Profiles in History, Calabasas, CA, June 11, 2015, 11:00 AM PST, Lot 164:
Estimated Price: $60,000 – $80,000
General George Patton’s personally owned Colt .45 revolver with original stag horn grips, Pat. Sept.19.1871,. July2.72, Jan.19 75. Serial # is 351427, ca. 1928, with the vast majority of the blue finish fully intact. Excellent condition. General George S. Patton, Jr.’s Colt .45 single-action revolver – directly from Patton’s grandson, Robert H. Patton. This Colt .45 Model 1871 single-action revolver (Serial No. 351427) was acquired by George S. Patton, Jr. around 1928 and owned by him throughout the remainder of his life, along with his famous ivory-handled Colt .45 revolver that is today on display at The General George Patton Museum and Center of Leadership in Fort Knox, Kentucky. Patton was photographed carrying this weapon at least once – while dressed as Rhett Butler at a “Gone With the Wind†costume party which he attended with his wife, Beatrice (ca. 1941). The event is referenced on page 314 in the personal memoir, The Button Box, written by Patton’s daughter, Ruth Ellen Patton Totten. The photograph is included in Patton: The Man Behind the Legend, by Martin Blumenson (p. 148). The weapon was positively identified in the photograph by matching the original stag horn grip (the natural texture of which being absolutely unique), visible above Patton’s belt at the 1941 costume party. A Colt .45 single-action revolver (ca. 1928) in this condition, with original stag horn grips – without the Patton ownership heritage – has an appraised value of $16,200 (Blue Book of Gun Values, 17 March 2015). To the best of our knowledge, no other Patton personal Colt revolver with documentation from the Patton family has ever come to market. Interested bidders should note that this is a working firearm and must be shipped through a Federal Firearms Licensed dealer. Provenance: This Colt revolver comes directly from Robert H. Patton, grandson of the legendary WWII General, and includes a signed letter of authenticity stating in part: “…the Colt .45 model single-action revolver shown below, serial number 351427, belonged to my grandfather, General George S. Patton, Jr…The pistol was given to me by my father, General George S. Patton IV, nearly 30 years ago. It was purchased by his father, the General of WWII fame, in 1928. This pistol, with the fancy stag horn grip, was undoubtedly a version of his more famous ivory-handled Colt .45 now on exhibit at the Patton Museum and West Point. Patton owned and used this gun for about 17 years.â€
This poor girl had no choice of rifle and had to make do.
I get emails from Quora, inviting responses to questions I previously answered or responded to. One common topic they pertain to is guns.
I don’t normally think of Quora questions and answers as blog fodder, but there was this answer today which was so out there that I feel obliged to quote it and comment on it.
What would be a good, fairly accurate and easy-to-maintain rifle I could buy without breaking the bank?
I’ve been interested in shooting for a while, and shot .22s, .223s and 7.62 at summer camps and a neighbor of my grandfathers, but never owned my own gun. I would like to get better at shooting and buy my own rifle, but none of my relatives know anything about guns, and a lot of advice I have gotten thus far was for either very expensive or very basic guns. I’m not a bad shot, and don’t need an absolute beginner rifle, but something fairly cheap that still has the recoil, heft and feel of a like a Remington 700 or equivalent gun.
I live in NH, if that helps.
and Bradley Peterson replied:
I just wrote out a thorough answer about the Remington 700, Winchester Model 70, Ruger American, etc. and then I said to myself “screw that”.
Buy a Mosin.
Pay around $200 for a run-of-the-mill 91-30, and you buy a ticket into an all inclusive club of Soviet conscripts, Tsarist soldiers, Finnish and Russian super snipers, Chinese phesants, Vietcong Guerrilas, Olympians, Ukranian Rebels, Bubba, and now, you.
I’d say the rifle is “good”. It has a proven track record – is first version was made in 1891, making the M91, and its 7.62x54r cartridge the longest serving cartridge in existance, and the longest serving rifle design on the battlefield. The cartridge itself is powerful enough to take down any North American game animal. The Mosin is probably the most deadly firearm ever invented – I seriously doubt another has killed more people. Its a sobering thought, but its a piece of history, and you have to accept it for what it is – a tool for breaking and killing things that was used A LOT.
Fairly accurate? It depends on which rifle you get. They are basically all used – coming in crates after years of storage covered in a preservative called cosmoline, and accuracy is a crap shoot. My 91/30 infantry rifle has a bright brand new looking bore, and is pretty darn accurate for having fairly poor iron sights. A realistically sized target is easy to hit out to 200 yards, at least. My PU sniper rifle, like the one held by Roza Shanina in the above photo, will shoot ~1-1/4 MOA. I’ve seen some shoot sub MOA – not bad for a 70 year old WWII rifle.
Ammunition is easy to come by. It was made by the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries during the Cold War by the crap ton, and its cheap, at around $.20 a round, or $100 for a 440 round can.
Did I mention it comes with a bayonet?
You can skewer a pig, drive a screw, or roast marshmellows with this thing (I’ve done the latter). Yeah, you can roast hot dogs with your rifle. Try that with a Remington. You can break bricks with the steel buttplate. The rifle has less than 40 parts. In a pinch, you can shoot a 30-30 round out of it, and the action is ridiculously strong. It is nearly impossible, save a bore obstruction, to blow this rifle up.
The drawbacks? The basic rifle weights around 8.5 lbs. With bayonet, sling, and ammunition, count on 10. Even with that weight, it kicks like a mule. When shooting my sniper rifle with high power commercial loads throwing heavy bullets, it hurts. The rifle is also sighted in with the bayonet attached – meaning to be accurate, you need to add an additional pound, and 1 foot to the end of your rifle, which is already hardly manuverable. You can move around the front sight base and re-zero, but its a pain.
In addition, people will look at your rifle, then at you, and think “poor guy, doesn’t have money for a real rifle”. The course of action to take from here is pretty simple. Put the stripper clip of ammunition into the rifle, and pump that target full of steel. They might try going *pew pew* with their glorified .22s while you produce smoke, fireballs, and a TON of noise, but you go home satisfied, knowing you have an awesome rifle.
I have posted previously on the current craze for purchasing and collecting (cheap, cheap, cheap) Mosin Nagants being imported by the container-load from Russia and other former Soviet Empire countries. The obvious foundation cause of Mosin collecting is the fact that Mosins are cheap right now and are bound to go up in price, the same way SKS-es did, once they run out of them, and the fact that the ammo is incredibly cheap as well.
The only real argument for owning a Mosin (they are really too expensive to use as boat anchors or tomato stakes) is they are very cheap to buy and very cheap to shoot.
They are a historic arm, of course, if you want to get in closer touch with the history of red-beet-munching peasants being conscripted and used as cannon-fodder; of purges, mass executions, and innocent people being marched off to Siberia; of totalitarian dictatorship, human life valued as next to nothing, the clash of two barbarous dictatorships and subsequent Third World wars of Revolution. Why! the proud owner of one of these can hold it in his hands, and imagine all the joys of being driven in mass formations into the fire of German machine-guns by commissars with machine-pistols ready to execute on the spot anyone who falters.
Factually speaking, Mosins are a crude, primitive military long-arm, featuring a design dating back to 1891, older than the Krag and not as good. They are ugly, non-ergonomic, ugly, heavy, ugly, and inferior in every way (other than price) to nearly all the best-known bolt-action rifles of WWI and WWII.
Mosins are at the bottom of heap, battling it out for last place and the title of most inferior and repulsive rifle with the Japanese Arisaka and the Italian Mannlicher Carcano.
What I would say to the unidentified author of the question is: Go to a gun show, or look on Gun Broker, for a nice, good quality sporterized 1903 Springfield or 1917 Enfield or 1898 Mauser or 1909 Mauser. I would suggest looking for one chambered in .30-06 Springfield or .270 Winchester. You will have to pay about double what a Mosin would cost you, but you will have a lot more attractive, lighter, more accurate, more ergometric and –in the long run– more valuable rifle.
Bob Owens argues, perfectly correctly, that policemen should not be carrying Glocks.
In terms of mechanical design, there are few flaws with Glock pistols. If a law enforcement officer, soldier or citizen does exactly what they are supposed to do all of the time with cyborg certainty, there will be no problems with the Glock or other popular pistols mimicking its basic design. Unfortunately, “RoboCop†is only a movie, and humans are liable to make similar mistakes over and over again.
The underlying problem with these pistols is a short trigger pull and the lack of an external safety. In real-world encounters, a short trigger pull can be lethal, in part because a significant percentage of law enforcement officers — some experts say as high as 20% — put their finger on the trigger of their weapons when under stress. According to firearms trainers, most officers are completely unaware of their tendency to do this and have a hard time believing it, even when they’re shown video evidence from training exercises.
For more than 35 years, officer-involved accidental discharges with Glocks and Glock-like weapons have been blamed on a lack of training or negligence on the part of the individual cops. What critics should be addressing instead is the brutal reality that short trigger pulls and natural human reflexes are a deadly combination.
Though short trigger-pull guns dominate the law enforcement market, they aren’t the only game in town. A number of major and minor agencies use guns with much longer double-action triggers that are just as easy to fire deliberately but that are much harder to fire accidentally. The half-inch difference of trigger travel may not sound like much, but it can be the difference between life and death.
Among the many very bad ideas that proliferated in Western society since the 1960s is the pernicious notion that one should have a trigger-safety and go around treating a semi-automatic pistol as if it was a revolver.
This has even led to people going around asserting that you don’t want a pistol with a real safety, because it’s so hard to move a safety lever to the off position.
Glocks are cheap, reliable, and easy to shoot accurately… but they are a very bad choice for careless people and non-experts. Really, the Glock design is best carried, the way the Israelis do, with an empty chamber.
Gaston Glock should have put a regulation safety on his design.
Jim Dickson, at Gun Digest, picks the three deadliest gunfighting pistols of all time.
His choices are the German Luger, the Colt Model 1911, and the Colt Model 1873 Peacemaker.
Personally, I think his list ought to have been longer. But the surprising choice is, of course, the Luger. Americans who played with one will be even more surprised to find the author praising the Luger for its reliability of functioning.
When the troops needed pistols the Fatherland set out to supply them, despite the fact that the Luger pistol cost three times as much to manufacture as the Mauser rifle.
The Luger proved up to the challenge. It took in stride the mud, dust and sand maelstrom that was a WWI artillery barrage and kept on working when the famed Smith & Wesson Triple-Lock Revolvers were jamming. It would continue firing when its barrel was bulged from being clogged with mud. A Browning-style gun with the slide over the barrel is jammed solid until a new barrel can be installed when its barrel is bulged.
This feature saved so many German lives in the First World War that when the P38 was designed, the army specifications demanded a fully exposed barrel on it. All the Luger needs for reliability is a magazine spring that is as strong as you can get in the magazine and proper ammo—standard velocity ammo of the proper overall length. Hot loads cycle the action too fast for the magazine to feed cartridges in position to chamber before the bolt rides them down. This was never a problem with German army issue ammo.
A larger problem was the fact that the average German soldier was not a pistol shooter. The Luger handled that problem better than any pistol before or since. The Luger is the best pointing pistol ever made, bar none. Just point at the target and you hit it. It is as simple as that. It is also the most accurate pistol you will ever find. Most any good Luger will shoot a 10mm group with 9mm ammo at 25 yards.
Armed with the Luger the German troops proved a terror in trench fighting. Every stormtrooper was issued one regardless of rank, and production was geared up to equip every combat soldier by late 1918 or 1919. The Luger was a key factor in the new stormtrooper tactics as well as the new infiltration strategies of General Von Hutier and Colonel Bruchmuller, which had knocked Russia out of the war. The intensity of the trench fighting and the number of kills made by the Luger was staggering.
World War II saw more intense fighting with the Luger often being used against Russian human-wave assaults. Sometimes it was the officer’s only weapon and sometimes it was the last thing he had loaded magazines for. At those close ranges one could hardly miss. Once more the tally went up drastically. Add to these figures the numbers of the other countries’ armies that used the Luger and you get a number far exceeding any other pistol.
Northwestern University girls brave freezing weather to go through a Home Guard rifle drill on the campus in Evanston, Illinois on January 11, 1942.
From left to right are: Jeanne Paul, age 18, of Oak Park, Illinois,; Virginia Paisley, 18, of Lakewood, Ohio; Marian Walsh, 19, also from Lakewood; Sarah Robinson, 20, of Jonesboro, Arkansas,; Elizabeth Cooper, 17, of Chicago; Harriet Ginsberg, 17.
“One of the coolest parts of our trip to Russia was a chance to check out scale model miniatures of some classic firearms. Everything from a FG43, Suppressed AKM, 1911, Thompson and everything in between.”
Jim Corbett’s the best quality boxlock W.J. Jeffery & Co. .450-400 double rifle, with which he killed so many man-eating tigers for the Indian government (Elmer Keith Estate Coll.).
Jim Corbett described using that .450/400 Jeffrey to slay the Thak Man-Eater at about 6:00pm on November 30, 1938, in “Man-Eaters of Kumaon”:
The tigress was now so close that I could hear the intake of her breath each time before she called, and as she again filled her lungs, I did the same with mine, and we called simultaneously. The effect was startingly instantaneous. Without a second’s hesitation she came tramping and then she stepped right out into the open, and, looking into my face, stopped dead. Owing to the nearness of the tigress, and the fading light, all that I could see of her was her head. My first bullet caught her under the right eye and the second, fired more by accident than with intent, took her in the throat and she came to rest with her nose against the rock. The recoil from the right barrel loosened my hold on the rock and knocked me off the ledge, and the recoil from the left barrel, fired while I was in the air, brought the rifle up in violent contact with my jaw and sent me heels over head right on top of the men and goats. Once again I take my hat off to those four men for, not knowing but what the tigress was going to land on them next, they caught me as I fell and saved me from injury and my rifle from being broken.â€
This was the last man-eater killed by Corbett.
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Elmer Keith died in 1984 and now, thirty years later, the famous writer’s personal firearms collection is finally appearing for sale in James D. Julia’s March 15th, 16th & 17th Firearms Auction.
Not many of us will be able to afford to own any of the highlights of the Keith Collection, but it’s certainly worth looking at the on-line catalog and imagining what you’d do if you won the Irish Sweepstakes in time to bid.
Here are two examples, either of which would be very difficult to top for historical significance and associations.
Hamilton Bowen will build you an unengraved replica (on a Ruger action) of Elmer Keith’s No. 5 .44 Special SA for a mere $4495.00. How high can the original possibly go? Six figures would not surprise me.
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“The most influential custom handgun ever made!” Elmer Keith’s own No. 5 Colt SA in .44 Special built in 1927 as “the last word in sixguns.”
Speaking at the ‘Taken 3’ press conference in Dubai on Monday, the Irish-born star of ‘Schindler’s List’, who once again plays Bryan Mills in the final film of the trilogy, responded to a question about the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris last week, which he linked to gun violence in the US.
“There are too many fucking guns out there, especially in America,†said the 62-year-old. “I think the population is, like, 320 million? There are over 300 million guns. Privately owned, in America. I think it’s a fucking disgrace. Every week now we’re picking up a newspaper and seeing, ‘Yet another few kids have been killed in schools.’â€
Reported by the Washington Post, Neeson added that there is a distinction between the violence of the movies and reality.
He said: “A character like Bryan Mills going out with guns and taking revenge: it’s fantasy. It’s in the movies, you know? I think it can give people a great release from stresses in life and all the rest of it, you know what I mean? It doesn’t mean they’re all going to go out and go, ‘Yeah, let’s get a gun!’â€
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Holier-than-thou Hollywood celebrities have been making millions from portraying armed heroes in movies, then taking public stands in real life in support of gun control, and they’ve gotten away with it. Except this time.
PARA USA, the company that rented the guns used by Neeson in “Taken 3” (2014), his latest action film, has responded to the movie star’s recent anti-gun, anti-Second Amendment remarks by stating publicly that they will no longer be providing the weapons for his cinematic fantasy roles.
KSL-TV (Salt Lake City) has an interesting lost-and-found story going back a long way and involving “the Gun that Won the West.”
Great Basin National Park employees are trying to solve the mystery of an 132-year-old Winchester rifle found in the park.
The rifle was found and recovered by park archaeologists in November, according to the Great Basin National Park Facebook page. The firearm was found leaning against a tree in a remote rocky outcrop. Park officials believe the rifle hadn’t been located sooner because the weathered, cracked wood stock and brown rusted barrel blended into the juniper tree.
The rifle was identified as a model 1873 Winchester repeating rifle because of the distinct engraving on the mechanism of “Model 1873,†according to the national park. The serial number on the firearm corresponds with manufacture and shipping records dating to 1882, held at the Center for the West Cody Firearms Museum in Cody, Wyoming. However, the records don’t indicate who purchased the rifle or where it was shipped to, the national park said.
Between 1873 and 1916, 720,610 model 1873 rifles were manufactured and in 1882 alone, more than 25,000 were made, according to the national park. The rifles sold for around $50 when they were first produced. …
Great Basin National Park officials are researching newspaper archives and family histories to learn more about the rifle they discovered. The rifle was transported to a conservatory so the wood can be stabilized and to prevent further deterioration. When it is returned to the park, it will be displayed as part of the Great Basin National Park 30th birthday celebration and the National Park Service centennial celebration.
