GUNS Magazine January 1957

Testing electric timing equipment, Ed McGivern is given hand by two aides,
Bernice, Peterson and Charles Troy, who are students of fastest shooter.
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For timiig two-man duels to see which shooter wins with no blood spilled,
McGivern built synchronous motordriven drum with electric recording pencils.
'em all week"-was taken literally by
moving picture producers and the num-
ber of shots a cinema hero can get out
of a Winchester lever action or a Colt
six-pistol is amazing. Guns of post-
Civil War invention appear frequently
in pictures dating many years earlier.
Fanning makes such a splendid picture
of frantic action that Hollywood has
turned every $30 a month cowpoke
into a trick shooter. And when it
comes to quick draw-well! The stop
watches need tenth-of-a-second calibra-
tion. And every shot hits, when the
hem is shooting. A dead man for every
slug is the motto.
But a comparatively new develop-
ment has appeared in the claims made
by publicity writers of actual timed
split-second records set by several of
the moving picture performers. Some
of these make some of us oldtimers in
the shooting business wonder where we
were when they were teaching people
how to shoot a pistol.
Hollywood shooter Arvo Ojala, who
coaches the stars, claims he drops a
half-dollar from waist level, draws a
hip-holstered revolver; cocks, fires-
and hits the half-dollar before it drops
four inches. According to laws of
physics accepted elsewhere than in
Hollywood, a falling body drops 32.16
feet in the first second after its re-
lease. Four inches is l/96th of 32
feet. Taking into consideration the
fact that a body accelerates in falling,
that it would be moving slowest in its
first four inches of fall, the Ojala draw-
and-fire would still have to be done in
the incredible time of l/lOth of a
second or less! This is many times
faster than Wild Bill Hickok's best
claim, and Hickok was not modest.
Ojala is also credited in print with
firing a .22 caliber bullet through the
hole in a Lifesaver candy mint at a
distance of 20 feet, without breaking
the candy. The hole in the Lifesaver
mint I have before me will barely
permit the passage of a .22 bullet, but
the margin is so small that the rim of
the .22 cartridge will not pass. The
hole is not more than .03" larger than
the bullet. Passing dead center, the
bullet would have a clearance of about
.015" around its circumference. This
is better accuracy than any manufac-
turer claims for its best match ammu-
nition-not allowing even a thousandth
of an inch for shooter error.
Hugh O'Brian, who has been play-
ing Wyatt Earp so long that he says
he has "taken on some of the real
Earp's characteristics," claims a draw-