This is not the Gun of the Week, but it is a gun. I got bored tonight and did a little culturejamming, when I noticed that, unlike the big swiveling ring mounts you find on older military handguns (like, for instance, the Nagant), my CZ 82 just has a little fixed lanyard loop on it, not unlike the ones you used to find on cellphones. (Maybe they're still a thing on other phone models, but there's never been one on a Motorola Droid that I know of, so I haven't had one on a phone of mine for at least five years now.)

So, well, I had this Czech military handgun with a cellphone-like lanyard loop, and I had a couple of Japanese anime-themed cellphone straps that I've never been able to use because my phone doesn't have anywhere to mount them.

You can probably guess what happened next.

Yup.

The CZ 82 is an interesting item, and probably warrants its own proper Gun of the Week entry at some point, but not this week. I'll give you the quick history sketch, though. The area that is now the Czech Republic, formerly western Czechoslovakia, has a long and distinguished industrial history, though one that has been largely obscured by the various masters the region has had over the years. Many of the tanks you'll find in the German tech trees in games like World of Tanks and War Thunder are actually Czech in origin. They're good at making things out of metal, is what I'm getting at.

As such, after WWII, when the reconstituted Czechoslovakia fell within the USSR's sphere of influence and became a Communist satellite thereof, they did things a little differently there. Most of the rest of the Warsaw Pact took the weapons the Soviets ordered them to standardize on. Not the Czechs. For logistical purposes, they standardized on Soviet ammunition, but tended to develop their own firearms, which were generally superior to the locally-made knockoffs of Soviet designs being made in other Eastern Bloc states.

The CZ 82 is one of those, developed in the 1980s to use the same ammunition as the Soviet Makarov pistol without being the Soviet Makarov pistol. "CZ 82" is a slight misnomer; it was made by the firm of Česká Zbrojovka, but it wasn't made for the civilian market, so the company never called it that. It was officially the "vz. 82", where "vz." is just an abbreviation of the Czech word for "model". (They did end up making a "civilianized" version for export, and that one actually was called the CZ 83, but the one we're looking at here is a proper military surplus vz. 82.) They've come to be known as "CZ 82" in the civilian surplus market anyway, because they were made by CZ and it's just easier.

Also interesting: The CZ 82, dating from you guessed it 1982, is one of the most recently produced firearms on the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives "curio and relic" list, most of which dates to before 1960.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Why is it, that I can easily picture each girl from K-On with a small pistol that has the cellphone strap things?

HTT, Band by day, Elite Special Forces by night.

>Why is it, that I can easily picture each girl from K-On with a small
>pistol that has the cellphone strap things?

Well, if Yui were some kind of elite secret agent, she would certainly put the "Yui & Nodoka 4ever" strap on her gun, so there's that. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>
>Well, if Yui were some kind of elite secret agent, she would
>certainly put the "Yui & Nodoka 4ever" strap on her gun, so there's
>that. :)
>

I'm not too sure I want to think too hard about what skills she'd have to drop to become an elite secret agent.

Peter Eng
--
"On the up side, she seems to speak perfect English, French, and Russian."
"None of us speak those languages."
"That's the down side..."

>I'm not too sure I want to think too hard about what skills she'd have
>to drop to become an elite secret agent.

"I don't know what you want. If it's money, I can tell you I don't have any. What I do have is a very particular set of skills, skills acquired over the course of the last couple of hours at the expense of pretty much everything I've ever known. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you."

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.