While sport shooting and hunting are still undertaken in many countries around the world, our staffers don’t often have the opportunity to test new guns in places as far away and mystical as Australia, but that’s exactly where Executive Editor Evan Brune went with the new rifle that is the subject of this month’s cover story.
My grandfather, a civil engineer for the Russian Tsarist government, obtained this Iver Johnson Safety Automatic .32-cal. blackpowder revolver sometime in the early 1900s on one of his trips to Finland or Britain.
My father owned a 6.5x55 mm Krag Jorgensen a so-called “boy’s carbine” designed for rifle training in the Norwegian high schools in the early 1900s. He used this gun for hunting and target shooting. My favorite thing was to show off this gun to my friends and show how to take it apart.
Taking responsibility for your own personal safety has never been more important nor, unfortunately, more unfashionable in some quarters. If the average person were to take at face value the discourse of many of today’s politicians, he or she might come to the conclusion that only big government has the answers to helping you avoid the nearly inevitable trouble encountered in everyday life.
I grew up in the Schuylkill County area of Pennsylvania. It was a rural and predominantly poor area. My father was a hardworking coal miner, with not a lot of extra money on hand as he was raising a family of five. Despite that, I did receive a Daisy pellet rifle for Christmas at an early age.