My favorite toy
If anyone has a spare Warsaw Pact SKS (NOT Type 56 Chinese) with folding bayonet and in good condition, and wants to trade it for a lightly-used (bought new) AK-47 with a couple-three 20-round mags, shoot me an email.
North Texas/southern OK-area residents will get a favorable hearing. Failing that, anywhere is fine, but we’ll have to do the FFL thing.
Reasons to be supplied at a later date.
Via Insty comes this link, and I have to say that I don’t really care about “what’s new” in shotguns, mostly because the shotgun circa 1935 (or earlier) was pretty much perfected, and what’s followed since has been tinkering.
However.
I don’t own any shotguns at the moment (try to contain your gasps of astonishment), but I have to say that this little puppy caught my eye (link in pic):
…which retails for just over $300.
For a while now, I’ve been thinking about getting an inexpensive pump shotgun for those unwelcome midnight-guest occasions, and I’ve come to the following conclusions:
This is not true for a clay pigeon (sporting) shotgun, where I will be putting hundreds of rounds through it because fun. This CZ Bobwhite has long been on my list:
…in that it fills all my sporting shotgun requirements (20ga, side-by-side, straight “English” stock, splinter fore-end, double trigger). This list makes the CZ rather less affordable (~$950) but I don’t want to compromise. And we all know how quickly this kind of shotgun’s price can spiral into silly money.
Anyway, I want to thank Insty for reawakening my urge to buy another gun — not that it takes much, mind you.
Reader Simon M. sends me this story which is so… I can’t describe it, but here’s the opening:
A young lady in NYC decided to write a diary. Being a young lady what she wrote in her diary she considered to be private. It was her thoughts, her fears, her wants. It was for her.
Unfortunately, her brother was an uncultured clod and when he discovered her diary in a public area, knowing it was private, decided to read it. We can guess about how the brother handled such private disclosures.
The young lady realized that she needed some what to secure her diary from prying eyes. The idea of wrapping it in chains probably didn’t appeal to her. Like wise, it is unlikely she was able to get a high level wizard to spell lock it.
She found a small portable safe at a second hand store and bought it for cheap. She then proceeded to lock her personal items in the lock box to keep her private stuff private.
And then the S. Hit The F.
Read all about it*.
And to answer the author’s question: no, there isn’t.
*To Reader Simon: please resend the email, if you can. She was broken.
This is one of the better comparisons between the .45 ACP and 9mm Europellet, because the targets are actually similar to the intended targets in self defense.
Quote of the day: “Guys who support gun control have wives who have boyfriends.”
Also:
“I learned one thing today… ”
“What?”
“I’m going to continue carrying 10mm.”
Fucking Millennials. I nearly did a little wee in my pants.
But food for thought, nevertheless. Me, I’m going to go for .45 ACP with lighter bullets.
Before I talk about the gun, I want to talk a little about something that was once the only option, then fell by the wayside, and now is practiced by only a few hardy people: hunting with a single-shot rifle.
To see that this type of hunting has not disappeared altogether, one only has to see the perpetual fascination for single-shot rifles in sales of guns such as the Ruger #1 (with its derivation of the Farquharson action), and the Winchester / Browning 1885 High Wall (with its “falling block” action).
I cannot describe the satisfaction one gets in working these exquisite actions. Mr. Free Market, after our most recent Schutzenfest, confessed to me that of all the dozen-odd different rifles he fired, the one that gave him the most shooting satisfaction was my 1885 High Wall in .45-70 Govt. Yeah, that one-at-a-time thing feels so cumbersome compared to the slick semi-auto and even bolt-action rifles of today — but there it is: a single rifle is the bee’s knees, and certainly if that’s what you’ve just used to fell a deer, buffalo or bear, your chest swells with pride — and so it should.
So with that said, allow me to present to you the venerable BSA-Martini Cadet rifle:
This is hardly an unknown gun: the old BSA has been used as a training rifle since the Stone Age, and is most commonly found in .22 caliber. (It’s what we used back at St. John’s College for our musketry classes, and was capable of astounding accuracy — far more than I for one could achieve.)
The BSA Martinis were also chambered for the silly .310 Greener (“Rook”) cartridge, which is a decent training caliber, but useful for nothing else except hunting rooks. Luckily, a large percentage of these rifles have been rechambered for other .30 cartridges such as the .32-20 and even the .357 Mag. The action handles the heavier loads with ease, and the rifle’s lighter weight makes carrying in the field less problematic than with its heavier cousins.
Which brings us to today’s rifle, which is chambered for the wonderful and very much underappreciated cartridge, the Winchester .32 Special. Most often compared to the .30-30 (.30 WCF), the .32 Win Spec is perhaps best described as the .30-30 on steroids. One acquaintance told me of a black bear taken with a single shot in Pennsylvania, fired out of a Marlin 94 lever action with a 20″ barrel.
Now take that same bullet and fire it through the BSA-Martini’s 28″ heavy barrel… and I think you can all see where I’m going with this one.
Just practice, and get really good — because you only get one shot.
Oy. As if Hanoi Jane hasn’t been enough of a festering pustule on society’s buttocks long enough, the tired old tart has to weigh in once again:
Left-wing actress and activist Jane Fonda suggested America “redefine vaginas as AK-47s” in response to the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.
In her case, and by her own admission, her well-trodden vagina is more akin to a rusty old Brown Bess musket, but that’s not what I wanted to talk about.
As an AK owner myself, let me say that the AK rifle works perfectly as designed, seldom requires much in the way of cleaning and maintenance, can be shared among friends as often as desired, and as such is about as far from a vagina as one could imagine.
So this unwarranted slight on Mikhail Kalashnikov’s excellent device is simply off base — not that this is far from Fonda’s norm, though.
And one last thought: a new AK-47 costs about a thousand bucks — and I’ve known many men who have paid a lot more than that, just for part-ownership of a vagina.