Tag: Guns and such

My favorite toy

Old Friends Are Not Forgotten

Gratuitous Gun Pics, The Gun Thing

My abbreviated honeymoon last weekend had one additional benefit:  it brought three old friends back into my life.

During the Great Poverty Gun Sell-Off (when I was forced to sell guns to pay medical bills), several kind and generous buddies came to my aid, buying several of my guns from me — with the caveat that should they ever decide to sell them, I would get right of first refusal.  (There was a hidden danger, of course:  that they would fall in love with the damn guns and refuse to sell them back  to me, which actually came close to happening with one.)  Recently I had a small windfall which made their buyback possible, so…

Anyway, here’s one of them, which I managed to persuade Longtime Friend Mark C. to sell back to me.  This is my prized Browning High Power 9mm, which had been on permanent loan to Connie.  Sadly, as her health deteriorated, she was no longer able to operate it and, well, there were doctors which needed paying, so onto the block it went.  But now it’s home again.  This was how it first arrived in the house:

…and this is how it looked when Reader Mark took possession:

I will soon (very soon) be reacquainting myself with this beauty at the range, maybe even this afternoon or tomorrow.  If I love it as much as I remember doing, it may well replace my 1911 as a primary carry piece.  (I know, I know, 9mm Europellet!  Say it ain’t so, Kim!!!  But as Loyal Readers will recall, the 1911’s .45ACP ammo has been beating up my old wrists badly… and anyway, pistol cartridges have come a long  way since 2004.  Right now it’s loaded with this new offering from SIG, which seems to be all the rage with the 9mm Smart Set.)

…and my bulk ammo order from the ammo dealers on my sidebar will follow shortly.  One problem:  I only have one mag for it, the original issue.  But a visit to the next Evil Loophole Gun Show (ELGS™) should provide me with some of those doubleplusungood 13-rounder magazines — you know, the ones which give the gun-controllers fits.  Five or six should do the trick, yes?

Welcome home, old buddy.  Range report to follow.

Quick Question

Behind Enemy Lines, Crime, Gummint, The Gun Thing

This one’s for the BritGov.

So, about that law you have which prevents law-abiding Brits from buying or owning handguns… how’s it doing to reduce handgun ownership and usage Over There?

Not too well?  You mean, only criminals  are getting their hands on the things?  And wait… don’t tell me… they’re shooting people and committing crimes and such?

Well, paint me  pink and call me Rosie.  Who could have foreseen such a thing?

Gratuitous Gun Pic: When Speed Doesn’t Matter

Gratuitous Gun Pics

There is something (okay, several things) about shooting an old-fashioned single-action .22 revolver that I like.  Take Ruger’s excellent Single-Six (and its modern -Nine and -Ten variants), for example:

The most common complaint about this kind of revolver is that it’s a royal pain in the ass to load and reload, in that you can only load one round at a time through the loading gate, and then, when the cylinder has been emptied, you have to push the spent casings one at a time back out of the gate with the ejector rod.

That’s not counting the PITA of only being able to fire the thing by re-cocking the piece manually after every squeeze of the trigger, of course.

To me, this slowness of operation is a feature, not a bug.  I like the slow, deliberate aspect of shooting as much as — or maybe even more than — the rush of sending as much lead downrange as quickly as possible.

It also satisfies the ingrained “make every bullet count” aspect of my shooting philosophy.

I can understand why shooting larger calibers like .357 Mag, .30 Carbine or .44 Mag ammo slowly through a bigger Ruger single action is defensible;  those big boys are expensive compared to .22 LR, after all.

But let’s be honest here, and compare shooting to fishing for a moment.  Is not one of the best parts of fishing the quiet relaxation of it, and would not the experience be a little spoiled if you hooked a fish every 30 seconds for the entire day?

I think that shooting single-action revolvers has a similar attraction.

Maybe it’s just part of getting older, but I’m starting to prefer an activity taken more slowly over something done in a frantic rush.  And I no longer own a Single-Six, mine having disappeared in the Great Gun Sell-Off Of 2015.

Which leads me to my final point.  I’m prepared to trade my new Ruger Mk IV 22/45 semi-auto (plus four magazines) for a Ruger Single-Six (and preferably a “convertible” with interchangeable .22 LR / .22 WMR cylinders).  I’m agnostic about blue- or stainless steel finishes and indifferent as to barrel length, just as long as the gun shoots accurately and the trigger is decent.

So if any of my Texas Readers is interested in getting a Mk IV and has a Single-Six gathering dust in the safe, let me know via email and let’s get together.

Update:  A Kind & Generous Reader has come forward.  We’ll be doing the swap sometime in the near future.

Dept. Of Righteous Shootings

Righteous Shootings

Escaped convict tries to break into a house (to steal food, cash, car keys etc. and/or to improve his prison love life with a little rapery), whereupon he learns, too late, that the lone housewife isn’t going to let him do any of that:

Bruce McLaughlin Jr., 30, was shot in the head by the woman after he kicked in her back door on Tuesday, according to Pickens County authorities.
After he entered the home, McLaughlin grabbed a knife sharpening tool from the kitchen and headed toward the woman’s bedroom around 3 a.m.

Of course, I don’t know whether the choirboy was going to do all that stuff, and now nobody will — which unsolved mystery is just fine by me.  (I do wish the report would give us the good info:  gun, chambering, type of cartridge etc. but let me not quibble over details.)

My favorite part of the story, however, is this:

 Sheriff Rick Clark said the woman was home alone and had undergone concealed weapons training at some point prior to the incident.
“This was a big guy. If she hadn’t had a weapon there’s no telling what would have happened,” the sheriff said. “I gave her a big hug. I told her how proud I was of her.”
Clark said the incident was “a shining example” of why owning and knowing how to properly use a gun is important.

Can I hear a round of applause for both the Lady Shooter (HEAD SHOT!) and Sheriff Clark?

Cheap Handguns

The Gun Thing

…if by “cheap” you mean something that doesn’t cost more than $500, that is.  CheaperThanDirt’s Shooter’s Blog features one such article examining the choices, and it’s quite informative so go ahead and read it.

Myself, I was struck by something else.  Here are the guns they talk about, stripped of the verbiage:

      

Is it just me, or do all these little carry guns look depressingly similar?  (We all know that they’re similar mechanically, i.e. striker-fired double-action mostly 9mm pistols.)

And I suppose that given the demands of ergonomics and what have you, these guns are inevitably going to turn out like the depressingly-similar wind-tunnel shaped modern cars — i.e. you need a microscope and micrometer to distinguish one from another — and you all know what I think of them.  (Cliff Notes:  ugh.)

No.  Frankly, my independent spirit rebels against this me-too nonsense, and especially so in the above case.  I don’t care that these guns may be a good bargain and work well, just as I don’t care that a Kia Rio / Hyundai Accent are a good automotive bargain and drive well.  I just don’t want to play simply because it’s cheaper, and I’m probably never going to own any of them, gun or car.

No.  If anything, it makes me want to go to the other extreme and carry something — ha! — iconic instead, even if I have to pay more and if necessary wait a while longer so I can save up for the thing.  To put it another way, I’d rather carry a Walther PPK than a Walther Creed because while both pistols are essentially identical in terms of their output (sends a 9mmx boolet into a Bad Guy efficiently), the PPK looks miles nicer and is worth the premium.  (And no, I don’t need an accessory rail on my carry gun.)

    

Your mileage may well differ, and as always, I welcome comments / insults on my old-fashioned attitude.