Monday Gun Day

As a kid I used to waste a lot of money on the gun rags. I dreamed then of being a man, able to buy whatever gun I wanted too and being able to shoot whenever. I dreamed of hunting trips with belted magnum rifles and outfitter tents and campfires. I was the weirdo in my family because I liked all that kind of stuff. For them, their idea of camping was a trailer - stuffed in a campground side by each with hundreds of others all round. But there were still a lot of old world outdoorsmen in those days and most of them knew exactly where I was coming from.

Old gun magazines are like time machines. Ike, Clark Gable and The Duke were all before my time, but for awhile their times and cultures overlapped with my own. You could still have a rod and a gun in the rack of your pick up. It was common for men to swap tips and lies about hunting and fishing. Our fathers put their guns in a rack at home too. The idea of blaming lawful gun owners for gun crime was laughable to anyone with an IQ above freezing. Where did that world go? And where in blazes did this one come from?

Also worth your time, if you're so inclined - is the latest from Private McKenzie in BC. He has an excellent presentation on the Canadian Ross rifle.

A hundred years ago I found myself in a gun shop, in a day when good mil surplus guns were still a dime a dozen. The sales guy on the counter (correctly) saw me as a potential rube and tried to offer me a Ross rifle - and I told him to shove it up his arse! I was a noob, not a rube... and I knew junk when I saw it. When he got snippy about it the other smelly and noisy patrons chimed in on my behalf and told him to shove it too - sideways! HAR HAR HAR! No shooter in his right mind would touch one of those junkers with a ten foot pole! The clerk snorted with dismay and roughly threw it back into a barrel full of other milsurp junkers.

But the Ross rifle is a funny animal - in spite of its shoddiness, in spite of being the worst rifle ever fielded by the Canadian armed forces, in spite of being built by Canada's shittiest people in Queerbec… this thing has become the Holy Grail for collectors and Crufflers! Guys like Rob here, will pay obscene prices for minty specimens.

With all due respect to Rob, the curators and crufflers - they can have the lot of them with my compliments!