For the Single Action Shooting Society®--the national/international organization--click here

For the Texas Historical Shootist Society, a SASS-affiliated shooting club, click here.

The Tejas Pistoleros, an independent Cowboy Action Shooting® club, is now defunct. Too bad. It was a good club.

Six-gun twirling is a true American heritage. Bob Hamm travels across the country putting on my cowboy six-gun twirling exhibitions for SASS (including End of Trail and other shooting events) as well as cowboy and old west functions. His performances preserve this part of our history, which began in the Old West and gained colorful fame in the silver-screen era of the cowboy legends in Hollywood westerns. To reach his web site, click here. His comments on this nearly extinct art form were so much better than anything I could think of that I am quoting him here!

Hunter's Shooting Association Advanced Field Marksmanship for Hunters. This is a neat web site with lots of links to other shooting related sites.

Good single action revolvers aren't cheap, and cheap ones aren't good. My favorite is the Ruger "New Vaquero." These revolvers are really good right out of the box. It's durable, and once you understand how they work, you can tweak them for high performance. This used to be difficult. Now, it's a lead pipe cinch. You can do your own trigger job for a reasonable fee, with drop-in replacement hammer and trigger parts from Power Custom. You can also get these parts from Brownell's or MidwayUSA.

When I started into this sport in 1999, Ruger's frames were a bit thick and their grips were a bit oversized, creating a "roundish" cross-section, which made aiming instinctively somewhat difficult. The late Joe Bowman, who was a close personal friend of mine, was the fellow who basically "invented" what is now the Ruger New Vaquero. He wanted a revolver that looked authentic but was tougher than the ones he had been using. So, he took a couple of Ruger Blackhawks to a gunsmith he knew and had them machined to look a lot more like the traditional "Peacemaker." The old "Peacmakers" had a bit thinner, flatter cross-section in the grip area. So Joe had new, flatter grips made. These eventually were the type of grips that are issued on the Ruger New Vaqueros. There are several companies that manufacture them.

However, I recently got some really nice ones from Arizona Custom Gun Grips. They have an eBay store at this location, or you can do a seller search for arizonacustomgrips. These grips are comfortable, well made and reasonably priced. They even went out of the way for me and installed a special set of medallions in each grip -- great customer service!!!!

I got a really nice set of holsters from a terriffic manufacturer in El Paso--El Paso Saddlery. Their leather is reasonably priced, and they will work with you to make sure your rig is exactly what you want and need.

Another excellent maker of great gun leather is right down the Rio Grande from there in Laredo. This company is Kirpatrick Leather. Their web site gives full details on ordering and pricing. They are hard to beat!

Here's another really fine source of leather. I haven't seen this leather in person, but it looks great in the pictures. They know what they are doing, too. G & J Leather has some pretty rigs that are a little different from the run of the mill things you see all the time. Give them a look.

For The National Rifle Association, the first group everyone thinks of in this field, click here.

To see gun ownership from a well thought out liberal perspective, go to The Liberal Gun Club.

For the single most active anti gun control web site you can find, visit Jews For The Preservation of Firearms Ownership.

For the Women's perspective on this issue, go to Women Against Gun Control.

And no list of this kind of site would be complete without mentioning The Second Amendment Foundation.

Two important gun owners' organizations with the same intials and similar purposes are Gun Owners of America and the Gun Owners' Alliance. Both of them deserve a visit.



To keep up with what our founding fathers thought about the right to keep and bear arms, check out The Federalist Digest.

To get an idea of what some people are doing on a state level, visit The Constitution Party of Texas. If you were ever under the impression that much of what you see on pro second amendment web sites was the result of a bunch of silly conspiracy theorists, this link will show you the truth-- click here to see who and what is behind some of the lastest gun grabs.

Let me point out that some government officials are doing their best to prevent us from preserving our civil rights under the Constitution of the United States. The Second Amendment is exactly that--a civil right. Nobody has the right to take it away from us. Legal gun owners are not the villains or the criminals here. And when ignorant celebrities and government officials try to make you believe differently, they are wrong. They are as wrong as the people who wanted to keep minorities from having the same rights as the rest of us during the 1950's and 1960's. If you are one of those benighted people who think that our second amendment rights are outdated, please read Dr. John Lott's book More Guns, Less Crime before you try to debate me about the subject. Lott started off as an anti-gun researcher, but he was sane enough not to allow himself to maintain an incorrect position once he was confronted by the facts.

For Judge Gullet's essay on the philosophy of the Old West, click on "The Cowboy Way."

One thing I must point out is that those of us who participate in Cowboy Action Shooting® do realize that we are not re-creating the Old West. We are re-creating the Old West as we remember it mainly from the movies and television. While we may occasionally present something with extreme historical accuracy, we avoid portraying the horse droppings in the street, the attacks of disease and all of the other "inconveniences" that real cowpersons endured. In a way, we are presenting something akin to what the Society for Creative Anachronism® presents -- just a later time in history.

And, one of my favorite links, which addresses what has happened to our culture, as we know it, and the reasons we are steadily losing our freedom, Charlton Heston's speech at the Harvard Law School Forum, February 16, 1999. Click here to view the text of this thought-provoking speech. It is interesting to note that Harvard Law School took the text of this speech off their web site. Evidently the school whose motto is "Veritas," Latin for "truth," cannot abide a pageful of the same on their own web page.


For a proposed code of conduct for schools, click here.

For some nice photos of Cowboy Action Shooting, visit my friend Captain George Baylor's Ranger Camp.

For a great article on how to make a Bowie Knife go to "Big Bowie Joe" Pierre's web site. There he describes how he set out to reconstruct Jim Bowie's "Iron Mistress."

A Very Special Y2K Announcement

This isn't really CAS™-related, but it is historical, and I think you might like it. The American Eagle Luger is being reissued in a stainless steel collector's version. To learn more about it click here.

Return to Three Eyed Willy's Cowboy Action Shooting Web Pages.

To contact Three Eyed Willy, click here.