Tag: Guns and such

My favorite toy

Gratuitous Gun Pic: Mauser 98 Sporter (8x57mm)

Gratuitous Gun Pics

It seems like forever since I last did a piece bordering on idolatry about Mauser rifles, so here we go.

This one’s a pre-WWII ’98 Sporter in 8x57mm, and can be had at Collector’s for an obscene amount of money.  Why “obscene”?  Allow me to explain.

When I arrived in the U.S. after the Great Wetback Episode Of ’86, I was of course gun-less, having had to leave them all back in the old Racist Republic.

It took me few months before I managed to get my first gun Over Here, and it was identical to the one above except that mine had a single trigger and was, as the saying goes, very well-used.  It was also quite accurate (especially as this was thirty-odd years ago, back when I still had young eyes and could use iron sights).

The seller was a work colleague — a bit of a dick, actually — who was based in South Carolina, and when on a business trip there I went over to his house for dinner and to flirt with his very pretty wife, he took me into his workshop and showed this wondrous thing to me, whereupon I was overcome with gun lust and made him an offer.  He counter-offered, and we settled on $150.

Now the problem came about getting the thing back to Chicago.

Because I was stupid and knew nothing, I simply popped the thing into my garment bag, and when I got to the airport, checked the bag and was asked to fold it in two, I replied that I couldn’t because there was a camera tripod inside which was already folded up to its fullest extent.  The airline check-in clerk just shrugged, found me a large cardboard box and taped it shut before sending it on its way.

Those were the good old days.  Imagine trying to do that now.

Of course, I only found out a few days later that to own a gun legally, I had to have an Illinois Firearm Owner ID (FOID).  This I learned when I went to Ye Olde Gunne Shoppe to buy ammo.  Oops.  That’s me:  Oblivious Kim, breaking a stupid law again.

Anyway, I held onto the rifle for years, eventually selling it only in a time of great financial duress — I believe it was the very last gun I sold, back then — and I have to tell you, I still feel the wrench.

By the way:  the guy’s wife and I had a bit of a fling not long after, so I got him for a twofer:  his rifle and his wife, both very enjoyable to play with.

Quote Of The Day

Gun/Ammo Tests, QOTD

Last word on the .444 Marlin comes from Reader Mike S:

“I shot a TC Contender w/14-in. bbl. chambered in 444 Marlin.  Once.
I couldn’t feel my right hand for 5 minutes.  Then wished I couldn’t.
“Muzzle Flash” is such an inadequate phrase.”

The .444 is not a pistol cartridge, no matter what you might be told.

Here We Go Again

Anti-Gun Nannies, Politics

…only this time with feeling:

Guns are white supremacy’s deadliest weapon. We must disarm hate.

Oh, really.  And who are these “white supremacists”, and who gets to identify them?  Well, the answer to the first is easy:  that would be “anyone who disagrees with my opinions” — uttered by any politician of the Socialist persuasion — and such disagreement is ipso facto  a definition of a white supremacist.

Got that?  Now read on to discover the primary identifier:

This deadly connection between white supremacy and guns runs throughout our history. In 1866, armed Confederate loyalists stormed the Louisiana Constitutional Convention, murdering 34 Black Americans in an attempt to block suffrage for freed slaves. In 1898, an armed White mob in Wilmington, N.C., proclaimed a “White Declaration of Independence,” then killed at least 60 residents before replacing the multiracial local government with white supremacists. In 1921, mobs of armed White residents of Tulsa attacked the Black neighborhood of Greenwood, murdering as many as 300 Tulsans for the crime of being Black and successful.

The commonality of all the above?   Why, it should be obvious:

That’s right:  all white supremacists have BOOBS !!!!!

(I’m just trying to follow this reporter’s logic, here.)

Okay, maybe that’s not what she was talking about.  What could she be talking about?  From the article itself:

Oh, okay.

So in the interest of racial comity, I’m calling on all women to throw off their Confederate bikinis.  Pics (or preferably videos) can be sent to me for verification.

The Swede

Gun/Ammo Tests, The Gun Thing

Longtime Readers will all know of my fondness for the venerable 6.5x55mm Swede (SE), and I happened on an article which gives chapter and verse to this wonderful cartridge.

With all due respect to its larger 7mm / .30 siblings, I stand firm in my belief that the Swede is quite possibly the perfect medium-game cartridge, the excellence of the .308 Win, .30-06 Springfield and so on notwithstanding.  When you take all the factors of shooting into account:  bullet velocity, flatness of trajectory, penetration, and most especially recoil, the sum of the Swede’s parts of this equation are probably higher than the bigger cartridges.  Here’s a pic I’ve posted before, comparing the Swede to its contemporaries:

Here it us with some other “quarter-inchers”:

And finally, vs. the .308 Win (my “1.a” choice for a do-it-all cartridge):

I will say unreservedly that if I were limited to only one cartridge for “ordinary” (i.e. excluding African large game) hunting whether human or animal, the Swede would get my vote ahead of every other cartridge I’ve ever fired.

The only caveat I have is that the Swede doesn’t seem to do as well in shorter-barreled rifles.  I think that in standard loadings — and certainly with the Hirtenberg mil-surp stuff — the bullet needs a longer barrel to get that bullet spinning towards its performance apex.  And the ultimate expression of that is in the wonderful Mauser Mod 96 with its 29″ barrel, as never used (in combat) by the Swedish Army:

In my earlier post on Great War Rifles, I said:

But of all the rifles issued to soldiers of that era, the one I’d have chosen to go to war with would have been the Swedish Model 1896 Mauser.  It has moderate recoil, yet the bullet travels flat and hits hard.  The rifle is also fantastically accurate: consistently-placed head shots at 400 meters and torso shots at 600 meters are quite possible even for an average shot like myself.

I haven’t changed my mind since.

That said, I have old eyes and the iron sights would be problematic — but mounting a scope on the old M96 can be tricky, with that 90-degree-lift straight bolt.  So I’d have to take instead my current love, the CZ 550 with its 24″ barrel:

Compromises… we all have to make them.

Stopping Bears

The Gun Thing

Seems like I may have been a little too dismissive of smaller calibers when it comes to stopping bears.  Here’s one story:

The startled cubs bawled out for their mother, which came running around the corner. The woman fled into her house, but her dogs slipped out the open door. A fight ensued between the adult bear and the dogs, during which the woman attempted to scare the bear away. The woman’s husband arrived armed with a .22-caliber pistol and fired a single shot in the bear’s direction, Peralta said.
The bear ran off and collapsed about 40 yards away, dead from the gunshot wound, Peralta said. One of the cubs was found near the house and the other was found in a tree.

Frankly, this is what I call a “David & Goliath” story:  David may have killed Goliath with a single stone, but that ain’t the way to bet.  A more likely outcome is this one:

On 1 September, 1995, two male tourists were attacked by an adult male bear on a remote island in eastern Svalbard. The two tourists defended themselves with a .22 calibre pistol which proved ineffective. One man was killed, the other injured.

These, and a whole lot more actual reports of people stopping bears with handguns of all calibers can be found here.

Basically, all this stemmed from a letter from Loyal Reader Steve N, who asked the following:

I’ve never hunted anything more dangerous than ruffed grouse, but I love guns vs. bear talk.  I inherited a Marlin .444 when my dad passed away a few years back.  I shot it a bit and always thought it would be my go-to if any of these NH black bears up here needed tuning up.  Any love for the .444?

Frankly, I’ve never been a great fan of the .444 Marlin cartridge.  Compared to a .44 Rem Mag, you get a whole lot more performance (for a lot more money — .444 typically costs almost twice as much as .44 Mag — I don’t know what the current situation is, in these ammo-free times), but I’ve yet to shoot more than three rounds of .444 Marlin before my shoulder really started to hurt — I mean, worse than after firing three rounds of 7.62x54R with a Mosin M44 carbine.  That may be because of the rifle type, though:  WinMar lever guns don’t give a lot of recoil protection.

All that said, Steve, the .444 Marlin should work just fine against the smaller black bears — and as it’s an heirloom rifle, the cost of the ammo should not be an issue.  Carry it in good health.  (Just remember that the .444 is a stand-alone cartridge:  you can’t shoot a .44 Magnum in your rifle — even though they’re shooting the same bullet — as the .444’s case tapers from a wider base, compared to a .44 Mag’s straight case.)

And because this discussion is useless without a picture:

For everyone else’s benefit:  if I were starting from scratch with a lever rifle, so to speak, I’d prefer to carry a rifle chambered in .45-70 Govt around in a New England forest (or pretty much any forest, come to think of it) rather than a .444 lever gun.  But that’s just a preference on my part;  your opinion may vary, and that’s not a problem.