Gratuitous Gun Pic: Prairie Assault Rifle

Longtime Readers know well that I am a huge, unabashed fan of the venerable lever-action rifle, often called the “prairie assault rifle” because of its history in the settlement of the West, its ease of shooting and handling, and because of its capacious (for the time) magazine capacity.  Here’s a Marlin 336 in .30-30:

…which as we all know, is a gun I think should be given to all freshly-naturalized citizens immediately after the swearing-in ceremony, courtesy of the U.S. Government.

However, someone in some Marketing Department somewhere decided that the Marlin needed a facelift, and came up with this concept:

…adding to its capacity, so to speak, and lightening the thing by carving out holes in its (plastic!) stock to make up for all the weight added by the extra cartridges (I guess).

Well you know, I don’t have too much of a problem with the above modifications, other than the fact that they make for a truly fugly weapon, and are completely unnecessary in every sense of the word.  (I do make an exception for the red-dot sight device, because I can’t see the front sight anymore and I’m sure there are a bunch of Olde Pharttes in precisely my predicament — said Olde Pharttes being, I guess, the principal target market for such “improvements”.)

The problem is that as much as they want to make the lever-action rifle more resemble a modern semi-automatic rifle of the AR-15 genre, there’s no point because the AR-15 is a semi-automatic with a detachable magazine while the lever action is, well, not.

So then, assuming that you do want a handy semi-automatic rifle but you want to keep the spirit of the lever gun (light, handy, large-capacity magazine etc.), then allow me to suggest an alternative to the Frankenlever thing above:

Yes, it’s the equally-venerable M1 Carbine, made in the several millions, killed probably far more Nazis/Commies than the lever rifle killed Indians, and is the spiritual descendant of the lever rifle.  And if you want, you can add a red-dot sight to the M1 as well, using an Ultimak mount:

See?  I’ll bet that given the choice, the early settlers would have been quite happy with them — and you won’t have to mess around with loading round after round into a lever rifle either (and both Oliver Winchester and John Moses Browning can stop that dreadful grave-spinning, as a bonus).

Gratuitous Gun Pic: Holland & Holland – Royal Grade Double Rifle (.375 H&H Mag)

Okay, I’m going to say it out loud:  seventy grand is too much to pay for a rifle, even one made by H&H.

But have mercy:

Of course you can get cheaper double rifles* — not much cheaper, as a rule, but still — and yes, the mighty .375 H&H cartridge will put down any large animal on Planet Earth (even Michelle Obama), especially when the double triggers will allow you to pop two 300-grain bullets into the target inside two seconds, far quicker than can be achieved working a bolt action, and which will arrive at over 2,500 feet per second.  Energy?  Sufficient.

And beauty?  Indescribable.

Luxury:  we may laugh and deplore it, but its attraction is undeniable.


*

Disposable Guns

From Longtime Friend & Reader Dave L. comes this excellent thought about carry guns:

I have a couple of nice carry pieces, including an Officer’s Model Kimber .45 and a Smith 640 which dates back to my wheel gun days.
Of late I’ve been thinking about what would happen if I did a bad guy during a church service. I’m very confident that I wouldn’t be charged with anything because Oklahoma and Baptists, but I remember from my sheriff days that firearms used in a shooting, even a totally righteous one by a retired deputy, have a way of disappearing into the system and never showing up again. I guess the DA can brag that he took another gun off the street.

With that idea in mind I started thinking about a lower priced pistol that wouldn’t bother me when it went into the evidence room.
After a lot of research I bought a Taurus G3C as my church gun.

In the past most gun people had nothing good to say about Taurus, but that reputation goes back 30 or 40 years when their quality was somewhat questionable. My son bought a PT92 Beretta clone about 20 years ago which has given him excellent service. I don’t care for the feel of the gun – I think that I’m shooting a brick – but it feeds everything and goes bang every time.
The G3 definitely isn’t pretty and we old timers don’t have much to say in favor of polymer pistols. Even so, the gun runs all of the time, every time and is more than accurate enough for my 71 year old eyes. I carry it in a Kydex inside the belt holster and have two spare magazines in my left front pants pocket (that’s my old school sheriff training showing). I’ve got it loaded with 115 grain Israeli Military Industries hollow points because the Israelis should know something about putting down terrorists and bad guys.
Should I need to use the pistol for the betterment of society, I don’t feel that I’ll be out a lot of money when it disappears into the system. I pity the poor fool who decides to rob the collection plates or make a political statement in our church.  (We have a church member who is a town PD officer and he provides paid security during our Sunday morning services. We also have at least 8 or 10 retired law enforcement officers (myself included) and serious “constitutional” carriers who will act as backup for our PD guy should things ever go to shite.

Dave sure knows how to give me the Warm & Fuzzies, oh yes he does.

You know, it pains me to think that if some time I am forced to ventilate some choirboy, my treasured 1911 may disappear as described above.

It sucks, and there’s just no justification for such an event even when, as Dave says, the shooting is completely Righteous.

And frankly, I’m not that interested in getting a cheap gun as a “throwaway” so to speak, because if I need to shoot someone, I want to be sure that my gun will work every single fucking time, with no asterisks.  I know very well that my life may depend on the gun, which is why I never stint on quality — but to see it just vanish… you get my point, I think.

Maybe we gun owners should have a friendly chat about this topic with our local lawmakers and get some legislation in place to allow for the speedy return of our guns — e.g. the court case happens, everything turns out well (for the law-abiding citizen, of course), and he’s given a pat on the back and told he’s a free man.

In that case:  what’s wrong with his gun being returned to him within 24 hours of the verdict — with stiff penalties for the relevant PD if this doesn’t happen?  I’d like to think that the local PD would be happy to follow such a law, but at the same time, I’m a realist and the chance of a grandstanding DA behaving as Dave describes is more the way to bet than the other.

I know I have a couple lawyers (nay even prosecutors and defense attorneys) among my Readers, so if any of youse guys care to comment on my suggestion, have at it.

Gratuitous Gun Pic: Farquharson (.577 Nitro Express)

Once more, that Evil Purveyor Of Death Steve Barnett shows us this (albeit misspelled) offering:

I talked a little but about the joys of single-shot hunting back here, and honestly, the rifle above touches all my buttons:  history, heritage, challenge, and peerless reliability.  Also, it looks wonderful.  (Here’s the whole story on this rifle and action type, and looking at this particular one, the “NP” — No Patent — stamp means it’s most likely a Gibbs-made rifle rather than an original Farquharson.)

The Farquharson action has been much copied, most recently by Ruger for its No. 1:


…and subsequent models of the same ilk.  But if you do a side-by-side comparison, the older rifle has it over the Ruger by a country mile.  Is that difference worth about $12,000?  Maybe not, but then someone who wants to buy a different rifle (that “history, heritage, challenge, and peerless reliability” thing) isn’t going to worry about such trifles.

Me, I’ll stick to my Browning High Wall — Chuck Hawks compares the Ruger and Browning here — but were I to venture into single-shot-dangerous-game hunting, I’d have to get something else, because the High Wall was never issued in anything larger than .45-70 Govt, and certainly not in the monster .577 NE.  (I suspect that the High Wall could handle the larger cartridge, but I’d only test it on someone else’s gun.)

Not that I’m ever likely to want to shoot the .577 NE, of course.  The Winchester .458 Magnum is about as high as (and maybe even a bit higher than) I would care to handle, according to my shoulder.

But for the collector, this Farq is lovely and in my opinion, worth every penny.

Quote Of The Day

After the NRA had its pee-pee whacked by a NY court, the Left and associated useful idiots rejoiced and went hallelujah (or whatever they say when the godless celebrate).  And then this comment appeared:

I’m getting a kick out of the MSM crowing that the back of the gun lobby is finally broken.
Sorry, kids – the NRA hasn’t been a player in a very long time now and the fact that you thought it was just goes to show how fucking ignorant you really are.

Yeah, what he* said.  The NRA is to gun ownership what the Democrat Party is to its anarcho-nihilist wing:  the polite face they want the public to see.  Most gun owners, myself included, see the NRA as a bunch of compromising lobbyists, and our interests are far better represented by Gun Owners of America (GOA) and the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF), to name but two.

Or else we can keep on being that seething, restless bunch of people who take gun ownership as a natural right, and prefer to argue more important issues — like whether the American .45 ACP is better for slaughtering Commies etc. than its limp-wristed Euro counterpart, the 9mm pellet.

I think we all know on which side I belong.


Can’t remember who said it, but if anyone knows, I’ll amend the above.

More And More

From the NSSF:

In 2021, according to the findings, more than half of the 21,037,810 total firearms made available for the U.S. market were either pistols or revolvers. In all, 12,799,067 were handguns, 4,832,198 were rifles and 3,406,545 were shotguns. The figure includes firearms domestically produced plus those imported (minus exported firearms).

We should be doing better, of course, but that’s a topic for another time.

Some more good shooty news:

28,144,000 modern sporting rifles (MSRs) have been put into circulation since 1990. [that they know about — K.]

Loyal Readers will recall that I don’t have too much time for that “modern sporting rifle” euphemism but hey, as long as more of ’em are getting into citizens’ hands, you can call them butternut squashes as far as I’m concerned.

Hubba hubba.  Of course, neither of the above are mine, no sir not me.  I’m old-fashioned, as any fule kno.

Just like our Founding Fathers used…