Julia wrote:
>I'm reminded of a conversation Dan had with some of our neighbors. >Apparently the neighborhood is heavily armed, and we're weirdos for having >a sword collection rather than a gun collection. (Of course, the one time >we really needed a gun, the next-door neighbor didn't have ammo for his >gun of the appropriate caliber. There *is* such a thing as overkill when >it's a snake in a hole dug right next to the house.)
One guy I knew (who had come home more than once to find a rattlesnake in the garage when he opened the door) carried a .357 Magnum revolver loaded with shot shells he loaded himself for that purpose.
Oh, a handgun is one thing. Most of what everyone around here has are rifles & shotguns. We wanted the BB gun for the snake. :)
Unless today's BB guns are a lot more powerful than the one I have left over from my younger days, I would have my doubts about them having much effect against a snake unless it were a quite small snake and the muzzle of the gun were pretty much in contact with the snake when it was fired. Some of the snakes I have seen in the area where my friend lives (most of them fortunately deceased by the time I saw them) were five or six feet long and at least as thick as your arm. He tells the story of seeing one in the road, running over it, backing over it, then running over it again, and when he looked in the rear-view mirror it was still able to crawl off the road. (Admittedly this was a rough dirt road, so it might have been partially protected by being in some sort of rut, of which the road had plenty�it was the road up the mountain to the observatory, and not maintained very well at all by the BLM.)
A pellet gun would be a different story: in fact, one of the lead stories on the local news tonight was about a young boy who died as a result of being shot by another boy with a pellet gun. Apparently the boys were playing and the victim told the boy with the pellet rifle "I'm wearing a bullet-proof shirt! Shoot me!" and the other boy complied, and the shirt wasn't.
A hunting rifle would be a bit much, for something in a hole that close to the house. (I shudder to think of the ricochet possibilities right in that spot....)
Seems like poking it with an epee or a rapier would be just as effective as a pellet gun. On second thought, the posibility of ending up with a snake on a stick would be rather daunting. Unless of course you had a cutlass or a katana to slice and dice said snake on a stick.
Mmmm, tastes like chicken.
When I lived in South Carolina our landlord, a fiesty old widower named Mrs. Quick would dispatch the occasional cottonmouth with a shovel.
I think that a lot of people don't want to get within a sword's length or a shovel's length of any snake until they are sure it is dead. And of course one problem with poking at a snake with some sort of stick or stick-like object is that they can actually crawl up on the stick and climb right up it toward the person doing the poking . . .
As for myself, if I needed to dispatch a snake and didn't have Mike handy with his .357 with its custom loads (and he lives in Utah, so the snake might well have moved by the time I drove out there to borrow his pistol and got back), I might consider a shotgun loaded with bird shot, which would have an obvious advantage in hitting the target over a firearm which fired only a single projectile at a time. Of course, in any case, you would have to be careful that ricochets did not break a window or something like that (the hole being as close to the house as you said) or bounce off the wall of the house and, as with the Red Ryder air rifle in that holiday movie we all remember, "put an eye out" . . .
(Of course, if you were considering eating the snake afterward, or turning its skin into a belt, you might prefer that it not be perforated as badly as a load of bird shot would leave it.)
A Firearm Is A Tool And You Want The Right Tool For The Job Maru
--Ronn! :)
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