Apologies to my neighbors...

I was in a really, really good mood and feeling all bouncy, and in spite of all her faults, Madonna's "Like A Prayer" is a really catchy, dance-y type tune. I'll buy some drapes, I promise. :o

From the Vault: "Just close your eyes and think of England,"

The above quote is allegedly advice to a young woman about to attempt the isometric exercise of finding ammunition or parts for her Webley & Scott Pistol, Self-Loading, Mark I N. Stuff is out there, but be prepared to pay.

Not at all a common find, these pistols were used as a substitute standard in the Royal Navy during the Great War, as well as being fielded in small numbers by the Royal Flying Corps and Royal Horse Artillery. Standing around with my gunsmith and a gentleman from one of the more active firearms importers, with probably sixty years in the gun biz between the three of us, not one of us could recollect having seen one in the steel before.

I had to have it.

Unusually heavy, yet with an awkward grip angle, the pistol points like you're holding a t-square and may be the homeliest non-Japanese handgun I've ever seen. Oddly for a gun so rare, repro grips are available, and Triple-K has catalogued magazines. Cartridge cases can be made by trimming .45 Colt brass to length, turning the rim down somewhat (the .455 Webley Automatic is a semi-rimmed cartridge) and machining an extractor groove. The barrel locks up very much like a SIG: a squared shoulder atop the chamber mating into the ejection port atop the slide. Everything is intricately machined from big chunks of steel and fitted together to a fare-thee-well.

Other odd features abound: The pistol has dual ejectors, as well as two different methods of disconnecting (should one fail, the gun won't run away.) The recoil spring is a massive v-spring under the right-hand grip panel ("If the recoil spring breaks, you don't know me," said my gunsmith.) The slide stop is activated not by the magazine follower, but by the absence of a cartridge in the feedway. You don't need an empty magazine in the gun for the slide to lock back, it knows when it's empty. (I think that's a little presumptuous of it, but that's just me...) The drift-adjustable rear sight has little micrometer hashmarks to help line things up. All in all, a piece satisfying both in its historical provenance and in its mechanical quirkiness; I couldn't be happier to add one to the museum.

"Can not give car." "Okay, I guess we'll buy 'em."

Like something out of the movie Three Kings, First Sgt. von Zeal thought he'd scored himself a pretty sweet ride for only five grand when he picked up a used '88 Benz 560SEL in the chaotic conditions of Baghdad, circa 2003.

The Customs Department had other ideas.

Unfortunately, he won't get to wow Friday night crowds at the local Sonic with his sled's swoopy built-in flamethrowers now.

... ... ...

I just noticed my last three post titles all ended with ellipses. Oy, vey! I'm in a rut!

Overheard At Work...

Salesguy: "I've got an idea to make a mint. A new menu item at Taco Bell: the goat meat taco. They can call it the 'Chalupacabra'. It's cheap; it's authentically ethnic-sounding; it's perfect. What's not to like?"

Me: "Hell, I'd buy one."

Here's an idea...

Like lots of other people, I have a "lighting the cheap seats" white light setup on an AR carbine. The whole schmear (rail, vertical foregrip, Viking Tactical mount, and Surefire G2) on my 9mm AR cost less than the PentagonLight MS2 on Project Housegun, and that's not counting the Surefire rail forearm and GG&G foregrip on the latter weapon.

I know lots and lots of users with this setup, either because they're short on funds, don't want to sink a mint into a .gov-issued weapon, or just want a cheap light on a trainer or backup rifle. The first company to make a remote tape pressure switch that'll replace the tailcap on the cheapie G2 Nitrolon will make a mint. I'm waiting...

Bored legislators make goofy laws...

I am of the age where being carded for alcohol purchases is usually more a source of joy than frustration. A carding at the convenience store could provide grist for my conversational mill for a day or two: "Hey, y'all, you won't believe this, but they carded me for beer at the Weigel's the other day!"

The local .gov recently took that simple joy away from me by requiring all retailers to card for all alcohol purchases. It kinda takes the compliment out of the carding when they ask the octogenerian in line behind you for ID, too. Now it seems they want to make sure I can't get complimented statewide.

This is the kind of stuff that happens when you pay folks to sit around and think up laws. The old ad campaign slogan "It's not just a good idea; it's the law," has morphed into "It's a good idea, therefore it should be a law."

Here are some future ideas for our liege lords in Nashville (since they've already done seatbelts and drinking ages and suchlike):

• Not wearing a sweater when it's really cold outside: Class A misdemeanor.
• Running with scissors: Class C misdemeanor.
• Putting something in your mouth when you don't know where it's been: Class B misdemeanor.
• Not listening to your mother: Class E felony.

Sometimes "Whoops, sorry!" just doesn't cut it.

A screwup by civil servants leads to a dead dog and a grieving owner.

One can hope that the responsible parties will be punished and the victim will be compensated.

One can also hope for world peace and the winning Powerball numbers. :(


(H/T to Zendo Deb.)

Blog Stuff: Coal Creek Armory makes me look good...

True Confession: I haven't updated my AOL home page in, like, six years. Further, the two B&W photos of me there were taken on the night of the "Rodney King Riots", back in '92. Just a year or two ago (about the time I started my current job) I was, well, a bit larger than those photos would indicate; the forced inactivity after my big motorcycle accident back in '00 (plus a sedentary job at the last gun store I worked at) left me torpid, lethargic, and much heavier than I was happy with.

Not long after I started work at the Armory, folks started mentioning that they thought I was losing weight. I didn't pay their comments much mind, but soon I began to notice that my jeans were getting baggier. I spent more time on my feet, didn't just sit around and order out pizzas for lunch, and ran (literally) back and forth between the showroom and the gunsmithing outbuilding eleventy-dozen times a day. Pretty soon I could see the results in the mirror. Tonight I was hanging all my long-sleeve winter clothes in the storage closet and while I was in there, on a whim, I tried on the outfit I was wearing in those 14 year-old photos: It fit fine. Yay! That was a self-confidence booster like I haven't had in years...

The CCA Diet: Maybe I should market it? ;)

Blog Stuff: Twelve Two Angry Men.

LawDog is torqued at NICS, which boots him into limbo every time he fills out a 4473.

Kevin is tweaked at John McCain, who thinks he's better than... well, everybody who isn't John McCain.

Politics: The Biggest Tent in the World.

While the Democrat Party's tent has gotten smaller than the smoking section in a Seattle Starbucks, the GOP has gotten so all-inclusive that it's hard to tell just what it stands for these days. Once the party of isolationism, it gradually became the party of cold war foreign policy hawks. Once the party of laissez faire fat cats, its ranks are now swollen by the union-member lumpen proletariat whose talk-show host heroes use the word "elitist" like it's a bad thing. It's the party of religious agnosticism; of special-interest populism; it's anything you want it to be. Bring some patriotic-colored bunting.

Now we've heard the new GOP stance on Illegal Immigration: Not only do we hate it so much that we'll deploy some troops to stop it, but we love it so much that we're going to make the illegal immigrants into citizens or guest workers or something.

Tents this big sometimes collapse...

Boomsticks: The Importance of Being Surplus.

One of our regular customers was in the shop the other day, browsing the showcases and making small talk with the sales staff. An older gentleman, he's well-known in the local gun collecting scene, and specialises in bucks-up 1911's (mostly rare Colts) with a sideline in S&W wheelguns, so he and I are fairly simpatico. At least, I thought we were, until that day when I was sitting in my cubbyhole entering invoices and heard his voice waft from the sales floor as he came to a halt in front of the floor racks of old Enfields and Mosins: "What does anybody see in these old things?" he wondered aloud.

What, indeed? That set me to thinking. I've mused at length on these pages about the value of old military rifles from my perspective as a history buff and collector of arms, but the more I reflected on it, I came to the realization that the inexpensive military surplus rifle may be of a lot greater importance to the continued health of the "Gun Culture" in the US than most people give it credit for.

Those who came of age into the shooting sports between the passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968 and the fall of the East Bloc in the '90s probably don't see the parallels between today and that earlier time. Before GCA '68 temporarily ended the importation of any arm that had actually seen military service, a young shooter could walk into a gun store and be greeted by barrels of cheap Mausers and Enfields. With the WWII generation reaching its prime earning years, the teevee was full of shows like Combat and Rat Patrol, firing adolescent imaginations with stories of battle from the last big war. Even on a soda clerk's wages, these rifles were easily affordable, and reeked of the stories they read about in the pages of Sergeant Rock.

As they grew older, a lot of those old rifles got modified to make them better hunting rifles. With affluence, they were sold or relegated to closets and replaced with purpose-built sporting rifles, and a new generation of shooters and hunters was born. GCA '68 ended the importation of these rifles, and no new supplies came into the country until the stricture was eased by the Firearm Owner's Protection Act of 1986, but it wasn't 'til the collapse of communism and the opening of the treasure troves of the East that the flood of old rifles started up again.

The tide broke on a shore primed to recieve it by the renewed interest in WWII. With the 50th anniversary of the war and the gradual passing away of the men who fought it, the media again filled with TV shows and movies like Band Of Brothers and Enemy At The Gates. Once again a young shooter could walk into a gun store and find racks of old rifles, just like the ones he saw in the video game Medal Of Honor, and they were again priced low enough to be accommodated by the limited budget of a student working part-time in retail.

With surplus ammunition, the rifles are cheap enough for those on a cramped budget to shoot often, and thus learn about how to be a better shooter. With the internet, they can be researched and used to learn about history and start a collection. With their low entry cost and simple nature, they're cheap and easy to tinker with or modify. Each and every day these old warhorses introduce hundreds of new shooters to the "Gun Culture." Additionally, when the owner of a Mosin Nagant that may have seen service at Stalingrad sees some politico hold up a semiauto clone of a modern service rifle and prattle on about "military weapons", they realize "Hey, I own a real military weapon, and I'm not crazy. What the hell is that person talking about?"

"What does anybody see in these old things?"

The future of our firearms freedoms, that's what. Go 'head kid, buy one; that first Mosin's cheap. ;)

Boomsticks: The LIXth Carnival of Cordite...

...is up for your perusal over at Gullyborg's. Mad props to the host for his recent graduation from law school!

Boomsticks: Fear and loathing in Galesburg.

Today's Day By Day strip by Chris Muir delivers a funny and pointed comment on the recent much-ballyhooed study purporting to link the handling of a firearm with the production of increased levels of testosterone in men. In a nutshell, Chris asks: "So?"

Lots of things probably do likewise: power tools, fast cars, the sight of boobies, Angelina Jolie film festivals (but I repeat myself.) The bizarre subtext to the study is the implication that testosterone is somehow, in and of itself, a bad thing. As Sam in the comic strip points out, testosterone is what makes men... ...men. Take the testosterone away from Russell Crowe or Viggo Mortensen and you're left with Richard Simmons or Leonardo DiCaprio and, assuming that one is post-pubescent and heterosexual, who really wants that?

The demonizing of the masculine has become so very entrenched in certain circles that it seems to be taken as a given: Testosterone = Bad. No thought seems to be given to the logical extensions of this way of thinking: If we need to shield poor weak men, who are such prisoners of their hormones, from anything that might cause them to produce their icky testosterone, we can't stop with handguns; it's burkhas for the lot of us.

Whence this Fear of the Male, anyway? Given my job, I've spent more time among them than Dianne Fossey did amongst her gorillas, and trust me, they're not as scary as the average woman-with-a-"y" tries to paint them. Heck, they're kinda cute, even.

Besides, without testosterone who's going to open the pickle jars?

Just in case you're reading this...

...have a happy Mother's Day, Mom. :)

Politics: If you use my tin can & string, can I tell Mom?

GOP apologist and popular ranter Kim du Toit has an essay up explaining and defending the most recent .gov brouhaha, involving the NSA's big 'ol phone database. He brings up several cogent points, but spoils his defense largely on a couple of things. First, the ol' "If you're not a terrorist, you don't have anything to worry about; frankly you're too unimportant for Big Brother to be interested in," angle is wearing a mite thin. It's just bound to set folks to thinking "If I'm so unimportant, then why are they copying my phone call data?"

As far as the vast majority of us are concerned, there’s not much to worry about. Nobody at the NSA is interested in the call you made to your Mom, or even to the call you made to your mistress. Don’t kid yourself: you’re not that interesting.

I've got news for Mr. du Toit: I'm plenty freakin' interesting. I'm so interesting that the Founding Fathers thought I was the most interesting person in the country, and they wrote a whole list of things the .gov couldn't do to me, some of which involved searches and warrants and stuff. Anything that makes folks twitchy on that angle deserves a better defense than "They won't stick it in too far."

Second, of course, is the whole usual "Terminally Stupid", "bloviating", "clueless" nature of folks on the other side of the debate. Now, I know that the whole vein-pounding-in-the-forehead, spittle-on-the-monitor thing is as much a part of his schtick as it is mine, but at the same time, one needs to look at the folks one is calling names. I mean (to use just a couple examples,) SayUncle and Marko are neither one of them exactly stool pigeons for the Democrat National Committee. Plus, I know them both in meatspace as well as via their writing, and would feel pretty comfortable putting either one up against Kim in a spellin' bee, so the "Stupid" insults ring a little hollow here.

A better tack to take would be this: 1) Does this really surprise anyone? I read The Anarchist's Cookbook for the first time back in seventh or eighth grade, and I clearly remember it saying "Never say anything on the phone you wouldn't say to a cop's face." Now, I wasn't particularly anarchic or criminal or anything as a middle-schooler, but that's the kind of advice that tends to stick with one. When someone tells me that Big Brother's been jotting down my call logs, it's hard for me to be shocked when I've subconciously held the idea from childhood that he was listening to all of them. And 2) Even in a perfect Libertarian wolkencuckcuckland, the telcos are private entities and you won't own the wire your call is going over or the electricity that's vibrating it. What's to keep Ma Bell from selling that data to a market research firm, or your boss, or Dr. Evil?

Anyhow, while I see where Kim's trying to come from, his last paragraph,

But I have to tell you, I am really glad that someone at the NSA was doing their job, and began to collect the data a long time ago—because otherwise it would now be gone, and we’d be behind the curve, just as we were on 9/10/2001.

stinks a bit too much of Victory Gin at the Chestnut Tree Cafe for my tastes. While I'm not as outraged as Marko or SayUncle, I wish I was.

Big, dirty fun.

Countertop has video up of him firing the MP5A2 at CCA a couple of Christmases back. Go check it out! :)

Boomsticks: Gratuitous Gun Pr0n No. 29

The Standard Catalog of Smith & Wesson describes the Performance Center PC13 as a "very serious carry revolver". Below, then, is a very, very serious carry revolver.

The "PC57", with Chris Reeve Sebenza.

After Marko acquired his PC13, he traded a .41 Magnum Blackhawk for a six-inch Model 57 at a gun show. A few skull sessions between he, uber-gunsmith Shannon Jennings, and myself resulted in the idea for the piece above; the result of throwing cubic yards of money at a poor Model 57 that just never knew what hit it.

The six-inch barrel was yanked and replaced with a factory-fresh 4" tube, but not until the shorter barrel had been sent to Mag-Na-Port for a quad-port job to match that on the PC13. The front sight was red-ramped and the rear blade replaced by one with a white outline. The action was slicked up to near-PPC-grade, with a smooth and stacking-free DA pull of just about eight and a half pounds, and the hammer was bobbed. (A skillful blotchy application of cold blue gave the area where the spur had been amputated a factory case-colored look.) The square butt grip frame was converted to a round-butt contour, and the serrations on the backstrap were excellently restored, leaving the gun looking as though it had come thus from Springfield, MA. The gun was finely bead-blasted and matte-blued, and was lastly fitted with a cocobolo Hogue Monogrip. The result is a no-joke totin' N-frame, as worthy an object of revolver lust as I've ever seen come down the pike. If you're coming by to shoot at CCA, let me know ahead of time, and I'll bring it in and let you run a few rounds through it. You'll probably want Shannon or Bob to build you one like it. :)

"What gun for a woman?"

I cannot begin to tell you how much this question, which constantly pops up both at work and on internet gun boards, completely grinds me to a halt. (At least they don't ask "What's a good chick gun?" or "What gun do you think a broad could handle?")

At work, I have to be nice and helpful because it's my job and all, and so I display the kind of tolerance with the question that makes Job look like a quitter. On line, however, my patience wore thinner than Kate Moss at least four years ago. My answers to the question "What gun for a woman?" have drifted from the trying-to-be-helpful "What will she be using it for? Which does she like?" to the flippant "I like a snubnose .44 Magnum today," to the dripping-with-sarcasm "You'll want something bigger than a .30-30; we charge when we're wounded."

My 'net friend Kathy is irked even more than I am (if such is possible) by the same question, and has finally written the answer it deserves, right here. (...and gawd don't I wish I'd written it first. Good stuff!)

The advice comes as part of her shiny new web presence at The Cornered Cat, which you need to go scope out, right now. I've been enjoying her posts on the boards for years; I can guar-on-tee you'll like her stuff, too.

(H/T to LawDog.)

Random Fact About Your Correspondent:

I always cry when HAL sings "Daisy" in 2001: A Space Oddysey. I mean, sure, he's a psychotic murderous artificial intelligence, but he meant well.