Hat tips to Bookworm via Karen L. Myers and to Vanderleun.

photo: Sir Terence Clark

photo: Sir Terence Clark

Sir Terence Clark writes:

Morocco has some amazing weapons still in common use. These muzzle-loading rifles with their silver chased barrels are used in the Fantasia [a traditional exhibition of horsemanship in the Maghreb performed during cultural festivals and to close Berber wedding celebrations], when a group of horsemen charge full tilt at the audience and at the last minute stand up in their stirrups, drop the reins, swing their rifles around in a circle and fire blanks into the ground with a deafening crash before pulling up short in a cloud of dust.

Pistols used in the Warsaw Uprising, 1 August — 2 October 1944, Muzeum Powstani Warszawskiego.

The Polish resistance inflicted more than 27,000 German casualties and destroyed 650 vehicles (including 310 armored), 22 artillery guns, and one aircraft.

The most common handgun, naturally enough, seems to have been the Russian Nagant Model 1895 revolver, but at least one lucky Polish fighter evidently had a US Model 1911 .45 (lower left) and there are two Smith & Wesson Model 10 “Victory” Models on the right.

Metrosexual Bryan Schatz, reporting for the red rag Mother Jones, impersonated a normal male American and attended a “build party.”

Build parties seem to be a California phenomenon (the only ones I can find reference to were advertized on the Calguns.net forum), in which people get together, in accordance with currently existing federal gun regulations, to complete personally the lower receiver (which is the element of modern semi-automatic rifles that is legally regarded as constituting the firearm as which is consequently the only part whose sale and transfer is regulated) and then assemble the complete AK or AR rifle using a parts kit.

A build party offers the opportunity to legally manufacture your own contemporary military-style semi-automatic-only rifle, which since you made it for your own use, has no serial number and need not be registered. Beyond that, a build party saves the prospective gun-owner at least a portion of the cost of a fully-assembled semi-automatic contemporary military-style rifle.

Schatz is your typical liberal pussy, who is intentionally milking for journalistic purposes all the shock and awe of actually handling, and even assembling, mechanical instruments that look war-like and can go boom! when you pull the trigger. These sorts of people always bask in the transgressive romance and machismo of it all.

Many kits come from stockpiles in former war zones. “I can guarantee you this one has bodies on it,” says one of the hosts as I peer down the barrel of a Yugo RPK. It’s lined with grit and soot. My host says the AK I’m building is an Egyptian “Maadi” that came to the United States via Croatia, likely having been shipped there during the Yugoslav wars. He tells me some wooden stocks come with tally marks notched in them.

But never for very long. Schatz quickly moves on to worrying about the absence of Big Brother monitoring all this. Since these build party guns are neither numbered nor registered, his liberal heart begins leaping with terror over the fact that they are “not traceable.”

Liberal efforts at gun control always begin with the fundamentally bogus idea that finding the perpetrator of a crime of violence is always, or even often, a question of identifying the actual weapon used or tracing its chain of ownership. In reality, the identity of the culprit is almost always determined from witnesses, motives and opportunity, or by the criminal’s subsequent actions, rather than by tracing ownership of the weapon.

Countless millions of unregistered guns, guns going back to the Beretta-manufactured wheel-lock that John Alden brought over on the Mayflower, are already out there. There are lots of Americans just as handy as the Afghan bazaar craftsmen who can make an entire AK-47 with hand tools in mud shack, and we are presently entering the age in which you can print out that lower receiver (or an entire gun) with a 3-D printer. The Canadians tried registering all of their guns, spent billions on the project, and finally concluded that gun registration, after more than a decade had never actually played any role in solving any crime.

The truth of the matter is that gun registration, keeping track of serial numbers and ownership, is not about solving crimes at all. It is really just a way of injecting friction and cost and potential legal jeopardy into firearms transfers and owndership, with the end goal being confiscation.

In the end, Schatz proves his liberal bona fides, naturally, by deliberately destroying the AK he had fun assembling and shooting. It would be wrong to own such a thing. After all, it might climb out of your closet and go on a killing spree.

I never knew that rational people actually read Mother Jones, but Schatz’s commenters really kicked Schatz’s nonsense around the block. The comments are a lot better than the article.

Build parties sound mildly intriguing, and I have actually begun to see the point of owning so-called “assault weapons.” That lower receiver is just the platform to which you can attach an extraordinary variety of optional barrels, stocks, and accessories, making it, in essence, a Swiss Army Knife-style shooting platform. Still, even with a build party, the cost of upper receivers and barrels, stocks, and accessories inevitably add up. Start with a few hundred for the lower receiver and the party, and add in the rest, and that black rifle plinking toy is always going to cost pretty close to a thou. It can easily cost more.

You can buy some awfully nice classic old-fashioned rifles for that kind of money. Who’d want a plastic semi-auto plinker, when for the same kind of money you could buy, for instance, a pre-WWI classic sporter? The way I figure it, if we ever get into a state of civil unrest in which one really seriously needs an AR, I can always just shoot some representative of the tyrannical government and take his, which will have full-auto too.

I’ve owned expensive rifles from top-end gun makers like Rigby, Jeffrey, and Griffin and Howe, but rifles don’t necessarily have to feature superb walnut, skilled engraving, or lots of hand work to be functional and pleasing.

I recently bought a little sporterized Model 1898 .30-40 Krag carbine for about as little money as you can spend these days and obtain a rifle that shoots.

What prompted this particular purchase was a lot of Krag carbine shopping on on-line Gun Auction sites in order to replace an old NRA Krag carbine my father acquired decades and decades ago. That old Krag must have a shot-out barrel because it produces 2-foot groups at 25 yards.

I have tried cleaning it and then shooting it again several times, but its accuracy didn’t improve. I have often thought of getting rid of it, but its action is so smooth, its carbine length is so handy, and the whole ensemble has a historic charm so potent that whenever I handle it, I can’t bring myself to part with it.

I thought of getting it sleeved or rebarreling it, but it seemed obvious that I could go and buy replacement Krags all day and spend less money. So I decided to buy another Krag carbine.

This one is sporterized, i.e. someone removed the upper handguard and the military ladder sight, then added a Redfield 102 aperture receiver sight which required no drilling. The Redfield just inserts into the hole used by the magazine cut-off and then locks into position with a set screw.

It’s probably my specific age that causes me to find guns from the period of the early 20th century, a few decades before I was around, terribly romantic and evocative. These old Krags were very popular out West. Krags shot best with round nosed 220 grain bullets and made good rifles for elk and bear.

The Krag gets a bad rap in the literature. The conventional wisdom is that the Spaniards’ 7×57 Mauser was the better rifle. And people generally find the Krag’s box magazine, sticking out on the right side, unprepossessing. Myself, I seem to have a weakness for the Krag action. Sure, Mausers and Springfields are better, but the Krag is slicker. That action may be weaker, but the fewer the bolt lugs, the smoother it works. And the action is certainly strong enough for the cartridge it was built for.

As to the box magazine, I absolutely love the crisp, military sound it makes when you snap it open or slam it shut. It is not the most intuitively obvious or logical magazine design, I will admit, but I suggest looking on it as a luxury item. Can you even begin to imagine what it would cost to get that magazine manufactured today, all that milling, all the hand-fitting?

I watched this amusing video yesterday. You know, there is a certain distinctive PING! associated with working the action of the Krag.

Via Vanderleun.

Bob Owens tells us that rush to stockpile guns is still heavily underway where he lives. People are lining up at the local gunshop and the shelves are empty.

I took my daughter to preschool this morning, and on the way back I drove past my local neighborhood gun store.

The owner was standing out front talking to the first customer in line as the clerks inside finished setting up for the daily rush. They would open promptly at 9:00 AM. The speed limit is just 25 MPH in that part of town, and I caught a red light as well, so I had plenty of time to count the number of people in line.

There were 25 souls patiently queued up from the front door down the sidewalk into the parking lot. This is the new normal, and has been for months. Sometimes the line is shorter, sometimes it is longer, and on days that it is cold and rainy, people sit in their vehicles until the store opens, but there is always a line.

I drop in every few weeks or so. Some of the more senior clerks there know my face if they can’t recall my name; this is the FFL (federal firearms licensee) that I most often used when a manufacturer transfers in a rifle or pistol for me to test and evaluate. I haven’t been inside in two weeks, but the last time I was there was the same as it has been from mid-January onward.

There are no AR-15s, no AK-pattern rifles, no M1As, no FALs, nor anything else that might reasonably impersonate a semi-automatic rifle. For that matter, there are no Garands worth their price, nor Enfields, nor Mosins.

Likewise, the glass handgun cases have largely been empties of service pistols. There are still a few, but most tend to be painfully expensive or the dogs that no one wants. Magazines for all of these are gone, of course, as are most common calibers of ammunition.

How much longer will this go on? …

In my estimation, this is the most heavily-armed the American people have ever been. I’m including the World Wars.

This video is hamming it up a bit by using footage of ladies who have obviously not been properly familiarized with how to hold or use those shotguns, but it certainly delivers an effective rebuttal to the Vice President. Obviously, not every woman who one day finds herself needing to defend herself and her home is going to have previously acquired good shotgun handling skills.

All over the country people have been stocking up on guns and ammunition, leading to inventory shortages nobody has ever seen before.

It has only gotten worse recently, post-Sandy Hook, but even back in December a gun rights blog was reporting that inventories were at astonishingly low levels.

Ammunition Stock levels have fallen by more than 90% from the pre-Election Day levels. Less than 10% remains available. Available Ammunition links will be updated throughout the day.

Handguns are down by 80%, Long Guns by 63% for an overall 72.2% reduction in firearms inventories.

AR pattern rifles are becoming particularly difficult to source.

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The Chattanooga Times-Free Press reports that this month, ammo shelves are commonly empty, police departments report months-long delays in receiving their ammunition orders, and it is becoming difficult to source reloading supplies.

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Bob Owens adds:

They didn’t know when they’d be getting anything back in stock, from magazines to rifles to pistols. Manufacturers were running full-bore, but couldn’t come close to keeping up with market demand. It wasn’t just the AR-15s, the AK-pattern rifles, the M1As, and the FALs that were sold out. It really hit me when I realized that the World War-era M1 Garands, M1 carbines, and Enfield .303s were gone, along with every last shell. Ubiquitous Mosin-Nagants—of which every gun store always seems to have 10-20—were gone. So was their ammo. Only a dust free space marked their passing. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Every weapon of military utility designed within the past 100+ years was gone. This isn’t a society stocking up on certain guns because they fear they may be banned. This is a society preparing for war.

Barack Obama, Dianne Feinstein and the rest of the Statists have done more to promote gun ownership than the NRA ever did. Well done,
Democrats!