Gun stories (tall tales) from strangers

Bones741 said:

Agreed there is overlap and both are great. Each has their own merits.

Edit: sorry for the derail of the thread. Stories here have been pretty entertaining !

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You did a good job of pointing out the truth.

I can cherry pick loading data and show that a .40 S&W is more powerful than a .44 Mag.

Ks5shooter said:

Fellow told me once how he skipped a 12 gauge rifled slug off the ice of a lake to kill a deer 300 yrds away.(one skepticle emoticon for each of the hundred yards)

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We need myth busters! I think it’s plausable! Highly unlikely, but crap like that happens. We had coyotes in the garden one night making lots of racket. my dad steps out on the porch with his 22 and fires one shot in the direction of their noise and they run off and we can sleep. The next morning there is a dead coyote with a bullet hole pretty much right between the eyes!

ATLDave said:

Great comeback!

"Oh, I meant, um, Gregorian yards. You must be using Julian yards. Gregorian yards are more tactical. If you really understood shooting, you would never have made that mistake. Obviously nobody can hit a can at 100 Julian yards."

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Well, I wish the comeback was original,,,
I had heard it before somewhere in my past.

But, it still worked.

Aarond

.

Too many to count, but the best were these.
"Didja know that Jeff Cooper killed two Japs over a mile away with an M-1 rifle???

Didja know that a .45 pistol is so powerful that if you hit a man in the arm, it will pick him up off of his feet and throw him down so hard that it will knock him out cold??

Had a young man, acquaintance of a friend who invited him to our annual shoot'n'hoot, this past summer spinning yarns late one night around the campfire to myself and a recently medically-retired Navy SEAL ... We had difficulty stifling our outright incredulous laughter as in one story, this rather pudgy young guy who claimed he'd done six years as a USMC special operator and sniper, related how he was sent -- alone -- on a mission to recover a downed Navy pilot in Afghanistan. He rather blew it when he stated the Navy pilot had been flying an Apache helo (I almost asked if the Army knew about this) and that the Taliban had shot the helo down with a JDAM.

Of course, this was shortly before he asked the former SEAL if he'd ever had to call in fire on his own position ... when the response was no, he gave us a sad look and told us how terrible the experience had been ... We both said with great sympathy, "Gosh, that must have been rough."

Needless to say, our host received a recommendation not to invite this young man up next year ... as we kinda prefer our campfire stories mostly true (or at least within the realm of believability).

Yeah, I don't know why the temptation to falsely claim "retired military special ops sniper" is so strong to some people. I once encountered a dude on a golf course who made that claim. He was also in his early 30's and weighed at least 3 bills.... and, no, it wasn't mostly muscle. The other guys in our group were friends of mine, and we were able to entertain ourselves for many months thereafter concocting tales of his time spent as a deep-cover operative with an assumed identity as a hippopotamus, the difficulties of finding ghilie suits at the local portly-gentlemen's haberdashery, how many MRE's he must have gone through during any stalk, etc.

To be clear, I could stand to lose more than a few lb's myself, and I don't think there's any great moral failing in being overweight or even obese. But it does make claims of having recently been a tier-1 life-stealer a bit harder to believe.

A kid (18 years old or so) is next to me in line at Cabelas in Hamburg, PA. He notices that I have a box of .380 ammo in my hand. He proceeds to tell me that a .380 round won't even go through my leather jacket and that it is a useless round. Everyone around me was laughing at this kid. It took everything in my power to not say "hey, when we get into the parking lot you should put on my leather jacket and we can test it" but I took the high road and just laughed him off.

I like to read science fiction and fantasy books.There are a lot of lost world type story’s where they went in “ loaded for bear “with 9 mill’s and AR’S
and take down dino’s.
I’m positive those same stories have retold by the ( I swear it’ True )creeps .Some of them have even been sober.
There should be a name for them.

I was told by a seller at a gun show that he had killed a deer with a slug out of his sawn-off Iver Johnson 16ga at 150 yards.

I currently know a person who is aware that I'm a gun guy . He was telling me about his 7 MM magnum rifle loaded with a 130gr Speer bullet is zeroed at 200 yards and shoots only 2 inches low at 400 Yards. His buddy reloads for him and he has no idea about what powder or primers he uses. I tried to tell him that can't be but he swears to it.

I almost had a pretty serious altercation with a man I believe had probably been in prison, but came back to his home town and told folks he was in special forces as some sort of shooting instructor. I was a transplant there also so I don’t know him. At the local sports bar some of my friends introduced us because they knew I liked guns and had Some great shooting places. The guy immediately rubbed me wrong by instead of introducing himself, he turned to his buddies and told them he could easily take me out if needed. I’m a nice guy so I went along with it. We sat down and had general conversation with mutual friends for a while and he started up a ballistics conversation. I listened to lots of bad info before he started explaining how bullets rise when they leave the barrel. I guess I tuned him out at some point and he called me out asking me point blank why I didn’t agree with him. I told him I knew the opposite to be true, but maybe I had misunderstood him along the way. The dude got really mad and defensive, started bowing up to me. I chose to go home instead of jail that night. I never saw that guy again and lived there 2 more years.

Fine Figure of a Man said:

A phrase that nearly always indicates fabrication.

I have heard more than once about rifles that will make a bullet climb after a certain distance.

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True. in order to do it, you need a ladder sight.

^^^ Winner! ^^^

My Dad relayed a story of a co worker who "makes custom rifles for spec ops units." He claimed to make his own barrels that were top of the line but couldn't tell my dad what twist he used for his .338 lapua super sniper rifle. He just looked dumb founded when the word "twist" came up.

I've noticed people who lie about military related careers always pick sniper as their job. Followed by SEAL. Followed by special forces. The guy who said he was in the motor pool or a cook is someone you don't have to think twice about lying.

years ago me a and a buddy walked into a pawn shop to look for a 410 shotgun. we had been doing a bit of rabbit hunting and I was wanting a 410 for it.

the guy behind the counter had a Mossberg pump 410,i forget the price but it was more than I could of got a new one for.

after going thru his spiel on what a great gun this was he added, I can sell you a box of slugs and you will be all fixed up for deer season as well.

I said id never heard of using a 410 for deer and he countered with, well you have to keep your shots under 150 yrds.

my buddy grinned at me like a possum licking blood off a glass floor.

I just said what I always do, we may be back, gotta look at a few more places first.

Had a guy in his 50s arguing that ball ammo is better for defensive loads because whoever was shot would need to deal with an entrance and exit wound and therefore wouldn't have any extra hands to fight back with. Watched the clerk try to explain expanding ammo for a couple minutes but left after voices started getting raised.

Jeff Cooper always said that hardball was just as good as hollowpoints.
Of course, they had to come from a .45!

I once heard a guy claim that .308 Winchester was just a 30-06 'short' and you could chamber and fire it safely, going so far as to claim he'd done it many times before. The dude was an occasional hangaround at my local watering hole and while I was sorely tempted to call him on it, I figured there was no fix for that kind of stupid.

One of my friends there who knew him a little better said not to worry, he didn't own anything more dangerous than an airsoft gun. I kind of hope no one listens to him, though, could get messy.

Mn Fats said:

My Dad relayed a story of a co worker who "makes custom rifles for spec ops units." He claimed to make his own barrels that were top of the line but couldn't tell my dad what twist he used for his .338 lapua super sniper rifle. He just looked dumb founded when the word "twist" came up.

I've noticed people who lie about military related careers always pick sniper as their job. Followed by SEAL. Followed by special forces. The guy who said he was in the motor pool or a cook is someone you don't have to think twice about.

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One of the biggest bad asses I know is a man that was the type writer guy in Vietnam. Something happened to their typer and they had tryouts and he made the cut. He claimes that’s why he’s alive.

A coworker loves to retell the tale of his monster 7 point buck. That “30 odd seeks” was built to shoot through a 6 inch sapling and come out might near as fast as it went in. Gotta shoot the deer real low though or your gonna tear up all of the meat do there’s nothing left that’s fit to eat. It truly wasn’t a bad deer, but the bad shooting turned a 140 inch 9 pointer into a 100 inch 7 pointer. He never hit meat either, the antler shot knocked the buck out and ol Rambo killed the deer when he stabbed it in the neck or when he cut the head off with a sawzall to get it mounted. Pictures supported this story. Shattered sapling, broken antler, bloody sawzall, bloody Bowie In the teeth in the pickup...

ANYTHING coming out of the mouth of someone who says they were in Special Ops.............it might take a while to determine which video game they were playing, but it usually comes out in the end.

The reply I can make with a straight face is ".... Well, it's your story ......." Kind of hard to get TOOO offended at that, and if there are other knowledgeable listeners around we just smile small at each other.

Guy behind the counter at walmart told me his friend hunted all over Africa with just one rifle. His trusty .22. He killed everything with it. Just shot them right in the eye.

Uh huh....so their governments oversight by said country means nothing? Because I'm pretty sure you can't hunt elephant with one of those. Maybe I'm wrong.

Let me tell you about my time a space shuttle door gunner...
Most recent was a former co-worker (fired) who always felt the need to "one-up" everyone. So, of course, he and his brother had a stockpile of full auto guns, the ammo to feed them, silencers galore. The automatic weapons were the obligatory "done with a file" conversions. The ammunition was unknown caliber but worked just fine. The silencers were bought from the trunk of a car because they're illegal, you know.

RedlegRick said:

I once heard a guy claim that .308 Winchester was just a 30-06 'short' and you could chamber and fire it safely, going so far as to claim he'd done it many times before. The dude was an occasional hangaround at my local watering hole and while I was sorely tempted to call him on it, I figured there was no fix for that kind of stupid.

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I found 3 cases at the range one day that proved to me that it could be done more than once, though not sure how safe it was, nor which make of rifle they were fired from.

George P said:

ANYTHING coming out of the mouth of someone who says they were in Special Ops.............it might take a while to determine which video game they were playing, but it usually comes out in the end.

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There are some here on THR who have BTDT, and I listen to what they have to say. But yeah, the BS'ers tend to be loud and stupid.