A lifetime of guns: the goal: shoot every type of gun ever made

Guns Magazine, April, 2005 by Mike Venturino

Five hundred guns for a lifetime. That's not many by some standards. I know several people who own 500 guns right now. But it's been my lifetime of guns, and it's pretty good for a hillbilly kid starting from a coal-mining town in southern West Virginia. Perhaps the only thing different between myself and others who have owned many guns, is I've kept a list of every single one. Its brand, model, caliber and barrel length have all been scribbled on notebook paper for 40 years now. Furthermore, I shot every single one of those guns, sometimes not a lot and sometimes tens of thousands of rounds.

Perhaps of even more interest, however, is the gun I bought as a present for myself to celebrate reaching 500 guns for my lifetime. As we will see shortly, it's a humdinger!

Like just about everyone else, my gun-owning and shooting career began with .22 rimfires, but unlike most American shooters, they have never interested me overly much. The records show that only 15 .22 rimfire handguns and seven rimfire rifles have passed through my hands in over 40 years. Only one of each remains: an original Winchester Model 1885 .22LR Winder Musket and one of the new Kimber Model 1911 .22s. Neither of those have been fired in over a year. To me, handloading is a labor of love not an onerous chore, so shooting centerfire guns is not a problem.

My First Rifle

My first centerfire rifle was one of the M1 Carbines sold by the DCM back in the early to mid-1960s for the grand price of $20. Not even 16 yet, I got my non-shooting father to join the NRA and get one for me. It was the thing I wanted most out of life at that time, so my father was flabbergasted when I traded it off the next year for a S&W K-38. You see, interests change quickly when you're that young. After getting a driver's license I had joined the local bull's-eye pistol shooting club and that M1 Carbine just didn't seem so important anymore. I had conned my folks into buying me a Ruger Mark 1 Target .22LR for a birthday present, and the club would furnish military surplus DCM loaner Model 1911s but for a mid-size gun I needed that K-38. That one was a milestone because it started me out as a handloader and bullet caster.

College interfered with bull's-eye pistol shooting, but not my gun buying and trading. However, being short of cash meant that something usually had to go before something else came. That's what happened to both the Ruger and S&W target handguns. By 1968 I discovered single-action revolvers. Never had I actually seen one for real: only in gun magazines and books, usually in material penned by such men as Skeeter Skelton and Elmer Keith. But I just knew that life would be much better if I owned a Colt SAA .45. After that first year of college I was humping freight on loading docks for a summer job, and on breaks us kids would shoot the bull with the truck drivers. Of all things one of them told me he had a Colt SAA .45. To make a long story short after much haggling and near begging on my part one payday he sold it to me for $100. It was the first of over three score of Colt Peacemakers, Bisleys and New Frontiers to date. I was floating high even though at that time I could afford to shoot it very, very little.

Colt .45s

By the end of summer I had accumulated enough money for .45 Colt reloading dies and a bullet mold. But I made it a .45 ACP mold because that works fine for both .45 ACP and .45 Colt reloading. You see, by then I also had a Remington Rand Model 1911. My father was a bill collector and that summer of 1968 he took that gun in payment for someone's debt. He walked in the house one evening and pulled it from his hip pocket saying, "Do you want this?" You bet I did! Today, even though I am very well known for writing about single-action revolvers and single-shot rifles, my records show I've owned 17 Model 1911s ranging from Ballister Molinas to Les Baer Thunder Ranch Specials. That latter one is especially "special" to me. As I've written before, Clint Smith and I are close, and happened to have been born on the same day. He gave that Les Baer .45 to me on one of our birthdays, and then the beautiful monogrammed grips on it for another.

Something else noteworthy happened in 1968. I discovered Montana. Late that August I made a camping trip there with the sole purpose of seeing the Custer Battlefield (Now renamed Little Bighorn Battlefield). That was fine, but the greatest part was seeing that in Montana they sold guns in gas stations and reloading equipment in discount stores and people were packing them about on their persons or in the racks of pickups. I knew immediately where my life would be spent!

The Varminter

Upon moving to Montana after college I quickly fell in with some fellows who were varmint shooters. There wasn't much rifle shooting done in my part of West Virginia, so varmint hunting was a brand new endeavor. I jumped into it joyfully. At one time my racks held rifles ranging from .222 Remingtons to .25-06s; all bolt actions set up with scopes suitable for long-range varminting. And for the first time in my life I began loading quantities of jacketed bullets. It was wonderful! One of my new friends owned some acreage and let me set up a benchrest and 100-yard target. In cooler weather, I spent nearly every free moment (not to mention dollar) testing handload combinations through my array of bolt-action rifles. Once a fellow visited me at that range and looking at the narrow trench in the hillside behind my target asked what sort of machinery was used to dig it. When I told him the excavation was done with bullets fired by me his jaw literally dropped open. Of course, in warm weather we were out after gophers, prairie dogs, and rockchucks. My records show that I owned over 20 full-fledged bolt-action varmint rifles in bore sizes between .22 and .25 caliber.