Great. Now I Want a Smith & Wesson 500

I like shotguns. No, I really like shotguns. There’s nothing like holding a cannon to your shoulder and letting loose the dogs of war. My Benelli M2 and I are old friends now, but the fun never gets old. The Springfield XD-M is going great thanks. I’ve shot over 5000 rounds without a single hitch. In fact, I’m pretty handy with the old girl. My marksmanship with my Remington 700 SPS sucks. Of course, everything I know about precision rifle shooting the rabbi taught me in one afternoon. Stil, I like it. Why haven’t I been shooting 308 all my life? (Other than my golf game.) The SCAR’s waiting for Christmas, but I can tell we’re a team made in Belgium. So there it is. My firearms life is complete. And then I met Joe Metafome at the American Firearms School . . .

Joe’s the owner of the Smith & Wesson snubbie that I sampled today. A 500 snubbie that fires some extremely large bullets. So I watched one of the AFS guys shoot; a young ‘un whose motivation was simply “I want to see if it hurts.” I take the same approach to getting out of bed in the morning. Anyway, it seemed OK. I mean, no one died or anything. And then AFS gun guru and combat vet Adam Deciccio stepped up to the plate to fire Joe’s Smith with a 700-grain bullet.

As you can see from Adam’s manual display post-ignition, there’s a price to be paid for high-caliber hijinks, in a Newtonian sort of way. You may have also clocked his comment “Where are the sights?” The sights were blown off the gun, obviously. But what the hell. As Ian “Fireball” Fleming said, you only live twice. I had to have a go.

I must admit that I only fired the 300-grain cartridge, single action. The recoil didn’t throw me. OK, I did take one giant step backwards. But my hands (and head) were none the worse for wear. The real problem: I started laughing. God damn that was fun! It was like lighting the world biggest firecracker and watching it explode in front of your eyes. As Adam said, “If you think guns are fun, you should try explosives.”

Pass. BUT—Joe and I will meet again. And I have a sneaking suspicion that I’ve discovered yet another way to melt my credit card. If I buy one of them 500s, I’ll have to hide it from Sam. Covetousness is a sin.