What are the opening hours?

Monday 8am - 6pm Tuesday 8am - 6pm Wednesday 8am - 6pm Thursday 8am - 6pm Friday 8am - 6pm Saturday 8am - 6pm

http://www.gunmonkeyfirearms.com/

Gun Monkey Firearms, 228 Sewer Plant Road, Crofton, KY (2026)

09/15/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/1DiwkDUx7A/?mibextid=wwXIfr

Annie Oakley watched a San Antonio woman shoot and told her, "you're the greatest shot I've ever seen."

The woman was Elizabeth Servaty Toepperwein, and hardly anybody called her Elizabeth. She had gone to work in a Wi******er cartridge factory as a young woman, and that is where she met Adolph Toepperwein, who shot for a living and was already well known for it. They married in 1903 and made their home in San Antonio. Early on, at one of her first lessons, Ad tossed a tin can into the air for her. She hit it, heard the small bright noise it made, and said, "I plinked it." The Texas State Historical Association calls that perhaps the first use of the word. Which means every man who has ever walked out back to plink at cans on a fence rail is quoting a young wife in Texas who had been shooting for about a week.

She turned out to be a natural in a way that is hard to overstate. At the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904 she broke 967 clay disks out of 1,000. In 1906 she went to Sea Girt, New Jersey, and became the first woman in the country to qualify as a national marksman with the military r***e. She was the first woman to break one hundred straight targets at trapshooting, and then she went and did it more than two hundred times over, with a twelve gauge Wi******er pump gun she knew the way you know your own hands.

And in 1916, at Montgomery, Alabama, she went after the world endurance record. Two thousand clay targets. Five hours and twenty minutes. She broke 1,952 of them. Sit with what five hours and twenty minutes of that does to a shoulder.

She and Ad performed together for about forty years. They did mirror shots, where she sighted backward over her shoulder into a hand mirror and hit what was behind her, and they shot hanging upside down, and during the Second World War she was still demonstrating the mirror trick for soldiers. The Trapshooting Hall of Fame brought her in in 1969.

Here is the part that stays. The word came first. Before the records, before the Hall of Fame, before Annie Oakley ever laid eyes on her. Just a young wife at her first lesson, a tin can going up, a small sound coming back, and one sentence out of her mouth that has now outlasted every record she ever set. Somewhere in Texas this evening a boy is setting a row of cans along a fence rail, and he is going to call what he does next plinking, and he has no idea whose name he is saying.