Category: The Gun Thing

Not just the guns, but all the stuff that goes with them

About Face

Marketing / Advertising, The Gun Thing

I see that following their woke cock-up (is there any other kind?) last week (my commentary here), Heckler & Koch have reversed course faster than Clint Eastwood finding out his date is a trannie:

The next day, Heckler & Koch revealed a colossal corporate change of heart. It deleted the tweets and seemed to suggest someone may have been fired.

Didn’t help, judging from the responses:

  • “I’d expect nothing less from the brand that will never compromise.
  • “Finally, a company that understands the toxicity of engaging in identity politics.”
  • “A fully-armed and bikini-clad apology would smooth things.”
  • “Someone got fired!”
  • “No, not good enough. Send me a free gun.”
  • “I’m so sick of the PC crap… Folks have enough to deal with without having to worry about offending some thin-skin’s sensibilities.”
  • “This almost does it. Need an ad with a good-looking woman in a bikini…with guns, and a beer…”
  • “Nope, I’m still upset! I will be requiring a VP9 and an HK45 as reparations before my feelings are unhurt.”

Companies need to keep tighter control on their employees’ social media, methinks — and especially if said employees have access to the corporation’s social media.

Beyond that, HK got reminded of something like a gun-safety lesson: Don’t point your tweet at anything — including your marketshare — that you aren’t willing to destroy.

Yup.

In the meantime, here’s a gun bunny to make us all happy again:

I know, she’s not carrying one of H&K’s overpriced guns, but that just shows her good sense (which is more than they have).

Entry Level

Gratuitous Gun Pics

So you’re a young-ish man or woman, and you want to get into the wonderful world of Hunting / Target Shooting, Rifle Division.  But when you start looking at what’s out there, you’re bowled over by the prices.

You might saunter over to Collectors, and snatch up this one, for only $600:

Here’s the checklist, all answered in the positive:

  • well-known brand
  • good, adjustable trigger
  • bull barrel which won’t start to wilt after only three rounds fired
  • popular cartridge, relatively cheap for practice, not horrible recoil
  • includes an acceptable Nikon scope (for hunting;  for greater distances, buy something more powerful)
  • lightweight stock

Caveats:

  • it’s consignment, which means Collectors hasn’t tested it for function (as they do when they buy guns from individuals)
  • the bolt may be stiff and clunky to operate (common fault of Savage rifles that haven’t been worked on

Honestly, it’s a dandy for an entry-level shooter.  Me, I think the positives outweigh the potential negatives, bigly.

They Hate All Of Us Anyway

Marketing / Advertising, The Gun Thing, Wokism

Here’s one that made me chuckle:

Gunmaker Heckler & Koch tweeted agreement Tuesday with Miller Lite’s woke campaign against using sexy women — “bunnies” — to sell products, then doubled down in a second tweet, describing ad campaigns that objectify women as “trash marketing.”
…
On Tuesday, Heckler & Koch doubled down, responding to accusations that they have become “woke” by giving a detailed explanation of their opposition of “objectifying women” in selling guns:

Wow- woke? Allow me to translate: objectifying women was never a good marketing strategy. In the firearms industry, that was a prominent strategy up until recently. Many industries have done that (including beer corps).

As an actual woman typing this, I’ll use more words for you to comprehend: using bunnies to sell products is trash marketing. Supporting women by not doing that is good. 

Of course, it’s easy to say all that bullshit when your target market isn’t men buying guns for their womenfolk (unlike light beer).  If it was, H&K (who, as Larry Correia reminds us, think we all suck anyway) would paint bikini models on the oversized grips of their overpriced guns.

And by the way — and this applies to all gun companies — your job is not to “support women” by uttering platitudes like the above.  Your job is to support women by making guns that they can actually shoot.  (Last time I looked, H&K is kinda lean in that product description.)

As with light beer, I can’t boycott H&K products because I’ve never owned one in the first place — mostly because of H&K’s Ferrari-like premium prices.  (Only unlike Ferrari, whose cars are arguably worth the $$$$, H&K guns aren’t.)

Anyway, it’s all bullshit. Manufacturers have been using beautiful women to sell their products ever since Mrs. Aarg preferred Mrs. Thaarg’s leopardskin loincloth.  That’s not going to change, ever.

Bloody fools.

Over-Buying

The Gun Thing

I may be stirring up a hornet’s nest here, but I assure you that this is not my intention.  Over on YooChoob, some guy named Bear Independent has a go at the gun industry, claiming that they are “lying” to us gunnies.  (It’s nearly half an hour long, so get some coffee and settle in.)

Basically, the executive summary is that he has come to realize that his gun hobby has cost him a lot of money, and he’s spent WAY more than he should have on all the different kinds of guns available.  I know nothing about the man, but from what he says on the video I gather that he’s a prepper extraordinaire, and he has an awful lot of guns:  guns of different types, of different calibers, and of different utility.  (You can see them carefully racked on the wall behind him in the video.)

All those guns have essentially sprung from his need to be self-sufficient, in gun terms.  Need to take a 1,000-yard shot?  Got a gun for that.  Clear a house of bad guys?  Got one of those too.  Close-range work?  Check.  Trench warfare?  Yup… and so on and so on.

All his guns are meticulously camo’d up and worn in all the right places, denoting hours and hours and thousands of rounds of usage.

And after all that he’s come to realize that when the S finally does Hit The F, he really only needs one rifle — what he calls a “GPR” (general-purpose rifle) — which is essentially an AR-15 with a scope and night light.  It’s very much “operatized”, to be sure, but it’s no different from any black rifle of that genus.  Here’s what I’m talking about, more or less:


(One thing Bear says that I agree with is the need to own two identical guns — as he puts it, the best source of spares is a gun like the first.)

Now I had to laugh when he talks about how the gun industry “lies” to gun owners about all the guns it has to offer — basically, of course, it’s really catering to gun owners, or rather to their tastes and perceived needs.  And the best way to do all this, from the manufacturers’ perspective, is by marketing the product(s), which means both primary advertising (in magazines etc.) and through third parties:  originally, with gun writers like Petzal and Seyfried in Guns & Ammo, and now by YouTubers like GarandThumb and their ilk.  There’s nothing new about this, it’s been going on ever since the gun industry started and there’s nothing wrong with it.  (He himself sells Bear merchandise through his website, publicized, of course, through his channel, and there’s nothing wrong with any of that.)

Here’s the point.  Nobody forces you to go down the rabbit-hole of your hobby — any hobby — your own fascination does.  Are you a long-distance shooter?  We have just the gun(s) and assorted gear for you.  Are you a varminter?  Say hello to Cooper Arms.  Are you a hunter?  Ho, do we have the right gun for you, says Winchester, Browning, Remington and the rest.  Need a carry piece?  Say hello to S&W, Ruger, Springfield Armory, SIG, and the rest of the alphabet soup.

Are you a… wannabe operator?  Oh boy, say all the AR-15 makers and purveyors of allied products like slings (2-point or you’re nobody), scoped sights (red-dot? IR? we got you covered), telescoping stocks and on and on and on.

So on and on (and on) you go until one day you suddenly realize that you’ve just spent thousands and thousands of dollars on gun stuff, when all you need to combat the Zombie Apocalypse is a single rifle that you’re very familiar with — and just like that, you become a one-gun man, philosophically at least.  You’re no different from the old Fudd living in the Pennsylvania hills who owns but one Marlin .30-30 lever gun because that’s all he needs to fill his annual deer tag.

(Look on the bright side:  instead of being a chastened wannabe-operator who has twenty guns he doesn’t really need, at least he didn’t decide to be a dedicated bird shooter — because in that world you could drop well over a quarter-million bucks on just five guns, none of which can take a 30-round magazine or a red-dot scope.  By design.)

The same, of course, is true of hunting:  plains rifles, deep-woods rifles, bighorn sheep rifles, African dangerous game rifles… you get my drift.  Unless you’re like Mr. Free Market, who has done (and plans to do still more of) all those kinds of hunting — and has the necessary wallet to do so — you’re not going to get one of each kind, UNLESS:  there’s a faint chance that one day someone will invite you to go hunting with them, and you don’t have the proper equipment to do so.  (Don’t even get me started on the different calibers…)

Which is precisely the situation our self-sufficient prepper finds himself in.

Me?  I’m not an operator, never been one except when I had to be, and now I’m at the age when all that is behind me.  I carry one handgun, a 1911 (okay, and occasionally a .38 S&W snubbie as backup);  for “social work” I have one very reliable semi-auto rifle of Communist origin, and if I feel like plinking there’s a sufficient number of rifles and handguns in Ye Old Musket Sayfe.  I’m unlikely ever to go hunting again — I’m too old for the exertion and frankly, I’ve killed enough animals to satisfy me — so other than the odd .30-30 Winchester lever gun and single-shot .45-70 Browning 1885, I don’t have a “proper” hunting rifle anymore.  (When my lovely scoped CZ 550 6.5x55mm disappeared in the Great Gun Theft Of 2021, I never replaced it.)

My gun hobby is, as any Loyal Reader knows well, a weakness for old military bolt-action rifles, which take up the rest of the safe — but I’m unlikely ever to add to them because, well, over the years I’ve owned enough and fired them all — and moreover, my old eyes are too crap to use their iron sights anymore.  One day I’ll just go to the local pawn shop and offload them all, the ones that the Son&Heir doesn’t want, anyway.

But after all that swimming in the pool of gunny goodness, none of it is the fault of the gun industry.  I did it all by myself.

And oh yeah, I still get the urge to buy a new gun, even after all that.  It may be a good thing I can’t afford to satisfy that urge, or else… there’s this one.

After sixty-odd years, they still call to me. [sigh]

But it’s not Mauser’s fault.  Damn them.

Ritual Humiliation

The Gun Thing

Last week I went to the range with the Son&Heir so that he could put rounds through his new Springfield 1911 Ronin:

…and mirabile dictu, he pronounced himself satisfied with its trigger.  Of course, he made me look stupid by putting all 8 rounds into a palm-print at 30 feet, one-handed, while I could only manage a side-plate-sized group at the same distance, two-handed.

Damn kids.

However:  when we stepped up the firing speed (all 8 fired inside 5 seconds, two-handed), I was pleased to see his group opening up considerably — about the same side-plate size as mine.

Of course, I shoot my well-worn and familiar 1911 every week, whereas he last fired a 1911 about three years ago, let alone a NIB gun with stiff trigger etc.

Anyway, I was able to satisfy myself in one very important aspect:  compared to the usual 230gr .45 ACP, my adopted 185gr practice ammo is far more accurate (and much less punishing).  I had found some inexpensive Defender 185gr FMJ reloads and (even better) some of Norma’s excellent MHP 175gr loads for a good price at Palmetto State Armory.  The latter really zips out the barrel (~300fps faster than ordinary 230gr FMJ), and from what I’ve read, the expansion in ballistic gel is impressive.

Neither of us experienced a single ejection- or chambering failure in either gun, for any brand of ammo (S&H was shooting Winchester White Box 230gr FMJ, and Hornady XTP 200gr JHP).

We’re doing it again next week, because I’m a masochist.