When it comes to this shotgun, you just can’t miss

With the economy leaking faster than my old patched chest waders, I’ve developed a stimulus plan for my own plummeting net worth by aiming my life experience and entrepreneurial prowess at America’s only prospering industry – guns.

A red tide of communists invading from the Pacific and the Atlantic couldn’t have spiked U.S. gun sales any steeper or higher than the election of Barack Obama.

Well-placed sources speculate that Obama’s record haul of campaign donations was secretly underwritten by the White Elephant, Sportsman’s Warehouse and Cabela’s.

The big money, of course, is in the manly semi-automatic AR-15’s, which have been selling like cotton candy at the fair. T. Boone Pickens lost $1 billion in energy-related hedge funds while he could have been mounting another fortune by leveraging that money into rapid-fire guns.

Meantime, I’m going to take my best shot at a niche market.

The target will be hunters, because I know they will find a way to pursue their passion even when the soup lines start forming.

And I’m zeroing in on the toughest group of hunters on the continent, the elite fraternity and the occasional woman who rise to the calling of chukars.

The Landers 12-gauge Full-Bore Chukar Annihilator will take customers to new heights in their lung-busting obsession.

It will be marketed as a gift from heaven for hunting the partridge from hell.

The prototype is a Browning Citori over-under that I’ve been field-modifying and tweaking in tortured vertical landscapes for 25 years. Chukar guns are as distinctive as the hunters who pack them into the haunts of an exotic bird derived from cross-breeding road-runners and mountain goats.

Knowing that the first scratch is the most painful for anyone to bear, whether it’s on a new gun or a new car, the Chukar pro-series will have the look and feel of my prototype – right out of the box.

The proud owner of a Chukar Annihilator won’t have to slip off a basalt cliff to dent the ventilated rib. The gun will come with a pipe wrench for removing the choke tubes from the pre-dinged barrel.

My customers won’t have to tumble a hundred feet down a scree slide to crack the plastic butt plate or embed rock chunks in the forend.

Nor will they have to carry the shotgun up and down the Snake River Canyon ridges 500 times in weather ranging from scorching heat to freezing rain in order to wear the bluing off the receiver and inlay some handsome corrosion.

After precision hand-crafting at the factory, each Annihilator will be meticulously detailed.

First, we’ll put it on the top of a car and drive down a gravel road until it slides off and cartwheels over the embankment.

Then the finished gun will be seasoned by tossing it into the mud of an active cattle feedlot for several days.

Even without signs or labels, this innovative product will be easily identified as a chukar gun on store displays. But there’s more than meets the eye:

•A 50-foot rappelling cable will be installed in the factory-broken stock.

•A hidden compartment will hold the industrial-grade tweezers for plucking cheatgrass from socks and prickly pear cactus spines from the flesh of hunter and dog.

•A nifty pump attachment for the breach transforms the top barrel into a rattlesnake venom extractor.

•A built-in radio transmitter is programmed directly to Mount Rainier climbing rangers, who may be the closest team with the skills to rescue an injured hunter in chukar country.

Removing the forend exposes a comforting list of foul language engraved in the bottom barrel. This anthology of enlightened and creative cussing is compiled from three decades of chukar hunting. (Get the complete list with the optional 38-inch barrels.)

My customers should never be at a loss for words when the fifth covey of the thigh-burning day flushes wild and soars across the Snake River.

Some of you already are reaching for your checkbooks, and that’s fine. I’m more than ready to take your money.

Unfortunately, production of the Landers Full-Bore Chukar Annihilator has been delayed after I recently made the mistake of taking my prototype to Brock’s Gunsmithing.

All I requested was a minor bit of tinkering to get the gun to shoot when I pulled the trigger. Simple as that.

You can imagine my shock when I returned to pick up the gun and didn’t even recognize it.

Ten days at the gunsmith shop erased decades of effort designing the chukar hunter’s dream gun.

The overzealous gunsmith erased the eye-appeal by polishing out ALL the rust spots. The thing looks like a Texas millionaire’s road-hunting quail gun.

He eliminated the built-in excuse for missing rocketing chukars by cleaning and lubing the safety/selector switch.

Worst of all – I mean this made me weep! – he added insult to injury by removing the dent in the ventilated rib.

“We can put back the dent if you want,” Dave Staley offered from behind the counter, trying to mitigate the damage.

“No thanks,” I said. “I’ll take care of it myself.

“I’m going chukar hunting this weekend.”