My eventual plan for sometime after the RAR project, pending an evaluation of how I get along with rifles, is to acquire some manner of thing that can be used for both hunting and range amusement and to use it for those purposes. For a number of reasons, including the potential effect of the current political climate and also the infant nature of the RAR project at present, it’s not necessarily something I’m planning to act on anytime soon.
Except that yesterday I decided on a lark to take my pet critter (of the human variety; that distinction is soon to become important) to view the oddness that is Gander Mountain. Among other things (inclusive of plastic deer, plastic deer horns, deer on hats, deer on shirts with amusing slogans, deer on PINK shirts with amusing slogans, bags to put deer in, and things to bag deer with), Gander Mountain has a reasonably decent firearms department inclusive of a rack of used rifles that one may fondle.
As we passed the rifle fondling rack, I noticed an interesting thing about one of the bolt action rifles: its bolt was facing the other way from usual. Hmm. A left-handed bolt action rifle, you say? So I looked at the tag, thinking “Oh, it’ll just be some wacky brand that I probably don’t want.” It was a Ruger M77. Then I picked it up, thinking “Oh, it’ll probably be in some wacky and marginally useless for my purposes caliber.” It was 7mm Rem Mag.
Well, shit.
So I did the more or less sensible thing, particularly since my back was working on going out and I was therefore somewhat distracted, and put the shiny object back on the rack, resolving to consider further and go back the next day, thinking “Well, it’s not like someone’s going to pounce on a left-handed bolt action in just one day, right?”
You can guess how well that went.
The bonus, though, about this situation was that in a sense there was luck and opportunity in either option — if the rifle had been there, I would have had the opportunity to purchase something which was quite well suited to my anticipated needs. As those needs are a bit off-kilter in areas (the left-eye dominance, in particular, tending to be that last constraint that causes the solution-finding process to go SPROING from mutually exclusive criteria), I can’t necessarily count on reaching out my hand whenever I want and plucking out exactly the item I need — a certain amount of serendipity may well be required. However, being as it seems to have turned out the other way, i.e. the rifle is not there, I then have the opportunity to do more research, do more shooting, allocate my cash flow a little better, and be in a better position to capitalize on whatever the next opportunity that comes along is.
Which, I guess if you think about it, that is kind of true for life in general also.
Smoke Test Shack 