Articles by Herschel Smith

Having bought worthless shooting bags, I found this video interesting and useful regardless of whether you shoot PRS. You need good shooting bags just to sight in the rifle, or shoot bench rest very well.

Thanks for the fine and informative video Tim, and no, I don’t underestimate the .22 WMR. In fact, I love that round and think it’s very special. I especially like the chronograph data from different length barrels.

And reading the comments forced me to go back and look at the CZ models again. I knew they had some sweet .22 WMR rifles, but I think I see CZ 457 Hunter Veil in my future.

Source.

Over 20 “ill-prepared” hikers were rescued from New Hampshire’s Mount Washington after they were trapped in “full winter conditions” without the proper gear, with some developing hypothermia, according to the Mount Washington Cog Railway.

The hikers, who were rescued on Saturday by railway officials, had reached the mountain’s 6,288-foot summit, but “most had no idea that summit services would be unavailable and that the state park was closed for the season,” Andy Vilaine, the assistant general manager for the Mount Washington Cog Railway, said in a statement on Saturday.

The train was heading to the summit as normal when crew members discovered “several distressed hikers,” Vilaine said in a statement to ABC News.

Some of the hikers even admitted it was “their first hike ever,” Vilaine said.

Near the summit, temperatures on Saturday reached roughly between 15 to 18 degrees, with a wind chill anywhere between minus 5 and zero degrees, Vilaine said.

Train crew members created space “anywhere we could” for the hikers, with some even placed in locomotive cabs “with the heat on full-blast so they could start to reverse the effects of hypothermia,” Vilaine said.

Imagine being so stupid that you use Mount Washington for your first hike ever, where the record low was measured at -50 degrees F, wind speeds achieve ~ 100 MPH, the wind chill is regularly in the range of -80 to -100 degrees F, and the weather is too severe to sustain plant life at all.

I have grown to love my KUIU gear while hunting (I just decided that I was tired of being cold and wet and I deserved better), and I wouldn’t have even done that this time of the year with all of it on in layers.

Then there’s this.

Mississippi Law Enforcement caught working with the cartel to smuggle drugs into America

“We're here today to talk about some incredibly serious allegations that mark a monumental betrayal of public trust — to announce the indictment and arrest of 20 individuals, most of them… pic.twitter.com/apNVHwN2XM

— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) November 2, 2025

Reader Georgiaboy61 mentioned the shot I pointed out in this video where my buddy made four-for-four 1000 yard shots with a .223, and I made a 1000 yard shot with a magnum (7mm PRC) on Friday. This is what that 1000 yards looks like.

It’s a long way off. The first cars are 500 yards. The 1000 yard mark is near the single car on the ridgeline. IPSC target to the right of the car.

Source.

Hunters in Florida were killed in a freak accident after they were struck by lightning while hunting with their dogs.

Two hunters, 38 and 31, from Miami were struck dead after being hit by lightning while hunting in Floridian wetlands.

Responding law enforcement were called to Rucks Dairy Road around 1.30pm on Wednesday September 24 and began searching for the men who hadn’t returned from their hunt.

Their abandoned car was discovered parked in the area before their bodies were found along with their two hunting dogs.

While the initial investigation determined the hunters and their dogs to have died from a lightning strike, the Medical Examiner’s Office is yet to rule an official cause of death.

Sheriff Paul Blackman said in a release from the Highlands County Sheriff’s Office: ‘Our area gets more lightning than just about anywhere else in the country, especially in the summer. If you can hear thunder, that means lightning is close enough to strike, even if the sky doesn’t look too bad yet.’

‘It is essential to pay attention and plan ahead when storms approach.’

Source.

A teen who did not return after going hunting in northern Louisiana was likely killed by a lightning strike, according to investigators.

The grim discovery was made around 8:30 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 18, near the town of Bernice, the Union Parish Sheriff’s Office reported in an Oct. 19 news release.

“Upon arrival of first responders, they were directed to a remote wooded area where 17-year-old Colton Gauge Honeycutt, of Monroe, was located inside of an elevated deer stand. Family members had become concerned when Honeycutt did not return from deer hunting earlier in the evening,” the sheriff’s office said.

“Investigators believe Honeycutt was killed by a lightning strike when thunderstorms moved through the area, just before sunset Saturday evening. Honeycutt was pronounced deceased at the scene by the Union Parish Coroner’s Office.”

The incident is the nation’s 20th lightning fatality of 2025 and the first in Louisiana, according to John Jensenius, a lightning safety specialist with the National Lightning Safety Council.

“Since 2006, there have now been a total of 8 lightning fatalities linked to hunting, 5 of which have occurred in the last two months,” Jensenius said in a news release.

Great. It’s not just predatory animals, or dummies failing to tether to the tree and falling asleep, or hypothermia, or getting lost and breaking bones or dying of starvation, but now lightning. What are we supposed to do? Carry an electrical safety pad with us on hunts? I doubt that would suffice anyway.

Oh well. You drop your dime and pay your time to do what you love. The rest is up to the Almighty.

Josh at Pursuit of Accuracy discusses Chinese optics.

By the way, on Friday I shot with Josh at Coleman’s Creek Shooting Range and if you watch about midways through the video, he puts 4 for 4 rounds on steel at 1000 yards with .223.

Also at the range, I put a 7mm PRC round on steel at 1000 yards.

At Shooting Times there is a good history of the 1911, including how the design transitioned into the double stack 2011.

Also of interest, there is a discussion of the Series 70 versus Series 80 modifications. Or, you could just purchase a Springfield Armory 1911 (Series 70) in which case they’ve handled the drop safe issue with a Titanium firing pin.

The Silver Eagle shooting range called the ATF on a man using an FRT resulting in his arrest with the ATF claiming it is a machine gun. They should be IMMEDIATELY boycotted and informed of the shooting communities displeasure. Contact info is below https://t.co/NrfPlx690A pic.twitter.com/bGYoWgEGo5

— Dr Death (@DrDeath1776) October 10, 2025

Here is their web site. If this is incorrect or didn’t happen, or if this is the wrong shooting range, the linked company can feel free to correct me in the comments.

So to begin with, the employees of the shooting range are apparently uneducated and untrained chimpanzees who can’t tell the difference. I would have asked to borrow the gun and found out within ten seconds what it was. Besides, they had no way of knowing whether the individual possessing the firearm had legal ownership of a machine gun or was an FFL SOT.

In response to this display of liberty, the untrained chimps called in other untrained chimps (the ATF) to make problems worse.

They should be ashamed. As for Silver Eagle Shooting Group, I hope your company sees an ignominious end and you go out of business.

Source.

Towards the end of September, comedian Bill Maher provoked social-media outrage by asking a simple question: why does the coverage of Gaza get so much mainstream-media attention when the persecution of Christians in Nigeria gets almost none?

‘They are systematically killing the Christians in Nigeria’, he said on his talk show, Real Time:

‘They’ve killed over 100,000 since 2009. They’ve burned 18,000 churches… These are the Islamists, Boko Haram. This is so much more of a genocide attempt than what is going on in Gaza. They are literally attempting to wipe out the Christian population of an entire country.’

You wouldn’t think of someone like Maher – a self-described ‘apatheist’ (‘I don’t know what happens when you die, and I don’t care’) – as suddenly becoming the most prominent voice on the persecution of Christians in Nigeria. But he’s absolutely right. They are being slaughtered en masse.

I have several remarks.

First, the Nigerian Christians needs to find a way to obtain firearms and go on a holy war a crusade against Muslims. It could be that the Muslims have benefactors and thus can obtain those weapons easily. As for world wide Christians, we don’t disobey laws against trafficking arms, do we? American Christians think Jesus was a Bohemian, peacenik, flower child pacifist. But either way, with benefactors or not, the Christians needs to stand up an well armed army of men.

As to the question ‘why’, it’s a shame that the likes of Bill Maher would have to ask the question. As for America, the corrupt, heretical and unbiblical seed of dispensationalism is to blame. As for the rest of the world, I have one sentence that can answer that.

Follow the money.