Tag: Guns and such

My favorite toy

Gone Missing

The Gun Thing

Several people have written to me, asking about shooting the lovely Ruger Redhawk .45 Colt I got hold of a while back.

Here’s its story.

One of the things I do whenever I get a new gun is to take the Son&Heir to the range to acquaint him with more guns, because otherwise he’d just shoot his 1911 and Ruger Mk II pistols till the end of time.  Occasionally that backfires on me — I’ve lost my treasured Princess Inge (Swedish Mauser) and a Marlin Mod 60* to him this way.  And that’s what happened here.

We’d finished shooting about three or four different guns at Mission Ridge (his home range), and when I was packing up I suddenly noticed that the Redhawk had gone missing.  When I asked him if he’d seen it, the Son&Heir said casually, “Oh, that’s going home with me.”  (Said without a hint of guilt or remorse too, I have to say.)

When I half-remonstrated with him, he simply shrugged and said, “I’m going to shoot it a lot more than you are,”  followed by the killer:  “…and I’m going to inherit it from you anyway.”   And then the final, unanswerable statement:  “This way, I’m not going to run the risk of you trading or selling it, either.”

He loves shooting it, and of course he shoots it far better than I can, the little shit.

Oh well.  I guess if I do want to shoot it some more, I can always ask him to bring it to the next range session.

What really got up my nose was that just the day before I’d gone to Bass Pro and acquired what we may call a “decent sufficiency” of .45 Colt ammo — so of course that disappeared into his trunk as well.

Kids… [he said proudly]

*For some reason, I cannot seem to hold onto a Marlin 60.

No sooner have I got a new one, when somebody needs one really badly and off it goes.  Bought one, lent it to a friend, bought another, lent it to Adopted Daughter, same result:  gone forever.  In the most recent of these occurrences, the S&H was going off plinking with some of his old shooting club buddies, so he borrowed yet another Model 60 from me because all he had was a bolt-action Marlin 981T (his first-ever rifle).

When I asked how the shooting went, he mumbled something about the joys of shooting a semi-auto .22 rifle and had the decency to ask if he could keep the 60.

Oh well, could have been worse:  he could have “borrowed” my brand-new Ruger 10/22…

Dept. Of Righteous Shootings

Righteous Shootings

So down in Arizona, this happened.  Executive summary:  Folks sitting at home doing family things, when an alleged intruder allegedly broke down the alleged front door.  One of the alleged family members happened to have an alleged gun, which he allegedly used to fire multiple shots into the allegedly worthless hide of said alleged intruder, whereupon said shootee’s body temperature allegedly moved quickly to room temperature.

Nothing to see here, move along.

 

Game

Shooting Sports, The Gun Thing

Is anyone else sick to death of all the fuss surrounding the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts?

I have an idea.

Let’s re-purpose the Kennedy Center.  Never mind all that artsy-fartsy stuff;  let’s turn it into a massive indoor shooting range, with all the 100-yard rifle- and 25-yard pistol ranges that the place can hold, open from 6am till 9pm, 7 days a week.  And so that it can’t be hijacked by the hoplophobes and politicians, we’ll hand over its management in perpetuity to, say, Gun Owners of America.

Now for all sorts of reasons, we’ll have to rename the place, because let’s be honest, J.F. Kennedy and shooting do have somewhat of an unpleasant association.

And I’m against naming pretty much anything after a politician, because they get enough name recognition already, the lousy poltroons.

So let’s name it after a renowned and respected American ordinary citizen, and to make it even more non-political, let’s stipulate that he’s no longer alive.  Without trying to prejudice the thing, and just to help the thought process, let me give just a few examples:  Elmer Keith, Wyatt Earp, Audie Murphy, Samuel Colt, Oliver Winchester, John Moses Browning… I think you can all see where I’m going with this one.

Pick one, and one name only, and put it in Comments / email.  You don’t need to give any reasons because I’m pretty sure it’s self-explanatory.  I’ll tally up the votes and give the people’s choice later in the week.

Oh, and you only get one vote each.  We are not Democrats.

Not Surprising

Marketing / Advertising, The Gun Thing

There’s another one of those (I suspect) A.I. videos talking about the ten guns that are sitting unsold on shelves, and have been almost since their introduction to the market.

There are a couple of obvious losers — the Remington R51 9mm, for example, which was the harbinger of the downfall of the once-great company because it was a shoddy, badly-engineered piece of junk (very much like the company).

The next were those which somehow thought that an expensive 5.7mm bullet was just the thing that the market wanted, and tied that belief to their launch in $900+ guns that were too bulky to carry and too flimsy to be serious rifles.  They were, in essence, expensive range toys, and in the post-Covid years were precisely what the market did not need.

In fact, “expensive range toys” is a pretty good description of most of these ten stinkers.  In saner times, one would have hoped that cooler heads in Marketing would have figured out that mistake;  but there weren’t sane times, anything but.  They were the early Biden-Covid years, when the feral ATF, FBI and Department of Justice looked for any excuse to deny gun owners guns, take away their guns and criminalize gun owners.  And the Covid-era panic buying of toilet paper (FFS) was a perfect companion to the rush to buy guns, any guns, by people who didn’t know anything about guns, where price hikes followed shortage as inevitably as night follows day, where dropping $3,000 on a semi-auto piece of crap seemed an obvious ploy to increase profits, or to plug up a gap in a gun manufacturer’s product portfolio.

Meanwhile, the real gun buyers — guys like most Readers of this website — didn’t fall for any of this nonsense, and spent out money (if we did at all) on proven guns and, while gritting our teeth, insanely-expensive ammo.

Then the waters started to recede, Covid panic ended, and suddenly gun dealers were confronted with a plethora of guns to be sold on consignment, as the panic buyers turned into gun-free zones as before.  Many gun stores which previously had not offered consignment sales now realized that there was money to be made in the commission business as a way of keeping the doors open.

Of course, the idiots who’d purchased awful guns like  like our top ten rascals in the video handed in their geegaws, and now the dealers were left with cluttered shelves full of expensive range toys which nobody wanted.

So when the godless gun-grabbers of the Biden Party lost the White House, the gun market as a whole cooled off, as always happens when the Happy Times return and people are no longer thinking they need to gun up in case of you-know-what.  It happened after Obama was term-limited out of office and conservative voters made sure that Hillary Fucking Clinton didn’t get to play her little Commie reindeer games, and one would have thought that gun manufacturers would have learned their lesson, but of course they didn’t because that has to be the only reason they launched those terrible guns.

It’s funny;  I looked at all the guns on the list, and realized that I, as big a gun lover as exists anywhere in the universe, wouldn’t be interested in any single one of them now, even as a gift let alone at their severely-discounted-but-still-insane prices.

Screw that, and them.

(Read the comments from @reaver6666 in the video’s comments for an excellent overview of the products’ common failings.)

By the way, there’s another A.I. crappy that breathlessly announces that these are the 12 guns you can buy on the cheap.  Yeah, right.

Unexpected Pleasure

Friends and Family

If blogging seems a trifle light today, it’s because most of yesterday was spent in the company of Longtime Reader UncleKenny — during which we had a fine session at my local range, followed by coffee and a long chat.

I should point out that most of the chatting was done by me, because as I seldom nowadays have any social contact with friends, I tend to jabber on endlessly when I do.  He didn’t fall asleep during said chat, and on occasion even prompted me to continue, which says much about his scholarliness and gentlemanliness.

I have without doubt the best damn Readers on the Internet.  Thanks, Ken, and it was a rare and special privilege to meet you in person.

Afterthought:  I should point out that nobody’s perfect:  he did bring a Glock to the range after all, but at least it was chambered for the manly .45 ACP and not the other rubbish.  And anyway, such lapses in taste can always be forgiven among friends.

FAQ – BBQ Gun

The Gun Thing

For the benefit of my Furrin Readers (Euroland, Oz, Britishland, California, etc.), I probably need to explain the meaning of the term “BBQ Gun” or “Governor’s BBQ Gun”.

This would be the handgun you’d wear to a formal barbecue event.  It should be a little more “showy” than your EDC (everyday carry) piece, and one you’d not be ashamed of wearing in polite company.  (By the way, this stipulation would automatically exclude such filth as Glock and Hi-Point pistols, but not old, well-worn pieces like your grandfather’s Colt Peacemaker.)

Your holster too would be a showpiece, not an IWB (inside the waistband) type.  Depending on the state, it could be unadorned or else festooned with things like silver buckles, turquoise stones and fringes.

Anyway, the question I’m frequently asked is:

“So what’s your Governor’s BBQ Gun, Kim?”

It’s not a pistol, but a revolver:  my beloved Ruger New Model Blackhawk (.30 Carbine)

I have a holster for it, but it’s kinda plain:

….so I’m idly looking around for something a little dressier:

Okay, maybe not that last one.

It might be that I have to sniff among the options at an Evil Loophole Gun Show, soon.

– Note that in the states outside America such as California, Illinois and New York, there’s no such thing as BBQ gun because those governors tend to hate and fear guns (unless carried by their bodyguards, of course).