The Rifleman was one of my all time favorite shows when I was a kid, and thinking about it a bit, still is one of my favorite shows. I flipped on the TV this morning & watched two episodes that were being played on The CW channel; awesome.
The show’s original run was before my time, from 1958 to 1963, but the re-runs went on well into my early years, so I saw it often. Chuck Connors and Johnny Crawford were the stars of the show, playing the roles of Lucas McCain and his son Mark. The episodes were pretty predictable, but still very entertaining. Lucas McCain was a good guy, a widower, living on a ranch somewhere, and trouble always seemed to be able to find him. But he was wicked fast with that Winchester, and wicked accurate, even while shooting from the hip most of the time. Yeah, the accuracy thing is a put-on for TV, but the way Chuck Connors handled the gun, with the spins and the fast lever action shooting was as real as it gets.
The gun that was used in the TV series was specially made to do the tricks Connors did, but it still took him a lot of practice to get the moves down and to make it look so smooth. It’s basically a modified Winchester Model 1892 .44-.40 caliber with a large rounded ring — the doughnut loop — in place of the standard lever that allows the gun to be cocked using a twirling action. That design was actually used first by John Wayne in the 1939 movie Stagecoach; Wayne’s rifle also had a shortened barrel, but Connors was a bigger guy — 6’6″ — and had a longer wingspan that allowed him to use a full-length barrel.
The lever also had a screw installed in the triggerguard that could trip the trigger when the lever was closed, effectively making the gun as close to a semi-automatic as you could get in that era. That feature was used in the introductory scene in the YouTube video above; a slow-motion replay of that video reveals he fires 12 rounds in what appears to be less than two seconds. There could be some camera/editing trickery going on there, but from what I’ve read about Chuck Connors and how seriously he trained for this role, I’m thinking it’s for real.
Of course, replicas of that rifle can even be had, at a price. One of the top returns for a Google search is a site called The Rifleman’s Rifle; and the guy who runs it, Mike Demuzio, has learned to handle the guns quite well himself.
Dimuzio’s replica rifles are pretty costly – about $2,400. But if they work as well as he demonstrates, it’s probably worthwhile. Not that I’m going to go out & buy one any time soon; with the current shortage of bad guys chasing after me these days, it would spend most of its time hanging on the wall. But it would look good hanging there!
