Presidents and Guns
 

Since the White House recently released a picture of President Obama firing a shotgun, CNN posted a gallery of Presidents and guns.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/04/politi...html?hpt=hp_c3

Something caught my eye in the FDR picture. The caption is "Franklin D. Roosevelt fires at the Marine Corps rifle range in Maryland in 1917." (He was Assistant Secretary of the Navy at the time.)

What's that gun in the foreground? At first I thought it was a Japanese Type 11 LMG, but the features don't match, and the Type 11 didn't come into service until 1922 anyway. Any ideas?

It's a Hotchkiss M1909 Benet-Mercie machine gun

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...kiss_M1922.PNG

http://i14.ebayimg.com/05/i/001/22/74/c8d4_35.JPG

http://world.guns.ru/userfiles/image...ie_m1909_2.jpg

Thanks! 10chars

Heh. FDR "shooting". That's a laugh. Let me dig a bit, for I recently found a great story about FDR going down to Camp Lejean for a staged photograph shooting with the Marine Corps rifle team.

As the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, visiting Marine installations probably came with the job. And this was a few years before he got polio, so he certainly had the physical capacity to do so.

Nah, this was when he was the President, after the passage of the NFA, and he was shooting prone to mask his polio.

That shot of Obama, as many have pointed out, seems too low to be skeet shooting unless the targets were skimmed along the ground. What is more likely is that he is test firing the shotgun. He is firing straight out and level, which is what I do when I test fire a long gun. He would probably only have his gun in this position regularly if he were doing sporting clays, since skeet (even if he is shooting from the low house) is still an elevated shot.

Thoughts anyone?

I suppose he could be firing at a clay rabbit, but that'd be pretty hard core.

If we're assuming he doesn't shoot often, it could be that he's waited too long and he's firing at a bird as it's dropping. When I first started shooting trap, I did that pretty often. The experienced shooters I've seen hit the bird early.