Now that's my kind of WOMAN.

When the conversation turns from her great-grandchildren to her gun, Rita Roherty speedwalks into her bedroom, pulls a case from under her bed and produces a Browning Lightning 12-gauge over-under shotgun.

"When a gun fits you, it don't kick," she said.

Roherty, 82, is a deadly shot. She blasted 91 of 100 clay pigeons to win the bronze medal in the women's division of June's Badger State Games. She won the gold three years ago.

A triple bypass surgery last August didn't pry the shotgun from her hands.

"As long as I can still hold the gun … " she said.

Roherty was born Rita McAuliffe into a house at McKinley and Linn streets in Janesville in 1923. She went to St. Patrick's School and Janesville High School. She married Donald Glynn.

The couple had 14 children in 28 years of marriage before Glynn died.

On Rita's first date with George Roherty in 1973, the couple went trap shooting. Rita joined a team of the wives of George's shooting partners.

"It was a very good couples thing to do," she said.

George died in 1993.

Rita stands a slim 5 feet of atypical shotgun-waving material. She wears twin hearing aids above plain white earrings that match her flaxen hair. She likes pie enough to bring it up without prodding. When she walks through her roomy apartment at Cedar Crest, she seems like she might break into a run.

Her apartment is surveyed at every angle by pictures of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Soft-lit senior pictures near Roherty's computer monitor show her two children who died young.

"They were a big loss," she said.

She went to the doctor last August and divulged she felt a burning in her throat. One "flunked" stress test and a triple bypass later, her children were taking shifts watching her and, most humbling, bathing her.

"Thumbs down!" she shouted.

She shoots because she likes competing. She also bowls, usually around 150, she said. When she won her shooting gold medal, she shattered enough pigeons to tie a woman in her 30s or 40s, then beat the woman by hitting all 10 pigeons in a shoot-off, she said.

Roherty isn't above taunting the younger men she shoots with at the Milton VFW Club.

She might ask, "You let an old lady beat you?"

The list of people the lady has beaten is long and growing.