This Model 1911 Colt .45 was found in the waistband of Clyde Barrow’s trousers by Texas Ranger Frank Hamer who brought the outlaws to justice via a high firepower ambush on a rural Louisiana road on May 23, 1934.

A breakout raid on a Texas prison farm by the Barrow gang in which two guards were shot (one of whom died) infuriated Texas state officials, who responded by hiring retired Ranger Captain Frank Hamer, a veteran of a hundred gun fights who had been shot 17 times and who had reputedly killed between 50 and 70 men, to track down the Barrow gang and out an end to their criminal careers.

Hamer’s commission was to deliver justice, not bring them back alive. He was encouraged to trap the gang, making sure the correctness of his identification of the suspects, and then to just “shoot everybody in sight.” Part of Hamer’s compensation for the manhunt included authorization to appropriate as trophies the weapons and personal effects of the criminals.

Hamer caught up with Bonnie and Clyde on a rural highway in Louisiana with an ambush by six lawmen, armed with a Browning Automatic Rifle, Winchesters, and two Remington semiautomatic rifles. The outlaws’ car was riddled with bullets before either had a chance to shoot back.

RR Auctions of New Hampshire is offering for sale next September 30, with documented provenance going back to Frank Hamer, two pistols found on the bodies of the deceased bandits, Bonnie Parker’s cosmetics case, and Clyde Barrow’s Elgin pocket watch.

News service story

RR Auction lots preview

This Colt Detective Special .38 was found by Hamer taped to Bonnie Parker’s inner thigh.

The photo of these 19th century shooters is from Lindsay McCrum’s Chicks with Guns.

Evidently the ladies, too, competed in Schuetzen precision shooting matches with specially-made target rifles in which the shooter fired from a standing position, typically outdoors at 200 yard targets. The photo is small, but those rifles look like Ballards to me. They would have been chambered in .32-40, the preferred American target competition cartridge.

The Scotsman, 28 December 2010, reported one very impressive result from Holt’s Auctioneers London Sale of December 16 instant.

A unique triple-barrelled shotgun made for a Scots aristocrat has been sold at auction for £43,000 [$66,000 at the time of the sale].

The shotgun – dubbed the “Holy Grail” – was made in April 1891 for John Adrian Louis Hope, 1st Marquess of Linlithgow and the seventh Earl of Hopetoun.

The three-barrelled ejector, 16-bore gun, with three triggers, was designed by renowned Edinburgh gun makers John Dickson & Son and is the only one of its kind. …

Holt’s founder, Nicholas Holt, said: “This is completely unique – the holy grail for any shotgun collector.

“The gun maker, which still exists in Edinburgh, looked back in their records and found this was the only single 16-bore, round action side by side by side ejector ever made. The mechanism was too complex to make more, but it still works fantastically well today and is capable of shooting three gamebirds with its three barrels.”

That is certainly an interesting gun, but it went, in my view, for a terrible amount of money all things considered. The auction catalogue description mentions a “slight crack at the hand” in the stock. It is nice to have three shots, but in return you get a gun weighing 7 lbs. when you could have a 16 gauge weighing 5 3/4 lb. (like my Greener). The gun is also chambered for old-fashioned 2 1/2″ 16 gauge shells, which until pretty recently had been neither loaded nor sold for decades in the United States.

The side-by-side configuration on this gun must surely be less handy than the alternative ways that the German gunmakers would arrange a drilling: either two barrels side-by-side atop one or two barrels over-and-under with the third to one side.

Why exactly three shots were wanted is unknown. It seems to me that a chap shooting driven grouse would be much better off with a better-balanced, better-handling pair of, or even one, 12 gauge gun. He’d have a better sight picture and a larger pattern.

Three shots are not essential in walking up shooting. If you can’t knock down the bird you just put up with two shots, you probably are not going to do it with three either.

The original owner was Governor-General of Australia, so perhaps there are particular circumstances hunting cockatoos or kangaroos, or in the event of convict rebellions, when a fellow simply has to have three quick shots.

Of course, in that event, he could purchase an American pump gun or semi-auto a lot cheaper.

On one strange and unique occasion, I actually personally scored a triple on ruffed grouse. I was just entering the end of patch of woods in Brush Valley, near Ringtown, Pennsylvania, which consisted of the remnant of an old orchard decayed and overgrown by surrounding forest, when I accidentally blundered into a ruffed grouse convention.

A grouse exploded from under my feet with my first step, and I fired and dropped him. I took another step, and a pair of grouse took flight on either side of me. I only had an open field of fire on the left hand bird, and I was again dead on target. When I moved forward to pick up the dead birds, more grouse exploded in all directions, and I managed to drop number three. Three was the daily bag limit, and I’d never taken the limit without reloading before. Grouse continued to launch from all around me as I recovered my birds. In those days, I was using a beat-up and downright elderly Remington Model 10 pump gun with a Full choke. I could not have done any better if I’d had that nice Dickson.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

(click on picture for larger image)

I think this photograph of Queen Elizabeth firing a fully-automatic assault weapon from a shooting rest is real, but I don’t think it is quite recent.

From ISI via John Brewer(Facebook).

This month’s American Rifleman has a feature article on “special edition” rifles and pistols from a company called American Legacy Firearms, a company that clearly was founded on the principle that nobody ever went broke by underestimating the taste or intelligence of the average American consumer.

With spectacular unintended irony, American Rifleman’s Assistant Editor Joseph Kurtenbach quotes American Legacy founder Steve Faler’s alleged mantra: Life’s too short to shoot an ugly gun.

It would be difficult to find any guns uglier in the history of world arms-making than these two utterly tasteless and totally garish “NRA special edition” models.

Supposedly collectible “commemorative model” firearms represent, in general, a kind of industry tax on the foolish and aethetically-impaired. Typically, they rapidly depreciate in value, occupying a special category of non-collectibility all their own. What makes an out-of-print gun collectible is historical significance and associations combined with rarity. Collectible value can be significantly increased as well by a weapon’s technical interest and beauty.

Taking a garden-variety, purchasable-anywhere-off-the-shelf gun, slapping on a load of bad mechanically-applied engraving and some hideous gold-plating creates an eyesore, not something anyone will ever down the road pay a premium to own.

Special editions numbered in the 5000s, of course, are special only in name and marketing approach and never will be rare.

Priced at nearly two grand a pop, even with a chunk of money being donated to NRA, these excrescences represent as lousy an investment as shares in one of Barack Obama’s green energy companies.

The NRA ought to exercise a little rationality and taste and should decline to participate in or promote this kind of crap. The only thing American Legacy and American Rifleman this month are right about is that life really is too short to be owning ugly guns.

Winner of most un-PC product for the first half of 2012 has to be the sly marketer behind the now-vanished “Hiller Armament Company,” which ran off a batch of silhouette targets referencing the Trayvon Martin shooting controversy featuring a faceless figure wearing a hoodie and carrying Skittles and a can of ice tea.

Shooters like novelty targets featuring amusing contemporary news references, and they love black humor items like this one specifically calculated to offend the left. The targets sold out in two days, Hiller Armaments pocketed its money and went away laughing, and lefties generally had a cow.

Daily Kos‘s reaction was classic.

The silhouette on the paper target is faceless. But the hoodie, the Skittles and the iced tea leave nothing to the imagination. This is meant to be Travyon Martin, the unarmed 17-year-old shot to death in February in Sanford, Florida. The unidentified internet merchant told Mike DeForest, a reporter for Orlando television station WKMG, that he sold out the silhouettes in two days. The targets come in packages of 10.

The twisted cretin who had these printed said: “My main motivation was to make money off the controversy.” Just business, man. Nothing personal.

Even Mark O’Mara, the attorney for George Zimmerman, the 28-year-old neighborhood watch volunteer who has been charged with second-degree murder in the shooting, found it disgusting:

“It’s this type of hatred — that’s what this is, it’s hate-mongering — that’s going to make it more difficult to try this case,” said O’Mara.

“I hope there is a crime that we can charge that person who made that with. I’m not sure what it is, but we need to come up with one.”

DeForest conducted an email exchange with the merchant who would not say how many of the targets he had sold, only that the response had been “overwhelming.” …

It’s not hard to imagine what buyers of the Trayvon targets say to each other when they’re on the firing line. And when they say “fucking coons,” they don’t mumble.

Change.org is running a petition demanding that Hiller Armanents be prosecuted.

From OlegVolk via Vanderleun.

Amanda Fortini

It’s a common journalistic meme: young and pretty urban female fashionista, for one reason or another, winds up visiting the real America, picks up a gun, tries firing at a target, discovers that shooting a gun is really fun, and then puzzles over the meaning and moral ramifications of it all.

Yet, these are nearly always interesting to read, especially since the gun-owning reader knows better than Amanda Fortini does that she has begun the process of conversion from deluded ignorance to realism.

My first thought is, I can’t believe how loud that was. I’m wearing earplugs, but you don’t just hear the firecracker noise in your ears; you feel it with your whole body. Even if, like me, you’ve never handled a gun, they figure so heavily in the entertainment we watch—from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit to Sarah Palin’s reality show to movie trailers and video game commercials—that firing one for the first time is a weird combination of startling and banal. Guns are (pardon the pun) loaded with so much cultural baggage that you think you know what to expect. You don’t. TV gunshots sound and act no more like real gunshots than construction-paper snowflakes resemble real snowflakes.

My next thought is, I want to do that again! I have an immediate, exhilarated reaction. Partly it’s that what I’ve just done initially frightened me, so there’s a sense of a limit overcome. For many people I know, guns remain unreal—the accessories of fictional characters, or at least of the Other, not you and yours. Yet to fire a gun is to realize you can do it: You can operate one, understand how it works. Shooting gives me a rush that comes from a feeling of (admittedly incomplete) mastery.

Plus, the sensory experience of target shooting—readying your stance, controlling your breath, focusing on the target—is so absorbing that I can’t indulge my free-floating worries. I can’t have a self-conscious intellectual reaction when firing a gun. It’s almost meditative. At one point I glimpse a woman in her sixties dressed in a white polo, creased khakis, and pristine white sneakers—attire for a day of golf at the country club; she’s brandishing a Glock. I have to stop myself from laughing with delight.

As I shoot, I again experience the strange, paradoxical sense of an act that’s familiar and unfamiliar at once. I’ve seen Clint do this; I’ve seen Arnold do this; I’ve seen Sigourney Weaver and Linda Hamilton do it. Shooting a gun is like smoking a cigarette or drinking espresso in a café in Paris or having sex on a Caribbean beach: You’ve watched it so many times on-screen that you experience your own actions as an echo. It’s impossible not to feel like a cliché.

I tend to try to avoid posting unsourced, unidentified photos, but consistency is the hobgoblin and all that. Click on the image for a larger version.

I once learned that rather more of these ancient colonial era fowling pieces survived in New England farmhouses than I ever would have suspected. It was probably the combination of unwieldiness and striking decorative value (once they became obsolete, they were the ideal object to hang over the mantelpiece) that caused them to be preserved.

From Nothing Via by way of Vanderleun.

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Gerard Van der Leun identifies the original source as the Jooney Woodward site, from Britain (!).

The pink polymer framed Taurus 738 TCP is chambered in .380 ACP has a six-round magazine and weighs only 10.2-ounces (.289 km.)

Guns and Ammo forwarded a cringe-inducing report. Earlier this month, on August 9th in Chandler, Arizona, 27-year-old Joshua Seto was attempting to secure his fiancee Cara Christopher’s pink Taurus .380 in the waistband of his trousers, before stopping in a Fry’s Food Store to make a purchase.

The unfortunate Mr. Seto, at the time under the influence of prescription drugs, accidentally discharged a round which struck him in the penis before proceeding through his left thigh.

The Arizona Republic reported:

The bleeding started immediately and was heavy, according to police dispatch recordings released Sunday.

“He is still conscious, there is just a lot of blood,” Christopher, 26, told 9-1-1 operators and dispatchers.

One operator told Christopher to apply direct pressure to the wound with a dry towel or T-shirt, but to avoid looking at the wound.

“I did look at it,” Christopher said. “It’s pretty bad.”

There was talk in the Arizona papers that Mr. Seto might even be prosecuted as the result of his accident.

The local police also proceeded to advise gun-owners to use holsters for carrying sidearms.

Ouch!

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My own opinion is that semiautomatic pistols offer a real advantage over revolvers for concealed carry in being flat sided and basically rectangular. They tend to have fewer protrusions and tuck up against the body more comfortably.

I myself look with disfavor on the trend in recent decades toward double-action semiautos, lacking a safety because they are philosophically intended to be treated as if they were revolvers. I own one such semiauto, a .357 SIG, and if I were carrying it, I’d carry it with an empty chamber, and simply assume that I would inevitably have adequate time to rack the slide if I ever needed to shoot anybody.

This accident was obviously a fluke. The victim was evidently impaired by drugs. But we are all impaired some of the time. Advancing age and illnesses impair everybody sooner or later a bit. We all occasionally take prescription drugs and some of us drink.

It is probably a little safer to use a holster, as the cops suggested, but I read regular reports of users of DA autos shooting themselves in the leg while putting their gun in the holster. Tex Grebner managed to do the same thing with a regular Model 1911 variant as a consequence of confusion induced by a push-button-release holsters. Grebner pushed the safety accidentally.

If you aren’t Jeff Cooper, it may be a better idea to carry that semiauto in Condition 3, magazine full, chamber empty.

Holy Taco serves up 25 photos of concealable guns or guns hidden in unusual forms.