By Deb Kroon
Review Staff Writer
The ownership of guns is a big issue these days. With the shootings that have happened in many different scenarios around our country, concern about gun safety is on the minds of many people.
Dave Dobernecker, the third generation of Doberneckers to live on the family farm about 6.6 miles south of Adrian, is a licensed gun safety instructor and a gunsmith, “I have lived on this farm for 58 years,” Dave said. “I learned to hunt with my dad. After my milking chores were done, we would walk around the grove and scare up rabbits or go out to the pasture in search of striped gophers. I worked my way up to deer hunting, which I have been doing for over 35 years. Dad always insisted that if I used my gun, I took care of it. He always stressed safety first when it came to my rifle. I guess that’s where I got my love for hunting.”
“As with a lot of things on the farm, I learned at an early age to take things apart, clean them, fix them and put it all back together. This included my gun. When I decided to go into gunsmithing, with my knowledge and experience working with guns, I finished gunsmithing school in 9 months. I went to school to learn the nitty-gritty technical stuff. The operating systems on guns are pretty much basic. I needed to learn the difficult intricacies of the gun. My official completion date was April 1, 2016.”
“I can pretty much fix anything people bring to me,” Dave explained. “The most common work I do on guns is the chambering and the extraction of the ammunition. These are the mechanisms that most frequently jam, or go wrong. I started out kind of slow, but now I sometimes have as many as fourteen guns waiting for me to fix.”
“I did some work on a Korean rifle for a customer. It was in pretty bad shape, but I cleaned it up and got it to fire once again. The oldest gun I’ve worked on was a 1863 Civil War Enfield. I had to be careful. The name of the original owner was carved on the bottom of the finger guard. I didn’t want to rub it off. I cleaned it up and got it ready to fire. I wanted to test it first. I do that with every gun I fix. I feel it’s my liability. I won’t hand it over until I’m sure it fires correctly. Anyway, I took this gun and put it into a vice outside and tied a string around the trigger. About that time Audrey came out and saw me. She asked what I was doing. I didn’t know what this gun was going to do, I’ve never fired one before, so I was taking precautions,” he explained with a laugh. “ I put in a light load of powder, stepped way back and pulled the string. The gun fired perfectly. I wasn’t going to hold it until I was sure it was OK. I fired it a couple of more times. It was exciting for me!”
“The neatest thing I have done is to mount a rifle on the wheelchair of an avid hunter who had become a paraplegic from a car accident. He wasn’t about to give up what he loved to do. I mounted a scope and a camera on the rifle, modified it to fit and mounted it on his wheelchair. He is able to move the rifle with a joy stick. He pulls the trigger with a wire he holds in his mouth. It was pretty cool!”
Dave has some very interesting guns in his collection. He has a WWII Turkish Mauser and a WWII Japanese Arisaka, both complete with bayonets. There are other guns, both older and newer, some he has never shot and probably never will.
Dave is a certified trainer for the DNR. He holds classes for youth so they are able to attain a license for hunting. He teaches the basics especially safety. He believes one of his biggest responsibilities as an instructor, whether to an adult or to a youth, is to make sure everything is done properly and safely. “Not only do these classes teach the kids how to handle a gun and shoot it properly, they have to prove to me that they can handle the gun safely. Their parents have to be present during the class. If the parent doesn’t approve of the child firing a gun outside, then they don’t do it. These classes have been full, they are in high demand.”
Dave is also a USCCA (United Stated Concealed Carry Association) certified instructor. He holds concealed carry classes once each month except for November and December. He limits the size of his classes to eight people. He feels the lower numbers allow him to give each participant more personal attention. He said there is a lot of material to complete before qualifying for a concealed carry permit. They cover the laws pertaining to the carrying of a hand gun, different scenarios a person may encounter and what to do when coming in contact with a law official. The trainees learn what caliper is right for them to carry and handle accurately. For some it would be a .22 caliper, but for others, it can be bigger. He stressed that accuracy is key to stopping a threat and not injuring someone innocent.
Dave explained some of the other things that go along with self-defense. He stressed that shooting should be the last resort. He explained how holding a gun pointing at the ground is a misdemeanor, and the minute you raise that gun and point it at someone it becomes a felony. There are 21 steps that must be fulfilled in order for a shoot to be considered self-defense. You will be arrested for shooting, booked and spend a couple of nights in jail until you can prove the requirements for self-defense were met. There will be expenses connected to this, and then the biggest issue of all is the moral issue of taking someone’s life. He goes through all of these different elements in his class, so the trainee is aware of what is involved.
The conversation continued with a discussion of violent crimes. Dave stated that according to FBI statistics guns ranked #5 as weapons used to kill. The number one weapon was bats or clubs, followed by knives, hammers and kicking and beating a person.
We talked about the types and appearance of guns. When asked why hunting rifles have to look like combat guns, he assured me the only reason was because they looked cool. He compared an older hunting rifle to an AR 15 rifle he also had there. He stated that both were semi-automatics, meaning the trigger has to be pulled each time it is shot. The AR 15 can have a choice of three different magazines, holding 10, 15 or 30 rounds before reloading, while the older rifle held two. The actual size of the shell is almost the same. The AR 15 was about 1/1000th of an inch bigger, but the shell has more powder behind it so it will travel farther. It looked like the M16s issued by the military, but the military uses automatic weapons that continuously fire with out pulling the trigger. He said, “The media has totally blown up what an AR rifle is. AR does not stand for assault rifle like they say. It is the initials of the original company that designed the rifle. The name was the Armalite Rifle. The company sold out to the Colt company who then made the M16 rifles for the military. The agreement was that the AR was to stay on the barrel of all of the rifles. The media has totally blown this all out of proportion.”
