What's your favorite movie guns? I pick two Clints and one Duke

What's your favorite movie gun? Obviously mine is Dirty Harry's S&W 29 .44 Magnum 'cause I got one just like it except mine has a 4" launcher. The NRA's American Rifleman magazine picks their 10 favorites. P.S. Movie trivia note: Did you know that the revolver Clint used in the first Dirty Harry movie was actually a S&W 57 .41 Magnum? For some unexplained reason, the movie substituted guns even though the script still identified it as a Model 29 "the most powerful handgun in the world" which it wasn't even back then.

The Duke's 1982 Winchester big-loop lever-action rifle in True Grit is also one of my top two. Do not attempt this maneuver with a loaded gun. Note where the muzzle is pointing in this shot, right at Rooster Cogburn's noggin.

And Clint's 1851 Navy cartridge conversion in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly is my close third. Never mind that if such a pistol ever existed it would have been a custom job and almost certainly would not have existed during the Civil War period which the movie portrays. Hollywood hardly ever gets guns right.

Pick your favorites and post them in the comments.

Firearms have been a part of the movies since “The Great Train Robbery” flashed onto the Silver Screen in 1903. In many movies the gun is as important as the character, and often is what makes a scene iconic. AmericanRifleman.org has put together a list of 10 favorite movie guns and why they are so remembered.

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How to carry? Strong side, weak side, small of back? All of the above

Holster choices and carry methods are many and varied but the main thing is to find something that's relatively comfortable and works for you. As Clint Smith says, a carry gun is not supposed to be comfortable, it's supposed to be comforting.

How do you carry? Paul Rackley of American Rifleman analyzes the various choices and chooses strong-side, whether inside the waistband or outside and waistband holsters.

Regardless of the type of holster, strong-side carry has some definite advantages over other methods. First and foremost, the handgun is easily accessible. There is no reaching across or around the body as the hand is already near the gun. Another strong-side advantage is that it allows the use of the weak arm for close-quarters defense without interfering with the draw. Most importantly, the strong-side draw can be simplified to its most basic motions, which, with practice, creates a very smooth, fast draw. And practice is more readily available since many gun ranges limit how shooters can train from retention (holster), if allowed at all, to strong side for safety.

Of course, every carry method has its disadvantages. Strong-side carry has three distinct problems for shooters, the most significant of which is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to start with a hand on the gun. Lifting the cover garment for the draw almost always reveals the gun to potential threats. The other issues with strong-side carry are “printing” and car carry. Care must be taken to not print (when the cover garment tightens and shows the imprint of the gun) when bending over or reaching for an item. This is especially a problem in summer months when light, airy shirts are the norm. Car carry is difficult because with the gun on the strong side, the cover garment and seatbelt combine to make drawing the gun nearly impossible, but it can be conducted with forethought and practice.

For carry at work, which is always open with a t-shirt in the gun shop, I alternate between shoulder holster and strongside waist holster for the main carry with a small-of-back holster for backup.

I'm a lefty but sorta ambiguous about it as my right hand is actually my "strong" hand, since I throw right-handed, so I'm also comfortable with a right-side holster. But after trying two waist holsters, I didn't like that as well as main carry on left waist and backup in small-of-back for right hand. I figure that way if my left arm is disabled or busy, I can still draw right-handed.

And when nothing else works well, I go to a left-side pocket holster for my Kel-Tec PF9.

Never too old to go back to the ABCs of Handgun Marksmanship

I'm always up for more edumication on how to shoot a pistol right and I just ran across an article in American Rifleman online from Wiley Clapp he calls The ABCs of Handgun Marksmanship

At some unknown point in time, an instructor stepped before a group of men and began to speak about the management of a curious artifact known as a pistol. It may have been a Texan speaking to a company of Rangers who had just received their new Patersons. Or maybe it was later or even much earlier—I don't know, because I wasn't there. But I do remember with crystal clarity the voice of my late father as I stood before a target and lifted a loaded Colt pistol for the first time. His message stays with me to this day: "There's not a reason in the world to shoot unless you intend to hit. You hit when you line up the sights."

...The basic message remains the same—stick to the principles, apply them to the situation. I must note that many books and manuals on the subject do exist, just as there are hundreds of good instructors doing their work for the uninitiated. The message from the good ones is pretty much the same, but the principles might sometimes be organized and/or taught differently. I believe there are five principles: Grip, Stance, Aiming, Trigger Management and Follow-Through. They are the "ABCs of Handgun Marksmanship." They should be viewed not as five principles, but rather as five steps on a stairway to success. See them as a linked chain of controlled and codependent events that produce on-target hits....

Download PDF of Full Article

I've downloaded and printed the full article and if you're a shooter, I'd highly recommend it. I'll use it personally as well as incorporate at least brief elements of it in my future pistols classes as an NRA basic pistol instructor and N.C. concealed carry instructor.

Clapp's introduction reminds me how fortunate I was to have a father who taught his sons how to shoot pistols, rifles and shotguns. It wasn't a formal education, but it was a good one, mostly in applying the basic lessons from the back yard into hunting. Nothing teaches you patience and the necessity of making the first shot count than still hunting squirrels with a .22 rifle.

I wrote about a few of those Lessons Learned With A Gun a while back on my personal site.

Discovering a gun-friendly writer is an unexpected pleasure

I'm way too stubborn to change easily when it comes to my reading-for-pleasure habits. I've got a few authors I stick with, Robert B. Parker, W.E.B. Griffin, Bernard Cornwell, Stuart Woods and a small handful of others.

So I am absolutely delighted to add another to that small list, Stephen Hunter. I just finished his latest novel, I, Sniper, about the adventures of a former Vietnam War Marine sniper Bob Lee Swagger. Now I'll go back and read Hunter's earlier novels and nonfiction works with pleasure.

And this morning in an email announcing the latest issue of American Rifleman, lo and behold there's an article about my newly found author with a "pigs fly" note: he's a retired journalist from The Washington Post! Lordy, I didn't think anybody who ever worked there knew which end of the gun the bullets came out of.

Mark Keefe, editor-in-chief of American Rifleman, had the same reaction when he first stumbled across Hunter's writing.

The world didn’t end, and there was no immediate evidence of porcine aviation. But my morning’s coffee spewed on the pages of Jan. 26, 2006, Washington Post was enough to demonstrate that the world was somehow out of balance. Appearing in that liberal, anti-gun journalistic bastion was one of the finest articles on firearms I’d ever read. When the U.S. Repeating Arms Co. factory closed, a film critic for the Washington Post wrote a heartfelt piece, “Out With A Bang,” for the paper about the legacy of Winchester—in particular the Model 94. In my opinion, it was the finest tribute written on that legendary firearm.

It should have come as no surprise, though, as that writer was Stephen Hunter—a veteran journalist and film critic with The Baltimore Sun and then The Washington Post who earned a Distinguished Writing Award from the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1998 and a Pulitzer Prize For Criticism in 2003. Hunter is also a New York Times bestselling novelist and one of the finest writers in America. Best of all for shooters his novels are well-known for presenting firearms in a technically correct fashion and giving them prominence in his plotlines. He has written 14 novels and introduced the character of Bob Lee Swagger in “Point of Impact” (1993). That novel was adapted by Hollywood into the feature film “Shooter,” starring Mark Wahlberg, in 2007. Hunter is also the author of three non-fiction works, and, in my opinion, “American Gunfight: The Plot To Kill Harry Truman And The Shoot-Out That Stopped It” has one of the finest descriptions of a an actual gunfight ever written.

I've already checked out one of the early Bob Lee Swagger novels and plan to read all I can find.