Published in Southwest Michigan's Second Wave Media
October 23, 2014
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| Gina Schultz (Photo by Susan Andress) |
Making bullets is part of the family business for the Schultzes. Today Gina Schultz runs the custom bullet business started by her father, a bulletsmith, in South Africa. Zinta Aistars reports on bullets designed to order.
Gina Schultz was 7 years old when her father first placed a gun in her hands. Schultz is the daughter of Gerard Schultz, owner of a gun shop in South Africa that he had opened for business in 1977, two years before her birth. Her father trained her and her sister carefully on how to shoot.
Handling guns, Schultz says, "is second nature to me."
In 1999, shortly after moving to the United States from South Africa, Schultz took over the ownership of the business that grew out of her father’s gun shop, opening a United States-based business to mirror the original one started by her father in Port Elizabeth, South Africa.
GS Custom Bullets is located at 69301 M-62 in Edwardsburg, Michigan. Schultz’s father oversees the technical side of the bullets he designed and patented, and her mother oversees the store’s administrative side at the South Africa location.
"We’ve been shipping to United States for years," says Schultz. "There was a learning curve to learn about importing, licensing, so I thought, why not just manufacture here?"
Schultz knows her bullets. Among her favorite memories are the hunting trips she went on with her father from age 13, and by age 16, the .220 Swift rifle she sighted on the beautiful blesbok, a type of antelope with a white blaze across its face, found only in South Africa. Schultz was 300 yards from her target.
"My father helped me get closer," she says. "It was a flat, open field, and the herd ran off but this one. Usually, a hunter fires at 200 yards; this was the longest shot I’d ever taken at 300, but I knew what my rifle could do. The shot hit the blesbok in the ...
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