Category: The Gun Thing

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

Gratuitous Gun Pic: Savage Model 99

Gratuitous Gun Pics, The Gun Thing

American Rifleman magazine once put the Savage 99 in its list of “Ten Rifles Everyone Should Own“, and while I disagree somewhat with lots a couple of their choices, the Savage 99 is a slam-dunk listing — with one reservation, which I’ll get to in a while.  But first, let’s look at this rifle and see what all the fuss is about:

I’m going to make my prejudices known up front.  I think the “99” is hands down one of the most beautiful rifles ever made, period.  That swooping stock as it leaves the receiver, the way the lever snuggles into the underside of the stock… ooooh, mommy.  And if you can find one like mine, with the “schnabel” front stock…

…and that’s before we start talking about the brilliant rotary magazine, which, unlike for some lever rifles we could mention (Winchester, Marlin coff coff ), allows one to load this rifle with pointed (and not be limited to flat- or round-nosed-) bullets.

Which brings me to my only quibble with the 99.  While it can handle medium cartridges (.308 Win, .300 Savage, .375 Win etc.), I don’t think the recoil is worth it.  My .308 Win model is, honestly, painful to shoot.  The angle of the thin stock pushes it right into the soft part of the shoulder, and for me anyway, it’s owie  after four or five rounds.  I think the perfect cartridges for the 99 are either the .250 Savage, or if you want something a little cheaper, .243 Win.  Those, I can shoot (and have shot) all day.  (I could have put a soft rubber pad on the rifle but I didn’t because wrong.)  But the Savage is not an all-day shooter, anyway.  That thin, elegant barrel heats up really quickly, and it will start to whip on you after a dozen rounds or so.

What this exquisite gun is, is a hunter.  It’s light, accurate, quick to reload (in my case, about half a second or more quicker than my Mauser 98K), and quite honestly, I can’t think what more one could ask for a deep-woods rifle.

What sets Savage 99 owners apart from the rest is the fact that they love their 99.  In the Rifleman  article linked above, the writer laments:

I once had a lovely mid-50s Model 99 in .308.  It was my favorite Texas whitetail rifle and in a weak moment I traded it for some rifle I can’t even remember.  Lesson:  Never sell or trade a good gun.

I’m one of those losers, and what I should have done was sell my .308 and immediately got a replacement in .243.  But I didn’t because I’m an idiot.  I should have just gone without electricity for a couple months…

Because of all this, Savage 99 rifles are relatively scarce, and quite expensive.  Their owners don’t want to relinquish them, and anyone who’s ever fired one, let alone hunted with it, will know exactly why.

No More Trophies For You, Matey

Gummint, Hunting, Mocking Furriners

I usually email Mr. Free Market and / or The Englishman to tease them about the latest BritGov foolishness — it keeps me busy (because of the volume thereof) and I like getting the return emails, contents of which I cannot share because bloodthirsty / seditious / both.  Here’s but one example:

Mr. FM’s response to this idiocy, however, was different:

The government could ban trophy hunting souvenirs after a huge spike in the number of bloodsport mementos being brought back to the UK.
Animal welfare minister Zac Goldsmith said the sport ‘turns my stomach’ as he revealed there will be an urgent consultation over the controversial imports.
It comes after a strong public backlash to trophy hunting after the deaths of animals such as Cecil the lion in 2015, as well as elephants and leopards.

We’ll leave aside the necessity for a government “animal welfare minister” for the moment, and concentrate on Mr. FM’s response:

“Excellent.  Given the cost of taxidermy, not to mention the astronomical shipping costs, this ban will just leave me more money to buy tags to shoot more animals*.”

In other words:

Yeah, that’s going to work really well for the BritGov.  It’s a classic example of what happens when you want to legislate against something but know fuck-all about the subject.

*I should point out that in most parts of Africa, there are few limits as to how much game you want to shoot;  the degree of scarcity drives the price up or down.  If you want to shoot another one, you just pay the additional tag fee — which by the way, are nosebleed (see here for typical per-animal tags).

Safe Queens

Beauty, Drive Time, The Gun Thing

I’ve talked about this topic before, but I’m not sure I’ve ever told this story here.

Many years ago, a guy heard from a Reader of this website what a sucker I was for WWI- and WWII-era guns, and offered to sell me a brand-new, still-in-the-box, never-been-fired Colt Government 1911 from that time (with Colt certification).  As it happened, I was a little flush with cash right then, and after a little pondering (and deciding not to pay down the car debt), agreed to his price.  I went over to his house to complete the transaction, and checked it out.

(Not a pic of the actual gun.)

It was a beauty.  Needless to say, I was nuzzling it and whispering terms of endearment to it (as one would a new puppy), but I did let it slip that I couldn’t wait to take this beauteous thing from my grandfather’s era out to the range and see how it could shoot.

The seller looked aghast.  “You’re going to shoot  it?” he asked.
“Hell yes,” was my response.

Whereupon the guy immediately canceled the sale, clearly traumatized that someone was going to take his baby’s virginity.

I told you that tale as an intro to this foolishness:

If you had a supercar, you’d probably drive it, right? Not the three owners of this Ferrari 328 GTS over the last 30 years.
They’ve clocked up a combined- and frankly meagre – 283 miles in total, making this one of the best time-warp examples of an iconic ’80s supercar we’ve seen for some time.
And it could soon be yours, if you have pockets deep enough. That’s because it’s being sold at auction in the UK next month, and the expected purchase fee is set to hit £150,000.

And the accompanying pics (out of several):

Now I have to say that I’m casting lustful eyes upon this beauty, and if those bastards at PowerBall had fulfilled their side of the bargain over the weekend, I’d be winging my way over to Britishland as you read this, letter of credit from Gringotts Bank clutched in my sweaty little hand.

And let me tell you that once I’d got it back Over Here, and after having had it checked and serviced by Giovanni at Boardwalk Ferrari of Plano (yes of course  we have a Ferrari/Maserati dealership in Plano — do you even have to ask?), I would turn that 283 miles/30 years into 12,830 miles/30 years+1 month faster than you can say “Scuderia Maranello“.  I’m thinking of an epic road trip around the southern states, going from one Ferrari dealership to another (because Ferrari) before the weather turns chilly.

I’ve never understood the concept of “safe queens”, whose possession is so precious that usage is forbidden.  As Longtime Friend and Ex-Drummer Knob puts it so elegantly:

“Owning a beautiful car and never driving it in case you lower its value is like having a supermodel girlfriend and never fucking her, just to make her more attractive to her next boyfriend.”

In fact, now that I think of it, I’d not only drive this 328 GTS, I’d invite Knob over to drive it as well.  (What the hell, as bandmates, we once shared two girls — not simultaneously — because in those days we both liked the same kind of woman:  low moral standards, voluptuous figure and huge breasteses.)  I figure we’d each get as much fun out of the 328, so to speak, as we did from Penny and Big Jenny.

Anyway, to wrench this train of thought back from the branch line:  I have no time for people who treat machines and tools like investments, even though they can be regarded as such.  And as for the Ferrari’s owner/idiot:  if he’d plonked the original purchase price of the 328 into a stock index fund (to name but one  investment vehicle) thirty years ago, he’d have made far more money than he’s currently going to realize from its sale.  Some investment, smart guy.

And in the meantime, that gorgeous car has been wasting away like Rapunzel in the tower.

Fach.

Headline Of The Day

Elections, The Gun Thing

Oh boy, this is priceless:

Beto Goes to Kent State, Argues Only the Government Can Be Trusted With Guns

I know the little Texas twerp is clueless;  but how clueless is that?

These socialist turds haven’t yet figured out that in America, threatening to ban a type of gun doesn’t cause us to stop buying it — on the contrary, it makes us run out and buy more  of them, in greater number and variety.  Even the ladies join in the fun:

And such is the ignorance among college students nowadays, I bet ol’ Beta-boy’s speech was rapturously applauded.  Morons.

Too Smart

The Gun Thing

We’re all familiar with the assholes who work behind the counter at gun shops — you know the ones I mean, those who want to show off how much more they know about guns and shooting than the Idiot Customer who simply wants to know whether a revolver or pistol would best suit his purpose, and who gets for an answer a supercilious blizzard of inside jokes and buzzwords which makes him or her feel like, well, an idiot.

This post is not quite about that.

As Longtime Readers know, I stand firmly opposed to the use of jargon and acronyms (although there are times when I fall into the trap myself).  In the past, I’ve written about Mystics at length so I’m not going to expound on it further, but I did notice its manifestation in an article on self-defense drills linked by Insty.

As a rule, I enjoy Ed Head’s articles, but this one falls into Trap #1:  obscure, unexplained terms and descriptions, and it falls during the very first paragraph of instruction, to whit:

The El Pres[idente] has become a competitive shooting standard, a drill practiced incessantly by top competitors. From the standpoint of an armed citizen, its best used sparingly as a test of your skill level, carry pistol and gear. To set it up, you’ll need three Option targets set 1 yard apart.

And for those people who don’t spend hours at the range, or weekends at competitions, “Option targets” are…?  these things:

One picture, and it all becomes crystal clear to someone unfamiliar with the arcana of shooting geekery.  Then Head spends a couple dozen words trying to describe the El Presidente drill, when all he needed was one of these:

And again, this time with explaining “Dot Torture*”:

Requiring 50 rounds and fired at a seemingly easy 3 yards with no time limit, Dot Torture requires total concentration, perfect sight alignment and a perfect trigger press for every one of the 50 shots. The targets are printed on a single 8.5×11-inch piece of paper and consist of circles measuring a little less than 2 inches.

And all becomes clear with:

(Actually, I prefer this one, but nemmind…)

Back to the main topic:  instruction should always — always — be delivered in a manner designed to impart the content with a maximum degree of clarity and a minimum amount of explanation.  (By “minimum”, I mean not wordy or obscure.  If a picture imparts the knowledge better than fifty words, and more quickly withal, use a damn picture.)

Shooting Times (or rather, their editors) should know better.  Ed is a very knowledgeable shooter and I agree with just about everything he says about shooting.  But he’s not well served by sloppy editing.  As this pic shows:

*As an aside, I absolutely love the dot torture drill, but I usually save it for .22 practice, whether with a handgun at 25 feet, a non-scoped rifle at 50 feet, and a scoped rifle at 75 feet.  And always, regardless of type of gun, a maximum of two seconds per shot allowed.  In a future post, I’ll show a modified version from my last trip to the range.

Gratuitous Gun Pic — Browning Buck Mark (.22 LR)

Gratuitous Gun Pics

I think the Buck Mark .22 pistol is one of the best modern rimfire semi-autos to be had.  It’s certainly one of the prettiest.  Here’s a Buck Mark Plus from Collectors Firearms, for example:

…and no serious shooter is going to argue with me that much.  Perhaps you can get a more accurate .22 pistol than the Buck Mark, but you’d have to spend a whole lot more money, because it’s more accurate than almost anyone who shoots it — and other than the high-end competition .22 guns like Pardini and so on, I certainly don’t think you can get a pistol with a better trigger  than the Buck Mark’s.

Best of all, Browning makes a dizzying number of variants to suit absolutely everyone.  I’ve either owned or at least fired most of the major types — typically, the Campers have a lightweight carbon bull barrel, and the Standards have a slab-sided heavy steel barrel, viz.:

My favorite, though, is the Plus Stainless:

I don’t have one of these brilliant little plinkers anymore — not after handing off various models to friends, my children etc.  But it’s on my shortlist, simply because I miss shooting it so much.

All that said:  field-stripping the Buck Mark should never be done in the field, as such, because unless you love scrabbling on hands and knees looking for the recoil spring and / or recoil buffer, you need to be really familiar with the Buck Mark’s innards.  Ask me how I know this.  Actually, your first attempts at cleaning it should preferably be done in a clean white room with a smooth cement floor just to make retrieval of said parts a little easier.  A Ruger MkIV it ain’t, folks.  (Here’s the back story on all the above.)

Still, I miss shooting the Buck Mark — one of the reasons I traded my MkIV for a Single Six revolver was that the MkIV wasn’t as much fun to shoot as the Browning.  (And oh baby… do I love shooting the revolver.)

And on and on it goes… if I didn’t love shooting guns so much, I’d have beaten myself to death long ago over all the stupid decisions I’ve made in the selling of them.  I need a Buck Mark, badly.