(another transplant from the Weapons Tech thread)

>For when you absolutely have to have a gun that will fit in your
>pocket, chambering a round designed to take down bears.

Many years ago, when I lived in the SF Bay Area, I used to go shooting at an indoor range in Milpitas called Target Masters. - Oh hey, it's still there - got a website and everything. If you're in the area, check it out. They did right by Zoner and me while we were in the area. Eventually we got to be well-enough-known to the staff that they would rent us guns to shoot on their range even if we showed up alone. (This is normally not allowed at many ranges that rent guns, because, well... sometimes people who go into a place like that alone and rent a gun have no intention of leaving again under their own power, as it were, and the staff really doesn't want to have to put up with that shit. And, really, can you blame them?)

Anyway, TM was a great place, but like anywhere that deals in guns and the usage of guns, it attracted its share of just utter outright headslap-inducing dipsticks. There was, for instance, the time it was invaded by a group of Japanese executives who were in the area for a tech conference, and who - how stereotypical is this - had a deep and abiding love for guns but no conception whatsoever of how they really work or how dangerous they really are. In particular, whenever one of them made a shot he was particularly proud of, he would turn to the guy next to him and declaim excitedly about it, making many sweeping and expansive gestures.

Usually with the gun he was using still in his hand.

Those guys could be at least partially excused, I guess, by the fact that they really didn't know what the hell they were doing - they were from a country where such things are unknown to the general populace except in movies and on TV, and they're not the memory that got me started about this in the first place.

No, that is of the man who came in one evening with a couple of his friends and a gun he had just paid a great deal of money - which he was more than happy to talk about - to have customized to his personal specifications. It had started life as a perfectly respectable firearm, a Colt Anaconda double-action revolver in .44 Magnum. Until this clown got hold of it, and then found a gunsmith with so little self-respect that he would actually take (in fairness, a startling, understandably-self-image-bending quantity of) this guy's money and perform the hideous crimes he had envisioned upon this poor, unsuspecting pistol.

Which mainly involved reducing the size of the grip frame (a feature of the Anaconda numerous owners sought to make bigger over the years), and then chopping the barrel to what I believe was the legal minimum length in California at the time: one and three-quarters inches.

So there the guy was, with his tragically amputated Anaconda he had paid as much for as a decent midrange sports car, blazing away with (what he was also cheerfully willing to inform anyone who asked, or didn't, for that matter) the most powerful .44 Magnum ammunition available on the market at the time. With a barrel that short, that gun couldn't even burn much of the propellant stuffed into .44 Magnum rounds as hot as that; it was actually spraying onto the floor in front of him, such that after about a dozen rounds, there was a visible fan pattern of dark grey unburned gunpowder on the floor in front of his station. Anyone who tossed a match down there would have caused a very lively little show. The gun made a godawful noise even by .44 Magnum standards; it made a muzzle flash sufficient to interfere with the vision of people in neighboring lanes; and with it, he was more or less guaranteed not to hit anything he wanted to hit. On occasion, he hit other people's targets. And he was so proud of that thing.

Zoner and I knew a few of the rangemasters pretty well by then; well enough that the two of us and one of them ended up standing off in a little group outside the shooting range's "airlock", watching through the big windows from the shop floor, and shaking our heads to ourselves at what a maroon that guy was. But hey, he was having a ball, and I suppose that's really the main thing. If only he hadn't been such a nuisance to everyone else.

Still, at least he didn't point it at anyone, unlike a couple of the Japanese guys. It must have made for a long day for their interpreter, having to explain to them why the red-faced man was throwing them out of his place of business.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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