Nothing makes me shudder and cringe like being introduced as a firearms expert.  To tell you the truth, I’ve met very few real experts in the firearms industry.  Ken...

He pulled the old ranch truck with the stock trailer holding his buckskin gelding over to the side of the county road, not far from where all the squad cars were sitting. With his spur rowels jingling softly, he walked up to a young highway patrolman and asked what was going on...

Robust. Strong. Sturdy. Sound. All these words are fit for describing Colt’s New Service double-action revolver. The New Service was an evolution of sorts of Colt’s first revolver with a swing-out cylinder...

In studying the gunfights of the Old West it quickly becomes clear that many of the most savvy shootists preferred using a rifle whenever they could get their hands on one quickly.  The handgun came into use when dealing with a surprise encounter or the rifle was not close at...

The .44 Magnum is one of my all-time favorite cartridges. But it hasn’t always been that way. We didn’t really get together until I got some firearms education and got enough nerve to do some experimentation...

You just never know what you’ll see at a small-town gun show. A few years ago, I walked into our show that’s held each Labor Day weekend at Sul Ross State University in Alpine and sauntered up...

Dan Westbrook had been a veteran of World War I. When he got home from that little fuss he went to work as a theft investigator for one...

Smith & Wesson introduced the .44 Special cartridge in 1907, in that classic revolver that is called the Triple Lock.  Although the...

Perched in an old quad-pod near a windmill in remote Pecos County, Texas is one of my favorite places to be each fall. For reasons...

In 1917, Gee McMeans was much better known than Frank Hamer. McMeans had been a Texas Ranger, the elected sheriff of Ector County, Texas...

Blue wildebeest, eland, gemsbok, greater kudu, impala, lechwe, springbok, white-tailed deer, and zebra. Right off the top of my head...

At the end of World War II, with their government contracts filled, the firearms companies got back to making guns for the civilian...

John Taffin passed away on March 10, 2025. He was 85 years old. John invited me to the Shootist Holiday in the early 1990s...It must have..

There was a time when every detective worth his salt carried some sort of snub-nosed revolver. And, naturally, a lot of citizens who felt...

Studying the gunfighters, lawmen, and outlaws of the Old West one encounters some shootouts that were unavoidable. Some were justified...

The Model 1886 Winchester was the first John Browning-designed repeating rifle to be manufactured by Winchester. The classic lines and...

I was just a big kid, horseback near the Nueces River, the first time I got a really close look at javalinas. I rounded a bend in the...

Back in 1930 this country was in one of the periodic messes that Americans like to stir up. They’d decided to hold the Great Depression...

The country where I live in far West Texas has the only mountains in the state. They run from the Big Bend of the Rio Grande all the way...

The morning air was crisp in the high desert as we unloaded my side by side from the trailer at dawn. Right after the sun breaks the...