Guns, lots of guns.

When I was younger, I worked briefly in the seafood department of a grocery store. Come break time, it was always easier, and practically as cheap, to steam up a mess of shrimp as it was to go get in the car and get some fast food for lunch. Did you know you can get heartily sick of shrimp?

Once upon a time, I really, really, really liked guns. There were guns I wanted soooo bad: I remember when getting a Spectre, or a P7M8, or a Mateba Unica-6 was the highlight of my whole month. I fear I've burned myself out a bit: the Specter was as useless as training wheels on a jumbo jet, the HK was hard to find leather for, the Mateba was a pain in the butt to clean...

There's nothing that really lights my fuse like that anymore. Oh, sure, I usually find something of interest at a gun show, but a lot of the thrill is gone.

There are still a few guns, though, that pique my interest enough that if somebody handed me the winning lotto ticket, I'd try to find one for the collection. Robb Allen asked "What would you get if you could get any five guns, cost and practicality be hanged?" Good question. So in no particular order, here's the answer:

• M1868 Papal States Remington:
  Because if the dead rise and walk the earth in search of human brains, there's nothing better with which to put them back into the hereafter than a rifle with the Keys of St. Peter stamped right into the receiver, no matter what Hornady may state to the contrary. Too bad the 12.7x45R cartridge is a handloader-only proposition these days; maybe we can get them to do a run of Z-Max, just in case.


• Webley Mars Pistol:
  Because it's cool. Ammo is completely unavailable, but you don't even need to shoot it: You can go on at length about Sir Gabbet-Fairfax's long-recoil pistol that drew the cartridges rearward from the magazine and fired a bottlenecked .45 that was the most powerful handgun cartridge around until the hot .357 Magnum barely edged it out, and the ejection pattern would... and your assailant will be bored to death. Like the Webley-Fosbery semiauto revolver, this thing's practically a Trivial Pursuit answer in solid steel.
  


• Russian military contract Winchester M1895:
  A box-magazine-fed, Browning-designed, fully-stocked, 7.62x54R Winchester levergun with a bayonet lug that may have been used to shoot Bolsheviks in Russia and Fascists in Spain. What's not to like?


• Mauser M712 "Schnellfeuer":
  If you don't at least kinda want one of these, I'm not sure we can be friends anymore.


• Swedish m/35 LMG:
  It's a Browning BAR with a finned quick-change barrel and it's chambered in 6.5x55 and it's about dead sexy.

Most of those are pretty much fantasyland, for fiscal reasons if nothing else, but I figure I actually have a shot at the M1895 and/or the Pope Gun someday...

How 'bout y'all? What are your five?