By The Campfire

August 22, 2008

Have you ever watched one of those old WWII sea battle movies where the big guns on a big ship explode with smoke and fire, propelling a massive canister of a bomb off into the embankments of some enemy fortress on an island far, far away?

This is like that.

When you first see it, your first instinct is to laugh. It’s that damned big. It hangs on the wall with all of the others and they stay cool in its shadow.

It’s a hand-cannon, a palm-buster, a bone-shudderer, a wrist-breaker. Five 440 grain cartridges fill the stainless steel revolving cylinder. It is as heavy as a concrete block and takes two hands to aim accurately. Its muzzle energy jacks 2,600 foot pounds of force through your grip and can knock a grown man down – maybe you, as you pull the trigger. What it can do to someone in you sights is unspeakable.

Shooting someone, however, is not the purpose of a chunk of gunnery this size. The purpose is to just shoot it. Go to a firing range and drop a buck-fifty and watch it upchoke the biggest, thumb-sized, projectiles you have likely ever seen. Just poke the five holes full of lead and try to hold on as it jumps like a bad dream and shoves a pain down your wrist into your forearms and rattles your teeth.

“What the hell was that?” I hear through the plugs in my ears. The man three booths down arches his neck around to this beast with bullets.

Smith and Wesson claims the Model 500 is the most powerful production revolver in the world today. I hear no arguments from the people around me as I pull the trigger and watch the end of the barrel explode into a plate-sized star of fire. A whoosh of blue smoke and invisible cordite bloom into the firing range chamber, turning heads and decimating the little shape of a man in front of me. I retrieve the target and see quarter-sized holes.

“Dear Gawd!” said the woman walking past.

The Model 500 has more than twice the muzzle energy of Dirty Harry’s 44 Magnum. The recoil is like trying to hold an angry spastic bull by a metal chain. It kicks like a mule that has made up his mind.

“Son of a –“ the teenager’s voice trails off, lost in the booming unleashed by the revolver.

Before I continue, I must explain that I am no gun nut, far from it. Research for a story, however, led me to this shooting range on Father’s Day with my oldest son where we pushed round after round through a Smith and Wesson .38 snub nose, a S&W 357 magnum, and a Smith and Wesson .45 1911 automatic that was as smooth as pudding and more accurate than any weather prediction. But nothing could prepare either of us for the 500.

“Not many people can fire that one,” said the man behind the counter.

My son, an ex-college fullback and linebacker, was the first to try it. He adjusted his stance, as instructed, with staggered feet, and unloaded the contents of the ridiculously large handgun into his target. When he dropped the hot barrel to his side, his trigger finger was bleeding and a section of skin was missing, chewed up in the mechanism of his underestimation of the deadly instrument.

People up and down the firing line watched as we reloaded and blew the contents of the big gun into the void. I loaded it, held it up and eased into the trigger. What happened is difficult to describe. Here, try this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axGPyfwsapA

Even that doesn’t do it justice. The sound from this thing silenced every other weapon in the place. Earplugs were almost useless. The concussion of the discharge rode through my bones and settled in my brain.

When we left, my hands were black with powder. I smelled like I’d been working in a salt peter factory. My ears rang and my hands throbbed. I took two Advil. The next day, I had a bruise the size of a golf ball on the palm.

As we drove home, I could see Clint Eastwood’s now ubiquitous snarling squint asking, “Do you feel lucky? Well, do you punk?”

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