Not just the guns, but all the stuff that goes with them
Yeah, they’re a pestilence too:
It’s open season year-round on feral pigs, whose population in Texas has grown to nearly 3 million. Hunters are not required to retrieve carcasses, although there’s an incentive to do so: “wild boar” sells for up to 60 cents a pound.
If anyone’s organizing one of these hunts in the near future, let me know. I have a new rifle that needs blooding.
While browsing through Collectors recently, I came upon this old girl:
I have often sung the praises of the Mosin-Nagant M44 as a short and handy carbine, but I have to say, the Carcano (often incorrectly called the Mannlicher-Carcano) Model 91TS as pictured would do pretty well in the same role. I’ve shot quite a few in my time — one even back in South Africa — and what impressed me most is the pure handiness of the carbine. One of the common complaints about battlefield carbines is their recoil — less mass means more recoil, because Sir Isaac Newton will not be denied — but the M91’s little 6.5x52mm cartridge is an absolute gem, and I have no idea why the Italian Army replaced it with the larger (and not much more effective) 7.35x51mm cartridge in the reworked Model 38. (Maybe they thought that size mattered.)
Anyway, that long, thin 156gr boolet means excellent sectional density and therefore quite adequate penetration on humans:
…but as with all old cartridges, there’s always that availability problem. And with the state the ammo industry is in now, it’s even more scarce than usual. Graf & Sons, normally my go-to guys when it comes to old military ammo, doesn’t have any in stock (surprise, surprise) and even when they do, it runs about $2 per trigger pull — unless you go with the lighter Prvi Partizan variant at a very reasonable $0.83 per round.
Had I known then what I know now (back in the early- to mid-2000s a.k.a. The Happy Times), I’d have snapped up a decent M91 carbine for about $95, which is about what they cost back then compared to over $400 nowadays, and a few hundred rounds of ammo for less than half of what it costs now.
But that hindsight is a bugger, innit? Here’s the much-longer M91 rifle, just for comparison’s sake:
I understand the concept of “provenance” — I sometimes call it “touching history”, in that when one can establish through an object some kind of lineage which can take one back in time, it’s always interesting. It’s why people continue to brave all the hassle and potential ills of going to Egypt, just to see and stand next to the Sphinx and the Pyramids.
I get all that. I’ve spoken how it felt to show the kids a church in Austria which had been built in 937AD, or going to a pub somewhere in southern Germany which had first served beer in 1256AD (and smelled like it — Daughter: “Eeewwww do you think they’ve cleaned the floors since then?”).
Those are all Good Things, and that kind of provenance is wonderful.
Much less wonderful is this nonsense:
The pistol used by the late Sir Sean Connery in the first ever James Bond movie – the 1962 classic Dr. No – has sold at auction for $256,000 (£190,000).
Now granted, the James Bond movies brought the old Walther PP/PPK back from the dead — it was never that great a pistol, despite being the sidearm of several European police departments — but… a quarter-million for a studio prop?
I don’ theenk so, Scooter.
I’ve never understood “collectibles” when applied to movie rubbish — Judy Garland’s Wizard of Oz shoes fetched some ungodly amount of money a while back (can’t be bothered to look it up) — and I’ve always considered this kind of thing to be akin to the groupie syndrome. I mean, who wouldn’t pay a boatload of money for Sonny Corleone’s bullet-riddled and (fake-)blood-drenched shirt from The Godfather, as somebody apparently did back in 2003?
Well, I wouldn’t, for starters, nor for any piece of make-believe “heritage”. Lord knows I love guns, but emptying out the old bank account for a piece of historical gunnery — even for Frank James’s Remington revolver? Nuh-uh.
And coming back to the Bond thing: Ian Fleming was a fine writer, but he didn’t know shit about guns. I think his original Bond gun was a Beretta .22 pistol, later “upgraded” to the .25 ACP and finally to a Walther (.32 ACP, not the .380 ACP as in the movie prop), as though this was the very apogee of weaponry a spy should use. Hell, even back in the late 1950s, those guns were already in disfavor as sidearms.
As the expression / cliche goes: A fool and his money are soon parted. And this is just the latest proof of the thing.
From Insty (link included):
…just nobody at this website.
Although, given both the cost and scarcity of ammo these days, it would probably be better to go with an SKS:
…especially as you can’t fit a bayonet to the MG-42’s barrel.
The kids clubbed together and bought me a birthday/Christmas present:
Never owned a Savage 64F before, and this stainless-barreled one is as pretty as all hell — once one loses the black compo stock, that is [sigh]. Came with scope mounts, but I’m in two minds whether to scope the thing or not, given that its function is “plinker”. I guess it depends on whether my old eyes can get it inside a respectable circle or not.
Apparently, the store was not able to include even a single box of .22 LR, but I believe I’ve got a few rounds of rimfire lying around somewhere. (I’ll also need a few spare mags at some point, but that can wait awhile.)
So if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the range to test it out.
Update: I couldn’t get a ten-shot string offhand inside a palm-sized ring at 25 yards, but the Son&Heir could (damn his young eyes) — so I’m gonna need a scope. [deep sigh]
Thanks for all the scope advice.
On the bright side: the 64F loves Aguila 40-gr Match more than any other ammo I tried. Fortunately, I bought a couple cases on a great deal back in about 2007, so there we go.
A lot of talk is centering around the Biden/Harris/Beto’s threats to disarm America. Several people have talked about this in Doomsday terms, e.g. in the Third World:
…and in Nazi Germany (same link):
I’m not going to suggest that this stuff never happened, because that would be stupid. Leftists attempt to deny history, and I don’t.
That said: I think that in order for a government to get its civilian populace disarmed, one of two conditions need to be in existence.
Firstly, this works in the Third World (Africa, S.E. Asia, etc.) where the population is scattered, impoverished and not very connected by media. Under these conditions, it’s quite easy for the government to send out truckloads of soldiers to village after village to round up the guns. In many cases, the gun owners aren’t aware that the raids are beginning or if they are, it’s too late and they’re too disorganized to devise some system to hide their guns or to organize resistance. And the very isolation of the population groups (by distance, desert or forest) adds to the ease for the government to do, well, anything (and not just gun confiscation) to their hapless citizens.
That’s not the situation facing a Marxist government like the Biden/Harris/Beto model. Gun owners in the U.S. are aware, connected and not easily cowed. Surprise may be achieved once, but only once before the word gets out and the job becomes not only more difficult, but a lot more difficult.
The other situation where gun control works is in a Western country — e.g. Germany or the U.K. — where the population is subservient by nature, and where disarmament can begin first with registration and later with door-to-door confiscation raids by the police.
That may work in Europe, but the snarling gun-owning population is the U.S. is anything but subservient. They’re actively hostile and willing to resist even “commonsense” policies like gun registration. (As was shown recently in Connecticut, the bluest of blue states, where governmental attempts to register AR-15s resulted in perhaps 5% compliance, and even that’s just a guess. Imagine the success rate of handgun registration or hunting — “sniper” — rifle registration…)
Even statewide gun control fails, as evidenced by the continuous wails of neo-Marxist governments like those of Illinois and New York complaining of the flow of “illegal” and unregistered guns from neighboring states like Indiana and Virginia respectively.
I’m not saying that attempts at confiscation aren’t going to happen. Anything is possible with these bastards. But if Marxists are good at anything, it’s trying to suppress human nature and in our case, Constitutional protections, because as with all things Commie, the results are irrelevant as long as the doctrine is followed.
What I am saying is that it’s not going to be as easy as they seem to think. In fact, it’s going to be exponentially more difficult than they think, and a tremendous amount of blood is going to be spilled, probably on both sides. In the end, the side which prevails will be the side with the greater devotion to their particular ideal, and the guts to push it, or resist the other’s, as hard as possible.
That’s enough talk. I’m off to the range. There’s ammo to be tested, and practice to be done.