Debates in statehouses and Congress concerning the size of ammunition magazines that gun owners should be allowed to buy and own are mostly irrelevant to Loveland resident Ray Ezinga.

It's not that he doesn't stand shoulder-to-shoulder with gun advocates that oppose such limits. He does.

But "one" is the number that Ezinga thinks of when he considers how much ammunition he needs in a gun at any one particular time.

One shot.

"If you only have one, you'd better make it a good one," he said.

Ezinga's string of hand-made, muzzleloading rifles began in 1950, when he was 17 years old.

He can't count how many he has crafted since then -- "I've never really kept track," he said -- but 10 are in display cases just inside the front doors of the Loveland Public Library, where they will be through April 27.

If You Go

What: Muzzleloading rifles hand-crafted by Ray Ezinga on display.

When: Through April 27.


Info: Ray Ezinga, 667-5702.

Ray Ezinga spends most of his time in a workshop adjacent to the garage of the log home he and his wife, Jean, built on the west shore of Horseshoe Lake.

The dark, narrow shop contains all the tools, and the raw materials, that Ezinga uses to make muzzleloading rifles that are artworks as much as firearms.

Blocks of dense maple that will become rifle stocks are propped against the back wall.

Nearby are materials that will become inlays and intricate, decorative plates for the stocks that make each piece, after more than 200 hours of work, one-of-a-kind.

The shop also is a small museum that tracks both Ray's and Jean's histories as muzzleloader sharpshooters.

The 'Tie-Breaker'

Used paper targets are pinned to the walls, bull's eyes obliterated by holes made by lead spheres, each shot one-at-a-time, propelled by a charges of hand-loaded powder set off by percussive caps.

Jean Ezinga pointed to the two halves of the four of spades from a card deck, split cleanly down the middle, tacked to the wall.

"I did that," she said. "That was the tie-breaker."

The card had been stood on edge, barely visible, downrange from her at the end of a shooting match with a man who surely thought he would win.

Jean became a markswoman shortly after she and her husband met as teenagers in the countryside near Grand Rapids, Mich.

She has competed against the best, shooting rifles her husband made during most of their 60-year marriage.

"I love shooting against men," she said. "And I love winning."

For Ezinga, his wife, their three children, eight grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren, the guns are more than museum pieces.

They're tools. They put food on tables, more than they put trophies on shelves.

'Deer Didn't Care'

"I grew up hunting," Ray said, recalling his youth in the Michigan woods. A single-shot muzzleloading rifle that he made would be his lifetime weapon of choice.

"The deer didn't know," he said. "The deer didn't care. We shot 'em, they fell down, and we ate 'em."

The Ezingas don't venture far beyond such basics.

If they're not at the cathedral-like log home they built on Horseshoe Lake, they're likely at a cabin that sits nearly atop Bull Mountain in Larimer County's northwest corner, about four miles south of the Wyoming line.

They hunt elk there, and deer, always one shot at a time.

Leaving Michigan

They have since the early 1960s, when they discovered Colorado and found that the home they had just built in Michigan "was in the wrong place," Ray said.

Ray, who turns 80 in July, has not much use for modern hunters, those who go into the backcountry pulling trailers loaded with all-terrain vehicles.

"These fools on these ATVs, racing around," he laments. "They go up there and tear up and down through the meadows, supposedly scouting for elk. Well, the elk get to thinking it's time to move. They go up to the Wyoming border, and wait."

Ray and Jean Ezinga walk or, for longer hunts, ride horses.

"When I'm up there, I don't want to see another trace of another person, and I don't leave a trace for anybody else to see," Ray said. "I like to think, when I'm out there, that I'm walking over ground that no one ever has before."
