>Anyway! What I was wondering is, of your collection, how many would
>you say you actively shoot, vs. how many are there just because you
>like collecting them?

Well, of late it's been pretty much exclusively the latter, and will likely remain so through the winter. Under closer-to-ideal circumstances I'd (very roughly) guess the proportion would be about 60-40. I have a few I can't shoot (my Mauser broomie, for instance, is Not Serviceable) and a few others that I've never managed to get supplies for (e.g., I have neither ammunition nor one of the very rare and expensive clips for the Roth-Krnka). There's also a list of questionables, mostly older guns I've bought under conditions where I really should have them checked out by an expert before I try to use them, and a couple that aren't unserviceable, but have work that it'd be nice to get done first.

>And, building on that, when you do put in range time on a weapon, is
>it mostly fun factor or is there some goal you're trying to achieve
>that makes you choose that weapon over another?

Sometimes one, sometimes the other. A lot of the time recently, for instance, I was specifically doing research for Gun of the Week writeups, or followups thereto. Other times my selections are more or less on a whim, although because the indoor range is so far away, I'll usually take more than one to maximize the return on the drive, and often I try to take them in sets that use the same ammunition just for efficiency's sake. (The one time fairly recently that I didn't do that, I had magazine problems with one gun and little enough ammunition for the other that I wouldn't have thought it was worth making the trip just to shoot that one by itself. There's probably some kind of lesson in that. :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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