Forged Accuracy

Countless American hunters—the author included—have iron sights to thank for making them the marksmen they are today.

- T. Edward Nickens

I’VE COME TO the grudging acceptance that I may never again be the rifleman I was at the hardened age of 14. It’s due not to failing eyesight or palpitations of the heart. It’s simply because I am no longer physically connected to a Crosman Model 760 Pumpmaster air rifle for upwards of 15 hours a day, which is how I spent much of my time as a young teenager. I no longer prowl backyards, city creeks, and sewer-line rights-of-way with 4 pounds of wood and steel fixed firmly to my right shoulder. Most pointedly, I no longer shoot iron sights.

I was 5 years old in 1966, the year the 760 Pumpmaster was introduced. By the time I scored a paper route and laid claim to my own spending money a few years later, the 760 had established itself as the sine qua non for budding adolescent hunters. It was the least expensive of the high-performance air rifles sold from the Sears Wish Book catalog, and it had a wood stock, a steel barrel, and a set of iron sights that, I firmly believe, did more to help fill deer freezers over the next half century than any other firearm development.