Time for a Little Group Therapy

Cal Sportsman ^ | 6/15/2016 | D Workman

[w1n1]

Complaining or simply beating up on yourself about a shot you missed last fall is not going to solve your problem. June is here, and with it are those long, lazy, mild late spring and early summer evenings that you can spend at the range, and if you’re lucky, you’ll bump into old pals and enjoy some therapeutic conversation and trigger time.

Making excuses for not being able to take this time seems to be a favorite pastime of people determined to become vegetarians and just go camping with guns in the fall. For the rest of us, however, putting meat in the freezer and notches in that tag requires more than just sitting around thinking about it until the night before the fall opener.

First item of business: Clean your rifle. Now. Inside and out. There’s nothing like a bath of Hoppe’s No. 9 or Outer’s Nitro Powder Solvent to get the gunk out of your gun. Pull the stock and clean the action and trigger group. You don’t have to be a gunsmith for this; just get some aerosols and go to work, preferably outside.

Item No. 2: Check your scope mounts and bases. If you missed an easy shot, it just might be that one of your bases has come loose. That happened to me once, about five years ago. Couldn’t get my rifle to zero all of a sudden, and this was with fresh ammunition I had only just loaded up at the bench. Sure as hell, one of my bases was just a teensy bit loose. I got out the gunsmith gear, tightened the screw down and dropped on a dab of clear nail polish. Read the rest of story here.