife.

To enter in this sweepstakes and to watch the video with Chuck Stapel and Tupelo Flash, click here….

To visit Chuck Stapel’s web site, click here….

If you are a CAS city or Down Range TV forum member, you entry will be registered twice. All you need to do is to enter your forum id in the entry forms.

The Ruger SASS Vaqueros also come with a Premium Action job by Long Hunter.

Visit our Giveaway section, watch the videos and fill out the entry forms. Good luck to all of you.

Long Hunter Shooting Supply is known for providing cowboy action shooters competition ready single action revolvers and lever action rifles. “We are frequently asked about shotguns and are excited about now being able to offer the popular Stoeger Coach guns in the same way as we offer our line of cowboy guns”,  says Jim Finch aka Long Hunter.

Fred Bursey aka Goatneck Clem is a long time competitive and SASS National champion shooter with 38 years of experience in custom action jobs on competition guns. His work on the coach guns are:

• Recutting Barrel and installing new front Bead
• Polishing of the Chambers
• Refitting barrel lugs to receiver
• Recutting barrel face for easy loading
• Opening angle of barrel to receiver for faster reloads
• Refitting top lever and tuning of top lever spring for faster 2 shot strings
• Readjusting safety for Cowboy Action Shooting
• Refitting and honing of all internal parts and replacing of springs

This action work is included in the price. As of now, Stoeger Coach Guns are offered in 2 different models.

For more information on the Stoeger Coach Guns, visit Long Hunter Shooting Supply.

***********

Long Hunter Shooting Supply is owned by Jim Finch and his son Brad Finch. Jim aka Long Hunter is a world champion cowboy action shooter, a firearms instructor and a gunsmith. Brad has been with LHSS since 2004 and was put in charge of production and quality control in 2009. Jim and Brad are life members of SASS and committed to customer satisfaction.and operated by Jim Finch aka Long Hunter.  For more information, call 806-365-0093 or visit www.longhunt.com

See more photos on kansascity.com.