>I agree that you also probably handled that about as well as could be
>expected, and just fine for (and here I may be guilty of regional
>stereotyping) rural Maine, where guns are not exactly an uncommon or
>unfamiliar thing.

Well, yeah, except I was in suburban California when I did it. :)

>re: the official name being some variant of the date of adoption - the
>most famous example of this that I know of being the
>classic/nigh-immortal Colt 1911.

Military designations worked like that in a lot of places in the early 20th century. The US went to just numbering things sequentially sometime after WWI (hence M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle, but the Garand rifle is the M1 and not the M1936), but it stayed on in e.g. Germany for longer (viz. the P38, StG44, and so on).

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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