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My Second Trigger Finger
- 3 hours ago
- 5 min read
by Joel Nelson
Joel Nelson is a lifelong shooter, hunter, cowboy, poet, and confirmed admirer of great guns. He has spent sixty years cowboying from Texas to Hawaii, which means he has fixed more problems with baling wire, leather, and vocabulary than most of us will ever encounter. For forty years, he has written and recited poetry, proving that a man can be handy with both a rifle and a rhyme. He doesn’t text or email, but he does have a pretty wife who can, which seems like the wiser arrangement anyway. Somewhere in all that living, he also spent fourteen months in the jungles of South Vietnam with the 101st Airborne Division operating on a six man team, collecting stories that will never be told. Let's give Joel a warm Gun Tales welcome. —Matt
I’d like to say I’ve been shooting since day one, but that would be too much of a stretch. You see, I began my shooting career with a handicap, although that term seems to be going out of vogue. Challenged seems to be more the accepted term in today’s sensitive society. So I was definitely challenged by both age and size. My dad was a ranch cowboy working for the Boone family east of Seymour in Baylor Co., and his only firearm at the time was a Mossberg semi-auto 22 that was fed via a teardrop shaped slot in the buttstock. The fore-end of the stock was hinged so it could be folded 90 degrees down for a handhold.
