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FOREST AND STREAM. 
[DeEc. 7, 1907. 

How To’s for Beginners. 
How to Carry Your Gun. 
Tue day when he gets his first gun is an im- 
portant one for any boy. He has seen his 
elders use a gun and has heard them talk about 
the joys of shooting, the good shots that they 
have made and their successful days afield. He 
feels that now he is going to enjoy the pleas- 
ures of which he has heard so much and he is 
eager to put the gun to practical use—to kill 
things. In this he is but following out the 
hunting instinct which seems to be inherent in 
all of us. 
But before he can do this he has many things 
to learn. In the first place he must understand 
the mechanism of the gun; that is to say, how 
it is built, how it is to be taken apart and how 
put together, This information is easily ex- 
plained, and to take the gun apart is very 
simple. To put it together is not quite so easy, 
although after this has been done fifteen or 
twenty times he who is manipulating the stock 
and the barrels will find that they come together 
more and more easily, until, almost automatic- 
ally, the lugs will fit in their places, and the 
breech will snap down, so that only the fore- 
end need be put in position to hold fast the 
mechanism. 
Much more important than to put up and 
take down the gun is to understand—and never 
to forget—how much care is needed in handling 
the weapon to insure the safety of all the living 
things it is brought near to. At first a boy is 
likely to wholly fail to realize that a loaded 
gun is a very dangerous implement, but the 
more he uses it, the longer his experience as 
a shooter, the more clearly he will understand 
the possible dangers that lurk within this beauti- 
ful and effective tool. 
Unless properly handled, a gun is dangerous, 
dangerous to the person who is carrying it and 
to those who are in his company. This danger 
must never be forgotten. The one who owns the 
gun must remember this constantly, and, remem- 
bering it, must train himself to habits which will 
insure his own safety and that of the people 
with whom he is associated. We say of course 
that an unloaded gun cannot go off, and that is 
true enough; yet in a great majority of gun 
accidents, the people who cause these accidents 
feel certain that the gun is unloaded. So much 
is this the fact that “he didn’t know it was 
loaded” has become a cant term to express the 
act of stupidity or thoughtlessly putting oneself 
in danger. There is but one way in which a 


A BAD 
POSITION. 
Ready for birds to rise, but in case of accidental 
discharge, likely to kill your companion, 
A SAFE 
AND EASY WAY, 
gun may be made safe, and this is never under 
any circumstances to permit it to point at any- 
thing that you do not wish to shoot. This rule 
of never permitting the gun to point at anything 
that you do not wish to shoot may be supple- 
mented by another excellent one; always re- 
move the loads from your gun when you are 
not ready to use the gun. Take the shells out 
of the chambers and put them in your pocket 
whenever you have occasion to climb over a 
fence, to get through a fence, to climb over a 
wall, to get into or out of a boat, to get into a 
wagon, to go into a house, or to put your gun 
out of your hands for a few moments. 
You have been advised not to point your gun 
at anything that you do not want to shoot. Let 
me repeat—it cannot be done too often—some 
of the things you should not do. In getting 
over or through a fence, even though you have 
already taken the cartridges out of your gun, 
do not pull it toward you by the muzzle, do not 
pull it into or out of a wagon or boat by the 
muzzle with the barrels pointing toward your- 
self or toward anybody else; in other words, do 
not point this dangerous arm except at some 
target that you wish to hit. 
[If you will talk with sportsmen of experi- 
ence you will find that, almost without excep- 
tion, they understand that a gun must be 
handled with greatest care, and, as a rule, the 
longer their experience the greater their care- 
fulness, the greater their indignation if any 
one in their company carrying a gun is care- 
less with it. If you have occasion to shoot with 
trained middle-aged or old men and wish to be 
popular with them, you must be extremely care- 
ful in handling your gun and in seeing that the 
muzzle never points at anything except what 
you wish to shoot at. Most sportsmen, as 
young men, have had the importance of such 
care so constantly impressed upon them by 
men older than themselves that they have 
formed permanent good habits in handling the 
gun, and, without knowing it, keep the muzzle 
always directed in such a way that even if the 
gun goes off the charge cannot do any harm. 
The guns of the present day, that is to say, 
breechloading arms, are vastly safer than the 
muzzleloaders of a generation ago. Now, 
whenever you get into a wagon or a boat, or 
go into a house, or even stop to sit down and 
rest your gun against the fence, you can re- 
move the cartridges from the chambers, which 
makes the gun absolutely safe. In old times 
it was not so. The load was fast in the gun, and 
the most that one could do was to remove the 

caps from the nipples. In those days people 
usually contented themselves with putting the 
gun at half cock, and if possible placing it in 
such a position that it could not be handled by 
any inexperienced person and could not be 
knocked down. Nevertheless, frequent acci- 
dents used to occur when a gun which had 
been rested against a wall or against a fence 
was knocked down, or when the loaded arm 
was left where a child could get at it, and 
might play with it and cause the hammer to fall 
on the cap. 
At the present day there is no excuse for an 
accident of this kind, and in fact they occur 
much less often than formerly. Nevertheless, 
as there are still many careless people, shells 
are too often left in the gun, and innocent per- 
sons or animals are killed or wounded. 
One of the first things that you should learn 
is to form the habit of carrying your gun with 
safety to others and to yourself, and to this end 
when you get your gun, you should practice 
carrying it about with you as much as possible, 
unloaded. 
There are only two directions in which the 
muzzle of a gun may be pointed, so that it will 
always be safe. One of these is up in the air 
and the other is down toward the ground. Of 
the two the former is the safer. If your gun 
accidentally goes off when the muzzle is di- 
rected toward the sky the danger of its injur- 
ing anyone is very slight, but it by chance the 
muzzle is directed toward the ground and your 
dog. walking beside you, pushes forward a little 
close to your leg, he may put his head under 
the muzzle of the gun, and if by any chance 
it should be discharged when he is in this 
position, it might kill him. Of course, a gun 
is not likely to go off without some. good 
cause. At the same time accidents are always 
possible and always happen in an unexpected 
way—else they would not be accidents, The 
breaking of a spring, the wearing of some little 
piece of steel, a sharp blow on the plungers by 
a twig or branch of a tree, combined with a very 
sensitive primer, may cause the discharge of 
the gun. 
The handiest way of carrying a gun is over 
the right or left shoulder with the hand on the 
grip or on the stock and the barrels directed 
into the air at an angle of thirty or forty de- 
grees with the horizontal. To carry the gun 
over the shoulder with the barrels horizontal— 
that is to say, pointed directly behind you and 
about on a level with your own shoulder—is 
an unsafe way, since the accidental discharge 
of the gun will send the shot off horizontally 
behind you, and may kill or wound anything 

A GOOD POSITION. 
Safe and convenient; carry gun under either arm. 


