462 
FOREST AND STREAM 
OCTOBER, 1917 
THIS YEAR’S GRAND AMERICAN HANDICAP 
A FEW COMMENTS ON NERVES, TRAP SHOOTING, THE 
FUTURE OF THE TWENTY GAUGE AND A NEW CHAMPION 
By DR. WILLIAM A. BRUETTE 
T HE American trap shot is a man in 
deadly earnest; for the last twenty- 
five years he has been spreading his 
propaganda so widely that trap shooting 
promises to become a national pastime, 
and far-seeing men who have studied the 
sport in its relationship to and influence 
upon our national life and the peculiarities 
of our character say “hasten the day,” for 
there is a use and a place for trap shooting 
that no other sport can fill. We have said 
that the trap shot was a man in earnest; 
more than that earnestness—real, sincere, 
play out the string earnestness—is an 
American characteristic. The successful 
American as a rule is intolerant *of the 
idea of conserving the slightest portion of 
nervous energy that could be used in any 
way to help spell that which passes for 
and is termed success. 
We are not going deeply into the subject 
of nerves—so many have them that it is 
unnecessary to do so. We all know that 
long continued concentration upon one line 
of thought often results in a complete ner¬ 
vous exhaustion that sleep or rest but par¬ 
tially restores, and for which the only sur¬ 
cease is to direct the mind through action 
into another channel of thought. 
There is no sport in the world that de¬ 
mands such tremendous concentration as 
trap shooting, and that is the very reason 
that trap shooting affords minds exhausted 
by concentration along other lines such 
complete relief. There is something about 
the popping shells, the pulverized targets, 
the rhythmatic squad Work, and the cheer¬ 
ful earnestness of the devotees that holds 
a man long enough to move his train of 
thought from one set of exhausted brain 
cells into a new and untouched field; his 
subconscious mind becomes more alert, his 
nervous ganglia stimulate each other, the 
worn, exhausted concious mind is allowed 
to rest and a quiet, restful evening and 
dreamless sleep follow an hour or two at 
the traps after a high-pressure day. 
Golf and a dozen other sports are all 
right in their way, exalt them as you will, 
but there is always time between strokes 
for the mind to drift back to business cares. 
Even in rifle shooting you can hesitate, you 
can shift your aim, change position, or even 
let down your weapon; but the man at the 
traps has got to do business and do it fast, 
for the next instant a little brown saucer, 
traveling like the proverbial blue streak, is 
going to slip out from the top edge of the 
trap house, and in addition to its visualiza¬ 
tion a dozen highly important questions re¬ 
lating to speed, height, distance, angle, 
windage, etc., have got to be settled, a gun 
pointed, and a trigger pressed: Concen¬ 
tration is the only answer, concentration 
first, last, and all the time. But if all of 
these problems be correctly solved the re¬ 
sult is so absolutely conclusive, so impres¬ 
sively expressed in the complete extinction 
of the target that floats in the air as a 
cloud of dust, that the mind registers in 
upper case characters SUCCESS. 
A complete relaxation of one field of 
nervous energy through a delightful stimu¬ 
lation of another is the reason that you 
find men of all ages, of all degrees of 
strength, and from every walk in life 
Chas. Lawson 
gathered in wholesome democracy at the 
traps, and for the same reason the most 
advanced members of the medical profes¬ 
sion and the greatest nerve specialists ad- 
\ ise take up trap shooting” as a standard 
prescription for mental exhaustion and 
overwrought nervous systems. 
The American gun maker and the Amer¬ 
ican ammunition maker recognized the se¬ 
riousness of the trap shooter many years 
ago, and keenly alert to their criticisms, 
suggestions, and insistent demands have de¬ 
veloped perfectly modeled arms and a re¬ 
markable efficiency in barrel boring and 
chambering, and the ammunition makers 
have emulated them by producing perfectly 
balanced loads. The standard gun at the 
traps today is the twelve gauge weighing 
about y ]/ 2 lbs., a useful weapon that has 
served the present generation satisfactorily 
just as the ten gauge gun served the gen¬ 
eration before them; but how long the 12 
gauge will retain this position is an open 
question, for the twenty gauge gun has 
appeared upon the trap shooting horizon. 
The greatest event in the trap shooting 
world is the Grand American Handicap. 
It is a classic state, the goal of all trap 
shooters. It has just been shot off at Chi¬ 
cago, and was won by Charles Lawson of 
Waupaca, Wisconsin, a young man only 
twenty-four years old. He used an Ithaca 
twelve gauge trap gun, U. S. Black shells, 
and broke 98 out of 100. A remarkable 
combination of man, gun and ammuni¬ 
tion, which left little to be desired. In 
other words, the gun maker’s art and the 
science of barrel boring, the development 
of powder, shot, wadding, and skill in load¬ 
ing, have caught up to the clay bird in the 
twelve gauge class; and as a result many 
of our clay bird shooters are running up 
scores of 90 per cent. There is nothing 
remarkable about 94 or 95 per cent, and it 
reqiures a practically perfect score to win 
the big events and squad after squad shoot 
with an efficiency so nearly mechanical 
that interest is liable to lag simply through 
attainment, and there is a movement under 
way to raise the tone of the sport by in¬ 
creasing the difficulty. This can be ac¬ 
complished either by increasing the distance 
or by standardizing smaller gauges and 
lighter loads. Today all signs point to the 
smaller gauges. The sixteen gauge is next 
on the list, but somehow or other it has 
never come in for either enthusiasm or pop¬ 
ularity, the attention of sportsmen, gun 
makers, ammunition loaders, seemingly 
having centered on that highly sporting 
weapon, the twenty-gauge. 
The twelve-gauge was pooh-pooh’d and 
scoffed at in its day, and there are those 
who will assume the same attitude toward 
the twenty and will loudly declare that it 
will never be popular at the traps. The 
twenty gauge however can not be dismissed. 
It is on the road. The vanguard are now 
using them in public, others are experi¬ 
menting with them in private. They are 
traveling everywhere in company with that 
ingenious little cantrivance the hand trap 
which has made it possible to enjoy trap 
shooting wherever there is an open field or 
a strip of beach. 
There is something very appealing about 
the twenty gauge with its light weight, 
finely modeled lines, and graceful tubes. 
They are a delight to handle and there is 
a charm about sighting over their slim, 
graceful tubes that few can resist. Their 
spiteful little report is not accomp 'd by 
