Video: The greatest political ad ever?

:53 – :55 the finger is definitely in the trigger guard and in front of the trigger. At the end his finger is not in the trigger guard.

aikidoka on May 17, 2010 at 7:56 AM

I’ll repost my post of last evening at 9:13PM. Perhaps you haven’t read it and might learn something about the Model 94 and horseback carry of said rifle. He handles the rifle exactly like it has been handled, when drawn from a scabbard, for over a hundred years. That is the way you handle a 94 when empty chamber, hammer down.

My first rifle larger in caliber than a .22 was a Model 94 30-30. I was 15 and that was 54 years ago. My rifle has ALWAYS been the Model 94, in various calibers, except for one year when I carried a Marlin 336. My rifle now is the Centennial Model 94 made in 1994 in .30 WCF.

As to the finger in the trigger guard, I can tell most of you commenting about it have never set a horse with a 94 in a scabbard or with a thong in the saddle ring looped over the saddle horn.

On horseback the 94 is carried with an empty chamber, hammer down or on half cock. The common way to pull the rifle out is with four fingers through the loop and the finger in the trigger guard. The trigger guard is an integral part of the lever and as it is actuated the finger naturally has to fall into the trigger guard. A person practiced with the 94 can draw the rifle and lever a cartridge into the chamber about as fast as someone else can disengage their safety on a normal rifle.

I logged many miles on a Quarter Horse named Star, with a thirty-thirty in the scabbard. I worked around many ranchers and cowboys and fence riders in Nevada for a while. Most of them carried a 94, just as I described, and handled it just like Peterson.

Peterson’s 94, in the ad, looks like one of the later models, so it not only has a half-cock safety position and the safety tit under the stock, actuated by squeezing the lever against the stock, but also that damnable cross-bolt hammer block that Winchester added to satisfy the lawyers on the later models.

If Peterson really is a horseman and a Model 94 rifleman, then he was handling the rifle in much the way it has been handle by cowboys since 1895.

Yoop on May 16, 2010 at 9:13 PM

Yoop on May 17, 2010 at 8:08 AM

Whoops, in previous posts meant three fingers in the lever loop, not four. I may have extra body parts, but an extra finger is not one of them. ;-)

One more comment. Check the very stringent rules for SASS and Cowboy Shooting matches. The lever-action class starts with an empty chamber, hammer down. Check where the trigger finger is. They are strict: break any safety rules and you are disqualified. Again: check where the trigger finger is.

Same rules apply to the single action revolvers. Even though most replicas now come with transfer bars under the hammer the rules absolutely require Cowboy-carry: hammer down on an empty chamber. If you’re caught with all six chambers loaded you are out of the competition. When the revolver comes out of the holster guess where the trigger finger is.

Cowboy-carry, be it revolver or rifle, is the safest way to carry.

For those people the gun was just as much of a tool as a hammer or a fencing tool, and they learned the correct and safest way to do it from the mid-nineteenth century on.

Yoop on May 17, 2010 at 10:18 AM