{"id":2708,"date":"2014-05-02T00:34:53","date_gmt":"2014-05-02T04:34:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/?p=2708"},"modified":"2014-05-02T00:34:53","modified_gmt":"2014-05-02T04:34:53","slug":"a-giant-passes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/a-giant-passes\/","title":{"rendered":"A GIANT PASSES"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A professor friend sent along this <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2014\/05\/01\/sports\/walter-r-walsh-dies-at-106-terrorized-gangsters-and-targets.html?hpw&amp;rref=obituaries&amp;_r=0\" target=\"_blank\">clipping from the <i>New York Times <\/i><\/a>on the death of Walter Walsh, one of the great gunfighters of the 20<sup>th<\/sup> Century. It\u2019s a very well done obit; my only quibble would be that in most accounts I\u2019ve read, the Japanese sniper he killed with his .45 pistol was 90 yards away, not 80.<\/p>\n<p>I had the privilege of meeting Mr. Walsh back in the 1990s, when we were both nominees for the Outstanding American Handgunner of the Year.\u00a0 He won that award well before I did, and he certainly deserved to.\u00a0 He wasn\u2019t a big man, but courage and fighting skill aren\u2019t necessarily measured by physical size.\u00a0 Walter Walsh was very hard of hearing, the occupational hazard of serious shooters of his time; effective muff-type hearing protection wasn\u2019t really available until Gil Hebard popularized it in mid-20<sup>th<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n<p>Said to have killed eleven gunmen as an FBI agent, and many of the enemy in the Pacific Theater during WWII, Walter Walsh was indomitable. In his most famous gunfight, with the notorious Brady Gang in Maine, he was shot three times including a .45 slug through his chest.\u00a0 With one of the first Smith &amp; Wesson .357 Magnums in his dominant left hand and a Colt .45 automatic in his right, Walsh returned fire and killed the gangster who shot him\u2026and then proceeded to apply his .357 to the gang leader, with equally fatal results.<\/p>\n<p>Above all, he was a gentleman\u2026kind, and soft-spoken.\u00a0 Most of the real gunfighters I\u2019ve met over the decades share those traits.<\/p>\n<p>Walter Walsh made it to 106.\u00a0 It was an honor to have known him.\u00a0 May this Guardian rest in peace.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A professor friend sent along this clipping from the New York Times on the death of Walter Walsh, one of the great gunfighters of the 20th Century. It\u2019s a very well done obit; my only quibble would be that in most accounts I\u2019ve read, the Japanese sniper he killed with his .45 pistol was 90 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":6428,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2708","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2708"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2708\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}